id
stringlengths 1
7
| text
stringlengths 59
10.4M
| source
stringclasses 1
value | added
stringdate 2025-03-12 15:57:16
2025-03-21 13:25:00
| created
timestamp[s]date 2008-09-06 22:17:14
2024-12-31 23:58:17
| metadata
dict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
46441 | Authorship - How to determine
I have a personal relationship with a psychology professor. We have 2 situations where I may have some claim on authorship but I'm not confident.
I was a participant in a research project in the spring semester. Due to my performance, I was asked to continue. The theory behind the research is that getting 2 types of training will improve learning of a specific task. Each session, I received both types of training.
He wasn't happy with the data from the spring semester. After spending hours looking at the data, he found some way to eek out an abstract. As we continued, I started to realize that although my performance varied from session to session, I either increased or decreased on both tasks. In other words, I thought that if I did better with Training A on Tuesday, I also did better on Training B. If I did worse on Wednesday, I would do worse on both tasks.
I told him about this. He looked at those particular data and I was right. There was a clear correlation. Within a few hours, he was saying it would be publishable.
My contention is that he provided the theory for the study but I proposed the hypothesis. He said "You don't think I would have eventually looked at that?" Then I pointed out that he hadn't looked at those data when he was struggling for an abstract. He says I'm just a subject who provided feedback but I did more than that. I predicted the correlation between specific data.
He's been working on a book chapter. His original plan was to write about his subject from the perspective of a different branch of psychology, one in which I hold a masters. His original interpretation was not good and I told him. We spent hours discussing this. I found the main reference on which he is basing this claim. Also, I spent hours teaching him the principles of my area. I gave him the interpretation from the perspective of my discipline which is the point of that section of the chapter.
He had me read the relevant part of the chapter. I found it confusing. He failed to explain some things and implied information that was incorrect. Also, he explained things in an order that would leave the reader confused. He was frustrated because he had not planned to rewrite that section but said "You're right." To be helpful, I sat down and wrote that section myself. Initially, I had given him an example that I'd heard elsewhere. This time, I included a new example that explained things more clearly. I shared the document online and he continued working.
A few hours later we were discussing it and I asked if he was using my new example. He said "No, because I don't want to give you a co-authorship." I was stunned. It's one thing not to give me credit but he is going to a great deal of trouble to avoid crediting me. Later he said he was excited for me to see the acknowledgement.
Yes, I should have discussed authorship with him before making these contributions. Setting that aside, do I have a claim to anything beyond an acknowledgement? I feel like I made "significant intellectual contributions" to both. The study has not been written but I provided a lot of the material for the chapter.
Are you also a member of the same university (as a undergraduate or graduate student, employee, professor, etc.)? If so, is the relationship known to others? I thought he may not want to reveal your relationship by putting you as co-author. Also, if you're a co-author, I would imagine that it's problematic if you're also a study participant.
Maybe the author of the question does not know what "personal relationship" implies.
This sounds very odd to me. You were a participant of the research group or of the study, meaning you were actual a human subject in a research study, who then analyzed your own data. It seems that IRB should have defined this line already. If not, from a personal perspective, psychological tests performed by someone on themselves should not be published as scientifically valid.
Personal relationship is correct and it's public.
I admit that the study is a bit odd. It was afterward that I realized it. Loads of data were collected so it was just one of many possible findings.
My real beef is with the chapter. What about that?
And I have no affiliation with the university.
I don't know about psychology, but in my field experiments on oneself are not publishable. I think the NIH has regulations about that although I can't find the article right now.
This is one of the most singular situations I have ever encountered on this site. In general, having multiple relationships with the same person can makes things complicated unless the parties are on especially good terms and/or are especially good at setting and respecting boundaries. Academically collaborating with someone with whom you're romantically involved is not (inherently) a conflict of interest, but it is a source of potential complication for both relationships. (I say this as someone who has never had both kinds of relationships with the same person, but who has found successfully navigating one or the other type of relationship separately to be complicated enough!)
I am simply bowled over by the fact that you are in a situation where the above two relationships are joined by yet a third: that of a participant in a psychological study.
My academic field (mathematics) is pretty far removed from psychology, so please discount accordingly, but my strong suspicion is that being romantically involved with someone in your psychological research study is already a potentially fatal (to the academic project, I mean!) conflict of interest. My understanding is that this is the sort of thing that should be cleared with IRB in advance, and in the absence of compelling reason to experiment on you and not someone else the practice looks iffy. When you compound that with the fact one of the subjects has a personal relationship with the psychologist and that personal contact led to a discussion of the study while the study is ongoing....holy moley. I think the professor should either submit the entire case to a body who is competent to authoritatively advise on the ethics of the situation or -- and I think this is better -- drop you from the study, remove all data which pertain to you, and consider whether it is worthwhile to try to replicate "your data" on a new and unrelated party. Continuing on to try to publish in this situation seems like such a bad idea, in which full disclosure and resulting failure to publish in a reputable journal is one of the better-case scenarios.
Having accomplished this, you will have reduced to the only ordinarily complicated double relationship that I mentioned at the beginning: being in a romantic relationship and a possible academic collaboration. I think you and your psychology professor friend are well overdue for a general talk about the boundaries between your personal and professional relationship. You don't list your own professional identity, and somehow I gather that you are not a psychology professor. Nevertheless you have a master's degree in psychology, which is more than enough for conversations about your friend's work to have a potential professional component. Your interactions with your friend about his work go way beyond the norm for "off-the-job" conversations with friends and significant others. Namely you:
analyzed his data (from the inside!) in a way that he regarded as making the transition to publishability
gave critical feedback on a subject in which (from the sound of it) you have more expertise than he does
read his writing in detail and gave critical feedback, both on the content and the presentation
rewrote a section of the work, changing the content to what you thought was superior
As it sounds like you know, any one of these contributions could be held up (and has been, at least once on this site) as being sufficient for coauthorship. In the confluence of all of them -- or let's say the last three, since the first pertains to something which may be to problematic to see the light of day -- I think it would be unethical not to have a conversation in which the coauthorship is carefully discussed and analyzed. Some may view your contributions as being essential to the point that it could be ethically problematic even for the two of you to agree not to list you as a coauthor: academics are not supposed to get substantial, expert help in their academic work "under the table".
He said "No, because I don't want to give you a co-authorship." I was stunned. It's one thing not to give me credit but he is going to a great deal of trouble to avoid crediting me.
Unfortunately I agree completely. It's unfortunate because this is really a tough situation: even from a professional ethics standpoint there is nothing to do other than to have the coauthorship conversation with someone who doesn't want to have it. If I were you I would plan this very carefully in advance. It may be that you will not be able to salvage both the personal relationship and the academic work you've both done, so it could be helpful for you to go into the situation knowing clearly which one is your priority. Good luck.
Without delving into the particulars of your case, the IMCJE has suggested four criteria that stipulate who should and who should not be considered an author.
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.
They also happen to be supported by COPE, who helpfully also has supplied these guidelines: How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.617919 | 2015-06-01T23:09:01 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46441",
"authors": [
"Anonymous",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"Bookbugg",
"Cape Code",
"arefeh mz",
"emmenlau",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12718",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/127905",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/132111",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/132667",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35333",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"mkennedy",
"user-2147482637"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
93505 | I found a huge error in my master's thesis which I defended a year ago
I defended my Master's thesis last year and continued on to pursue PhD in the same university under a different adviser. My Master's thesis adviser and I were getting ready to present a paper pertaining to the MS thesis at a conference in two weeks. The paper is already accepted.
Earlier this week, in preparation of showing reports at the conference, I started re-running my Master's thesis code to obtain fresh reports. The results gave me the nastiest shock of my life. The new results I was getting were a magnitude off from the results I had before. I could not believe the new results. Thinking that I had done something wrong in the current run, I re-ran my previous projects which I had used to obtain the results for the thesis document and defense. Even these runs gave me the same results as the new results I was getting. When I dug into it further I realized that I had misinterpreted the value of a single variable which changed all my result values by a magnitude. This reverses half of the conclusions I made and slightly alters the rest. I immediately emailed my adviser for a meeting to discuss this issue. I am meeting with her next week.
In the meantime I am panicking that my adviser or the school board might think that I deliberately presented the wrong values since I was getting better results. I am scared that they might not see my mistake as a mistake or even if they do see it as a mistake, they might take some strict action like revoking my MS degree or suspending me from school or even expulsion. I am panicking. Please advise. Thank you.
"I am panicking. Please advise.": You're doing everything right so far, except for one: Don't panic. Sadly, I regret to inform you that you most likely are human, indeed, and not a robot with no imperfections besides the inability to know you are a robot.
That's unfortunate, but an honest mistake. You won't be "punished" for an honest mistake.
... no biggie ...
Theses are not revoked for honest mistakes. Nor have I seen honest mistakes in academic work leading to expulsion. What you should do? Post an erratum if there is a reasonable place for that. (If it's a maths or CS thesis, I'd consider the arXiv.)
Welcome to the club! Just do your best to "fix" it (erratum/etc) and done. Research isn't sales, the actual numbers don't matter that much, especially in master's level. At this point the "procedure" of science is far more important, and you are experiencing another facet of it now :)
Thank you everyone for the support. I had been freaking out ever since I found out. I am going to take Bryan's advice and calm down.
It's good to know that my mistake might not cost me my thesis, although I am ready to re-defend it with the new results if my adviser deems it necessary. Anyway thank you for the support. I will report back as to how my meeting with my adviser goes.
Correct the mistake for any peer-reviewed publications (journal, conference, etc). Don't worry about the thesis published at your institution.
Reason being, your committee signed off in the work as a whole as fulfilling the merits of the degree. Yes, it's unfortunate, but theses often aren't indexed by journal searches, and even when they are, they are generally interpreted with less weight.
On the bright side, you recognized an error others might not have. Apply this lesson moving forward. In any other case, you'd have to retract.
PS - I did the same thing during my masters thesis. Didn't sleep for a week.
Thank you HEITZ. I am going to discuss this with my adviser and see how she wants me to proceed. Luckily the paper does not need many changes. I checked on the IEEE website and for the conference I submitted to, the papers don't get published till next year; so I hope the editor will let me make changes to the paper.
These things happen. It's unfortunate, but as Bryan said in his comment on your question, we're all only human. You're doing exactly what you should be doing, and now you just have to wait to hear how your department asks you to proceed.
To put things into perspective, the concept of austerity cuts as a method for bolstering economic growth stemmed from an error in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Whoops. Be glad this is just your thesis and not an internationally-recognized research effort that drove over a decade of global economic policy.
Thank you @eykanal. I am going to discuss all options with my adviser and see how she want me to proceed.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.618654 | 2017-07-21T16:44:40 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/93505",
"authors": [
"Bryan Krause",
"Fábio Dias",
"QuickName123",
"Shake Baby",
"Thomas Steinke",
"darij grinberg",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41208",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44249",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46838",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/76456",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7725"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
10610 | How to survey recommended course readings?
I am interested in analysing the selection and distribution of course readings given to students of middle eastern studies in universities internationally.
By course readings I am referring to subject bibliographies given to students as background reading to accompany lectures, etc. I suspect this would be difficult to investigate, since most course readers are not available online.
Does anyone know of lists, bibliographies, methods or other resources which may help to conduct such a survey of course readings?
Isn't this an xy question ( http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem )? If you want to find bibliographies for a specific topic, why not directly ask that question?
Thanks Silvado, I completely agree. I have rephrased my question accordingly.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.619032 | 2013-06-14T14:51:33 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10610",
"authors": [
"Edan",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3890",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/420",
"silvado"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
156493 | How can I find papers that are not sponsored by industry?
Are there any databases or search filters for published peer-reviewed articles, particularly concerning environmental issues, that are neither affiliated with nor funded by corporate interests?
I am trying to find peer-reviewed articles on the history and impact of plastics pollution. Most articles I have found either have authors affiliated with petroleum/packaging/fast-moving consumer good companies, were commissioned by those companies, or received funding influenced by those companies.
I am not asking whether industry-sponsored papers are less accurate, as this has been asked before. I understand that high-quality independent research can emerge from (and be enabled by) corporate funds, and that every funding source has biases of some kind.
I would just like to know how to find articles whose authors and funding have no corporate ties.
Additionally, I understand that not all connections with industry are apparent. As an example, one article encouraging plastics packaging had no author affiliations but received funding from a major English research council. Although this council describes itself as independent, its directors' declarations of interest contain many corporate ties, including to petroleum giants. Since this is indirect, I would not expect it to qualify as "industry-sponsored."
If you have access to Web of Science, there is an option to sort by funding agencies. Clicking the "more options" link also allows you to exclude funding agencies. It's not perfect since the last time I used it there were quite a lot of false positives & negatives, but it's better than nothing.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.619124 | 2020-10-11T20:48:58 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/156493",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
125685 | Publishing research using outdated methods
I'm currently an Economics MA student doing a referee report on a paper that employs a dated empirical method. This particular method was originally created in 1980 but then improved upon in 1998 by other researchers, after they had discovered certain issues with it.
This got me thinking about how exactly those on the cutting edge of research seem to lag behind by over a decade (or more) in method and still manage to get published.
This is concerning because it shows that published researchers make mistakes and don't review all relevant research before publishing. I can imagine that in the hard sciences and medicine this would happen also, which is especially concerning knowing that those on the cutting edge could be decades behind in knowledge which has been around for a while.
Is this acceptable? If so, why?
It's not clear to me why the method is "outdated" in this specific case. Could you elaborate on this? So far you only mention that it is from 1998, that means it is 21 years old, but that does not mean that it is outdated.
@holla, the question does not clearly state that the method is outdated. It is implied in the title, but this could be simply a personal opinion. The relevant part in the question itself does not give a reason why the method is outdated, which is why I have asked for clarification. It's really easy to clarify this by adding either "I think the method is outdated because it's so old" or "The method is definitely outdated because there has been a new method that leads to much better results".
Discussion on the general quality of research and researchers moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.
What you call "an outdated method" another may call "the well-understood method".
In neuroscience, this is a very common occurrence. There are new techniques for analyzing different types of neural recordings coming out each month in a number of journals, and each one aims to improve on a specific aspect of a predecessor. Unfortunately, the new techniques are exactly that—new—and therefore untested against lots of data with different initial conditions. There are a good number of researchers who will simply ignore all the new techniques until people have developed them to a place of comfort. Even for those that do gain acceptance, they may not be appropriate for every type of analysis1.
I'm unfamiliar with your specific case, but I have seen similar concepts elsewhere in Econ, where older published techniques remain highly popular because (1) they're well-understood and (2) the new techniques were created to fix problems that not present in all databases, or not relevant for a given analysis. The old fogies sometimes do have something to offer.
1 In one case, a technique called DCM became widely popular in a very short period of time, and consequently was very quickly becoming widely misused. It got so bad that the authors actually published a paper titled "Ten simple rules for dynamic causal modeling" with the goal of educating researchers how to use the technique. (Biomed researchers in general don't have a great track record of performing world-class data analysis, but thats a separate story...)
@holla: The question asks why it would be acceptable to use older methods. This answer says why it is acceptable to use older methods. How does it not answer the question?
@holla, see my other comment, but the question does not state what you are saying it does. It does not describe a "dated method with known issues", it describes a "dated method with known issues that were then fixed in 1998". That's a huge difference and makes it very ambiguous what the actual problem is here.
@Spectrosaurus When I first read the question, I understood it to mean that the paper in question used the 1980 method, despite the availability of a better method from 1998. But on re-reading the question, I see that it could just as easily mean that the paper uses the 1998 method.
What you are describing is not uncommon. In my field people still use methods developed 50 years ago. Some of these methods are still valid and have proven to be robust, some of these are flawed with known improvement, and some of these are down right logically inconsistent but people still use them because of inertia.
Whether using an outdated method is a critical flaw in a paper depends on many factors. But it eventually comes down to whether the flaw in the method invalidates the main conclusion. For example, if the main result is qualitative, and the improvement from the new method is incremental, then it's not a big deal. If the result is supported by multiple lines of evidence, then the fact that one of them is flawed is then less severe of a problem. If the method is known to fail in special cases and it is clear that the data do not fall into such cases, then it is also not a big concern.
Overall, for better or worse, people are going to be more forgiving if the newer method is not well known or the improvement is marginal.
This reminds me of an occasion where a university Vice Chancellor told a department head that they need to update their programme and not continue teaching concepts that are hundreds of years old... such as the methods developed by Newton, Fourier, Leibniz, etc.
Using 50-year-old methods that work well is not so bad as publishing papers that claim to have rediscovered them. I've seen that more than once in my own field. It's easy to "forgive" students for not accessing literature that was only ever published on physical paper, but referees should know better IMO.
@alephzero You mean like this paper which invented integration in 1994?
@Mick Please tell me you're joking. OT: The validity of research is not necessarily dictated by the up-to-dateness of the methods. A lot of current research in natural sciences is based on methods from the 60's which were deemed unfeasible but are now used because raw comp. power is available which makes them feasible (and the methods are easy to comprehend).
I'm currently ... doing a referee report on a paper... [Author did X] Is this acceptable?
You're the referee, so you tell us!
As a referee you have the authority to use your discretion here and decide what kind of recommendation you want to give to the editor. You have identified that the authors use an outdated method of analysis that has some problems highlighted in later literature. You should point this out in your review, and you will then need to decide how big of an issue this is. Is the old method sufficiently poor that the method should be revised to the improved method from 1998? If so then perhaps a revise and resubmit might be appropriate (assuming other aspects of the paper are okay).
This got me thinking about how exactly those on the cutting edge of
research seem to lag behind by over a decade (or more) in method and
still manage to get published.
This is not at all uncommon. It happens to many well-known techniques too.
Symbolic execution was invented in 1976. But it had been dead for decades until being resurrected around 2005 (thanks to significant advances in constraint solving). Now, it is popular, used in Google, Microsoft, NASA etc. All winning teams in DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge used it, the top team was bought by the Pentagon. What a comeback.
Similar story about neural network, it was crashed to dead by SVM (with kernel methods) years ago. It is now resurrected with a new fancy name: deep learning.
@holla, I don't think that's fair, I have never read a paper that doesn't endorse the method they use. The question is whether it really is good. OP says the trend has moved on and the method in question is accepted as not interesting anymore. As qsp points out if this was cause to prevent publication we wouldn't get revived methods, but we do!
I would say that in it's own right, that a better method exists does not, and should not, invalidate research.
It might be worth noting that if: a better method exists, has been used, and provides strictly better results that an outdated method does little or nothing to improve upon, then that's a different story.
To reiterate, I would be very uncomfortable citing "could have done better", on it's own, as a rebuttal.
For what its worth, my field mostly involves computational modelling and new methods are a frequent occurrence. The entire field only ever publishing with the latest and greatest methods would be almost inconceivable, and perhaps that effects my opinion more than it should in other fields.
@holla I didn't say it shouldn't be a factor. It may well not be interesting, I think I made that caveat clear, but it doesn't make it not interesting either. It's necessary to exercise judgement.
@holla The research can well be interesting, even ground-breaking. The methods are just a tool. If you are using the tool to find out interesting stuff in your subject, the tool can well use older methods. In urban climate and wind engeneering many use computational methods for solving fluid flow developed in the 1970s to 1990s. There is huge iterature threafter, but you don't need the most recent methods of computational fluid dynamics to find out interesting results. The older ones still work and often converge to the correct result.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.619317 | 2019-02-28T01:23:52 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/125685",
"authors": [
"ANone",
"Andreas Blass",
"David Richerby",
"Mick",
"Nick Matteo",
"Nox",
"PoorYorick",
"Vladimir F Героям слава",
"Wrzlprmft",
"alephzero",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/102822",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/104376",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13991",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14273",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23580",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32961",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34771",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
51659 | asking professor to fund Master's student
I am a graduate Masters student from one of the top-tier universities in the US. I have been working closely with a Professor and two of his Ph.D students on a Research Project for the past two months. I approached the Professor out of my interest, hoping to gain some research experience. I have plans of pursuing a Ph.D. in the near future, and I am totally enjoying this research experience under his supervision. Quite recently he told me that he would add me as one of the co-authors if I completed an analysis for the work I have been working on.
It's a well-known fact in my university that usually Masters students are not funded. I expressed my interest to continue working with him right through the next few semesters, and he replied back saying he was glad to supervise me, adding that he has been enjoying my enthusiasm and productivity. On an average, I spend ~30 hours every week on Research and to my knowledge, my Professor has a lot of funding. I was just wondering if I could request him for any possible funding, such as a standard 20-hour student worker position, if not a tuition waiver because it's very expensive here. Doing other on-campus job besides all this to manage my monthly living expenses, might get too hectic (heavy coursework next semester+research+20 hours on-campus job). I am so hesitant to ask him this, fearing that he might start thinking I have been doing all this for the sake of getting funded, which has not been my intention.
Should I just refrain from asking him about funding as a Masters student to maintain this healthy student-supervisor relationship that I have with him, or is it ok to ask him about funding me?
You might be mistaken about your professor having funding in abundance. Even if he has managed to bring in a lot of funding, he might be spending it all on research and researchers.
One possible way to address this might be to approach your professor at an appropriate time and gently bring up the possibility of receiving funding for your work. I would even leave it up to him how many hours per week should be paid.
As a matter of fact, you might mention immediately that you also keep working if there is no pay. It might seem that you will not receive anything when you mention this, but your professor might feel that it is morally right to provide some funding, and it will make the conversation less awkward.
You are hesitating to bring this up directly with this professor. The relationship is going well, but is not completely consolidated yet. I can understand your feeling of uncertainty.
The solution might involve switching programs. It really depends on the institution and the department. I suggest starting by having a confidential conversation with an administrator or academic advisor in your department that you think is student-centered, positive and discreet.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.620145 | 2015-08-17T15:55:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/51659",
"authors": [
"Afifah31",
"DownInTheDumps",
"Spammer",
"Tim Assal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142137",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142138",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142139",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142159",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142180",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142369",
"sandeep naagar",
"สุทธิสาร ปานสัสดี"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
119143 | I received an acceptance letter. Before publication the EIC rejected!
March 2018: I submitted my paper in a Q2 journal. The Editor in Chief (EIC) approved for peer review. He sent it to Editor for Europe.
April 2018: I was asked by the Editor for Europe to re-submit it with changes.
May 2018: I re-submitted the paper. The EIC approved for review. The Editor for Europe sent out for peer review.
September 2018: I received a positive feedback by the reviewers. The Editor for Europe asked me for minor changes.
Early October 2018: I submitted a revised manuscript.
Mid-October 2018: I received an acceptance letter by the EIC and a congrats email by the Editor for Europe asking me to wait for the proof to check before publication.
End of October: I received a new reject letter by the EIC!
I asked for clarification. The EIC said that my response rate was low. He did not even apologize for the frustration they caused me for a long 8-month process and an amateur treatment. Nevertheless, I re-submitted the paper correcting a number that dropped the response rate; as he suggested. I received another reject letter.
My final response to the EIC: "I can accept nothing less than proceeding to the publication of my paper as it was accepted by you (reviewed by the Editor for Europe and by two reviewers); " The acceptance letter was attached with my letter. I am now waiting for his response within 48 hours" although I am not waiting for any change in his decision.
My questions:
Did this happen to anyone of you? If yes, what was the final outcome?
Is there a legal path to ask for my right to publish my paper?
I also worry for my data; it took me 6 months to finalize emails with repondents' list.
Why do you think you can force them to publish?
What is a response rate in this case?
What is, and what is the significance of, "response rate"? Is it a statistic that you develop in the paper? Is it something you cite? Is it something about other peoples' response to your paper? Specifically, what is it that it could cause rejection? What does "correct" response rate mean? Factually accurate? An assumption? Something you cited correctly/incorrectly?
So the editor noticed that the response rate was too low for the conclusions, then when this was pointed out you changed the reported response rate to the "correct" number? You don't see that this appears suspect?
I also worry for my data; it took me 6 months to finalize emails with repondents' list. It must be nice to work in a field where 6 months is a long time to work.
I am voting to close this question as "Unclear what you're asking". It could also be closed as "Opinion-based". At present the question seems like a rant that is looking for sympathetic answers rather than asking for a specific and objective answer. If you have a specific question, please edit the question so that's clear. "Did that happen to you?" is not a useful question; and the answer to "Is there a legal path to force someone to publish your paper?" is so obviously "No" that it's not worth asking.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.620418 | 2018-10-28T16:35:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/119143",
"authors": [
"Azor Ahai -him-",
"Dmitry Savostyanov",
"Solar Mike",
"Tobias Kildetoft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17418",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26671",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"iayork",
"paul garrett"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
176516 | Graduate students funding availability in Pure vs Applied Math
Universities in the U.S. are sometimes limited in how many students they can accept by the available funding. How does funding compare in Pure vs. Applied departments? Is one generally more funded than the other? Is this less of an issue the higher ranked a university?
Most math "funding" in the US is in the form of TA, or, less likely, RA funding. Since TA funding is paid back to the university by participation in assisting (or even teaching) courses, it isn't really a big "expense". Without TAs, lower level courses would need more faculty participation - smaller classes in most places.
So, the number of slots is less determined by some "funding" available than by the sheer size of the department and its need for assistants in lower level (and especially service) classes. Math needs a lot of this since the math department also commonly services most of the rest of the university in its need for some specialized math and maybe statistics courses.
I don't know current statistics, but I'd guess that if a university has separate pure and applied math departments, that the pure math side is bigger, hence more need, hence more slots.
But it also used to be the case that such departments were unified with pure and applied math in one department. In that case, it is immaterial what a student wants to study for the purpose of funding. A TA will still assist in first year courses offered, so the overall size of the department and the number of courses/sections it offers in the lower division is the dominant factor.
And this is independent of the "rank" of a university, though a few top places might have more RA slots that are grant funded rather than coming out of the instructional budget.
And, funding in the sense of "come and study here for free with no obligations or duties" is pretty rare.
I agree that math departments might have more funded slots than applied math departments, but it might be that some applied math departments bring in bigger grants and offer higher stipends. Though this is just speculation.
@Kimball It can go either way, but it's roughly true that the top-ranked pure math departments and the top-ranked applied math departments are at different schools.
Undergraduates students majoring in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) typically take more required math courses than students in other fields. At a STEM focused institution you're likely to find a bigger math department (relative to the overall size of the institution) and more teaching assistnat slots. At institutions without engineering schools you'll see the opposite effect.
@Kimball TA/RA funding is often standardized across an institution. Students in applied math are certainly more likely to get research assistantships, but that doesn't mean that they'll be paid better.
@BrianBorchers I wonder how common that is. At my university, there are minimum standards, but the actual grad salaries vary by department (and possibly type of appointment)---I think the pay is highest in engineering or business and probably lowest in the humanities.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.620693 | 2021-10-09T13:25:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/176516",
"authors": [
"Brian Borchers",
"Elizabeth Henning",
"Kimball",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/77539"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
176582 | How are MS and MA programs in Mathematics different?
Most graduate programs in Math only offer a PhD program, but some provide either an MS or MA in Math. Are there any significant differences I should be aware of between the two, or are they practically identical?
Does an MS provide better preparation for PhD while an MA provides a better teaching experience? Does it depend on the university and course requirements?
Also, is there a general perception from academic or industry employers on one being better than the other?
This likely varies a lot from one institution to another, but at the institution where I earned my bachelors and masters degrees, the difference between a BA and BS, (and the difference between an MA and an MS) came down to whether or not you took a foreign language. If you had sufficient foreign language hours, you could get a BA/MA. Otherwise, you took CS classes, and got a BS/MS.
There might not be any difference at all. My masters is an MA from an R1 university. I had the choice of degrees just by applying for one or the other. There was no difference in requirements. I took the MA since my math undergraduate was a BA, and again, I had the choice, but only there because I'd taken various humanities courses as well as math.
It might also just be up to the university what to call the degree and how the university is organized. In many, maybe most, US universities, the math department is in the Liberal Arts division or school. So MA might be more common there, where if it is part of the Engineering school an MS would be more natural.
It might also be reasonable to make a distinction for pure math (MA, perhaps) and applied math (MS). Applied math can depend on use of the scientific method as found in science, where pure math seldom does.
But, the requirements are likely to be very similar, if not identical. No one ever blinked at the titles of my degrees: BA, MA, PhD.
Some schools might differ from this of course and want some way to distinguish between a degree with thesis and one without. But you can still be a success with either option.
But note, also, that "most graduate programs in Math only offer a PhD program" is probably incorrect. Some_ might not accept students for only a masters (US perspective), but doctoral students may still be able earn a masters along the way, sometimes just by asking, sometimes by writing a separate thesis (my personal case), and sometimes as a consolation prize for those who drop out.
Of course in those places that require a masters for entry into a doctoral program, that might be the only option.
Indeed, seems mostly a university-specific thing. Princeton's CS department offers both an AB and BSE degree in computer science. As it says on their FAQ page, "Should I choose one degree over the other depending on what I want to do after graduation?
Our experience is that employers and graduate schools do not care whether you're an AB or a BSE (and most don't understand the distinction)."
At least one university I'm familiar with, secondary teachers got MAs in math, and the rest MSes.
I believe that at my university, the general education requirements are different between BS and BA degrees. BS degrees have to have a certain number of "hard sciences" classes (physics, chemistry, biology) whereas that number is smaller for a BA where instead the number of social sciences credit hours is larger.
@WolfgangBangerth, as it was at mine. I'd just fulfilled requirements for both so got to choose either.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.620951 | 2021-10-11T19:13:01 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/176582",
"authors": [
"Azor Ahai -him-",
"Buffy",
"Jon Custer",
"Wolfgang Bangerth",
"Xander Henderson",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/117368",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
118088 | Is it ethical to withdraw a paper after reviews?
I have a submitted a paper to a IEEE letter. Unfortunately, at a later stage I noticed that letter is still in process to have an impact factor.
I already received reviews from reviewers and the journal is willing to
accept the paper after minor revision.
Is it ethical to withdraw the paper at this stage?
Pretty-much-duplicate: How to withdraw an under review manuscript from a journal when you decide you want to submit to another journal with a higher impact factor? See in particular the top voted answer.
Another quite similar question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21742/is-it-ethical-to-withdraw-a-paper-after-acceptance-in-order-to-resubmit-to-a-bet
It is fine (and ethical) to withdraw your paper at any stage. Also, you have no obligation to justify the withdrawal (but the editor will be curious, of course). The reviewers have put in work so it may not be NICE, but that is another story. In the end it is YOUR work and your paper, and you can decide what to do with it. If it deserves to be published in a (much) better journal: go for it.
On the other hand, if the journal is not a "predatory journal", your paper is close to being accepted, and the possible increase in impact factor is minor, it may not be worth the extra work to change the formatting and go through the whole review process again.
I think it is not ethical to retract if the reviewers already have done the job (and a proper job, as befits a solid journal). Reviewers already have the unpleasant job of filtering out papers, and if I were a reviewer that has seen already a paper submitted somewhere else, and would be expected to re-review it, I would be wondering what the reason for rejection was.
If I learned that I had invested some hours' work to review a paper, only to have the author retract it because he is not happy with the journal, I would feel rather pissed indeed. If the review is open and I know the author's name, I would consider refusing to review any more of this author's work, because there are few things more disrespectful of an academic than wasting his time. No, retracting after reviews is not ethical. -1.
@StephanKolassa Stated better than I did. Definitely disrespect for the time of the academics.
The few hours of work the reviewers did are nothing compared to the possible effect on the author's career when the paper is published in a journal of lower quality. The paper may for example not be counted for a grant proposal because its impact factor is below a threshold. Being disrespectful and making reviewers "pissed" is not good, but it is definitely NOT unethical. People make mistakes and have the right to correct them, even if this causes others to do more (unnecessary) work.
I do agree with you. But i would disagree with being pissed. @StephanKolassa
@louic Other researchers have a career, too. They put their own work at the back burner and invest several valuable hours to review the paper, and they get, sorry to say, a "slap in the face". If they are serious researchers who have agreed to review for an even not so good journal or paper, OP has now deprived them of several hours of productive work for absolutely nothing. And frankly, if impact factor hunting is a sufficient motive for a retraction, it is even worse; it is applying the wholly wrong principles. Some of the best (and most cited) papers are in low-impact factor outlets.
I perfectly understand. It is annoying. But changing journal because a genuine mistake was made is NOT unethical. It may be unethical to submit to a low-ranked journal with the purpose to get reviews, improve the paper, and then retract and re-submit to a better journal. Also, your "valuable" work is not wasted, it improved the paper and contributed to better science. You did your contribution to science as a reviewer. Great, well done. If you don't want to "waste" your "valuable" time maybe you should stop reviewing altogether.
@louic True, a good review might be able to help the author improve the paper, no matter where it is published - so far I agree with you (although the review mechanism is defanged by switching journals). You suggest that, as a response to journal switching, to not waste valuable time I should stop reviewing altogether? I disagree with your logic: rather what OP and you implicitly imply is that one should stop reviewing for lesser known journals, because chances are that the review might be wasted. Perhaps you are right, but I believe in supporting serious, even if less elitist, journals.
I have neither said nor implied that one should stop reviewing for "lesser" journals. As for the retraction being ethical or not: let's agree to disagree; ethics is by definition subjective.
There is nothing to do with ethics as question asks. This is simple professionalism. The journal has devoted enough time for reviewing the manuscript. The reviewers have put in their efforts.
If you are really fixed about not go ahead with submission of revised manuscript, then do the following:
Don't submit the revised manuscript to the journal.
If the journal editor asks about the revision, then say that you are extending the article in various ways and would not submit the manuscript. But, thank them for their efforts.
But, I would suggest that you had made a mistake not looking at the journal statistics, you should go ahead with this journal with the publication.
Yes, I made a mistake as I mixed up the name of journal while look for impact factor.
So you are stating that (1) The submitter should delay the process by not submitting a revision without notifying the editor, and (2) The submitter should lie to the editor by stating that they are extending the article, and (3) The submitter should not be allowed to correct their mistake. I wish I could downvote three times.
When you submitted the paper, you entered into an informal contract. Based on this contract, the journal expended resources as did others. Ethically, you are bound by the contract unless the contract is invalid. A possible reason for being invalid is deception (The journal pretends to be another journal, but this is not likely with IEEE). Another reason is disproportionate bad consequences (E.g. you need a publication in an approved journal for the Ph.D. , but the journal is not approved by your graduate school.) In the latter case, the damage done to the journal is minor compared to the damage it does to yourself. You would still need to explain this to the editor and apologize. A third reason is that the journal did not treat you with respect.
The contract is informal because it cannot be enforced. But if you get a reputation of violating these types of informal contracts repeatedly, you might find that your career has become much more difficult.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.621519 | 2018-10-08T10:10:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/118088",
"authors": [
"Captain Emacs",
"Louic",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Stephan Kolassa",
"cswah",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45857",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/64075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/88321",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
210106 | How acceptable is it to copy and paste a certain structure and some particular sentences in letters of recommendation?
I hope this isn't a silly question, but I was wondering how acceptable it'd be to copy and paste a certain structure and some particular sentences in letters of recommendation.
Of course, I'm not thinking of copying and pasting anything very specific about the candidate, but there are certain traits that are shared among students and I also have a certain structure that I like and ties nicely with particular sentences (e.g., when talking about the student as being collegial, responsible, always meeting deadlines etc.). I'm not good with words so the truth is that the more I can reuse the phrases that I like, the faster I can write it and the quality of the text will likely be better as well.
Would this be flagged by some review software? If it is, would one regard it as unethical to reuse stretches of previous letters? I should clarify that all the particular strengths, projects etc. of the student won't be copied and pasted, just sentences about general traits and so forth, or greetings, paragraph transitions, all the repetitive stuff. I guess my real question is: is it ok to use a standard template and just make the required adjustments? Or do I need to keep rephrasing the same points?
At one point I was on a master's admission committee at a specific state school which always got applications from the various smaller state schools. One professor at a very tiny school kept sending nearly identical recommendation letters to us for students each year. It did not help the students very much. And it especially did not when part of their boilerplate language was the same extreme praise.
Using a template is totally fine. I do that, as does every professor I know. In fact, I shared a chunk of my template in an answer to another question. A lot of those sentences get reused in letters I write, and tailored to the individual person. It's usually a good idea to start with a letter you wrote for a similar student applying to similar things (e.g., PhD programs vs REUs).
Would this be flagged by some review software?
There is no review software designed to prevent this practice, because it's so widespread.
If it is, would one regard it as unethical to reuse stretches of previous letters?
It's not unethical.
I guess my real question is: is it ok to use a standard template and just make the required adjustments? Or do I need to keep rephrasing the same points?
It's fine to use a template and make the required adjustments. There are more important things to spend your time on than writing every letter of recommendation from scratch!
@Fe2O3 It's hard to imagine a less useful activity than wordsmithing a letter of recommendation so that no words/sentences in it have ever appeared in another LOR I've ever written. I've written around 100 in my life. There's only so many ways to say "Student X took course Y with me and was a top student..." Certainly I think sharing my experience and advice with people here is more useful than such wordsmithing.
What is a good use of time is to write about the specific project student X did, why it was impressive, and why it shows they will be successful in grad school. And I do that. But, having a template for the standard stuff means I can write a letter of recommendation in 1 hour instead of 4 hours if I was writing it entirely from scratch.
@Fe2O3 It's not fluff. If it's missing it says a lot.
Generic and boilerplate text has the property that it comes across as, well, generic and boilerplate. For this reason, an effective letter of recommendation will contain descriptions of an individual that are specific to that person. People simply do not find generic praise compelling or persuasive. So if you want to make your description of someone as collegial or responsible convincing, it's pretty essential to give some specific details of actual behavior that gave you that positive impression. That's what I try to do when writing letters of recommendation; it's basically the show, don't tell principle of writing.
Coming back to your question: if your letter conforms to the principle of containing a good amount of details specific to the person you are writing about, but also contains some boilerplate/copied-and-pasted language, I think that's fine. But if your idea was that through reusing content from past letters you could escape the need to formulate a coherent description of a specific individual and why they need to be hired/admitted/given a fellowship/etc, I think that's a very misguided idea, as a letter without those kinds of details will simply be completely ineffective and won't provide any benefit for the student's applications. Whether it's ethical to write such a letter becomes the question of whether it's ethical to write a useless letter, knowing that it's useless. I think the answer is pretty clear.
On the one hand, you're copying from yourself, so there's no issue of plagiarism or copyright violation or anything like that. I don't see any legal or ethical issue.
I don't know if job recruiters use plagiarism detection software. Would they do some sort of automated review that would spot the repetition? I don't know. I'd guess not. No one is concerned about plagiarism in a letter of recommendation. Even if it was true that someone copied a letter of recommendation off the Internet and then edited it up, so what? The HR department isn't grading the letter of recommendation for originality. They're evaluating the job candidate.
What WOULD concern me is if the HR department got two letters from you for two different students and noticed they were almost identical. At that point they might conclude you weren't really writing about the individual student but just had a stock letter of recommendation that you sent out for anyone who asked for it.
If the template part is truly only the most generic stuff, "I am a professor at Foobar College and ____________ asked me for a letter of recommendation" or some such, I doubt anyone would worry about it. But if you had standard phrases that you used for every student, "_______ is very hard-working and intelligent", etc, that might make an HR person think that you really didn't put any thought into this.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.622076 | 2024-04-30T12:02:17 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/210106",
"authors": [
"David White",
"JoshuaZ",
"Marianne013",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34571",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/66685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/97038"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
182335 | Author refuses sharing his "open access" code/data
My doctoral project required me to learn a whole new method from zero. My advisor had another student who mastered the technique since his BA studies, and so was much more advanced than me. I asked this student several times to share his code with me, but he claimed that his research was "classified" (No, it was not), so he is not allowed to share it.
Now his papers are published in open access journals under the statement
Scripts using the R and MATLAB programming language are provided to produce figures and extract data from external databases. Additional code and related files are available from the corresponding author (him) upon request.
Only that now he is ignoring my emails.
Is there anything I can do? The truth is I want to use his codes simply because I want to learn from him.
You should discuss this with your advisor and have them determine the best approach.
Yes, I've considered doing this. I'll try to write to him once again and, if still no reply, I'll ask our advisor
I wouldn't share my code if I expect you to learn the basics, or that giving you my code means I now have to spend time teaching you. I had students asking me for source code so that they can complete their assignment. I suggest that you learn to code the method yourself, and only ask for specific advice or missing steps or tips when you are truly stuck. Do not ask for the whole source code.
@Prof.SantaClaus some people including myself can learn by reading code.
@FranckDernoncourt sure. Many students prefer to do that because that's what they are familiar with. For example, in my area, most concepts are described mathematically, and students prefer to read source code as opposed to mathematics. However, from my perspective, they cannot run away from mathematics.
Here are the typical steps to follow until you got the code:
Email the student who has the code. Send a reminder after a few days.
Email the student who has the code and CC the student's advisor and/or co-authors. Send a reminder after a few days.
If you can meet either student or better the student's advisor face-to-face, try it.
If none of the co-authors is your advisor or close to you, email the journal to raise a formal complaint that the author didn't send you the code. Attach your previous emails to the student who has the code as a proof. If one of the co-authors is your advisor or close to you, explain the situation and get them to put pressure on the student who has the code, to comply with the open access requirement of the journal.
That should resolve the issue in most cases.
PS:
His papers are published in open access journals.
Note that "open access journal" doesn't entail open source code. Neither the journal nor the student who has the code has any legal obligation to share their code (unless some special cases, e.g. if the student's funding agency forces them to do so in their funding clauses).
Step 4 is interesting; would a journal be obligated to intervene in such a case? Especially because the complainant can't attach proof of not having received the code (only of having asked). This would mean that the journal needs to arbitrate and spend resources on ascertaining if the code has been shared in full etc.
@AppliedAcademic no legal obligation, but it's rather fast for them to email the authors with complainant in CC asking for the code. At the end of the day, the student who has the code has no legal obligation to share their code (unless some special cases eg if their funding forces them to do so).
+1 for open access journal doesn't entail open source code
Makes sense. This would not be grounds for the journal to issue a retraction, IMO.
Thanks a lot! Indeed, I prefer not to write to the journals, and also not to get our advisor involved. Pay attention that he is signed on "Additional code and related files are available from the corresponding author (him) upon request.". That means he is suppose to share it if requested
Two nits on this answer: (1) This would work for a general case of getting code, but in this case it appears that the student is a former lab mate under the same advisor. This is overly formal for that situation. (2) Your step #4 seems a bit much. As a journal editor I would probably ignore such an email as code sharing is good but not required. (Obviously this would change if it were a requirement.)
@eykanal why are steps 1 to 3 too formal? step 4 is last resort, better than giving up and coding for 2 months imho.
@FranckDernoncourt I view the OP's situation in the class of "problems with lab mate", rather than "problem with random other researcher." Getting co-authors involved is a bit much. Of course emailing and meeting is fine, but the overall described progression feels heavy to me.
@eykanal what would you do if step 1 fails?
Talk to my (and his) advisor, who managed the project, and get his take on how to proceed.
@eykanal I see, so basically removing step 2 and go straight to step 3. I agree, that makes sense too in this case if the advisor is easy to meet.
I interpret the question as "I need code to do stuff, how?".
The classic option, the one that you are doomed to use if everything fails, and the way things were before open code repositories, is: just hire / take a BSc student. They would need to implement that thing from scratch using papers / books on the topic as a part of their job / BSc thesis.
Ask the PI on the project / the corresponding author of the paper, if they would share the code with you. They might not agree. I am sure, other answers will detail on the open access and availability bit, I suspect some internal shenanigans.
Basically asking for code is not the best way to do it in my opinion. You do not want to study the code, you want to do stuff, right? Then ask about it. There are multiple options.
"I need your code, because I want to understand how it works / reproduce the results in the paper." That's what the availability thing is for, officially.
"I want to build upon your code to produce new research results." This is the most favourable version. Mostly implied with it (but it does not hurt to state it explicitly) is: "you get to be a coauthor on the new paper".
"I want to apply your method to my data and to use the results in my paper." It is a milder version of the above. Some authors are not inclined / not allowed to give the code to anyone. (This behaviour becomes less frequent, for good, but is still present.) Still, they might be interested in a collaboration. A possibility is to give them your data (if you, on your end, are comfortable with it), let them process it, obtain the results. Again, it implies "you get to be a coauthor", as they do work for your new paper.
"I want to compare your method to mine." It is a valid concern, in most of the cases it produces just a citation of the others' paper.
"I want to do some statistics / automatic code analysis on your code." That's a citation, I'd say.
I'd say that people are in generic more inclined to provide data or to collaborate on one of the above terms that are more exact and clear than just "let me see your code".
I would assume that the most frequent "fears" that lead to not giving code to other people are: "they might 'steal' it" – i.e., an idea that someone would build upon your code and not acknowledge you; and "legal" limitations, ranging from "I have transferred the copyright to my research unit and they don't share" to "my supervisor said 'no'". (Again, I am not discussing here, how the data availability statement of the publication agrees with those.)
Thanks a lot for your detailed answer. The actual email I recently sent him said "I actually try to learn from you, and this could be a huge help". He is just not willing to share. During all these years I made it very clear that all I want is to learn from him.
You are welcome. Well, you'd get code from me with such a mail, but it's little you can do, if they do not agree. The big gun of the availability statement might help, but it is not the focus of my answer.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.622648 | 2022-02-13T12:19:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/182335",
"authors": [
"AppliedAcademic",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Oleg Lobachev",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Uri",
"enthu",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/148877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/153364",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15723",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39510",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46265",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/90681",
"user2705196"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
36891 | Decision time on a postdoc offer while applying for other positions
I have recently applied for several postdoctoral positions as well as a lecturing position. A week ago I had an interview for one of the postdoctoral positions and I should know the outcome of this interview by the end of next week. During the interview I was asked if I was applying for other positions, to which I said yes and briefly described what these were.
The project is a very interesting one but I also want to consider the other positions I applied for (especially the lecturing one) if I were to be the preferred candidate. However, I will have to wait until the end of February or so to hear about these other positions.
So, if I was chosen for this postdoc I was interviewed for, I was wondering how long it is acceptable/customary to make them wait until I give them a final response.
I'm sure they would be ok with a couple of weeks, 1. because moving overseas can be a bit of a change from a personal perspective and 2. because considering other potentially interesting opportunities makes sense at this stage in my career, but I was wondering if making them wait for a month or so was too long.That being said, I heard about people making an employer wait four months or so but I would find it rather impolite.
Thanks for your input!
Most likely, you won't be able to "make" them wait at all. If they give you an offer, they will also give you a deadline to decide whether to accept it. You can ask for an extension of this deadline, but there are no guarantees that they will agree to extend it. The power here is mostly on their side, not yours, unless you are really a superstar, or are the one and only qualified candidate.
For a position like a postdoc, the employer typically has a fixed number of positions available (often just one). Commonly (especially for a field with an academic-year hiring cycle) they interview a number of people and then make offers made serially. Every day that they wait for you to make a decision is a day in which the next person on their list might take another job, reducing their options if you turn them down. So it's not in their interest to give you an indefinite amount of time to decide, since that could result in them hiring someone not as good, or not being able to fill the position at all. They don't want to rush you into declining, but they also can't wait forever.
It's hard to predict what kind of deadline they might give you. Some employers will give a candidate a very short deadline (a few days) if the candidate is a "reach" - the employer doubts that the candidate will accept, but wants to at least try to get them. This way, in the likely case that the candidate says no, not much time has been lost. More commonly, the deadline would be on the order of a week or two. Having as much time as a month seems unlikely, but there are a lot of factors that could affect it, and if they are not tied to the academic year there may be more flexibility.
What "makes sense" to you from a personal perspective (pondering an overseas move, exploring options, etc) is not really the employer's concern. Even before receiving the offer, it would be a good idea to carefully consider all the pros and cons, and come to a tentative decision about whether you would take the job if offered (including scenarios about other offers received or not received). Between the interview and your own research into the institution, you should have almost all the information you're going to get; the only extra information in the offer itself would be the salary (and other benefits). So ideally, as soon as you get the offer, you should know how you intend to decide, or what other offers you need to wait for.
It's entirely possible that you may have to make a decision on this position before hearing about the others. That's just how it goes.
It also is entirely possible that the funding is flexible and the PI is willing to wait for a decision. It can never hurt to ask, just be up front about it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.623344 | 2015-01-15T23:08:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36891",
"authors": [
"Chun Rapeepat",
"Mamoun A. Homaida",
"Pat",
"StrongBad",
"Trina K Ngo",
"gsp",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100293",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100295",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100302",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100303",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100373",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100374",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"samiyah mathkuor"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95792 | Are there guidelines for choosing colors in figures?
Are there guidelines how to choose colors for figures in papers? I know that about 5-10% of the population see colors differently. How do I create a figure that has to have at least 4-5 different colors in it and make sure everyone will be able to see it and distinguish between the components.
On Graphic Design SE there are many questions and answers that address this issue.
Second on colorbrewer2.org as it also has a function to filter out color blind friendly scheme. This page also introduces a color blind simulator which allows you to upload an illustration and look at how it appears for people with different color perceptions. And lastly, if you can do it with just grey scale or other design, I'd suggest go without color.
Choose colours that can still be distinguished when printed black and white, or go old-school and introduce different patterns/shapes, if possible.
This question already has an answer on TeX.SE
@koalo: Since it's on another SE site, and the question is particularly relevant in academia, I'd say it's on-topic here.
The problem of different color perception (at least with respect to climate science) was pointed out 2004 by Light and Bartlein in EOS. With a strong emphasis on climate science the blog "Climate Lab Book" discusses the problem of the so called "rainbow color scale". As mentioned in the comments they recommend "Color brewer 2" to create color palettes. (There are packages for MATLAB, Python and R. The link to R includes some more advice.) Already pre-defined palettes (again with a strong emphasis on climate science) are presented by the Department of Geography of the University of Oregon. This palettes include color-blind safe ones, as well as palettes useful for specific associations.
For example when displaying temperatures blue is often associated with "cold", while red is associated with "hot". Diverting from similar common associations may prevent an more intuitive understanding of your figures.
Another reason for caution regarding color palettes: "Rainbow" (and similar ones) may distort your perception of boundaries.
To conclude: There appears no easy way to select an appropriate color palette for your figures, but there is plenty of advice.
Different screens may display colors differently due to different color curves (or even display settings). And colors don't scale linearly on most screens, so you can't just use RGB values (not to mention RGB is a poor color space in relation to human perception). Just because it displays well on your screen doesn't mean that it will display the same way for everyone else, regardless of disability. The other issue is that some people print out papers, and may not use color.
To help reduce these problems, you should use a contrast checker. If you have to choose between 4-5 colors, pick colors that each differ enough on this color checker. There are also established standards at least in the web development community, but they should be reasonable that they apply to this as well. Among these guidelines are color contrast requirements.
There are alternatives to using colors to differentiate though. You could also use different shapes or different border designs, etc. Preferably, you could use these in addition to smart color selection, but if your colors have poor contrast, then these can help to further distinguish the various elements in the figure.
Just from personal preference, but colored text (not white or black) almost always looks bad because the characters end up being pretty narrow, and subpixel coloring to avoid anti-aliasing doesn't help here.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.623723 | 2017-09-11T15:37:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95792",
"authors": [
"Mark",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Penguin_Knight",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/61201",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6450",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"koalo"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
94856 | Non-consensual authorship order change after paper submission?
After submitting a paper to a conference, my advisor told me that he was going to change the authorship order (putting him as first author, me as last) because he contributed more to the final manuscript, even though I conducted all the experiments. He proceeded to change the order without my consent.
Is this common in academia? I'm a new master's student and I'm not sure if I should just get used to it or change advisors.
Did you agree upon the initial order together or did you just submit it? Normally it's NOT okay to change the order afterwards, especially not without approval of all contributing authors. At least in journal papers, though some fields treat conference contributions in a similar way as other fields (mine) treat journal papers.
We agreed on the initial order together. He did all of the theoretical work and I did performed all experiments. How should I proceed in this situation?
What is the position of your advisor, is he PhD student, postdoc, faculty, professor? Is he independent or are you both working in some other professors group? How much of a role do conference papers play in your field?
He is a tenure-track professor, and we are working on a project that is not part of any group or lab. Conference papers are crucial in my field (Machine Learning).
The review is double-blind, meaning that the pdf does not have authors listed. The final order is chosen when we send the camera-free paper, with the authorship listing. So there is no final author order until the final version of the pdf is sent to the conference.
So you did the experiments based on the theory developed by the professor? Was this the plan from the beginning? And is performing experiments considered a substantial contribution to a paper in your field?
Related: Can a supervisor extend the paper and change the order of authors?
You agreed on something, worked together and he then changed the conditions without your consent. That is not ok in all, neither in academia nor in any business.
However, both in academia and everywhere else, it happens. The question now is: What can you do? Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself. To help you with that, here are some ideas:
He might actually be right that you contributed less than anticipated. Still, changing the order in the last second without giving you the chance to earn first author is not a nice move.
You can simply accept it and be happy to have a (maybe even the first?) publication, even if not at first author. On the other hand, this might mean that he will try the same thing next time.
You can confront your advisor about it. Depending on how he answers, you might decide how to proceed.
You can contact and notify the conference about it. This might mean that you loose the publication and get on your advisors bad side, though.
You can ask others at the institute what they think about it. Maybe they already know the tricks your advisor plays? This might also backfire if you badmouth him to much.
As you see, all options also have drawbacks. Personally, I would try to get a detailed explanation out of him. Don't blame him, rather try to make clear that you want to know your mistakes, want to know how you could have contributed more, to work better on your next paper. If you are lucky, he will point out your weak points, you will agree that you could have done better and everything gets resolved.
Changing authorship order without consent is not common in academia, and this should not have happened. However, rather than asking yourself “what can you do”, as @Dirk Liebhold pointed out, I would ask “what do I want”. Are you going to keep on working with your advisor for a long time or are you leaving immediately after? Is he/she reasonable? If you do not plan on publishing with him, do you really care about pointing out his misconduct?
Keep in mind that last author is not so bad: first author carried out the experiment, but last author is the one who designed or had the idea for it, and possibly the one who found the money to fund it.
In my opinion it is not very important if you are first or last, given that this is only a conference paper , but you should make it clear who is actually going to the conference! Also, if a paper is going to follow on this work, decide the author list in advance with him.
Edit: In some fields (such as computer science), conference papers are peer-reviewed and are at least as important as journal articles, and last authorship carries no prestige.
"given that this is only a conference paper" Nope. In some areas of computer science, a paper at a top conference can make or break an academic career.
Do you mean that being first or last author of a conference paper can make or break a career? And do you mean that conference papers and full peer-review articles have the same weight in computer science? I do not work in this field so I am genuinely curious.
Not sure about that. My point is that the situation is not less bad because it's "only a conference paper". In some fields, conference papers are equally or more important than journal papers.
Thanks for your edit. Just for maximal clarity: in the fields where my comment applies, conference papers are peer-reviewed, too.
@ JeffE Edited accordingly
@JeffE for early career scientist I would argue that it is better to be first author, some people might question why you were the last author and senior authors were first authors.
@user4050 The importance of author order varies by subfield. Authors of theoretical CS papers always appear in alphabetical order, so there is no prestige attached to first authorship. In other parts of CS (like machine learning, the topic of OP's paper), it's definitely better to be first author.
@Zep Fixed your edit. CS conference papers are peer-reviewed, sometimes more stringently than journal papers, especially in machine learning.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.624082 | 2017-08-21T17:42:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/94856",
"authors": [
"Herman Toothrot",
"JeffE",
"Kimball",
"Mark",
"Tobias Kildetoft",
"Zep",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4050",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48413",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/78776",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/78808",
"lighthouse keeper",
"rebecca_cs"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
104448 | An author of a paper included a blank supplementary file. Is it possible to make the journal correct this?
The authors of a paper explicitly wrote that they included their code as a supplementary file, and the file is actually available, however, it only includes the header and no code whatsoever. Is it possible to make the journal take notice and correct this issue?
Are you asking as a reviewer, or just as an interested reader?
As a reader. I want to test the methods used by the authors in my own data.
If a file is missing or appears to be missing, then the editor in charge of the paper should obviously be notified, since he or she is the person responsible for managing communications between the authors and the reviewers. (I have done this before when there was an obvious missing document.)
Well, the file is available for download but seems to have been left blank intentionally.
@Lumimoto: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I would proceed under the assumption that it is a mistake that the editors/authors will happily correct when they are informed about it. Why would the authors write that the code is included if they didn't intend to do so? If the authors really don't want to share the code, you are out of luck anyway; see https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96356/can-one-demand-to-see-code-used-to-generate-an-article/96358#96358.
Is this an old or a new paper - if it is old you may not be the first and, effectively, it won’t happen, but if new, you may be lucky...
Of course, it could be a new paper and they have changed their minds, which leaves you the choices of finding the code elsewhere or coding it yourself...
Obviously the suggestion to produce the code yourself is not well received...
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.624581 | 2018-02-24T02:33:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/104448",
"authors": [
"Lumimoto",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Solar Mike",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72129",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
97039 | What does "the manuscript has been removed from your Associate Editor Center" mean?
I received the following email:
Dear Prof. X:
You are no longer assigned to manage the review of Manuscript ID #####. The manuscript has been removed from your Associate Editor Center.
What does it mean? I sent the paper 2 months ago and just today I got the email above. Do I have to wait long as a new editor will check the manuscript?
Is this in response to a paper you submitted, or one you were supposed to referee?
Also, are you Prof. X? Does the manuscript ID match yours?
This question is highly unclear. It seems like this message got into your mailbox by mistake.
From its wording this e-mail is intended for the associate editor managing the manuscript in question. Thus unless you are an associate editor of said journal and were the editor assigned to the paper in question, this mail is not intended for you. Therefore you should not have received this e-mail. That you did receive it anyway means that something went wrong. Contact the journal and tell them what happened.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.624770 | 2017-10-07T19:11:39 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/97039",
"authors": [
"AJK",
"Coder",
"Wrzlprmft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53762",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9892"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
44352 | Where can I publish corrigenda for a conference paper?
I am wondering where I should publish a corrigendum. The paper, which has some wrong numbers in it (nothing major but it still is not correct), has been published in conference proceedings. I don't think a journal would publish a corrigendum for a mere conference article, submitting to the same conference next year does not seem to be the right way to do it either (takes too long, I don't know if they would accept it since there would be not much of a presentation). So I am thinking of a technical report. Would that be a correct way to do it?
If the proceedings is one that was issued by the conference at the same time as the conference (or shortly thereafter), you may be stuck with just publishing it on your website, which is presumably what you meant by a tech report. If the conference was run by a major society, you may at least be able to get the online version of the proceedings updated. You should get in touch with the program chair for the conference at the very least.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.624911 | 2015-04-27T20:55:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/44352",
"authors": [
"Arghavan Mohammadhassani",
"Debprasad Dutta",
"Ferdinand Lubobi",
"Rohit",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120525",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120526",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120534",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120535",
"igo"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
49934 | Is it better to have just two good letters of recommendation, or two good letters and one bad letter, if three are expected?
Some universities say that "The minimum number of letters of recommendation are 2 but we highly encourage 3". If I know that I can get 2 good letters of recommendation but they "highly encourage 3", should I send in a third?
"Bad" or just not stellar? A letter that says you are a terrible person, have no work ethic, and are as dumb as a post, i.e. one that actively disparages you, could certainly kill your application. A mediocre letter is a somewhat different story.
I was thinking more of "not stellar". Just a so-so letter.
Two and a half is more than two. :)
@BobRodes That's almost certainly not the right way of looking at this.
A mediocre third letter is generally worse than no third letter, (when a third letter is not required).
@xLeitix Quite so--there's almost certainly no such thing as half a letter. :)
Is it better to have 2 good letters or recommendation or 2 good and 1 bad letter?
Definitely, it's better to have two good letters. A bad letter is a very, very bad thing.
They're not counting -- they're reading for understanding.
"They" will also wonder why there weren't 3 letters, since other applicants have 3... "Cherry-picking" faculty contacts suggests itself, etc.
@paulgarrett "The minimum number of letters of recommendation are 2."
@paulgarrett Isn't selecting your letter writers by definition "cherry-picking"?
@xLeitix, sure, selecting 3 is ... selecting... but only being able to come up with 2, instead of 3, is an indicator that one's fan base is 33% smaller, etc.
@paulgarrett On reading the quoted instructions, someone might think, "I have 2 strong letters and one positive but not so strong letter, I'll stop at 2." Or "I have 2 good letters, and my third reference is in a dig in Asia at the moment, so I'll stop at 2." Or "I am a returning student and I could only find 2 references after my childrearing gap." If they require 3 letters they should ask for 3 letters.
@aparente001, "strongly suggested/encouraged" is a pretty strong hint. Not making it a "rule" simply gives flexibility for the decision-makers, but should not be viewed as being "unclear" about what is wanted.
@paulgarrett - How about putting your point of view in an Answer? (I am not really sure exactly what your point of view is....)
If you can't feel assured that that third letter writer will write a positive letter, forget it. Don't risk having a negative or even so-so letter in your file.
There are three different dimensions of the value of a recommendation letter that are relevant here:
The quality ascribed by the writer to the recommendee.
The certainty or itensity of that statement.
The reputation of the letter writer himself/herself.
A letter that scores high in the first category, but is less persuasive on the other ones, should not be detrimental. A typical example would be "CANDIDATE attend my course on X, participated well and scored top grades in the exam." This won't get you far, but also shouldn't hold you back.
A letter that is not good because of the first criterion is problematic. A letter which scores very low on the first and very high on the third will probably kill of an application regardless of most other circumenstances.
They may count, or not, depending. My department would count because every application had to qualify for submission for graduate fellowships (policy decision), where 3 means 3. (There was also a quota of "exceptions", they could spend an exception if the candidate was worth it). Not all departments will care. Not all faculty and disciplines have fallen victim to praise-inflation, so a simple letter stating that you did a competent job in your work could be good enough, especially if the writer is known for being conservative in praise.
If only to clarify my comments to other answers: if the "instructions" say "minimum 2 letters, 3 strongly suggested", or similar, it means that the admissions committee reserves the right to consider situations with only 2 letters... but certainly not that it hardly matters. It matters. A solid 3rd letter is fine, and infinitely better than no third letter, for at least two reasons. One is the mere "strongly encouraged" message, which, if effectively disregarded, amounts to a "failed diagnostic". The other is the subtler issue about appraisal of a student's potential: as it happens, it seems possible to get one super-enthusiastic letter, and one more "pretty good", ... but it's hardly to bluff to a third that is "ok". Further, and perhaps surprisingly to students, the "second excellent letter" is very often not-so-sterling-after-all, and this unexpected loss can be compensated by hearing from a third, "disinterested but informed" party, that the student has good chops. So... everyone, including the student, wants that third letter.
Thanks for clarifying your position. "A solid 3rd letter is fine, and infinitely better than no third letter" is a good point in response to a different question!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.625189 | 2015-08-04T20:00:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49934",
"authors": [
"Bill Barth",
"BobRodes",
"Chikita Isaac",
"Noor",
"Power.Peace",
"Steven",
"Tangoed",
"Thomas Lumley",
"ZeroWorks",
"aparente001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12678",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138767",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138768",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138769",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138770",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138804",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138807",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138874",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138898",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/138899",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/139049",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34965",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"ohwilleke",
"paul garrett",
"perigon",
"soap",
"theGrad",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
46081 | Is it appropriate to describe our methodological mistakes in manuscript?
I work outside academia, but am working on a project with a master's student. During data collection, we had some skip-logic errors pop up while administering the survey online and it resulted in some superfluous data. She and her adviser decided to throw out all affected data and only analyze open-field text, and outlined these mistakes in great detail on her master's paper. While writing our joint manuscript for publication, is it appropriate to outline these programming errors?
What's a "skip-logic error"? What does it mean for them to "pop up"? What do you mean by "programming error"? I'm trying to understand better the nature of the error, the cause, etc.
It would be inappropriate not mention the mishaps in my opinion. But there is no need to document this in great detail, as you mentioned. I would comment during the revision process that you feel the description of the "skip-logic section" is too wordy, and it should be trimmed to be more concise.
Keep the focus on the positive findings as opposed to mishaps.
Another option would be to include a brief summary of the error/resulting data loss in the main text and provide more extensive details to interested readers in a Supplementary Info section (if the journal allows this).
I would also mention significant failures in the methodology because it can serve as an important warning for future researchers. For instance, needing to change the number of samples or the testing period because of experimental (or computational) difficulties may be necessary, and it would be helpful for others to know why you needed to change the protocol. In addition, reporting such issues is important for purposes of reproducibility.
However, as the others have posted, there is absolutely no need to spend huge amounts of space discussing such issues, unless your paper is attempting to correct the methodological mistakes of others in the literature.
In the Methods section we detail the process of obtaining data to analysis. Errors resulting in loss of data is a deviation from the said protocol and hence should be reported. The details need not be excruciating fine; a sentence to explain the skip logic pattern and that affected subsections were not analyzed should be sufficient. This is by no means an uncommon practice: there are generic missing, loss of data storage media, biological samples expired, or even contamination in lab. If any of these activities can potentially bias your end result or lower your statistical power, then they should be reported.
Judging from what you said that the student and the supervisor had to throw away all multiple choices and only kept open-ended question, I am guessing the skip pattern problem was extensive? If that's the case, you should try to gain full understanding of the error and carefully decide if any of the data are actually salvageable. For instance, if the skip pattern problem had made the survey questions appear to be illogical, would you still expect the respondents to be in their right mind when filling in the open-ended questions?
The master's paper needs to happen probably because the student has done the due diligence and finished a project, despite with technical errors. But data mishap that is sufficient for a master's thesis does not imply the data are fit for publication. As your name will be on it, if you feel uncomfortable, request to be removed from the author list. You may opt for acknowledgement or even no relationship.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.625628 | 2015-05-26T15:55:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46081",
"authors": [
"A Jack",
"Anbu Arasu",
"D.W.",
"Daniel Wang",
"Drake P",
"Gizem Kabak",
"Remore1112",
"Sachiko.Shinozaki",
"Sid",
"Vasileios Thomopoulos",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126763",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126764",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126765",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126774",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126776",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126777",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126786",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126787",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15616",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/705"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
55703 | Second time chance for applying in one university
My application for admission to a degree program or research position at universities in Europe, USA, Australia, and so on has been rejected. If I then write several new papers for journals and conferences and again apply to the same university, is there any chance for me to obtain admission, or will I be automatically rejected?
I can only speak about the admissions process in the United States, but you will not automatically be reconsidered (i.e., you will need to apply again).
At least in my area, published papers do carry non-trivial weight in the admissions process, so it's great that you now have those. Overall, I think they key factor in getting an different outcome this time around is highlighting what has changed since you last applied. It seems like you now have publications you didn't have before, so be sure to highlight those. If your grades or standardized test scores were weak, highlight anything that can show that you've made an effort to improve them (e.g., getting good grades in areas where you were weak, getting a higher GRE score, etc). If you suspect that your recommendation letters were not strong, perhaps try to ask someone else who may provide a stronger letter this time. Et cetera.
In most cases of multiple rejections from the same program, I believe applicants are rejected again because their new application is not substantially different from their old (previously rejected) application. Like Alexanders, I also encourage you to apply to different schools in addition to reapplying to the same schools as before, just to maximize your chances of admission (of course, only apply to schools where you could realistically see yourself going, as to not waste your time or the time of the respective admissions committees).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.625951 | 2015-10-08T16:32:35 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55703",
"authors": [
"Manlam Konyak Arolim",
"MiFischer22",
"RedGiant",
"Timothy Weigand",
"Zuhair",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152533",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152534",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152535",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152543",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/152730",
"reddyr"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
98752 | What should I do if I accidentally get graded on a take-home exam for someone else's work?
A few weeks ago, I had an exam. Some of the questions were to be solved by computer and the results printed out and handed in. I didn't do well on the exam: I didn't solve some of the questions and I didn't do the part where I was supposed to print out the results, so I expected to get an F or D but I got a really good grade! Then i went to the professor's office to check my exam i was shocked to see that the papers that I was supposed to print out were "included" and solved correctly!
I was so shocked and nervous I didn't even say a word and left the office! I'm still shocked. I don't know what to do: I don't know if he really helped me or the papers weren't mine and by mistake got included with my papers! And now, when I see him around, I feel awkward. What am I supposed to do?
Shall i go back to his office and tell him i just want to check my grade and leave? Or that i need someone to explain what happened?
Tell him that you didn't do those parts and ask him to retake the exam. Also inform him that "your" exam is probably someone else's who may deserve a better grade than he/she got.
While this may be off-topic as a student question, it's very much on-topic for faculty who may have to deal with such a situation.
Do go and see the professor, as pointed out someone else may be hurting. It may well be that the prof could turn around and sort the other person's grade to its correct value - if that is the case, and then say, well for your honesty, yours won't change...
However, do be prepared to retake it, or your grade to change...
It also depends on how many assessments there are in the course: if there are only a few it may be corrected, but if there are many - then it won't make a huge difference...
Be known for your attitude...
You should go to your professor, explain what happened and your confusion with your score, and ask to retake the test if indeed this was in error.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.626138 | 2017-11-10T19:31:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/98752",
"authors": [
"Bob Brown",
"Mark",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
46786 | Relevance of Advanced Placement courses to graduate admissions
So a lot of websites recommend taking AP courses and earning college credits in advance. What exactly are advanced placement courses and where can one take them ? Why are they stressed upon; are they really all that important a factor while considering students for admission to a Master's program?
Advanced Placement (AP) courses are taken by high school students in the US as a way of earning undergraduate college credits. This isn't relevant to admission into a Master's program and is off topic for this site.
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/home AP is a system for getting college credit by examination instead of taking classes. They are for bachelor's degrees, and as far as I know they are irrelevant to master's programs.
@BrianBorchers: Not directly, no. However, they can have an influence. See my answer below.
As mentioned in the comments above, the Advanced Placement (AP) program offers students the opportunity to earn college credits for courses completed during high school by successfully passing an exam of difficult comparable to that of a college course.
Directly, AP courses do not influence graduate admissions, since they are generally excluded from cumulative averages. However, they indirectly can influence master's and PhD admissions, because the ability to place out of lower-level courses can open up the possibility to complete more advanced courses in a given discipline, or allow for enough "freedom" in the course plan to allow time for graduate-level coursework. For example, I had sufficient AP credits to opt out of a number of courses as an undergraduate; as a result of this, I was able to take three different graduate-level courses plus an advanced undergraduate math elective that otherwise I would not have had time for.
I strongly second the points in this answer! To reiterate: no, the literal getting of more undergrad credits does not affect graduate admission, but it makes possible coursework and other activities that can greatly enhance graduate admissions prospects. E.g., taking as many graduate-level courses as possible while an undergrad.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.626329 | 2015-06-07T17:42:33 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46786",
"authors": [
"Abo Ghazi",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"Barbers Fitzrovia",
"Brian Borchers",
"Jocker",
"Peter Paccone",
"VarunBarad",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128918",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128919",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128920",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128939",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128940",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128990",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"legalbeetle",
"paul garrett"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
85921 | How can I make sure that my paper's work is unique?
I am trying to write a research papers that applies the ELK stack to visualise social media data (twitter API). How can I make sure that my work was not done by someone else before? I searched in different repositories for the two titles but did not find any paper that deals with them combined. How can I assure my work is contributing in that area?
My professor is really busy person outside the campus and I can't meet him regularly so emails is the only way that I keep him informed about the progress, once I asked this question he answered, "we'll get the answer when conference reviewers send you the feedback."
Isn't that too late? How should I proceed?
Getting on top of the literature in your field is an important skill for a researcher and, I think, too broad as a question for this format. However, from what you tell us, it sounds like your advisor does a very poor job in advising you, which is a real and significant threat to your chances to graduate. If you still have the chance to switch advisors, you might consider doing so.
I can tell you that applying ELK to social media is not novel in industry. Whether anyone else has written a paper, read the answers.
Possible duplicate of How can I improve the effectiveness of my literature searches?
There are several questions on this site about how to do a literature search: see, e.g., http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/13594/705.
To address you concern that it is too late once it has been submitted to a conference.
Acceptance: Conference reviews are not the be all and end all. Getting accepted does not make it a good or correct paper. It does not mean that the paper makes a novel contribution. Acceptance reflects the views, knowledge and biases of the reviewers. This type of peer review is useful from the view that it is a a final last check on paper quality, novelty, etcetera. before being put out in the wild to see if your ideas are useful/deepen understanding/correct.
Therefore, you should only rely on the reviewers as a last line of defense against publishing something non-innovative, etcetera. and do a thorough literature search beforehand. You can never be sure, of course. Some authors put "to the best of our knowledge" before making claims of novelty.
Rejection: If you are rejected because it is not seen as novel is not as detrimental as you might think. Firstly, the next time you submit to a conference you might get ignorant but positive reviewers, or the reviewer who thought it was not novel may be someone who thinks everyone is copying them.
Therefore, if it is rejected for not being novel you should not worry too much. Most likely your paper might claim to be the first to do X and Y, but another paper already does X and Y. However, X and Y might be a very broad general contribution. Perhaps the existing work does X and Y using method M1 whilst yours uses M2. Or perhaps existing work makes a more specific contribution than X and Y, X1 and Y1, whilst yours makes X2 and Y2 and both pieces make contributions that could be described as X and Y. In other words, you would need to rephrase how your work is different by making comparisons on the specific details. Now, if the specific details are also the same (never seen this happen, personally), you can at least do a little bit more research to make it different.
To summarise, even if after doing an extensive literature search (which is necessary to make a contribution) you can always adjust how you sell your work (which is sufficient to make a contribution).
The only thing you can do to ensure that your contribution is original, i.e., nobody has done the same thing before, is extensive literature research.
Use Google Scholar or Scopus to search for keywords related to your field and try to find something similar. You will notice that there is only so much literature that is closely related to your topic. If you are thorough, you should be able to say if you have done something original.
Your advisor doesn't seem to be keen on talking to you regularly. In the case that you want to continue working for him, you should probably do the literature research, write the article, send it to your advisor for corrections and hand it in. I doubt your advisor will take much time to correct your article, so you should have more experienced colleagues read your article before sending it to him. If he agrees, submit it to a journal and wait for the outcome.
Tactic #1: Keep up with the literature
I once wrote a blog post on this topic; here is the summary:
Use search engines, especially Google Scholar
Link forward through the literature
Learn how to do effective keyword searches
Use review articles
Use RSS or email notifications for new journal issues
Check preprint servers (like arXiv) and key author websites
The details are in the post linked above.
Tactic #2: Talk to people
Talk to everybody you can about your research topic. Ask them what they know about related research. Do this at your university, but especially at conferences or when you visit other institutions. When you have new results, email your close colleagues about them. Once you know a few people, this approach becomes even more effective (and much more efficient) than #1, since you are leveraging your colleagues' collective knowledge of the literature.
[...] once I asked this question he answered, "we'll get the answer when conference reviewers send you the feedback."
Isn't that too late?
Strictly speaking, the answer is no: you can always resubmit the paper to another conference.
However, arguably, this way of delegating your job of doing a proper literature research to the reviewers is both inefficient and harmful. Inefficient because there's a chance that the reviewers do not tell you all relevant references, and you will have the same issue when you resubmit the paper somewhere else. Harmful because you will communicate the impression that you didn't do your job properly. Based on this impression, you will have an even harder time getting the paper accepted when the same reviewers read the paper again for another conference.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.626535 | 2017-03-03T12:49:21 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/85921",
"authors": [
"D.W.",
"bmargulies",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20580",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48413",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/705",
"lighthouse keeper"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
91556 | Am I harming myself by doing a PhD in a less prestigious university than where I did my MSc if I don't want to stay in academia?
I did an MSc in an extremely prestigious university, in mathematics and theoretical computer science. I got an offer to stay there for a PhD, but turned it down. Instead, I enrolled on an MRes + PhD programme at a good but far less prestigious university, in a subject I thought I was far more interested in. I will soon have finished the MRes year.
As much as I am enjoying it, I've realised I don't want to stay in academia. What I'd like to go into is probably quantitative finance. What I'm studying at the moment involves a lot of stochastic processes - which would certainly help with quantitative finance. My thinking is that it would be best to finish the PhD, get really good with stochastic processes, and then apply for the kind of job I want. My issue is that, after having read the answers to this question, the less prestigious university might actually harm my career prospects and overshadow the prestige of the university where I got my Master's.
To that extent, I'm wondering: is a MSc from a very prestigious uni + a PhD from a good but less prestigious uni worse than just an MSc from a very prestigious uni (and no PhD)? The jobs I've looked at don't strictly require PhDs.
I'm in the UK (just in case this makes any difference).
Edit: I ended up writing to a place I would've been very interested in working at. They replied saying that they were more interested in my ability to produce great research than in any league table, and that my MSc at a world-reknowned univeristy already proves my ability in the subject. As such, I will continue with my current programme, seeing as I am enjoying it very much and seeing as I find my supervisor to be extremely supportive.
Hiring in elite quant finance post-PhD level positions is highly selective, and yes, by switching to inferior reputation university (especially "far less prestigious"), you are harming your career. For e.g. just having a PhD in Math from say Harvard will certainly get you a interview at DE Shaw, but a PhD in Math from PennState, you have to show extra ordinary results for same chances.
@mystupid_acct would you say this is true, to the point that it might not even be worth starting the PhD?
In general, PhD from "far more prestigious" program is almost always a better bet. How about you look at 20 people who have the kind of job you want post-PhD, and see where (if anywhere) they did their PhD.
@mystupid_acct good point. I will mention, though, that my thesis advisor studied (and did his PhD) at that same far more prestigious university. Would this make a difference?
I don't think anyone will care, especially in industry, unless they are graduates of that more prestigious university and feel a superior attitude about it and let that overwhelm their interest for qualified candidates who can do the job they are hiring for (in which case you probably don't want to work for them anyways).
This all assumes that the lesser university is still a good research and learning environment and still lets you pursue your research goals. In the question you linked, that wasn't clear.
What might be important is that you have an answer to "why did you choose to get a PhD at this university?" which may or may not carry an additional implication of "...and why not at more fancy school?" You have an answer already (emphasis mine):
Instead, I enrolled on an MRes + PhD programme ... in a subject I thought I was far more interested in.
That said, the networking potential of a particularly well-known school can't be understated. Still, it seems you already made up your mind. I wouldn't worry too much about that decision now that you've made it. You may be able to tap into your old networks from the previous institution when needed for a job, assuming people from that institution also move toward the industry you are interested in.
"assumes that the lesser university is still a good research and learning environment and still lets you pursue your research goals"
yes, this is definitely the case. If anything, I feel like I might even be getting more support here than I was in my previous institution. Thanks for your answer
You can also include that in your reasoning. "I had experience at Jedi Master School and it was a great place to do research, but I knew PhD students who complained they got little support from their advisors there. I heard great things about the research experience at Dark Side university, though, and I feel like I learned a lot more from the closer advisory relationship there."
@BryanKrause The awkward thing about Dark Side university is finding out your director of studies is your father..
@MikeMiller It does complicate the letters of recommendation.
@BryanKrause just to clarify, I would still have the chance to leave my programme if I wanted to after the MRes year before starting the PhD. Hence my question
So do you think prestige matters in academia because it is full of people who" are graduates of that more prestigious university and feel a superior attitude about it and let that overwhelm their interest for qualified candidates who can do the job they are hiring for". ?
@mystupid_acct Not always, but occasionally. I think it matters in academia because 1) there are way way too few positions for the number of new graduates, and it is very difficult to distinguish yourself sufficiently at an early career stage that "every little bit" doesn't count, and 2) university ranking systems are unfortunately somewhat recursive, such that the strength of programs are defined in part by the students and faculty they attract, including the institutions they come from.
@mystupid_acct As you point out in your comment on the original post, though, that high ranking university might be an important "in" with certain types of jobs in the professional world, too. In my area it doesn't matter at all.
@mystupid_acct having done a PhD at the best-ranked university in the first place would obviously have been the most impressive choice. However, given the choice I made would you say it's better to finish a programme that's still pretty good (with a very good advisor), or to leave this course, take a gap year, and then risk not even getting a place again at my previous institution? And even if I did end up getting a place there again, would it become hard to explain all the starting and quitting to employers?
These are all very specific questions, so I am unable to help or predict the future. As I said, look at profiles of people who have the job you want, and see where they got the Ph.D.
If you enjoy what you do, and you are good at what you do, then where you got this degree or that training is basically meaningless. The only way you can "harm" yourself is to follow down a path for all the wrong reasons. Have faith in yourself and don't make it about what other people think.
As ridiculous as this may sound, I'm getting paid more at my current institution, and receive more money for travel than I would have if I had stayed at my previous one. I also find I am receiving far more support from my advisor. Overall, I believe it is a better learning environment. My only qualm is the university's reputation. I realise that might mean I'll have to climb uphill once I'm done, but perhaps the aforementioned reasons I've mentioned make up for it. Thanks for your reply
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.627005 | 2017-06-30T19:24:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/91556",
"authors": [
"Bryan Krause",
"Mike Miller",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42955",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72730",
"man_in_green_shirt",
"mystupid_acct"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
57919 | How to apply to a prestigious American university as an international student?
I am planning to do a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in the US, more specifically California, and recently started looking into potential Universities that offer a good physics programme. A number of questions came up.
I understand that an American Ph.D. program is very different from a European one in that it usually takes around 5 years to complete and involves coursework. If a master's degree was already obtained, do American universities allow for a more European style Ph.D. completed in around 3 years? Does a Ph.D. necessarily involve paying the university's tuition fees?
Ph.D. students in Europe are employed by their university, receive a monthly salary and don't pay tuition. Does this model exist in the US, i.e. is there any way to avoid paying tuition fees as a Ph.D. student?
I appreciate any helpful advice including to questions I did not ask but maybe should have.
This question is too broad. If they haven't been asked before, you should ask each of your questions individually. Additionally, the first two questions are likely to be to specific to you, and to Stanford. Try and make them more widely applicable.
I think that we already had the third question answered here at some point. The general answer was "no", part of the reason being that Bachelor degrees are typically 4 years in the US, so a German Bachelor+Master will not be equivalent to a US Bachelor+Master. But then again you also learn a lot in the first two years for your actual research, so they want you to take it as well.
Acceptance rates are low everywhere (and to me, 5% looks incredibly high!). Don't apply only to Stanford.
@MJeffryes Why would it be an issue if a question was specific to Stanford? Surely, Stanford is a sufficiently large institution to be of general interest. Also, I do describe my own academic situation here but that does not make an answer on my chances of being accepted irrelevant to others. Those others will know their own academic situation and can derive an estimate for their own chance of acceptance based on the feedback I receive and how their situation compares to mine.
@Casimir You are presenting your specific situation and then asking "can I aspire to attend Stanford". This is clearly a question which is too localised to you. Also bear in mind that it isn't clear there is anything special about applying to Stanford as opposed to any other prestigious American university, so confining the question to Stanford is also too specific. If there was something unusual about the Stanford admissions process you wanted to ask about, that would probably be acceptable.
@MJeffryes I rewrote the question to be more. It no longer contains any mention of Stanford and only very little about my specific academic situation.
The question is looking better to me, but it might still be considered too broad. You can flag for moderator attention to get your question reopened.
The post just contains too many questions which could be answered individually - some of which may be duplicates. #1 is addressed in many other questions, such as question 38237. #2a is addressed by question 41162 (generally no, though there is no universal strict rule). #2b (tuition) varies by program - common advice is beware of programs that don't offer full funding (they pay you to attend, you don't pay them). #3, you can not pay tuition by getting funding in the form of a fellowship, grant from the school, and/or "assistanceship" (RA/TA - like a job). So try to pick one main question.
Your specific question - applying at Stanford - is answered fairly well on their web page. If accepted, your tuition is covered; you'll need 145 units' worth of classes (some transfer of credits might be possible, which I would not ask about before being accepted); and you'll earn a living stipend as an RA or TA. Not covered, but safe to assume: you will not finish in 3 years - 4 or 5 should be possible; and your letters are arguably the key component of whether or not you'll be accepted.
Your first question is definitely too broad, there are entire books written on that subject (e.g., this one found via google search). The rest of it seems OK to me.
Readers should note the post has been edited to remove the first of the original three questions. References in comments to "first question", "second question", etc, will no longer match.
I recommend splitting your two questions in two posts, allowing for more focussed answers.
I am planning to do a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in the US, more specifically California
Many American prospective graduate students limit their search with severe geographic restrictions. I view this as being a poor investment in a future academic career, but if someone truly prioritizes being an easy drive from their family and childhood friends, that's certainly up to them. If you are coming from abroad it makes no sense to me to concentrate your search in "California". California has some excellent institutions, but certainly only a minority of the nation's best institutions are in California. Moreover, if by chance you have family living in, say, Los Angeles, going to graduate school in San Francisco is not going to put you close enough to them to be helpful to you.
I understand that an American Ph.D. program is very different from a European one in that it usually takes around 5 years to complete and involves coursework.
First of all, American PhD programs can take less than five years to complete -- though it is quite rare to see a student graduate in less than four -- and also more than five years to complete. In my field (mathematics) the time to completion is certainly less than the overall average, but I think there are very few, if any, math PHD programs where the average time to completion is 5.0 years or less. (I went to one of the top programs in the country. I did graduate in five years, which was most common in my program. I think though that more students took more than five years than less than five years.)
If a master's degree was already obtained, do American universities allow for a more European style Ph.D. completed in around 3 years?
I think you may be misunderstanding the system slightly. There are (virtually) no length requirements in American PhD programs. You probably do have to complete a certain amount of coursework, but this is just what you would automatically get by spending 2-3 years in the program. In most cases you can get "course credit" for your thesis work, so the amount of actual courses that PhD students take varies considerably and to a large degree is up to them.
Entering a PhD program with a master's degree makes much less of a difference in an American PhD program than you might think, and the better the program the less it matters. For instance, I had a sort of "secret master's degree" in that I got it along with my bachelor's degree. I don't think having this master's degree impacted my studies at all (except of course to convey that I had roughly equivalent training to the excellent foreign students who were admitted to the program). At a certain point in our PhD program we "earned a master's degree" and could, with a little paperwork and a small fee, formally collect it. I seem to recall a few people did that, perhaps to get a leg up on some summer job. I already had one; I could have gotten another, but what PhD student needs two master's degrees in the same field?
My present PhD program (mathematics, UGA) is around the 50th best in the country, and things work differently. Up until a few years ago having a master's degree was actually a formal disadvantage to our entering students in that it conferred one year less of guaranteed PhD funding. But we observed that students with entering master's degrees were not in general better prepared than students without, so we rolled back that requirement a few years ago. In this regard let me say: in the American system a master's degree is kind of a "no man's land": we have absolutely no agreed upon notion of what skills and work a master's degree should convey. If you get a master's degree from a low quality institution, you are probably less prepared in every way than if you get a bachelor's degree at a solid institution. Conversely, a master's degree at a pretty good institution is worth something: of my first four PhD students, they only one who graduated in five years came in with a master's degree from a good place. This counted for something: in fact he started working with me in his first year in the program, whereas many PhD students spend a year or two or three entirely focused on coursework and exams with no research in sight.
Does a Ph.D. necessarily involve paying the university's tuition fees?
Nooooooo. As a good rule of thumb, if you are in a STEM field, you should not enroll in a PhD program unless your fees are being paid.
Ph.D. students in Europe are employed by their university, receive a monthly salary and don't pay tuition. Does this model exist in the US, i.e. is there any way to avoid paying tuition fees as a Ph.D. student?
Yes! Most PhD students in STEM fields not only do not pay tuition, but also receive a livable stipend (which is some combination of money for teaching, for research assistance and outright scholarship money). There are some circumstances in which one might want to consider enrolling in a STEM PhD program without such a stipend, but they are the exception, and you should think very carefully before agreeing to this.
I'm not familiar with the European Masters or PhD programs, but US schools vary greatly in how they handle students with a US Masters. You'll have to check the specifics of each school you're interested in. Most programs should have a "Degree Requirements" or "Steps to Graduation" type page on their website.
It's extremely common for PhD students in the STEM fields to not pay tuition and be paid a stipend by the University. In fact, I don't know of any PhD student who isn't funded by their University. That said, it's not always a free ride and many schools will require you to teach or TA in addition to your PhD duties. This can be offset by fellowships or grant funding.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.627649 | 2015-11-10T11:33:16 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/57919",
"authors": [
"777大象传媒视频入口带_777大象传媒视频入口带无跳转入口",
"BrianH",
"DCTLib",
"Davidmh",
"Janosh",
"MJeffryes",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Spammer",
"eykanal",
"gnometorule",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159119",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159120",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159132",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159151",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159152",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159364",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159377",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159385",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31487",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3890",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44098",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"silvado",
"免费see8成长人版黄安装--高清播放",
"大型开放世界手游_大型开放世界手游-在线观看完整版",
"成都东站附近的宾馆贼眉鼠眼_jw万豪侯爵酒店开业龙潭虎穴",
"此花亭奇潭曲奇动漫_此花亭奇谈免费观看樱花动漫",
"此花亭奇谭动漫时来运转_此花亭奇谭漫画黄金时代",
"老式学校蹲坑图片水木清华_厕所蹲坑的管道图泾渭分明",
"适合一个人的游戏名_适合一个人的游戏名-高清播放"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
71391 | Where can I obtain the content of closed MOOCs?
MOOCs are often not as open as their name would suggest. For example, Coursera will soon remove hundreds of classes from its website, and many courses are not open for enrollment after the course is over.
Where can I obtain the content of closed MOOCs?
I am aware of http://academictorrents.com but it doesn't contain many MOOCs. Are there any more complete resources?
Disclaimer: this post does not advocate illegal or unethical behavior.
According to their TOS, redistributing material downloaded from Coursera is almost certainly a copyright violation, outside of the situation where the material can be obtained under an open license.
@user37208 seems, or is?
@WillieWong Coursera's ToS tend to be on the conservative side, which is quite unfortunate. I am ready to bet that most active users have infringed it already. Luckily, there are other MOOC platforms. Also, some MOOCs on Coursera may have some open license, as you pointed out.
My point is same as that of @user37208; I would be much happier if your question specifically ask about MOOC platforms with open licenses, or in some way is restricted to course content that can be legally redistributed.
@user37208 Those are generalities that do not apply in many situations.
@WillieWong I do not condone self-censorship.
@user37208 to me that is the right way.
At risk of seeming pedantic, I feel like the only answer to this question is, "there isn't a way - else it wouldn't be a closed MOOC". Have you considered emailing the course instructors and asking for the material?
@tonysdg doesn't sound very scalable.
Scalability was never specified in the question as a requirement ;-) Why are you looking for old/closed MOOC materials? For review? For distribution? For archiving? That might help us answer your question.
@tonysdg To learn. I sometimes prefer to watch videos that I have already viewed. Also, I sometimes want to check out the materials of a closed MOOC.
The question deserves a technical answer. It is then up to the user to respect the copyrights and only keep the open licences ones. This long legal debate seems quite out of topics.
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is possibly advocating illegal or unethical behavior.
@eykanal unethical is subjective: it is unethical for me to remove educational content. And as stated above it is not necessarily illegal.
I don't disagree, which is why I wrote "possibly". However, given the discussion, I feel comfortable with the groups assessment that this is a discussion that is not appropriate on the Stack Exchange network.
@eykanal why isn't it appropriate? is it because it is illegal in some situations?
@eykanal I have added a disclaimer: is it okay now?
@FranckDernoncourt - lets take this conversation to chat.
This is illegal the way it has been asked. You are asking alternative ways to the resources which might include proxy or third party intrusion.
@Coder as you say, might, but not necessarily…
@eykanal Since there seems to be no consensus on meta, can you please reopen the question?
@FranckDernoncourt - Not sure we can safely say "no consensus", there hasn't bene much discussion. Barring someone convincing me otherwise I'm definitely in favor of keeping this closed. That said, if the community votes to reopen I would not object.
@eykanal Not many people can vote to reopen, and reopen votes expire. There have been 7 upvotes, and 8 dowvotes on this question, so I believe it shouldn't be closed since it means that approximately half the readers are ok with it.
Continuing the conversation in chat.
I decided to post an answer since some people might have a similar question about MOOC downloads, albeit not in relation to Coursera courses that will be taken down.
3 [legal] solutions:
The best way to obtain Coursera content is to download it when enrolled. Coursera does allow the download of videos: "You may download content from our Services only for your personal, non-commercial use[...]" see Coursera T&C. Edx T&C reads: "the [...] video [...] on this Site are for your personal use in connection with those courses only". Bulk download of content can sometimes be against the T&C- I would scan the T&C before making any such attempt.
Sign up for future iterations of the course that you wish to obtain. I have oftentimes enrolled in a course, not actively taken (or downloaded) it, only to see that the course was subsequently closed and I could not revisit the content again. By signing up for future iterations, you will be notified as soon as the content will be provided again. In my personal experience of using MOOCs for 4 years now, this is a useful feature that I have benefited from myself. Example: "Advanced Data structures in Java" was previously offered, then taken down, now re-offered: Course enrolment page
Email the course instructors and make your case why you would benefit from the course content. My intuition would be that instructors will be bound by their institution's and Coursera's policies, but it doesn't hurt to ask. They might be able to re-direct you to other (future) courses featuring the same material.
Lastly, I wonder (and this is pure conjecture) whether the soon-non-availability makes the previously uninteresting courses suddenly appealing and a must-have. As mentioned above, Coursera does have a track record of re-using material and re-enabling access and it is possible that much of what is taken down will re-appear in the new system of specializations.
"Coursera does have a track record of re-using material and re-enabling access" -> https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-old-platform-shutdown-download-courses/ seems to disagree: "Less than half of the 450+ courses currently hosted on the old platform are open to enrollment."
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.628675 | 2016-06-15T16:44:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/71391",
"authors": [
"Ali Safiey",
"Coder",
"Dr Hemant Patankar",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Hugolpz",
"Ja Don",
"Nawaz Saiyed",
"Shane Liza",
"Willie Wong",
"Xue Lai",
"ctpu-cga-zoom",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200328",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200329",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200330",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200331",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200372",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/200447",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20997",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210759",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210766",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210774",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36315",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53762",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94",
"phyllis gyang",
"tonysdg",
"user45234"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
176364 | Are graduate Math programs that use the quarter system more difficult?
It seems to me like 10 weeks per course may not be enough time for some graduate courses if they are not developed carefully. Do colleges using the quarter system like Dartmouth or UC Irvine have about the same difficulty compared to similarly ranked universities using the semester system?
How do you propose to test the hypothesis that quarter system programs are more difficult? This seems unanswerable.
Not surprisingly, the professors know they are on a quarter system and don't cram a semester into a quarter. My wife liked the quarter system, since it came in smaller chunks before a final.
@DanRomik I suppose the ideal person to answer such a question is either someone who has taught using both systems and can compare the course load and student performance or the less likely case of a student who transferred and had experience with both. Also, someone who studied at a semester-based system in their undergrad can still give some insight into the differences.
@JonCuster Did she study Mathematics or something else?
@Delta_Epsilon well, I’ve taught at both types of programs. But there were too many other differences for any sort of comparison along the lines you are proposing. I still think your question has no meaningful answer that can be given with any level of reliability. Or to put it differently, focus on other concrete details about the programs you are considering, they will give you much more useful information that makes the quarter/semester dichotomy completely unimportant.
@DanRomik I see your point. Thanks for your input.
@Delta_Epsilon - chemistry. I'd say most STEM classes don't care much, but heavy reading and writing classes (English lit, etc.) might feel more rushed (more major term papers in a year, less time to do a bunch of research/writing for them).
I taught at a university that had terms of 7 weeks in spring and summer and semesters of 14 weeks in fall and winter. I taught the same class (Integral Calculus) four times, twice during the terms, twice during the semesters.
Term classes met twice as often as semester classes. We covered the same material and used the same book.
Guess which classes had better grades overall? The term (7 week) classes. There are many confounding factors here of course, but the accelerated nature of the course actually made students focus in and learn the material a bit better I felt.
There is a point of diminishing return (2 week crash course meeting 8 hours a day would be tough of course), but instructors and students who are prepared for a shorter calendar can do just fine.
I also was a student under a system similar to the one described above. I took several graduate math classes in 7 week terms. I learned the material just fine. You have to be prepared to devote twice as much time to studying for the class--but you also have a lower class load, so this is possible. In some ways, I would be in favor of short terms year round.
I suspect students took fewer courses when they were more concentrated. That was my experience at a university that used the Dartmouth System - four full quarters per year.
@Buffy Yes, this is the case. Fewer classes, faster pace.
Interesting. I was wondering if taking shorter semesters with fewer classes would be more effective for some. Students normally take 3 courses in a semester-based program. Would they take 2 in a quarter system?
@Delta_Epsilon I usually took 2 classes in the shortened terms. It would depend on the term as well. When I was writing my dissertation, I "took" dissertation credits.
The University of Chicago is on the quarter (meaning trimester: the fourth quarter is in the summer) system: a quarter lasts ten weeks. Harvard University is on the semester system: a semester lasts 13 weeks.
I received a master's degree (while being an undergraduate) at Chicago, for which I took 9 graduate courses. I received a PhD at Harvard and took, well, certainly more than nine semester courses there. Which one was easier, quarters or semesters? The answer is...the other differences between these two programs (which have similar rankings and draw from a similar cohort) were so much more significant that it is impossible to say what quarters or semesters had to do with it.
It makes more sense to compare three quarter courses to two semester courses than to compare one to one. The nine graduate courses I took fell into three full year sequences: in analysis, in algebra and in geometry/topology. If you were to take e.g. the graduate algebra sequence at these two places, at the end of the year there would not be much difference between quarters and semesters (especially compared to other curricular differences).
For what it's worth: I remember liking 10 week quarters more fondly than semesters. For the last 15 years I have taught at the University of Georgia, which has 15 week semesters. This is really too long, and the Faculty Senate tried to shorten it some years back, but it failed because apparently some administrators and even a few faculty members asked how we would be able to offer "equivalent educational content" in one fewer week. This was of course ridiculous: any instructor knows that you can just go slower / faster, be more / less efficient and so forth from class to class, and you can gain or lose a lot more than 15/14 this way. Moreover 15 weeks is really too long: even with breaks in the middle, everyone is more or less worn out by the end. In fact UGA used to be on the quarter system a while back, and the faculty that experienced it said that they liked it better. But I don't think it translates directly into material covered.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.629181 | 2021-10-06T18:00:35 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/176364",
"authors": [
"Buffy",
"Dan Romik",
"Epsilon_Delta",
"Jon Custer",
"Vladhagen",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14518",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/147202",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
175807 | PhD Admissions - Does it matter if I work in the same lab for 4 years?
I started working in a lab on campus as a freshman and I really like what we are doing and in a perfect world I would be more than happy to stay here for my remaining time.
But, since I want to get my PhD (in a field that is related but not necessarily the same to the work I do in the lab) would it be more beneficial to leave this lab and join another one at one point? Obviously it is not ideal for personal reasons (because I really enjoy it a lot), but for professional reasons and applications reasons I can see the benefits to having multiple experiences before applying.
no, it doesn't matter
@Our would you mind explaining why just so I can understand a little better?
if you explain why you think it might matter, then I'll explain why it doesn't
@Our I think it would matter because I feel like a number of various different experiences in research as opposed to 1 experience would look better since it would show more experience and make it seem like I am flexible and enjoy research. I feel like phd programs may be more hesitant if their program doesn't align with what Im doing they might think Im not interested (obviously this is assuming I write a good personal statement as well).
an experience is an experience, regardless of in which institution it was done. They care about what you can say & offer as a researcher & academics; #institutions you have visited in your limited academics career is not one of them (as long as all of these institutions are credible ones)
I'm gonna disagree with a previous responder. When it comes to demonstrating fit with a lab you want to join for a PhD, not all prior research experiences are created equal. How beneficial it would be to change labs will depend on how close your potential graduate school work is to your current work (both in terms of field and in terms of research methods). If the labs you'll be applying to are studying similar topics and/or using similar methods, then not much is gained by changing labs.
Once you have any research experience, the fit of your experience to future lab becomes the next most important part of evaluating, and diversity of lab experiences for diversity's sake isn't terribly helpful. If changing labs will get you experience that is more relevant to your grad school goals, then you might strongly consider it.
PS Having 4 years of research experience and a good letter of rec from your supervisor is plenty to show that you enjoy research; you don't need to diversify your experiences for that reason.
Thank you I appreciate this answer a lot! This makes a lot of sense to me and I think I will stick with my lab since it has a lot to do with what I want to go into.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.629626 | 2021-09-23T02:13:58 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/175807",
"authors": [
"Our",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/147270",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51585",
"welcome_to_harvard"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
47302 | How can I re-use someone's mathematics thesis without plagiarizing?
I am writing a report for my master's research. One entire section of my report has been expertly written in someone else's PhD thesis, which happens to mostly take the form of a monograph on the subject.
I am not writing a research article, and they don't expect original research from me (or at least not much), but to be self-sufficient, my report needs to include some kind of quick overview of the subject. The problem is that now that I have read this thesis, I seem to not be able to more than heavily take inspiration from it.
Said thesis is available under the BSD3 license and I of course cite everything but I don't know how to approach what is basically copying a large amount of work.
My options seem to be:
Rewrite everything "my way" while citing the thesis. Considering it still would not be original work and would amount to just cleverly changing the original work wording and structure it feels intellectually dishonest.
Just clearly say "The following work is from X" and translate X exactly. This seems academically dishonest.
Forget about this section. Leave it alone for two months and hope that I forgot the thesis so that I can write with a clear mind and conscience.
Does your institute have a plagarism policy? Often universities have detailed documents listing what is considered plagarism.
I tried to look for such a document ( I found a lot of Thesis from English speaking countries with a Declaration of Authorship so I was puzzled ) but couldn't find any.
I will probably just ask my advisor directly
You will find good answers below - but this is indeed a question to bring to your advisor. Tell him or her you asked here.
As a side comment: you mentioned "said thesis is available under the BSD3 license". There is a big difference between copyright violation and plagiarism. Your third bullet point is a non-solution; your conscience may be clear but others may disagree.
I assume that someone's PhD thesis is a larger piece of work than a section of your report. Therefore, I don't see how you can avoid summarizing the thesis to fit your work. And while you are at it, you get the chance to deepen your understanding of the subject, because you will basically be writing a review of this someone's thesis in light of you report. That is a prospect you shouldn't miss, as in academia as well as in industry, you will be expected at some point of your career to "digest" some work and produce some implication of it.
Citing the thesis is a must, if it is used as a reference, there is no debating it. I would recommend writing your section "your way", but not just changing some details to mask your copy-paste trail. Put the material in the context of your report. You don't need a clear mind and conscience to use something you learned from a source. If it "looks like" the said thesis, that is not a problem, as long as it fits and you have gained significant understanding from it.
PS: If you did a simply copy-paste, you would likely find that the text still needs some polishing to fit your report. That can amount to a significant amount of work.
Very important the not just changing some details to mask your copy-paste trail part is.
I really like this idea of "writing a review": i.e. talk about what they did, which is your own independent scholarship on the subject, shows that you understand the subject, and specifically ties that work to the work you're doing in this section.
For what it's worth, I've found that it's fairly common in math papers (especially longer expository works) to say something like the following:
We will now discuss [insert topic] and prove [insert theorems] in
order to [insert reason you care about this thing]. The treatment here
largely follows that of [cite reference]; see there for more details.
and then to present the material from the reference. The wording and exposition should be your own (obviously, you can't just copy/paste the work), and you should try to repeatedly summarize and re-organize the work to fit your own context, but it's fine to re-use notation and proofs and such. Unless you're doing original research in math, you're always presenting somebody else's proof, and often there's only trivial ways to vary how you say it. For a personal example, in the course of writing a term paper for a math class, I found three different expository sets of notes all explaining a topic in parallel ways, all of which followed the outline and major proofs of a single source, which was itself and expository work putting some very old results in modern terminology.
Especially if it's just one piece in a larger work, I wouldn't be too concerned. It's much more dishonest to "forget" the reference and pretend you never read it than to admit that you're heavily borrowing from it.
This is exactly the problem I'm in and the way I'm mostly doing it right now, the section I'm writting is purely expository. Of course I cite before every theorem and direct the reader toward the paper containing the proof but the difficulty I encountered is that by doing that I am more or less forced to follow the structure of the original thesis. If the original author proved Th 1,2,3 Lemma 1 , Th4. Even if I decide Th 2 and 3 aren't relevant I still need to follow closely the same format because Th4 depends on Lemma 1 and Th1 and I feel like this constrain me to "plagiarize"
You are almost certainly using the information in a different context than it was originally presented in. If nothing else, the material needs to be modified to fit its new context, as well as being cited of course. Even the most hard-core mathematical description typically has a lot of text as well, explaining the mathematics, which will need to be adjusted and paraphrased (and if it doesn't have such text, you should add that). I typically find that by the time I have finished adapting a piece of material to its new environment, I have quite thoroughly rewritten things in my own style; combine such with appropriate attribution, and the question of plagiarism is moot.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.629986 | 2015-06-16T13:36:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/47302",
"authors": [
"AureySteader",
"Charlie Crown",
"Ethan Bolker",
"Gaurav",
"Joey Ben",
"Mindwin Remember Monica",
"Nathanael Farley",
"RMS",
"VLT campus",
"Willie Wong",
"aussetg",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130445",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130446",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130447",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130451",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130457",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130509",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28715",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35935",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7018",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94",
"julia",
"professor M",
"yoavsnake"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
99252 | Failed PhD qualifying exam, must it be mentioned it in SOP? can I ask my advisor not to mentions in recommendation letter?
I failed my written PhD qualifying exam twice in Computer Science from a middle-ranked university. Instead of kicking me out, I can get a terminal master's degree. Please note that this will be my second master's degree.
Now I am planning to re-apply to PhD programs at other Universities. My questions are:
Since I am getting a master's degree, is it okay not to mention about failing in the PhD qualifying exam in statement of purpose (SOP)? Please note that the Graduate committee informed that it will not be reflected in the transcript.
If the answer is yes for the previous question, then my advisor is ready to give a strong recommendation, so can I ask him not to mention about failing in the PhD qualifying exam in his recommendation letter?
Please note that the written qualifying exam is about getting good grades in 4 subject areas of Computer Science, it has nothing to do with research. This is one of the main reasons I do not want to mention in SOP, I wanted to highlight my research potential saying that I submitted a 10-page research paper in a top tier conference in one year. I have industry experience of more than 5 years.
Please help, since my goal is to get into academics, help students and do independent research. I want to pursue my dream irrespective of this setback.
Institutions to which you apply are going to want to see your transcript. Attempting to conceal that you were in a Ph.D. program will likely be viewed as misconduct.
@BobBrown Not necessarily. In many schools you are not considered to be in the PhD program until you have passed the appropriate exams, especially those with Master's-only admissions. In this case, the question mentions that the attempt is not recorded in the transcript.
What country is your school in? Be aware that in the US, many schools will not kick somebody out of the PhD program unless their advisor implicitly agrees.
@user71659 OK. Suppose OP was admitted only to a master's program, his transcript, as he says, does not show failure of the qual, and he was awarded the master's degree. He's still being dishonest in asking his advisor not to mention his failing the qualifying exam.
@BobBrown How is that different from applying to a school and getting rejected? Also, depending on the country, failing the exam may be considered protected educational information which he has the right to withhold. If it is dishonest, then the school should have put it on the transcript. Regardless, my other point above was that people will figure it out and ask his advisor questions, which may be better in writing or better left for a phone call.
@user71659; @BobBrown Thanks for your discussions. Just to give more context, I am in US school and the administration informed me that failing PhD qualifying exam is a confidential information. Moreover, the written qualifying exam is about getting good grades in 4 subject areas of Computer science, it has nothing to do with research. This is one of the main reason I do not want to mention in SOP, I wanted to highlight my research potential saying that I submitted a 10 page research paper in a top tier conference in one year.
Are both your masters in CS? And did your advisor intend for you to get a PhD with him/her (versus a MS advisor)? Was your position financially supported by your advisor?
I have deleted the third question, since as a matter of principle we do not recommend programs or schools.
@user71659 Both my masters are not in CS. My advisors intend for me to get PhD, even now one of my advisors believes that I am a good candidate and hence he is ready to give strong recommendation letter. My position was supported by advisors.
@BB3 Your need to give us all the information upfront. Now you say you are not enrolled in a CS program, (assuming) never had a CS advisor, and attempted to enter a CS PhD program and failed?
@user71659 Sorry for misleading information. My first master's degree was in Information technology, then I worked as researhcer in requirement engineering. After two and half years, I joined PhD in computer science and now converted into my second master's degree.
The issue is that schools know about other programs in their field. If you are applying to another school while you are still enrolled, the obvious assumption is that something has gone wrong at your current school. This will act as a potentially big problem—particularly if the other school is known not to have a separate master's program, but instead admits directly to a PhD program.
I would recommend not hiding this from schools to which you apply; doing so would be sufficient grounds to revoke your admission, if it were to come to light, since you are lying by omission in your application.
Moreover, if you have done good research, and your advisor is willing to testify to that, and your only significant issue is that you struggled with the qualifying exam, then you should be able to find a new department. (Perhaps you should look for departments where you won't have to take a qualifying exam—there may be some in your discipline, and more and more schools are dropping them.)
I would argue that this would not be the right content for the statement of purpose. This is where you write about what you will research and your academic interests. What you will do as a Ph. D student and how you will contribute to the greater body of knowledge.
Instead, and if the application allows for it, discuss this in your personal statement. What has happened and most importantly, why it happened. Just like a background check, you have the opportunity to explain past setbacks and what you will do to not repeat those mistakes.
Even more important than "Why" but impossible to answer without knowing why: What will the OP do differently this time around that can reasonably be expected to lead to exam success?
-1: Very often, STEM programs ask for only a statement of purpose and not a personal statement. See application page. In this case, the statement of purpose is exactly the place that applicants should explain possible red flags, such as bad grades as an undergrad or why they left a different graduate program prematurely, as well as their research interests and goals, (I'm not saying the OP should discuss it there; I don't know the right answer to that question.)
@PeterShor; @PatriciaShanahan; @Frank FYC Thanks for your discussions. Just to give more context, I am in US school and the administration informed me that failing PhD qualifying exam is a confidential information. Moreover, the written qualifying exam is about getting good grades in 4 subject areas of Computer science, it has nothing to do with research. This is one of the main reason I do not want to mention in SOP, I wanted to highlight my research potential saying that I submitted a 10 page research paper in a top tier conference in one year.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.630507 | 2017-11-21T23:06:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99252",
"authors": [
"BB3",
"Bob Brown",
"Patricia Shanahan",
"Peter Shor ",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10220",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24431",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5912",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83220",
"user71659"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
99372 | Bad Recommendation from PhD Advisor
I am in the final stages of my PhD and have been applying for postdocs for the last six months. Recently, I heard back from the job I applied for, we had a phone interview and he was very happy with my experience and skills. In fact he was looking for a new postdoc with the same experience what I did in my PhD. We communicated through emails in a very friendly way and he invited me to visit his lab. We scheduled the visit but he wanted to talk to my references before that. He sent an email to my present PhD supervisor and asked him what would be a good time to talk over the phone. My supervisor didn't reply to him for at least a couple of weeks. I know this because every week, I used to get an email from him to remind my PhD supervisor to reply to his email. Finally, my PhD supervisor replied and they talked over the phone. The potential postdoc mentor suddenly took a U-turn after that. He said i may not be a good fit and he will stop this right here.
I am really freaking out in this situation. I initially had problems with my PhD advisor because he is very aggressive and loves to make racist jokes. But I managed to handle his sense of humor and aggression. But I feel like he is racially prejudiced to me and will spoil my whole career.
Did you suggest him,did you suggest anyone else?
What advice do you want now? You ignored a big red flag, and kept working for that guy. That prof who looks for a postdoc might even have a good point: If you put up with that, what else are you prepared to ignore?
@ Mark I gave the recruiting prof a list of 3 references and Phd advisor was mentioned as one of them
P.S. Not judging you, just want to give you an outside perspective. There's not much you can do, can't tell prospective employers your old boss is an asshole and racist. Best thing you can hope is he keeps ignoring people who ask him about you.
@ Karl You have a point I should have taken it seriously right at the beginning. I decided to stand it just because switching professor is not a great idea specially when you initially work with a senior prof who is also a graduate co-ordinator. I dont really care if he is racist or not i just want him to be honest and sincere.
BTW if he ignores how it gonna help me ?
@user83349 maybe don't put him up as reference? That might look strange and cause some questions during an interview, but still better than bad unjustified comments from your professor to future potential employers. They might still contact him though..
Will it be a good idea to confront my prof? I have one skype interview approaching
By the way: what is your actual question?
Wanted to vent to overcome the anxiety. Expecting some suggestions that might be help to cop this situation.
I think this question is likely to help others with racist supervisors, which is likely a lot of people. I think including those aspects in the title would help, e.g., "Bad Recommendation from a racist and aggressive PhD Advisor"
I will share some information with you, based on two things you mentioned:
a) You said your advisor is very aggressive and loves to make racist jokes
b) You suspect your advisor soured your postdoc application through negative remarks to your prospective employer
This sounds like a situation which might be investigatable by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), if your PhD institution receives any federal funds.
If you decide you would like this investigated by OCR, you would need to file a complaint within 6 months of becoming aware of alleged discrimination. A complaint of this kind can be filed by an individual working alone without a lawyer.
You might be able to find a lawyer would would help you with the complaint pro bono (free) or with a reduced cost.
It would be helpful to cite as much specific information about (a) as possible. However, you can send the complaint letter quickly and then submit more specific information subsequently. It can be helpful to file these complaints quickly rather than not quickly, because some regional OCR offices are extremely backed up.
If OCR feels that your complaint letter fits with their purview, and meets some other basic requirements, but your letter doesn't include specific information such as dates of incidents and descriptions of incidents, then you will be asked to provide specifics.
If you want to learn more about this: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/howto.html
The part I feel most unsure about is the employment aspect. However, the How-To page I linked to mentions
Some of the civil rights laws enforced by OCR also extend to employment.
Each university has an office that addresses discrimination issues, so you could in principle bring the issue to them. However, many people have found it more effective to either go ahead and file with OCR, or draft an OCR complaint and share the draft with the institution (as a draft).
Alternatively, you could instead try an informal approach: make an appointment with a department administrator and share your concern. The response you get could help you decide about next steps. Here's a relatively gentle way of starting such a conversation:
I had a job interview that seemed to be going great --until suddenly it wasn't going great any more. I'd like to get some constructive feedback so that I can do better in subsequent interviews. But it would be awkward for me to ask my advisor directly for feedback. (Answer truthfully but with a very neutral tone if you're asked why.) Can you help facilitate me getting some constructive feedback from Prof. So-and-So (your advisor)?
If you're part of a graduate student union, it might be helpful to bring the problem to them to see if they can provide support.
**11/25 additional notes 11/25:
Your university may have an all-purpose grievance procedure that can be used in general situations, even when there's no alleged racial discrimination.
In the answer I wrote yesterday I was only providing information. Now I'll provide a couple of strategy notes. If I were in your shoes I would probably start with the informal approach I outlined yesterday, and try to keep it in the department. I'd avoid using any language that might alarm the department administration, and keep the tone very calm and neutral. But at the same time, I'd be working quietly on collecting evidence and witnesses, and starting to draft a complaint. Putting the facts down on paper can be an extremely useful exercise.
I recommend that you avoid escalating your concern beyond your department. But if your university chooses to do so, I'd recommend you do one of the following, pretty quickly:
(a) find an ally or a lawyer
(b) submit a complaint to OCR
(c) submit a draft OCR complaint to your university
Reason: some universities play hard ball. It would be safest to protect yourself in case your university turns out to be one of those.
If I had strong evidence for the racism allegations, and did not have an ally or a lawyer, I would likely go with (c). A draft complaint could give you some useful leverage. When OCR investigates, it requires that the university submit a lot of documentary evidence (both about your particular situation, and also about its policies and procedures), and it conducts interviews. Institutions generally find this onerous and often would prefer to resolve the potential complainant's concerns pretty quickly, in order to prevent an OCR complaint from being filed.
Note that filing an OCR complaint provides protection against retaliation.
Note also that it can be a frustratingly slow process. Therefore it would be good to try to get your goals clear before you talk to anyone. I imagine your goals at this point are
Graduate
Get a post-doc
I hope you find a good administrator in your department.
I am really freaking out in this situation. I initially had problems with my PhD advisor because he is very aggressive and loves to make racist jokes. But I managed to handle his sense of humor and aggression. But I feel like he is racially prejudiced to me and will spoil my whole career.
A resource you should consider before escalating (such as aprante001's recommendation to file a complaint with OCR) is to approach your university's office of the ombudsmen/ombudswomen. This office serves as an unofficial conflict resolution agent within an institution and advocates impartially and anonymously.
Think of it like a PI (Private Investigator) working for you to gather the details and try to resolve the problem before you call in the Cavalry (Office of Civil Rights). Because once you escalate, there is often no means to de-escalate. After all, are you 100% certain that the result is your adviser badmouthing you? Even if you are 100% certain, is there evidence to support it with a p-value of <= 0.05?
First of all, everybody is free to write whatever he wants in his recommendation letters and to tell people whatever opinion he has about you and you cannot influence that. So, you need a really solid reason to accuse your PhD advisor of any "racial prejudice" against you (perhaps you have one, I don't know). If he just says that you have no talent and are hopeless and you can bring up only that, no matter how much the legal action will damage him, you'll lose your reputation forever. So play this card in a smart way if you choose to play it at all.
Second, try to get recommendation letters from people who know your work and can explain its value to your potential employer in a clear and convincing way. A bad letter from a PhD advisor is a big minus but it can be remedied if you have a substantial evidence that you are a good professional doing valuable things. Proving that your PhD advisor is an asshole (if he is) adds absolutely nothing in this respect.
Unfortunately, the best advice would be to change your adviser a few years ago, but nobody has a time machine. So good luck, stay smart, and remember that your main objective is to prove your value to a potential employer and to get a position. The revenge (if you are thinking of one) can wait until you are standing firmly enough to pick up fights and deliver the blows (though, most likely, by that time you'll not care about it anymore).
I think you had a narrow escape from a similar situation. The professor who requires the references is very unprofessional.
If you require some references, you do it before the invitation. Because the person might have rejected other interviews/visits. This is very disrespectful to the potential postdoc.
The references might be in several forms. The most popular is written and signed form. However, if one requires an alternative form of discussing, this is their responsibility, not yours. The professor should have asked your supervisor himself before you agree for a research visit. Using you as an interface is, again, disrespectful.
Assuming that you did not do something that can give you serious trouble, one should always keep in mind that every PhD student might have some conflicts with their supervisors. Thus, if he cancels the visit based on a negative comment, then he will do more when he's your employer. What if you have a conflict with someone during your research visit? Any negative comment has a high potential to damage your job.
I think your best course is to move on and find a more professional supervisor to work with.
As for handling the interviewer; now that you have experienced a terrible incident, best is to prove your abilities yourself, preferrably with a research visit. If another potential employer asks for an interview, you can briefly tell the incident, and tell them that you want to make a research visit regardless of their decision.
Thanks so much apparante001 Frank FYC for your valuable feedbacks. I always felt myself less competent whenever did mouthing to me and that has considerably lowered my self esteem. I emailed him this when he shouted on me in front of 20 people in the lab. Reading these comment, i feel like i dont deserve that treatment. This forum is actually giving me the base where i can again rebuild my confidence,
Thank you Padawan for your comment. If i can manage to get a job without giving anyone trouble i would prefer to choose that way. Can you add something more to it? I have one more interview early next week so i was wondering if i should let my interviewer know my current situation that i am not among those lucky folks who get help and strong recommendation from their PI. I am sure the interviewer will contact him at some point. I am wondering what would be the best way to handle the interviewer!
@user83349 I have edited my answer according to your comment. However, I must say that I don't have the best experience in such situations. Only negative review was from a professor whom I've worked in a project, which basically meant nothing to noone.
@user83349 where you are looking for job? what sector?
I am looking for Postdoc researcher positions
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.631005 | 2017-11-24T22:08:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99372",
"authors": [
"Dr. Thomas C. King",
"Karl",
"Mark",
"SSimon",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15949",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45983",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47391",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83349",
"padawan",
"user83349"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1256 | How do academic position job search committees evaluate potential for intellectual leadership?
From what JeffE says over at Priority of application materials for admission decision
The list is not that different for postdoc hiring (not "admission"),
at least in my field (computer science). The big differences are (1)
grades do not matter at all and (2) the focus changes from "potential
for research" to potential for intellectual leadership backed by
actual published research.
So I'm curious - how do committees assess potential for intellectual leadership? And how do graduate students demonstrate it?
Nice question! I'd like to hear from seniors as well, whats their viewpoint on such a question +1 ! ;)
@AnonymousMathematician's answer expresses my own opinion far more eloquently than I ever could, but our definitions of "postdoc" are probably identical. I'd like to hear from someone in the experimental sciences.
As a postdoc applicant, you should be starting to develop a distinctive, compelling research agenda and vision. As a grad student, it's usually enough to work on problems someone gives you, and you can go to your advisor for help as needed. If you never move beyond this, it's not a great outcome, but you'll eventually get your Ph.D.; you just won't be on track for further research success. To be a successful postdoc, you need to develop the ability to work more independently. However, intellectual leadership is more than just independence. It's not enough just to write papers. Instead, these papers should fit together and be aimed towards larger goals, in a way you can articulate coherently. If someone asks you what sort of research you do, you should be able to explain what you are aiming for, how your work differs from other people's, and why your approach is worthwhile and even important.
This takes time and comes only with experience - more will be expected of tenure-track job applicants, or people being considered for tenure or a full professorship. But a postdoc applicant needs to demonstrate a start, by writing a research statement that sounds exciting, and ideally by publishing several papers that build on each other to accomplish something larger than any one of them. It's even better if other researchers have already started to take up your ideas and apply or extend them, although that's more common in fast-moving fields with short publication cycles.
What you don't want is to come across just like your advisor, but with less experience and perhaps less talent. You can succeed that way if you do fantastic work, but it's not a wise approach for most students: it's just not good advertising to say "I'm basically a less good version of my advisor." Even while you are still in graduate school, you should be aiming to differentiate yourself a little from your advisor (with your advisor's help - after all, they shouldn't be trying to produce a clone). Find some important aspect of the subject that interests you more than your advisor, learn some useful background they don't know well, or find a collaborator who doesn't work with them.
As for how committees judge this, you've got to make a convincing case in your application. Your research statement should sound like a future leader, not a student (don't be arrogant, but you shouldn't sound like you are implementing someone else's vision - you need to demonstrate clearly that you understand how everything fits together and are adding your own ideas). You need to back your research statement up with publications worthy of it, as well as some concrete ideas for future work. Your letters of recommendation should convey the impact you are already having on the field.
Of course this is the best case scenario, and not every application will achieve this, but if you want to get a prestigious postdoc position and go on to a tenure-track job at a research university, then this is what you should be aiming for. You may feel like a fraud even trying to do this, since you know perfectly well that you still have much more to learn, but you should ignore these feelings. Everyone recognizes that postdoc applicants are still developing their research abilities, but it's important to be ambitious and show what you are capable of. (In fact, no matter how far you progress in your career, you'll never reach the point of being able to say "OK, I've reached my full potential and know everything I need to," but you can't let that stop you.)
Nice answer! So, in the end, independently workin' is #1 keypoint, right?
+1 for "You may feel like a fraud even trying to do this". Repeat for tenure-track job. Repeat for tenure. Repeat for full professor.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.631929 | 2012-04-23T23:16:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1256",
"authors": [
"DavideChicco.it",
"Ivan Machado",
"JeffE",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/379",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/690"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1762 | How does a PhD student make meaningful comments or suggestions regarding a professor's work?
So bobthejoe said this:
The PhD students I remember the most are the ones who came up to me
and made meaningful comments or suggestions regarding my work. They
get extra bonus points if in the middle of the night the next week
they offer more meaningful comments or suggestions.
Here's the question though: how many PhD students actually manage to make meaningful comments or suggestions about a professor's work? And how often does the professor follow up and inform the student that those comments are helpful (rather than pretend that the comments are helpful as a matter of politeness)? And if the comments are implemented, does the professor ever notify the student?
I'm saying this as someone who makes a lot of suggestions/comments to other people, but who can never be sure whether or not they find them helpful. Most suggestions seem to be discarded simply because it takes too much time/effort to implement them.
The title needs a revision, I'd say. "How does a PhD student make meaningful comments" - by putting in a lot of thought in his comments. Seems "Not a real question" to me.
If you want to make meaningful comments, you typically need to first learn a lot about the topic the professor works on.
The other answers make good suggestions for the asking of questions or posing ideas to professors. Most professors are open to questions and new ideas. I personally love it when my students come to me with something that I hadn't thought of before. As for getting recognition, it depends on the relationship between the Ph.D. student and the professor.
If you, as a grad student, ask a poignant question at a visiting professor's lecture, and then the professor returns and gets his or her group working on the matter, the you will very likely not receive any further communication about the matter. You will, however, be able to determine if your question had an effect when the publication came out. If nothing else, you can have that warm little feeling that something came of your question.
If you, as a senior graduate student, pitch something to your adviser that is relevant to your project, your adviser should listen. At some point you know more about your project than your adviser does. I pitched many things to my adviser over the years. Sometimes I was shot down, and then did them anyway. One of my questions, however, transformed the direction of my thesis work. I started and finished a whole new project in my last year based on an idea I pitched.
Senior graduate students weighing in on other projects going on in their group also tend to get listened to, and occasionally acknowledged in the publication for "helpful discussions." Yes, sometimes those names are graduate students. For one example I know of, see the acknowledgements in this article. "The authors would like to thank... ...Mr. Benjamin N. Norris for helpful discussions."
"Poignant"? That's probably not the word you wanted.
Likely. However, I have no idea what might have been in my mind four years ago.
Ha! I didn't notice the question was 4 years old. It was recently bumped to the main page. Maybe "pointed"?
From my perspective, even a good question at a department colloquium will make a student stand out. Often, a student will ask a question or make a comment that I've thought about but didn't bother to mention. That is also something that catches the eye. Ultimately I think that Bravo's point is a good one: just try to think about the problem and comment if something comes to mind.
The same way any other researcher would make meaningful comments or suggestions regarding a colleague's work. By having real insight, and presenting it carefully and respectfully.
(And I agree with all the other answers.)
But PhD students generally don't have a lot of experience being "any other researcher"
@Max: True. Hence the second sentence of my answer.
Very very carefully. One of the important aspects of being a PhD student is learning how to think critically. Turning that critical eye on a colleague, and even worse on an advisor, can be a real disaster. The key is for the student to be able to provide his/her insight into the issues without putting the colleague on guard.
While this may be too idealistic to hope for, one would hope that within a department, students are given more leeway to critique faculty, even if the critique is incorrect - they are there to learn after all.
A department where professors can only be criticized "very very carefully" for fear of "disaster" should not be allowed by the university to exist, in my opinion.
If a professor finds your comments insightful and valuable, he/she would take the initiative to request your opinion or collaborate with you on a project. If not, they won't make an effort and may keep silent about it to be polite or outright request that you not give your opinion. Just keep in mind though... Some professors may regard your comments as being a bit ostentation or arrogant... I know, because I've been there and done that myself :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.632415 | 2012-05-28T02:27:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1762",
"authors": [
"Aziz",
"Ben Norris",
"Bravo",
"David Ketcheson",
"Highly Irregular",
"JeffE",
"Jeroen",
"Jim Conant",
"Max",
"Nigel Thorne",
"Olaf Dietsche",
"Suresh",
"Trevor Wilson",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209620",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2744",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/411",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4338",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4339",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4340",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4345",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4349",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4392",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8937",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/924",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9464",
"sabine garcia",
"student",
"user3224"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
22084 | Are there any available studies on the effectiveness of "learning by teaching"?
There is a study which claims that "learning by teaching" has a 90% retention rate. However, the study is no longer available and it is not clear what kind of research was actually done to support that claim. The legitimacy of that particular study is the subject of a related question on Skeptics.
Are there other studies that are available, proving or disproving that "learning by teaching" is more efficient than other learning methods?
@Renan What's wrong with the study mentioned in the Skeptics question? It does say number 90% in it, as far as I can see.
@AndrejaKo That study only mentions another study which is unavailable. It's impossible to confirm if the conclusion is reliable without any information about the size of the sample field and the criteria applied.
See also: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20888/does-learning-by-teaching-have-a-90-retention-rate and http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/7594/what-is-the-retention-rate-of-%E2%80%9Clearning-by-teaching%E2%80%9D
This question is too ambiguous to find any relevant research. The retention rate for any instructional method, even "learning by teaching," will depend on many, many factors -- e.g., what is being taught or learned; prior experience or knowledge of the learner; prior teaching experience; age of the teacher/learner; etc. I would suggest rephrasing your question and being more specific about the teacher/learners and what content, skills or knowledge that is being taught.
This question appears to be off-topic because it is against SE policy to cross-post an identical question on multiple SE sites. If you want this question to be in Academia.SE, you should delete it from the other sites (or ask a moderator from those sites to migrate your post to Ac.SE, and flag for merging here).
I deleted the identical question in Cognitive Sciences. There isn't an identical question is Skeptics though. The purpose of that question was to verify if a specific claim is true. On the other hand, in Academia the purpose is to find studies proving or disproving that "learning by studying" is more efficient than other learning methods.
What are you asking? "Learning by teaching" or "Learning by studying"?
Ok, I edited this question to clarify the difference between it and the one on Skeptics, and reopened.
According to one source, a man named Edgar Dale developed that retention rate pyramid. Edgar Dale had been both a teacher, and a school Superintendent.
The wikipedia article makes an interesting statement regarding this:
However, Dale included no numbers and did not base his cone on
scientific research, and he also warned readers not to take the cone
too seriously. The numbers may have originated as early as the 1940s,
when a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin created visual
aids for the military.
Wikipedia points to another article written by a Dr. Thalheimer, whose PhD was in Human Learning and Cognition, which is possibly a better resource. He makes this statement in his introduction:
People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see,
30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar
pronouncements are fraudulent. Moreover, general statements on the
effectiveness of learning methods are not credible---learning results
depend on too many variables to enable such precision. Unfortunately,
this bogus information has been floating around our field for decades,
crafted by many different authors and presented in many different
configurations, including bastardizations of Dale's Cone.
Dr. Thalheimer goes further:
The bogus percentages were first published by an employee of Mobil Oil
Company in 1967, writing in the magazine Film and Audio-Visual
Communications. D. G. Treichler didn’t cite any research, but our
field has unfortunately accepted his/her percentages ever since. NTL
Institute still claims that they did the research that derived the
numbers. See my response to NTL.
Michael Molenda, a professor at Indiana University, is currently
working to track down the origination of the bogus numbers. His
efforts have uncovered some evidence that the numbers may have been
developed as early as the 1940's by Paul John Phillips who worked at
University of Texas at Austin and who developed training classes for
the petroleum industry.
That's interesting... does marketing voodoo usually stick around in the public mind longer than original research? Anyways, he re-emphasizes the importance of listing citations and the importance of understanding where research originally comes from, up to and including context. There were two guilty parties, according Dr. Thalheimer; of course, the original people who generated the tables, but also the folks who disseminated the research without checking the citations.
Thalheimer goes on to suggest that the information floating around in his industry can not be trusted.
It tells us that even our most reputable people and organizations may
require the Wizard-of-Oz treatment---we may need to look behind the
curtain to verify their claims.
So, how does one answer your question? Well, the US News rankings show Stanford as being the top University for psychology, at the moment. So, I'll take that at face value; because I don't have better information to go on, and assume that there are some decent researchers on cognition in Stanford. Out of the researchers who study cognition, which one's seems like they might be doing research on human learning? After I find one, I might be able to identify some of the journals in the field. They might even be some of the "top" journals in the field.
Part of the reason why this trick works, is that professors and fledgling professors usually keep a curriculum vitae, or CV. And often, listed on their CV is a set of references to papers that they have written in the past. Some are even so kind as to showcase some of the papers that they believe to be part of their best work to date. In some cases, this can act as a kind of roadmap to show you how to become a professor.
So this procedure pulls up a list of possible resources for journals that might have articles on that topic:
Cognition
Developmental Science
Developmental Psychology
Perspectives in Psychological Science
Here are two possible resources:
Frank, M. C., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Gibson, E. (2013). Learning and long-term retention of large-scale artificial languages. PLoS ONE, 8, e52500.
Shafto, P., Goodman, N., & Frank, M. C. (2012). Learning from others: The consequences of psychological reasoning for human learning. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 7, 341–351.
That might be enough of a seed to begin to answer your question. Let's begin by trying to read Shafto et al's paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science. The official version is behind a paywall, but a version of the paper is freely available from Goodman's web page at Stanford.
In the abstract, Shafto et al says:
From early childhood, human beings learn not only from collections of facts
about the world, but also in social contexts: from observation of other people, from communication, and from explicit teaching.
Beyond the abstract, in the 'Learning from others: The consequences of psychological reasoning for human learning', Shafto et al states:
Children are often compared to scientists, but even a perfect scientist,
using experiments alone, would struggle to rediscover all of human knowledge in the span of one lifetime. How then are children able to acquire a good fraction of this knowledge in just a few years? The answer must be that children do not rediscover everything—they use their ability to reason
intuitively about other people to learn what others already know.
Below figure 1, Shafto et al make the statement:
Research on human learning paints a very different picture of how datapoints are
selected. A wide variety of approaches have pointed to people and their intentions, as an important factor in learning, highlighting that data are
chosen rather than random (Bruner, 1966; Vygotsky, 1978) and that observed data are
often the consequence of goal-directed actions (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961; Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977) or intentional communication/teaching (Coady, 1992; Csibra & Gergely, 2009; Harris, 2002; Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005).
So what can we gather from this? Within the field of psychology/cognition, there is discussion in the literature to support the possibility that people do, in fact, attempt to describe the process of learning by teaching. But the focus of Shafto et al's paper is not on trying to find the learning retention rates for different types of learning. In fact, nowhere in the paper does it even mention the term 'retention'. The focus of their paper, as described in the abstract, is rather to develop a formal framework for how a learner might observe someone's actions and infer from those how much that person knows about the world.
The focus of this paper could potentially be useful in trying to develop a learning model for an artificial intelligence.
In the conclusion, the authors make an interesting statement:
Our approach suggests that intuitive psychological reasoning potentially provides a very strong lever by which learners may capitalize on others’ knowledge to learn about the world (see also Coady, 1992; Csibra & Gergely, 2009; Harris, 2002; Tomasello et al., 2005). The key difference from previous formal approaches is how one views other people. If other people are viewed as random or even malicious in choosing their actions, then learning will likely be very
difficult. However, if people are viewed as approximately rational,
goal-directed agents, or as knowledgeable and helpful teachers, then the learning problem becomes much more tractable.
This statement appears to mean that the ability to learn by observing an observee's actions depends on the observer's assumed framework. If the observer assumes that the person whom they are observing is acting randomly, or perhaps that they are malicious in their actions; then it's more difficult to create a model to represent who they are observing. It is more difficult to learn. I'm not convinced that my interpretation of this statement is correct, given the context.
This paper also makes some references to studies done in the past. We could follow up by reading some of these as well. You may find this necessary, as this paper doesn't address your question directly.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.632892 | 2014-06-07T23:48:52 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/22084",
"authors": [
"AndrejaKo",
"Angry Academia",
"Brian P",
"DP.",
"Donovan Vargas",
"Gandalf the White",
"J. Doe",
"Marshall",
"Martin",
"Mohamed Farhoud",
"Nobody",
"Peter",
"Renan",
"Sahil Kolwankar",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/159",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17232",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60633",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60634",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62504",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62679",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62680",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62681",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62682",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62694",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62753",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62921",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62922",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62923",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/648",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9653",
"olfek",
"peluca79",
"user17364"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
15080 | Literature Review versus Literature Survey. What is the difference?
I have read several articles about literature reviews. At the same time I found some guides about literature surveys. I am confused... how is a literature survey different from a literature review? What is the standard procedure to conduct a literature survey without making it a literature review?
Welcome to Academia.SE. You have a couple of different questions in your post. We encourage multiple posts for multiple questions. See our [about] and [help] pages. Your questions about literature surveys and reviews are closely related and match the title. You should make a second post about how to pursue research given your background, since that it unrelated.
Reviewing the literature relevant to a given field is a standard part of doing research, as this serves to put your work into the context of the larger discipline in which you are working.
If there is an actual difference between the "literature survey" and the "literature review," it's that the latter can serve as a paper in and of itself, and is much more extensive than a literature survey, which is typically a major part of the introduction of a research paper.
The literature review as a standalone article could be compared to a "curated" overview of the literature in the field—who has done what, how do papers relate to one another, and what are the most important present and (possibly) future directions of work in such a field. Such papers can also be considerably longer than a traditional research paper, and some reviews might cite as many as a thousand references!
In comparison, the literature survey of a standard research article is usually much shorter (1-2 journal pages), and will not cite nearly as many papers (anywhere from 10 to 100, depending on the topic and the amount of relevant literature available).
Hi thanks for your comment. But I m still confused. I have seen survey papers are published and I have seen literature review sections in thesis. I mean aren't survey papers related to computer science are literature reviews ?
In general, "review paper" is much more commonly used than "survey paper." Maybe CS prefers "survey paper," but essentially, there's no substantial difference between them. But every paper includes some sort of synopsis of existing literature; in a review or survey paper, it's the entire paper.
Thanks ,I understood that review papers should be read to do a research.
Well, I have written couple of survery/review articles published in prestigious journals here, here, and here and hence I think I can give you some hint on this question.
First View: One of the most important things to consider is that, these terms have been used differently in varied academic disciplines and even in some cases they are used interchangeably with negligible differences. Even in CS (my field), the way image processing scholars look at these terms may be different from networking researchers (I once experienced the comments I received from experts in image processing and realize how different they look at the works). So it might not be wrong if consider insignificant differences between these two terms.
What I describe here may be more applicable to CS.
There are two different views at these terms that I describe here
Technically a feasible description around these two terms is that in survey works you should review the published papers and analyze, summarize, organize, and present findings in a novel way that can generate an original view to a certain aspect of the domain. For example, if researchers review the available research findings and conclude that electrical cars are emission-free vehicles, another researcher can review the same results and present an argument that building batteries themselves produce huge emission. The second contribution opens door for new research around emission-free production of car batteries.
If we consider that survey paper is the result of literature survey, we can use the following definitions from CS journals.
According to the definition of survey paper provided by IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials journal (one of the best CS journals), "The term survey, as applied here, is defined to mean a survey of the literature. A survey article should provide a comprehensive review of developments in a selected area".
In ACM Computing Survey (another prestigious CS journal), survey paper is described as “A paper that summarizes and organizes recent research results in a novel way that integrates and adds understanding to work in the field. A survey article emphasizes the classification of the existing literature, developing a perspective on the area, and evaluating trends.”
In Elsevier journal of Computer Science Review, you will see here4 that “Critical review of the relevant literature“ is required a component of every typical survey paper.
To summarize, these two terms can be distinguished using following notes (or maybe definitions)
Literature Survey: Is the process of analyzing, summarizing, organizing, and presenting novel conclusions from the results of technical review of large number of recently published scholarly articles. The results of the literature survey can contribute to the body of knowledge when peer-reviewed and published as survey articles
Literature Review: Is the process of technically and critically reviewing published papers to extract technical and scientific metadata from the presented contents. The metadata are usually used during literature survey to technically compare different but relevant works and draw conclusions on weaknesses and strengths of the works.
Second View: The second view over literature survey and review is that in survey, researchers usually utilize the author-provided contents available in the published works to qualitatively analyze and compare them with other related works. While in the former, you should not perform qualitative analysis. Rather it should be quantitative meaning that every research work under study should be implemented and benchmarked under certain criteria. The results of this benchmarking study can be used to compare them together and criticize or appreciate the works.
So basically you can look at current literature and find which approach is dominating in your field. Hope it helps. I try to revise it if I came a cross other points or useful comments here.
Up vote for Comprehensive answer.
Nice answer (+1). I agree with you that the difference between the two terms is non-essential and preference in terminology depends mostly on the research discipline (field) and journal editors' preferences. Having said that, your distinction between the terms seems artificial, meaning that I don't see core logic that prevents applying both definitions to the opposite terms (unless I've missed some points). Also, I wanted to add that more accurate definitions should mention that literature survey or literature review is each both a process and an artifact, resulting from that process.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.633717 | 2013-12-26T13:46:36 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15080",
"authors": [
"Abhijit Kumbhar",
"Aleksandr Blekh",
"Amirmasoud",
"Ben Norris",
"DecisionNerd",
"JJ Olivier",
"Npn",
"adolflow",
"aeismail",
"eddieisnutty",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10259",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10267",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12391",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39268",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39284",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39307",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39308",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39400",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/924",
"j605",
"user3135645"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
144073 | Identifying pleasant PhD supervisors
I want to pursue a PhD at an institution in Japan that I don't know first hand. As lab websites or personal webpages don't really reveal the personalities of professors, it isn't easy to know in advance which professor's working style and personality could match my own.
Are there ways to determine whether a professor will be a good match for me?
I've rewritten your question in an attempt to make it on topic. I don't understand what you mean by "pleasant," so perhaps edit that aspect. Also, I'm a little unclear as to your precise question, so perhaps edit to address. (I vote to reopen.)
This is one of the best and most important questions here.
This may be relevant: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/30285/72855
Thank you for the suggestion @Solar Mike
Do you have a bachelors only, or a higher degree?
I would be quite surprised if any students or postdocs would "betray" their advisor, in Japan.
Only way is to talk to their students. I for example become very unpleasant if you are not performing.
I would note that when you ask the students, you need to read between the lines to a certain extent. Just as letters of recommendation are always positive, but supervisors will look out for what is not said in them, you should apply the same principles when you are assessing a supervisor.
Let me give an example: I was interviewing for a postdoc in the US, and the supervisor had the students and postdocs take me out for lunch. Over lunch I asked how hard people worked, and were they well looked after. The answers were the expected - they were well looked after, the boss had high expectations, but supported them well to meet these expectations, they worked long hours, but they wanted to. Then I asked them what they liked to do outside the lab. Silence. Apparently noone had any hobbies. Eventaully one of them ventured that they drummed in a band, but later came up to me and asked me not to share this with the supervisor. Perhaps it was a joke that went over my head. Perhaps it there were other things going on. But I wasn't going to take the risk of ending up somewhere where people didn't want their supervisor knowing they had a life outside work.
Asking current PhD students as Azor Ahai recommends is a good source. Another source I like are the PhD thesis of former students. These usually contain extensive acknowledgements and thankyous to the supervisor. Various information about the style of supervision can be gotten there. Note that only positive things are mentioned, so also look out for things supervisors are not thanked for.
In the US, typically, you would speak to current graduate students about their working style. In general, a cold email usually acceptable, but don't pester.
However, you might run into very different cultural expectations if you aren't yourself Japanese, so I would take their perspectives with a grain of salt.
Have you experience with writing cold emails on that matter? For myself, I would probably not write much to a person I do not know(I might depend on the prof's goodwill my whole life!) and definely no negatives on them.
The best supervisors will volunteer a mechanism by which you can contact existing or former mentees. I would not work with someone who reacted negatively when asked the supervisor to put you in touch with some. But I should point out, this is UK/US. Cultural expectations might well be different in Japan.
True, I would definitely be very cautious of putting anything in writing if I were disgruntled. Ask if they have time for a skype, and chat with them to build trust first. Also, in a really good lab, people will tend to be effusive and straight out recommend you to come. If they don't do that, I would be wary. As Azor mentions though, culture is also an important factor here.
If you can, try to find out who was the most disgruntled member to leave the lab, and ask that person. If that student says things were okay, or you get the impression this person might have be the source of difficulty, it's a good sign.
What? Do you have experience with this? It is hard to believe that a stranger would hand you a name instead of just ignoring this strange question.
Yes, I do. And, some people will, some people won’t.
So have you asked someone who the most disgruntled member was or have you given out the name of this member to someone?
Like with so many things in academia, the key is knowing the right people. Do any of your current or previous supervisors know someone at that institute? Or have even met the professors you are talking about at a conference or somewhere else? If this is not the case, they might know someone who does, and so on. These connections are important, especially since applying for a PhD with connections is most definitely beneficial.
Don't be afraid to ask people you know for help, they will understand your situation and will most likely want to help you.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.634293 | 2020-02-11T12:42:53 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/144073",
"authors": [
"Buffy",
"DeltaChief",
"Ian Sudbery",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Solar Mike",
"Steve Heim",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/119308",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21119",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22768",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82972",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"paul garrett",
"user111388",
"user2768"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
83695 | Corresponding author published article without sending final proof to all authors, corrigendum
My professor was the corresponding author of an article written by me as first author and one second co-author. Having the correspondence with the editor, the professor didn't give much information about the actual status of the article, allthough I asked several times for it.
Some months later, I got the notice that the article is now published. I never got a final proof of the article from the professor/ corresponding author and when I read through the published version, I was in huge shock as I noticed some formatting issues. However, the worst and most severe thing is, that one sentence was "corrected", stating the contrary of what it was supposed to mean. Obviously there is now a mistake in the article. This mistake doesn't affect the measurements results, but it is contradictful within the overall statement of the article.
I asked my professor about writing an erratum concerning this issue. The answer was, that he assumes this sentence not to be noticed and therefore, an erratum would be too much effort. I am feeling really bad being the first author of this paper, where I know about the mistake. Do you think I can ask the journal for an erratum without the consens of my professor?
Furthermore, I want to publish one more article of the work I have done, but the professor still claims the corresponding authorship. As my professor answers my emails only within months and as I don't have much trust in his actions anymore, I really don't know what to do. Does anybody have experience with such a situation?
--
EDIT: thank you for your answers, they are very helpful to me. The paper is a non-open access paper and already published in a printed issue of the journal. Furthermore, it is about a subject what I am not researching anymore, so there are no follow-up papers planned in the same journal.
I think my corresponding author will not be amused when I am writing the publisher as he already refused a corrigendum. You see this is a really tricky situation. What about writing a comment to the paper? I already saw remarks from third researchers concerning existing papers...maybe that could be a solution?
1.If your article is just published OnlineFirst (version of your paper published online with a DOI but not having a volume/issue number details) and not allocated in an issue then, instead of an erratum you can you can request the publisher to make the requested changes at the issue level. Some publishers do not make any changes to the article published OnlineFirst, but they will make the changes at the issue level, which will then replace the online version. For every article the publisher has a main point of contact (corresponding author) and the publisher directly contacts them for any kind of publication concerns. In your case, first check if your article is not published in an issue then you can go ahead requesting the changes to the publisher keeping your corresponding author in the email chain.
If your paper is already published in an issue and you feel there are formatting issues (the formatting is done as per the journal style), then you can get back to the publisher requesting them if it can be fixed. If they agree, along with the request you can make the changes to the contradicting statement in your article.
If the formatting is correct as per the publisher, then you may add a short statement in your upcoming paper (to be published in the same journal) stating the correction (with reference to page nos, Vol/Issue no. and section details) of your previous article and provide the DOI link of the previous article. Request the publisher to link this statement to your previous article section where there was an error.
I hope that answers your question.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.634818 | 2017-01-23T15:44:45 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/83695",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
64834 | Why attend predatory colleges in the US?
I just read this article about predatory colleges in the US:
S. Cagle, These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
I am not from the US and didn't ask in the comments of that site because I wouldn't want to insult anyone concerned.
I just wondered: before you enroll for any degree, would you compare what the college's officials say with reality? Like, looking on the internet to find people with a degree from that school who got jobs, asking a local employment worker, asking at a local employer if they would consider giving a job to someone with a degree from that school, etc.
How is it this article says the students were so young they could not possibly have known they were being tricked? If you are old enough to go into debt with thousands of dollars for a college education, how can you not be old enough to check for the quality of that education first?
Why would people attend predatory colleges?
@Dirk I think the article was the catalyst to his question but really has nothing to do with the root question, "Why do people attend predatory colleges?"
Maybe, but in it's present form the question is really not suited. The parts "would you not...?", "Is not that just plain common sense?", "How is it...?", "How can you not...?" clearly indicate this.
@Dirk I agree. I edited it a bit without changing the overall question, but I hope the OP can clean it up further.
This question could also be boiled down to the much more general question - "Why do people fall for scams?", which is a question as old as the oldest fool.
Latin may be a dead language, but most folks still know the meaning of "caveat emptor".
Kids are often deperate to get into college, and are often ignorant of other outlets like community college if they don't have the grades. People see what they want to see, and when you're a high school graduate with a 2.0, you'll be excited to attend just about anywhere. They are also ignorant of how employers hire students, often having targeted universities from which to recruit. They do not realize thier application will not even be looked at if they got a degree from a non-target school.
@tjd , no they don't. Most don't even know there is a thing called latin. Or emptor.
A lot of diploma mills recruit former military members who have their tuition paid for (or heavily subsidized by) the GI Bill.
"programs offered by schools like Corinthian and its subsidiaries, scam students into expensive but ultimately worthless degree programs that leave them with high rates of loan default and low rates of graduate job placement".......and this differs from traditional colleges and universities how?
@coburne There is a big difference between schools like Corinthian and more traditional schools. Traditional colleges and universities have paid protection money to the right accreditation agencies and Corinthian has not.
FWIW some people do all right with their degrees from DeVry, and for some its about the only option since its faster and has easier entry (ex: nursing majors). Reminds me of people who get "non marketable degrees" from normal colleges, even in other countries...
"For profit Colleges": I'm not american, but from what I know about higher education in the US, all colleges are basically "for profit".
@Fatalize all organizations are "for profit". So called "not for profit" colleges just pay out their profits in different ways.
@tjd In university, I used "ceteris paribus" a lot. Everyone has to take economics, so they know what it means. In the 7 years since I graduated, I don't think a single person has known what it means. I've had to drop it from my vernacular which is unfortunate because it's quite succinct.
I'm always baffled by articles like this. How do you commit thousands of dollars and years of your (or your child's) life to something without even googling the university to check?
It would be useful if someone could add a quick description of what a predatory college really is. The article is quite long and verbose. TL;DR: TL;DR.
@Federico Poloni: How could you give a useful answer, if you don't understand the question?
@JørgenFogh I don't want to give an answer myself, I want to read and understand other people's answers and the discussion. And in any case your point is misleading: one doesn't need to read the long story of the troubled life of a former student to answer the question "why attend predatory colleges", as long as they know what they are.
@Superbest But you're assuming that people do in fact know how to get useful search results from Google and even if they do get them, that they're able to interpret them. If you have no idea about a field, how are you to determine the quality of the experts that are doing the lectures? University itself is basically an appeal from authority. If you're unable to determine its authority yourself, then you'll just have to trust someone else. This is where accreditation programs come into play. The linked article mentioned that some of the collages had accreditations and some lost them. cont.
cont. If you know nothing about a field, who can you trust other than an accreditation agency? Even searching on the Internet can be very misleading, due to issues with sample sizes you can find in your answer. I mean, going to a forum where people complain about something can be very similar to going to a hospital and concluding that everyone almost in the city is sick, because hospital is full of sick people. cont.
cont. Also I don't like to make huge sweeping statements about groups of people, but in this case I think I'll have to. There are people who are in fact unable to think logically. You can't explain things to such people and solid information is useless for them. Instead, they look for emotional arguments and in such cases, marketing can work very nicely. They'll believe something because someone told them or they heard it. It is my belief, from doing a bit of research here, that there may be a significant number of them in the "victims" of predatory schools.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
@Strongbad: Source? As it’s “a lot,” care to share several examples?
@gnometorule these were early hits for me https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gi-bill-benefitting-profit-colleges-instead-helping-veterans and https://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/04/obama_targets_diploma_mills_th.html but a google search turns up a lot of stories.
@SteongBad: Thanks! I misunderstood your comment though: I thought you said that those colleges are heavily operated by veterans (I saw no reason why that would be the case), not that they dupe veterans. Thanks for clarifying!
A few possibilities:
These people genuinely don't know any better. They think a degree is a degree. I would guess that they come from parents that did not attend college. A friend of mine started at a for-profit school because she really didn't know that there was a difference between my 4 year bachelor degree and her 12 month online degree.
People want to take shortcuts and these schools know that.
These schools spend a lot of money on commercials and marketing to try to convince people to attend. It isn't surprising that people would fall victim if you see a commercial for a school 3 times a day.
These schools also promote their currents/past students to help recruit their friends. I have certainly seen this on my own social media feeds.
I once had a manager at a large company that was working on a degree from a diploma mill because the company was imposing a new policy that all managers had to have a degree, but it didn't matter from where.
So to directly answer your questions: No, a lot of people probably don't look into the details of past student success. The type of people that would do this, aren't the ones being targeted by these schools. And even if they do, you're bound to find some successes (confirmation bias) which the school will proudly advertise.
Unfortunately, these types of schools prey on uneducated people, so while it seems like common sense to us, those people may really be getting tricked and yet the government continues to have surprisingly loose regulation.
+1d for all of this but especially the commercials part. I have family members with mountains of debt from for-profit 'schools' and they were 100% sold on the flashy commercials and marketing which, if you don't think too much about it, made the college look great. They also throw very expensive, lavish 'parties' for recruitment and of course that draws people in who are attracted to that kind of thing. They make a ton of money, they have that money to spend on marketing.
Very good, but realistically people do very little research on non-profit schools also - it's not like these other students are somehow already more intelligent or harder working. There are significant discrepancies between advertised (and non-profit universities do a tremendous amount of advertising!) and the actual salaries, hire rates, and later academic success that results from their programs.
In addition a lot of people just want a certificate that will get them a job, not a 4 year degree. From what I've see people who go to these colleges want to become electricians, HVAC techs, welders or medical assistants. A lot of the predatory colleges advertise that they'll train you and place you in a job (or help you get one) and people think that's a straightforward path to improve their lives, not realizing they are paying through the nose for something they can get at their local community college for 1/3 the price.
Also, some people can't get into a 4 year college or at least think they can't.
"These people genuinely don't know any better." Exactly. These schools actively seek students who don't know any better; that's precisely why they're called "predatory."
I was a professor at a major for-profit university in the US. A couple campuses, out of many had been caught in scandal for preying on students financially. The university, in my opinion, was not trying to scam people. However, when you pay people to recruit students by volume, you will get bad apples.
I taught A+ certification. The academic side was solid. The teachers wanted to teach, the curriculum was correct. The books, the labs, the premade tests, etc were all, in my opinion, extremely satisfactory. If someone wanted to learn, they most definitely could.
My classes were filled with mostly inner-city students that were simply uneducated. They could barely read or write. They could only do the most basic of math problems. I had one student told me he graduated with straight D's because his school didn't want to give him F's and hold him back for a year. I had a couple of students who were there because they committed a crime and a judge told them it is either school or jail. I had a few students who said they were there because their parents said it was go to school or leave the house.
There were a few students who definitely had potential. Mostly, it was the older ones who wanted to do better in life. They were there for the right reasons and were willing to learn.
Needless to say, it was not what I thought teaching would be.
The reality is, their public schools failed them. These students have no chance to go to a quality university. Nor would they have a chance in a local community college. They simply did not have the education needed.
So that's were the for profit schools come in. They give these students a chance to learn a trade and be successful. I do not believe they are out to fleece the students out of their money. It does happen, but there are bad apples in every business.
The for-profit schools, admit people who can't go anywhere else. However, some of those students are destined to fail. But in reality, isn't every school like that?
Now, as an employer, I went to a local for-profit school to hire some low level IT techs. We had one employee who graduated from that school and was extremely competent. However, I interviewed many students who had just graduated, or were about to, and I was extremely disappointed. Students who graduated from the school could not answer the most basic IT questions. This school failed them horribly. There is no excuse for having students graduate and not be able to do the basics.
So here is the real question: Do you deny a student a chance at an education, given their odds might be slim?
Very interesting perspective, thank you for sharing. Two things come to my mind. (A) I wish there were [better] state funded programs to give such people a chance at an education and (B) I don't think the real question is about denying a student a chance at an education, but rather denying a business from financially ruining a student's life with debt when the employment outcomes are far worse than graduates of non-profit schools.
@AustinHenley the public schools are the issue. That is the state funded program. As for ruining a students financial future, regular colleges/universities do that as well. I think for-profit schools' are really out for the student's benefit, but they are a business and have to make money.
I do want to add, that not all departments of my school were like the IT side. The nursing, medical coding, and electricians departments were very successful, i believe.
I am a long-time participant of this site. I have reviewed 2719 first posts on this site. I must say this is one of the best first time posts I have reviewed. Thank you for sharing this information with us.
@scaaahu it's not a first post. And I'm #33 on the second largest se site, super user. :)
Thank you for this answer. So, the problem is not in the existence of for-profit, but that it mixes decent schools like yours, with others where the idea of a nursing degree clinical experience is visiting a creationism museum.
@Davidmh problems exist at every school. Major public universities have scandals as well. I believe people simply have a larger reaction to headlines that say people are taking advantage of poor students. No one writes exposes on rich students getting degrees in philosophy and then cant find jobs.
So your school accepted people who could barely read and write and charge them money for college level classes? How is that not predatory? Clearly they knew the students do not have the necessary skills to master the subject at hand, yet they happily took their money.
@ventsyv no. Some of the students got their certifications and started a career in IT. Some did not. At the time I was there if a student wasn't showing up to classes or did not perform adequately within 90 days they got their money back. Simple as that.
"Nor would they have a chance in a local community college." Can you please elaborate on this statement? I always thought that community colleges were easy to get into and were designed specifically for all these issues you mentioned (giving people a second chance, people who can't read/write/do basic math). I thought if you were over 18, you could get into a community college. To me, it seems like you are saying that these for-profit colleges are there for the same reason CC's exist. I don't see a difference.
@FixedPoint Even local community colleges have academic requirements to get in. Google your local CC's requirements, they do have them. Many of my students would not meet those requirements. Even those that did, met them on paper only.
What do you mean you taught "A+ certification"?
@David Hill CompTIA A+ is a major certification for PC technicians.
@Keltari: "Whatcom Community College welcomes all future students who are at least 18 years of age or who have graduated from high school or earned a GED certificate." So based on your story of "one student told me he graduated with straight D's" without merit, such a student would be accepted. As I understand it, different community colleges have different entry requirements, especially in different areas.
Another reason people attend a predatory school is that they may benefit from it.
I know plenty of people who work at large companies, government, etc., where there is a flat "Master's Degree = 20% raise" rule, or something of the sort. In these cases, while the student may realize that they are not getting a proper education, and they are paying more than they should for what they are receiving, it is still worth it to them financially. They work full time, so getting a proper degree may take too much time. And while they are over paying for the "education" they get, they still end up making more than if they did not attend the school.
This doesn't account for all the students, especially not the ones who find themselves in great debt, but it does account for some of the schools' students.
At a former organization, I was paid slightly less than a peer for the same work simply because I had a Masters degree and my peer had a PhD. If the differential had been large enough, it could have paid for a diploma mill PhD.
+1 Cliff AB . If an organisation has a relatively rigid pay Vs Quals scale then extra "study " would be worth it for some employees especially if its easy .In NZ the blabour market is more deregulated so there is not such a direct relationship between pay and degrees.
I remember speaking with my stepfather about social reform, and how my vision for helping people in less fortunate nations involved creating things in first world nations, which would hopefully inspire people in the less fortunate nations. He pointed something out to me: the people in those nations are too focused on their severe problems, like finding out how they are going to get food, and that focus can prevent their ability to focus on things like social reform.
Similarly, unwealthy Americans may notice the riches of others in their society. When a college offers them an "opportunity" that they didn't think they had before, it may seem quite attractive.
They know full well that this college-I've-never-heard-of is less famous than the Ivy League schools (Harvard/Yale/UCLA/MIT). Yet, they don't expect to meet the admissions requirements of those famous schools. When a recruiter says that a local college will accept them, and they can get paid money from the government, that may defy their previous expectations.
Later they may find that the government money is in the forms of loans, not grants. Still, they hear this argument that sounds logical: after you graduate, you'll make more money, which will allow you to pay off the loan.
The most compelling reason to move forward with the enrollment may be this: not enrolling means continuing their life the way it was. And, that didn't seem nearly as spectacular. So, getting guaranteed money immediately, with some hope of having a good situation in the future, and some risk of troubles down the road, may seem more attractive than immediately being guaranteed to live the same troublesome life that a person has been experiencing.
Details, like the college's reputation for an education quality which is less than stellar, are a discomforting thought. However, such concerns may not be significant enough to counter the immediate benefits of going along with the program by the recruiter. After all, the organization does seem to be successful enough to pay its bills, and there is some sort of tie-in with the federal government that is helping to sponsor all this stuff, so there's enough faith in the overall system to begin having a better life right now. If things don't work out, the plan is to simply live life and tackle challenges down the road when (or, actually, if) they come to fruition.
I suspect many people who enroll in predatory colleges don't know the college's reputation.
Wait, I probably should have seen this earlier but have not: Your government REALLY gives you a loan, knowing full well you are going to spend it on a predatory college whose degree is not worth ANYTHING? And you cannot sue your government for that?
There are lots of rubbish colleges in my country that offer "degrees". There is even a place called MIT which is the Manakau Institute of Technology, not to be confused with the top league place in the USA.
The pass rates are high in the rubbish colleges. In the US they would be probably called "diploma mills". The property developer "BOB JONES" wrote a book about it called "Degrees For Everyone". This book was intended as a bit of a joke, but in the future it will become a cornerstone for academic reform.
The real success rate of a college is the employment outcome ratio. The employment outcomes are terrible at the easy colleges and very good at the good colleges. In my country the labour market is relatively deregulated so if someone with a degree can't get a job in his or her field the pay is a disaster. In other words if you end up with a macjob in the service industry you may never pay off the loan and never own a house. People must think very carefully about whether it is worth it to take out a student loan. Unfortunately most young people don't think that way.
I will point out that employment outcome metrics can be very misleading, regardless of the university, but I overall agree with your comments.
This is a potentially useful comment, but I don't see how it answers the question.
@StephanKolassa what is this sub-SE position regarding "I am posting this as an answer because it is too long for a comment"?
@Mindwin Usually it's 'form this into an answer or shorten it into a comment'. Long comments are interesting, but not really the intended purpose of SE.
@Zibbobz some subs are more tolerant of this kind of "answer" than others. That is why I asked.
@Mindwin Not sure about academia.se's policy - Maybe it would make a good Meta question?
Degrees For Everyone. Heh. If I say, "people with money are better off than people without it, so let's give everyone a million dollars to eliminate poverty," anyone with half a brain can instantly say "no, that won't work, because inflation." But if I say "people with a college education are better off than people without it, so let's give everyone a degree to eliminate poverty," a lot less people catch on.
I think this answer is factually inaccurate - predatory colleges in the United States are often not "diploma mills". Because of predatory colleges' inability to fulfill promises of job placement, it's in their interest to get students to pay tuition but not complete their degree. One technique used to achieve this is schemes using government-backed financial aid to fund the student for most of their time at the predatory school, then leave them stuck without funding near the end.
@MasonWheeler That is because increasing the education of every single person is demonstrably a good thing. Would giving out a bachelors to everyone diminish its meaning? Yes. Would you still be able to use your more advanced skills? Also yes. It wouldn't eliminate poverty per se, but would leave everyone better off.
@kleineg Yeah, that sounds great in theory, right up until you run into real-world places with a significantly higher than average concentration of degrees, like Washington DC, which has seen actual instances of jobs such as "pizza delivery guy for Domino's. Required qualifications: Master's degree or higher." How much better off is the guy with a 4-year degree, once eduflation has taken its toll?
@MasonWheeler I live in washington dc and I did not know the ppl who deliver my pizza have masters degrees - not too surprised. what is wrong with over educated pizza delivery guys?
@kleineg: Educating everyone may in deed have value. The question is whether that value exceeds the costs.
@JørgenFogh That is the question to ask. The answer may not be everyone going on to post high school education, and definitely not at colleges which do not provide the right skills. I wasn't making the point that absolutely everyone should get a Master's degree, I was saying that increasing the base education level provided to everyone would give people who don't want to work delivering pizza more opportunity to do something else. My inspiration for this comment is South Korea and Finland, which reap the benefit of the best pre college education systems, without needing predatory colleges.
These schools play into human psychology in two huge ways. One is the Lake Wobegon effect. Many people I know who went to "specialty schools" did so because "it's the easy way and in the end it doesn't matter because I not the stupid one. I am the smart and driven one who will go there and end up with a job / transfer anyways." Sure, some go there, learn some stuff, and then do just fine. The problem is that most people think they are better than the average person, and so "failure" statistics "don't apply to them," so they ignore the warning signs.
Secondly they do a lot of psychological pricing. Just like at 4-year colleges, most people aren't paying the full price. However, when they get a piece of paper saying "We gave you a scholarship! It's only $5,000 a year for you!" you think you're getting a great deal and why would you not go there? It's the same way that stores get people to buy things they don't need by telling them it's a good deal.
In the end, the people going to these schools think they're getting a great deal and any warning signs don't pertain to them. That makes it sounds like a good choice!
[Note: Many people I know were suckered into going to Community Colleges the same way. They went into it thinking it was a good deal and the dropout rates didn't apply to them. Sure, some did fine. The vast majority never graduated because they either couldn't get into the right classes or because nobody around them (even the teachers) cared. I think the moral is to be careful of any shortcuts.]
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.635543 | 2016-03-09T09:32:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64834",
"authors": [
"365 SHR",
"77 88",
"AndrejaKo",
"Austin Henley",
"Autistic",
"Dave",
"David Balažic",
"David Hill",
"Davidmh",
"Dean MacGregor",
"Devin",
"Dirk",
"Emmanuel Murairi",
"Emmyelle",
"Fatalize",
"Federico Poloni",
"Fixed Point",
"Huizhou Dongjiangjiesong Techn",
"Humayen Ahmed",
"Judge Pilot",
"Jørgen Fogh",
"Keltari",
"Kevin Krumwiede",
"Kimball",
"Mahaveer Constructions",
"Mahmoud Nabil",
"Mason Wheeler",
"Mindwin Remember Monica",
"Nobody",
"RandomYellow",
"Real spam",
"Salim Vare",
"Seattle Exterminators",
"Spammer",
"Spammy Spam SPAM",
"Stephan Kolassa",
"StrongBad",
"Superbest",
"TOOGAM",
"Tawhid",
"Valjean",
"Zibbobz",
"coburne",
"corsiKa",
"ejx",
"emory",
"eykanal",
"gnometorule",
"h088bmIuXaskpzJEe3ld",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10637",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10675",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11258",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11330",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14864",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15566",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181864",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181865",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181866",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181873",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181874",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181876",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181881",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181886",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181887",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181888",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181944",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181950",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181980",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/181988",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182073",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182086",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182088",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182217",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182218",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182329",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/182484",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23693",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23717",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27409",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28449",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/29163",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/30772",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40702",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41751",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42110",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42463",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4335",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47667",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48409",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48579",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/50151",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/50517",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/529",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9653",
"itit y",
"kleineg",
"la femme cosmique",
"meow",
"recognizer",
"rhea mar keith on-poo",
"rogerdpack",
"tjd",
"ventsyv",
"woody"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
131793 | When an academic researcher receives a gift funding from an industry partner, does the academic researcher's university take a cut?
When an academic researcher receives a gift funding from an industry partner, does the academic researcher's university take a cut, or does the academic researcher receives the entire gift funding?
If this is university and country dependent, I am mostly interested in the United States, and I'd be interested to have some survey (e.g., x % of universities % take a 20-30% commission, y % of universities % take no commission).
@Closevoters: according to What is our stance regarding questions asking for survey of institution’s regulations?, the question is on-topic. Closing the question would prevent future readers to add surveys as an answer. For example, someone who work in the industry with many university partners might have a good idea of how often universities take commissions for gift fundings. Buffy's answer shows that one can give a good answer to the question, stating factors that may come into account.
In response to comments:
the expression "taking a cut" is neutral. I'm not trying to imply anything in my question.
Definition of gift funding: see https://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/definitions-and-types-agreements/gift-vs-sponsored-projects-and-distinctions-other-forms-funding#anchor-1102 (mirror) "A gift, on the other hand, is defined as any item of value given to the University by a donor who expects nothing significant of value in return". A gift isn't a grant or sponsored research project.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
Than can depend on a lot of things. The answer is often yes, occasionally no.
The question may depend, in part, on what the university contributes to you as a researcher, including office space, lab space, RA support, whatever. It might also depend on whether it is the university that has to manage the grant and verify to the funder that the funds are properly spent - accounting for the funds and seeing that any necessary taxes are paid.
Universities have policies about these things and you should find out what those policies are in your case, but the answer is more likely that you and the university share the proceeds. The university "cut" might be quite a lot, actually.
And the characterization of it as a "gift" might be questioned or contested.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.637734 | 2019-06-12T16:28:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/131793",
"authors": [
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
93917 | Getting grants at a teaching department while officially being considered an R2 institution
My department is focused on teaching. We teach 6 classes/year with heavy undergraduate mentoring. It actually feels like teaching 8 classes per year. I know that there are grants "designed" for teaching institutions (RUI at NSF, for example), but to be eligible my institution has to be officially a PUI (primarily undergraduate institution). By all measures my department would qualify (no masters/phd degree), but other departments in the university are research active, so we are an R2 institution.
Furthermore, the university has been heavily pushing to be considered an R1 institution. They are giving a lot of resources (time/money) to these research-active departments. People at the teaching-intensive departments are at a significantly disadvantage since our research is less intensive, so we never get the internal grants.
When I talk to the administration the conversation goes like this (not literally):
They: ..., we support your efforts to get grants.
Me: It is difficult to get grants due to the heavy teaching load.
They: People at (teaching department at another university) get grants.
Me: They qualify as a PUI.
They: That may help them, but if your proposal is good, it will get funded.
Me: To do good research I need the time to do it.
They: You can apply for internal grants to get seed funding/time.
Me: Most of my department applies, but we are not funded. It is difficult to
get internal funding when competing with people in other areas that have more time for research.
They: Then you can apply for external funding, we support your efforts to get grants....
In summary, I work at an undergraduate department, but due to funding agencies rules, I am considered to be at a research intensive institution. Also, I have applied for grants, and colleagues at panels told me (in confidence) that other weaker proposals were funded because they got the PUI classification. My research was not considered strong enough (for a research intensive institution).
Has anyone had this experience?
How can I maximize my chances to get INTERNAL funding when competing with people that have much more time for research?
How can I maximize my chances to get EXTERNAL funding when competing with people that have much more time for research?
Start applying for faculty positions elsewhere.
A few thoughts -
One is that extramural funding is more about gaining prestige from your institution than actually resulting in a net revenue gain to your University. See this article from the American Association of University Professors website for an explication of the ways in which the focus on extramural funding harms universities.
That said, if your tenure and promotion system is based on securing external funding and/or having time to do research, then you probably still have to play that game even if you know that it's harmful to the university in the long run. One thing I'm thinking is psychological research about locus of control; if you believe that you are in control of your own success or failure it's been shown that you put more effort into and consequently have better performance than if you believe that others control what happens to you and that what you do doesn't matter. It does sound like the system is rigged against folks in your situation, but nonetheless, you can still do your best to put together a competitive application - have folks read over your applications, look at other people's successful applications, etc. Perhaps there's an office or staffperson on campus that helps with applications for external funding that could be a resource?
Finally, it sounds like there are some more systemic issues about courseloads and advising loads being too high. These seem like great things to raise during faculty union meetings or to bring up to your Academic Senate representatives - you're probably not the only one feeling this way, and if you can open up a conversation with other faculty maybe there are some changes that can be made in the way things work. Here's a case study about how faculty unions dealt with this in Ohio that might offer some inspiration for taking collective action.
This is one of those situations where there is strength in numbers. If you're the only one complaining, it's likely little will change. However, if you and your other colleagues in "teaching-intensive" departments collectively make noise about the issue, you're much more likely to force action on the part of the university.
In the meanwhile, you have to do the best you can with your given situation. Unless you were lied to about your expected teaching duties and other obligations, you know what you have to do for tenure. Making sure that it gets done should be your top priority while you're there (and possibly looking for other positions).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.637972 | 2017-07-30T15:03:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/93917",
"authors": [
"JeffE",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
94623 | Why are academics expected to pay out of their pockets for society memberships?
I had a discussion with a colleague about paying to become a member out of our own pockets. His argument is that we have to support a society if we care about it.
I don't understand the argument. The best way I can explain it is if we compare it to industry. You would not be asked to pay out of your own pocket to do the job you were hired for. Instead, your employer would have to pay it.
However, with respect to memberships in academia we are supposed to pay to do the job we were hired for (by the way, in my contract it says "give presentations in academic meetings"). It might be my experience in industry that makes me think this way, but again, I do not find it appropriate at all that we have to pay to do our jobs.
Why is there this discrepancy between academia and industry?
PS. I know in some cases one can use certain funds to pay for membership, I am not asking about that. I am asking that if you have the options of (1) not being a member or (2) pay it yourself, you are expected to pay it yourself.
Extra information: I asked around in my office and all (but me) frown upon academics that are not members of any society. In practice, this means (as far as I know, told this in confidence) that colleagues in my department do not consider you a committed professional and can use this as an excuse to minimize your achievements and maximize your weaknesses. One of the comments was similar to one of the answers here "if someone is not committed, then he/she should change careers, they have no place in academia"
In Germany and Austria I know for a fact that researchers are often covered by the institutional membership of their institute if that's offered by the society. Else, memberships often come with discounts on conference fees that can be used to get reimbursed for society membership by your university. I would guess the same applies to other European countries.
I agree completely with you, for what it's worth.
Just curious, in your discipline, is it necessary to be a member of a society in order to "give presentations in academic meetings"? The major societies in my discipline do organize meetings, but one is not required to be a member in order to present at those meetings (though non-members pay a higher registration fee). There are also many important conferences which are not organized by any society.
@NateEldredge In my area, the societies often have the cunning scheme that the registration discount for members is greater than the cost to join!
Nothing in my job requires me to be a member of any society so, in my field, at least, your question is based on a false premise. Also, is it normal for companies to pay professional society membership fees for their employees? My assumption is no.
"is it normal for companies to pay professional society membership fees for their employees?" If it is to do their job, then experience says yes.
"s it necessary to be a member of a society in order to "give presentations in academic meetings"?" No, but can make the cost of registration lower and so most of my colleagues become members to save the department money (not their own money). Also see my last edit in my question.
I would also like to comment that the policy "employer pays for all things necessary for employee to do their job" is by no means universal in the private sector. As a simple example, a sales firm might require its employees to dress elegantly, but would likely not pay for those elegant clothes.
I once joined a society (ACM or IEEE, I forget which) because the membership fee was less than the member discount for a registration fee at a conference I was going to. I thought I was being clever by saving money, but instead my university refused to reimburse the membership fee and I ended up worse off. That's a good example of this being an illogical policy; next time I won't try saving money.
"PS. I know in some cases one can use certain funds to pay for membership, I am not asking about that. I am asking that if you have the options of (1) not being a member or (2) pay it yourself, you are expected to pay it yourself." This is particularly nonsensical. "I assert this thing is true, I do not want to hear things counter to this assertion" is...not productive.
First of all, I believe the premise of your question is largely incorrect (and I know from your disclaimer that you are "not asking about that" but will take the liberty of addressing that anyway). At my university, researchers can use their research funds to pay for membership in academic societies, and my perception is that this is the norm in the United States. So, to the extent that it's not the case at your institution, my feeling is that that is out of line with the norm, so perhaps there is indeed no good reason for it and you should lobby to get this rule changed.
Second, even if it is the case that you cannot charge this expense to your research funds, the assertion that "academics are expected to pay out of their pockets for memberships in academic societies" still sounds highly questionable to me. What does "expected" here mean? I was not a member of any academic society until last year, and nonetheless managed to become a full professor and department chair at a respected university. So I maintain that no harm will come to your career if you ignore this so-called "expectation". Sure, it might be nice to be a member of a society and can come with various small benefits, but if you don't feel like paying for it, you'll be fine.
Third, even if it is the case that becoming a member of an academic society in your discipline is somehow a professional necessity, and that the only way to do that is to pay for it out of your personal money, I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable (nor is it entirely true that things aren't like that in industry - lawyers have to pay annual bar fees, for example, not all of which are covered by their employers). Your interpretation that this means "we are supposed to pay to do the job we were hired for" seems to me like a very narrow-minded view of what life in academia is about. Sure, it is a job and we are paid a salary for it; at the same time, being a researcher is much more than a job - it is a vocation, and that is why researchers are notoriously bad at separating their personal lives and their professional lives: most normal "workers" don't work late nights and weekends (not to mention holidays and family vacations) and don't spend a large proportion of their lives traveling for work, including moving repeatedly across large geographical distances before landing their first permanent job.
In fact, to be honest, as an academic, I feel like I can't draw a precise line separating my "job" from my "personal life". When I read a math book or article at the beach or swimming pool, am I "working"? When I think about a research problem while driving or talk about math with a friend over dinner, am I "working"? I honestly don't know. And that's a good thing. It means that I am doing something that makes me happy. How many other "workers" can say that? Too few, sadly. So let the industry people have their employers pay for them to do the "duties" that are "written in their contract", is what I say. If you are passionate about your work and being a member of a society is something that interests you enough, you would not find it burdensome having to pay a small amount for it. And if not, well, either switch careers, or just forego the society membership, and all will be well.
I'm not so sure about your perception of the "norms". At my institution (R2), faculty aren't by default allocated any general-purpose "research funds". There are internal funds available for travel and various other specific purposes, either automatically or by competitive application, and of course one can apply for external grants. But I don't think professional society dues are allowed by any of these. I wonder if there is any broader data on this.
As for "no good reason" for this policy, I think the university would cite what they see as the most compelling of reasons: it costs money which they don't have, can't afford, would have to cut other benefits or services to compensate, etc, etc.
@NateEldredge sure, lack of money is obviously a valid reason. I guess I assumed that since lack of money is a generic answer to many questions of the type "why isn't my employer enabling me to do X, which I need to do in order to do my job?", OP wouldn't be asking the question if that were the reason in his institution's case. But anyway, good point.
@NateEldredge Researchers at my institution get a small amount of unrestricted money from every funded grant proposal ("indirect cost recovery" or "ICR") . That's what we use to pay professional society dues; if I don't have ICR money, I pay from my own pocket. Junior professors can also use startup funds, but that's just another species of ICR. Using direct grant money would violate funding agency policy.
"the assertion that "academics are expected to pay out of their pockets for memberships in academic societies" still sounds highly questionable to me": As I said, in my office and all (but me) frown upon academics that are not members of any society. One of the effects (as far as I know) is that tenure committees make it more difficult to attain tenure or promotions. I guess it is similar to industry when they sometimes just say "not a team player" as a generic way to decrease chances of promotion. Also, I did not ask about your university, I know that some fortunate individuals can use funds.
@Roger I'm sorry for expressing skepticism about your claim, but I can't really help thinking that. It's true academia is a big place and I'm sure you have some good grounds to think that being a member of a society is important, but somehow it still seems difficult for me to accept that your failing to become a member will somehow sabotage your career. It may be true, and ultimately only you have full information about your situation and can decide what to do based on it, but I gave my opinion for what it's worth, based on my experience with one part of academia. Well, good luck in any case.
As for answering something you did not ask about... well, I was trying to write a full answer that would be maximally helpful to you and to others with similar concerns. Hope you found at least parts of it useful.
@Roger I don't know what your field is, but a lot of the people here seem to be mathematicians, and no one cares if you are not a member of the AMS, MAA, etc. I have heard myself that professional membership is important in other fields, so don't put too much stock in some of the comments here.
@ElizabethHenning I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it to come across this way, but a literal reading of what you wrote parses as "don't listen to them, they're just mathematicians". Would you care to clarify your remark? I don't mind if someone wants to say I'm talking nonsense, but dismissing what I say because I'm a mathematician seems rather... illogical. Note that the question did not ask about a specific discipline, and for all we know OP may be a mathematician as well, so a math-centered answer is as valid as any other.
@DanRomik You must know that what is true in R1 mathematics departments is very often not true in the complement of R1 mathematics departments. My comment was only intended to provide that missing qualifier, precisely because the OP did not state that they were a mathematician.
You would not be asked to pay out of your own pocket to do the job you were hired for. Instead, your employer would have to pay it. Oh, really?
A few perspectives on this question, from someone who has had one society membership paid for by their university, and several not:
You would not be asked to pay out of your own pocket to do the job you
were hired for. Instead, your employer would have to pay it.
First, I know a number of people in industry who end up paying out of pocket (especially if we consider the time value of money) for learning things important to their job.
Second, rare is the society membership that is required to do your job. I have only published in a single journal that required an author on the publication to be a member of the society, and generally speaking, I also haven't had to be a member to attend meetings, present work, etc. - though it's often cheaper than registering as a non-member.
However, with respect to memberships in academia we are supposed to
pay to do the job we were hired for (by the way, in my contract it
says "give presentations in academic meetings").
As noted above, society memberships are neither necessary nor sufficient for you to fulfill this clause in your contact.
PS. I know in some cases one can use certain funds to pay for
membership, I am not asking about that. I am asking that if you have
the options of (1) not being a member or (2) pay it yourself, you are
expected to pay it yourself.
You made a general argument, but don't want to hear about the counters to your general argument?
I've used both startup and grant funding to pay for society memberships.
There are other reasons that I can come up with off the top of my head for why this isn't done (often):
For many faculty, even those with unallocated money, society memberships may fall in that category of "annoying, but not worth spending my limited grant funding on."
It is very hard to link society membership to a particular tangible work product, save for rare cases. My membership in SIAM, for example, has done exactly nothing for my career, and is tied to no products, yet I still find it reasonably valuable. That's hard to put into a grant, and hard for a university to justify spending.
There's no cap on it. There are always societies to join. If you come to a university and say "I need a PCR machine to do my work" you buy the machine (and perhaps a service agreement) and you're done. "I need to join some number of societies" isn't capped. Is that number one? Three? Fifteen? Fifty?
Society memberships follow people, not positions. For three months, I was between jobs - yet I was still a member of the Society for Epidemiological Research. If I quit my job tomorrow, I will still be a member of one of their committees. The same is true if I switched jobs.
In my field, it is not required to be a member of any society. So it is not expected that one would pay for that. Personally, I do not pay for any memberships. But, If wanted to, I would use my research funding (permitted in many universities). And otherwise, if I would not have enough funding, I would just pay it with my own money, and it would not be much of a problem. In my field, membership are cheap for students (about 50 $ USD). And for professors, we typically have a high enough salary that paying a membership is not much of a problem even if we would pay from our own pocket. If you really like research, you may not mind paying a little bit from your own pocket, especially if you don't have enough funding and you think it could help you.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.638381 | 2017-08-16T13:43:11 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/94623",
"authors": [
"Dan Romik",
"David Richerby",
"Elizabeth Henning",
"Federico Poloni",
"Fomite",
"JeffE",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Roger",
"Thomas Steinke",
"henning no longer feeds AI",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31917",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44249",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75403",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/77539",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
41264 | Why are there so many awards in academia in the US compared with academia in France?
I spent a bit of time in France and in the USA. I observed that there are many more awards given to students and academics in the US than there are in France. Is that observation correct, and if so what accounts for it?
Examples:
Grade awards in the US:
University of Chicago Student Marshal
Dean’s List
Student research awards in the US:
Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize
Jin Au Kong Thesis Award
George M. Sprowls PhD thesis award
William A. Martin Memorial Master's Thesis Award
Teaching awards in the US:
MIT Inspirational Teacher Award
Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award
Gordon Y Billard Award
Graduate Student Council Teaching Awards
I am unclear what you're asking. Would you please clarify what you mean by "awards"? Nobel prize is of course an award. Do you consider scholarship an award? What other things would you consider awards?
@scaaahu Teaching awards, research awards, grade awards, leadership awards, etc.. Of course not considering funding-related awards as no such issue of funding in France. Not considering international awards either.
@scaaahu Is it clear now?
Well, there are many more people in the US...
@DavidKetcheson Sure but even looking at award per individual the rate is seems much higher in the US.
This seems to be biased. You're more likely to look at CVs of people who are more successful. Also, people who are less successful are probably less likely to be flooding the internet with their CV.
@AustinHenley Why would it affect the US more than France?
@FranckDernoncourt Maybe it doesn't. Or maybe because of cultural differences, people in France put their CV out in the wild even when it isn't impressive? Who knows.
@FranckDernoncourt Another possibility is that the incentive system in France puts less emphasis on these awards so researchers don't put as much effort into trying to win them (many awards require someone to nominate you or write letters of rec for you).
I have half french kids and I have spent a lot of my life in France and in the Midwest. The answer is easy - culture.
Americans love recognizing everything. Participation awards, so many awards that anyone that is pretty good at something will surely get one. My 4th grader at the time got a ribbon for 4th place in a race and his French grandmother said, "Why?" She didn't even understand it.
In France if you win something you are really at the top of your game and its a big deal. They generally don't placate to keeping self-esteem high, even with children. Things are more regulated, committees generally mean something and there isn't a lot of duplication. Now I see this slowly changing in France over the years and it becoming more westernized.
Your answer is just, different culture. England is a bit the same as America except they seem to have accreditation companies and societies that also allow you to "pay" for an award.
I never knew it was possible to refer to Western Europe becoming "more westernized". ;-)
@DavidKetcheson well, USA and UK are at the west of France (or a very long way to the east).
@DavidKetcheson - You win the good observation award!
In the US, its common to try and award as many participants as possible. This trend hasn't gone unnoticed in the US either.
Usually this trend is blamed on one of two things - raising self-esteem of the participant, and need to show achievement to be accepted into a prestigious school or college.
In America, its pretty common for families to enroll their young children (middle school and younger) into summer sports teams. As these teams are meant more as a family bonding experience, several hand out participation and superlative trophies to encourage families to sign up next summer.
The other recent I hear less often is that most universities expect to see extra-curricular activities, and winning an award is better than simply participating. Therefore parents may expect (or demand) their child be awarded in some way. Sports and other clubs have responded by simply adding more awards.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.639395 | 2015-03-08T05:44:59 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41264",
"authors": [
"Akanksha Thalla",
"Austin Henley",
"David Ketcheson",
"Davidmh",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"John Zheng",
"Lucus",
"Nobody",
"Pavani",
"Textus",
"Tonic",
"blankip",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111281",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111282",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111868",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111870",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11420",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/120360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
52316 | Lack of letter of recommendation due to long-term research experience
I only have 2 research experiences, one of which lasted more than a year and is starting to look very promising for high impact factor publication (I'll be the second author though, and it's not likely to be published by the time of application). The other is with an highly esteemed professor from the U.S. who's quite happy with my 2-month research internship in his lab. Both are willing to put in some good words for me, but that's all I got, so I need a "did well in class" letter of recommendation which will probably be worth nothing. Will this hurt a lot to my graduate application? (I'm an international student)
If you have two strong letters of recommendation for research work, that's already quite good. I would think that "this person is a strong student" letter filling out the set will be just fine---after all, somebody has to testify that you're good outside of the lab as well!
One of my research adviser doesn't really have much experience in writing letters of recommendation (this is his third or something), and have no connections in the schools I'm applying for, plus the research paper won't be published in time so I don't really have a publication. Would the letter of recommendation from him still be considered strong?
@arax - It's fine. Don't confuse an application for a PhD program with an application for a postdoc. --- Regarding the inexperienced letter writer -- if he's feeling unsure of himself, he can get some mentoring in the letter writing from a more senior person (perhaps the person you've been working with for two months). --- Don't worry about the lack of connection with the schools you're applying for. I have seen how important that is in some countries, but it doesn't matter in the U.S.
All of your fellow students are in the same boat: almost nobody has more than 2 successful research experiences (and many have fewer). You don't have to have a stellar file when applying -- it just needs to be as good or better than that of all of the other candidate, most of whom will mostly have "did well in class" letters.
In other words: you're ahead of the curve. Nothing to worry about.
Thanks! I've been browsing gradcafe lately, and it seems that many people there can get 3 or even more strong letter of recommendations from influential scientists that anything less than two pages can be a concern. Is that merely sample bias?
@arax Yes, it is.
Indeed. I've looked through hundreds of grad school applications. That is not the norm.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.639869 | 2015-08-27T03:50:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/52316",
"authors": [
"Wolfgang Bangerth",
"aparente001",
"arax",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"jakebeal"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
48514 | Is it necessary to add email address to paper?
Short and simple question. Am I allowed to not include my email at a publication?
On a related note, what should I do if I don't have an e-mail address, or have an e-mail address at my university which will expire when I leave the university?
Get a gmail or yahoo or whatever free address you can and use that.
Should you? Of course. Is it necessary? Only the guide for authors of the journal can answer that.
Are you the only author of the paper, or are you asking whether it is ok for some of the authors not to provide an e-mail address?
I wonder if I'm the only one who always googles for an author's homepage and copies the mail address from there when asking a question. Only very seldomly, researchers write gmail addresses on papers (as it looks unprofessional to some people), and other addresses can expire. Also, Alumni addresses are often not given to everyone (e.g., postdocs). For postdocs, professional e-mail addresses are almost guaranteed to have expired after max .two years. I know of a case where at the time of publishing the paper, the mail address already expired and the server would just silently eat the mail.
@O.R.Mapper I ask whether it's ok not to include an e-mail address(no matter if you are the only author or co-author). As I said, if I make a publication as a graduate student my academic address, in my uni, will expire after a year so nobody will be able to contact me. Also I think getting a gmail or a free address looks completely unprofessional.
@Nickolas: Ok, I have added an answer to explain my point of view, within which I show why I think being the only author or being only one of several authors completely changes the answer.
I think many journals have explicit policies about this.
You should put your email on your paper. Not doing so means people who want to contact you can't, and it's obnoxious, non-collegial, and extremely unusual in science.
As for what address to use, I see two main paths: "permanent" and "traceable":
For the "permanent" path: many universities have a permanent alumni email address, which you can set up while still there and which is an excellent choice for long-term usage. If you don't have access to such, you can get a free address (Gmail is a good "professional" choice, but others can be as well; don't use AOL, Hotmail, or others with a poor reputation). The advantage of this approach is that your address need never change; the disadvantage is that you may not be using an email associated with your primary affiliation.
For the "traceable" path: it is worth recognizing that even when you have a "permanent" position, such as a tenured faculty post, that it may not be permanent. People relocate away from long-term jobs for all sorts of reasons, and an email address thought to be forever is not. Everybody who wants to contact you will understand this. Thus, rather than use Gmail, you might instead just make sure you always maintain an easily identifiable web presence that includes information about your former affiliations and papers. Thus, when somebody searches for you, they can easily link you and your paper, even if your email has changed.
'Gmail is a good "professional" choice, but others can be as well; don't use AOL, Hotmail, or others with a poor reputation' - YMMV, I don't see much of a difference in "reputation" between the various free e-mail services such as Hotmail, GMail, or Yahoo, despite GMail currently arguably being more "fashionable" to have.
In my circles, using a Gmail address in a professional context if the definition of dubious.
@O.R.Mapper I might well be out-of-date in my opinions about different free email services, having gotten on Gmail back when it required an invitation and AOL was still recruiting by (physical) junk-mail.
"Not doing so means people who want to contact you can't": That's not really true, at least not generally. Especially for older papers, you will often have to lookup the current email address somewhere anyways.
+1, but "and extremely unusual in science" is unfortunately not true. I had plenty of trouble trying to track down authors because of this. Having a website is a good suggestion but googling up someone with a name like "W Zhang" can be quite a challenge ... I really wish people would just always put a permanent address (like Gmail). It's a pity and not very reasonable that some consider Gmail unprofessional, as evidenced by the comments above.
I strongly disagree. An out-of-date email address is obnoxious, since people waste their time trying to send mail to it. If I'm lucky, they'll get a bounce; if I'm unlucky, they won't and they'll think that I'm the obnoxious one for not replying. In contrast, if there's no email address on a paper, people can easily search for an address and will most likely get the current one. In particular, early-career researchers are likely to have their email address change every couple of years and many universities refuse to forward mail for former staff/students.
@Szabolcs Gmail is permanent? How do you know? Do you have a contract with Google that says they will continue to provide you with some service for X amount of time? Or are you just assuming that Google is huge so will last for ever? You mean like CompuServe and Alta Vista and Geocities?
@DavidRicherby No need to twist words. Sure, nothing is permanent, we might be hit by an asteroid next year and human civilization will come to an end. But Gmail (and similar big providers) come close to the most permanent address one can easily get today. Certainly more permanent than an institutional address.
@Szabolcs I'm not twisting words. Google ceasing to provide email service for free to anyone who wants it is considerably more likely than an asteroid wiping out mankind in the next year. For example, around a year ago, it looked likely that Gmail might cease to be available in Russia because of a new law there requiring Russian users' data to be held on servers within Russia. Gmail is no longer available in China.
@Szabolcs Even more likely is Google changing their terms and conditions in a way that you find unacceptable, causing you to close your account.
"it's obnoxious, non-collegial, and extremely unusual in science." I totally disagree, and any search engine allows to find the email address of someone that wants it to be found. Putting email addresses everywhere is one of the reason we are deeply buried into piles of emails.
@Szabolcs I'll trust that my university will be around for longer than Google. Of course, not all won't forward mail, sadly.
@DavidRicherby Searching may not be very helpful if, for instance, the target homepage is not available in a language you speak, or their name is very common, or the person has changed their name (e.g. due to marriage), or they don't have an academic website (anymore).
Whether you can choose not to include your email address in your paper depends on the journal. Some journals make it mandatory for the authors to include their e-mail addresses, while others do not mention anything about email addresses in their guidelines. Read the journal guidelines carefully; you can choose to not include your email address if the journal does not have any problem with it.
Having said that, I would say that you should provide some other detail that will allow readers to contact you. This is required for two reasons: first, to establish your credibility, and second, to be available to readers if they wish to contact you for some clarification. I can understand your concern that the university email is not permanent. However, you can definitely use a personal email address (although an institutional email looks more professional), or provide the link to your website or any other webpage that will provide your updated contact information.
I was hoping that the credibility of my work came from its quality, rather from what comes after the at-sign in my email address...
The credibility of course does come from the quality of your work, but as an author, giving your contact details indicates that you are taking complete responsibility for your work and are willing to help in case people have any questions about it or issues with it.
"giving your contact details indicates that you are taking complete responsibility for your work" I always thought that writing my name at the top of the paper indicated that. Who else could possibly be responsible for it? Was nobody responsible for their work before email came along?
Even before the email was popular, authors did provide contact details I think, and people could contact them by post if required. You can provide some other contact detail, if not your email, but I would think it a part of my responsibility as an author to be available to answer any questions or doubts that come up with regard to my work.
Yes, I've never seen an academic paper that didn't list the authors' affiliations.
If you are the only author, providing an e-mail address (or at least another form of contacting you) is highly adviseable, as explained by several of the other answers.
If you are not the only author, and some of the other authors can provide a more permanent e-mail address, then it depends on the conference or journal whether you can skip providing your e-mail address. If the conference or journal allows so, you do not need to provide an e-mail address, as the other authors already provide some contact information that is probably more reliable/durable than your own address. Otherwise, in the worst case, future readers might, of all of the indicated addresses, pick yours, with either of the following results:
If you manage to convince someone to prolong it, for one reason or another you might not check it any longer (e.g. no convenient forwarding feature) and the reader will not get a quick response.
If your address is deleted, the reader will get back an error message (which, IMHO, is worse than implicitly having them write to a more reliable address in the first place by not listing an address that is known to expire soon) or, even worse, no indication that something was wrong, even though no-one will ever receive the e-mail.
If you set up an extra address specifically for the papers, once again you might end up not checking it (unless it actually is your personal address, and at least I personally can very well understand if you would not want to divulge that in any publicly accessible place like a paper, same as you possibly wouldn't publish your home address).
The main reason I don't like putting my email address on the paper is because my inbox becomes rapidly flooded with requests to become a reviewer for some vanity press or international journal or an endless list of requests to publish in journals that are not PubMed indexed or charge money to submit.
What's more, I would prefer not to put my institution on their either, particularly if the work was not supported by my institution or reflects controversial views not sponsored by my employer. I haven't found a way around that, though.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.640164 | 2015-07-08T23:43:11 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48514",
"authors": [
"Bill Barth",
"DCTLib",
"David Richerby",
"Fabian",
"Guilherme Martins",
"Kakoli Majumder",
"Luc",
"Mark",
"Michael Hardy",
"Minula",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Raphael",
"Rrjrjtlokrthjji",
"Sylvain Peyronnet",
"Szabolcs",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11907",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12934",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134295",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134296",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134297",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134303",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134304",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134361",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134405",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26460",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32563",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/43",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7229",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9920",
"jakebeal",
"phresnel",
"pooterpan",
"qwerty",
"xLeitix",
"박진우"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
151401 | Why did UK quit Erasmus?
Why did the UK throw away something that has been one of their most valuable assets in higher education?
It is a bit like a company that has successfully manufactured items which generated the lion's share of their sales for a very long time, and now saying "despite the massive hit to our income, we can somehow successfully survive without that product". No doubt that the EU are now going to retaliate by blocking UK from related schemes, e.g. Horizon Research Grants...
Context: Erasmus+, details about UK participation in Erasmus
While I agree that Brexit isn't beneficial for science (or much of anything for that matter), this feels more like a rant than a question.
What are "Horizon Research Grants"? Horizon 2020 research grants?
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
Eramus+ is an EU-funded program. Non-EU countries can join, but need an agreement with the EU. Since the UK is no longer part of the EU, and they've yet to conclude an agreement with the EU, they can't participate anymore.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
Participation in Erasmus probably requires accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. See Wikipedia for an example of a ECJ decision involving Erasmus. Google Search shows more.
The United Kingdom government has pretty much ruled out any program involving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. For example, see Brexit and the European Court of Justice or many statements by leading politicians in the news over the past years.
Therefore, barring a change in government policy, United Kingdom participation in the Erasmus programme is unlikely under the present circumstances. It's not impossible, but it would require some degree of political backpedaling on an issue that is not very high on the priorities of the the UK Conservative party or Brexit-voting electoral base, so I wouldn't expect the UK to rejoin Erasmus any time soon.
"Participation in Erasmus requires accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice." Do you have a source for this? (I am not contesting the claim, I am simply looking for a source.)
@Szabolcs I cited a source for a ECJ ruling with implications for Erasmus and a Google Search for more. Are such examples insufficient as a source? I suppose I could dive into the treaty texts for Erasmus where it may be stated explicitly.
I upvoted your answer, because I suspect that there might be a political linkage between accepting the jurisprudence of the CJEU and continued participation in ERASMUS and other EU programmes. I don't think, however, that there is any technical or automatic "requirement" to accept CJEU jurisprudence to participate in ERASMUS. By the way, the linked Wikipedia paragraph is quite vague and unclear. I couldn't find the ruling it seems to refer to and I didn't understand from the description what the ruling was about.
@gerrit Basically what the comment above says: the linked section doesn't really imply that a blanket acceptance of ECJ jurisdiction is required.
I have added the word "probably" before "requires" to make that statement a bit less strong.
For a motivation as to why this might be desirable to some the explanation is not income but profits (setting aside the political reasons too, which are likely strong with regard to the ECJ). Overseas students generate more profit for many universities than domestic ones as they pay higher fees. Erasmus likely makes EU students more equivalent to domestic students as part of the general goal of treating all citizens of member states equally no matter the state they are in.
So leaving Erasmus may reduce the number of EU students that choose to attend UK universities as the requirements and paperwork may be more burdensome. This is bad for academic exchange. However, this may make it easier for UK universities to charge EU students higher fees than they do presently, which may further reduce the number coming, which is again bad for academic exchange. The upside is that a university may get more profit per-student. Ultimately a university needs funding.
Now whether the majority of universties feel this is a good business move or not I cannot say. It could simply be that the people negotiating simply see more profit as a good thing that is likely to counter anything else.
As a comparison, some UK universities have 'J-1 Visa' type exchanges with their counterparts in USA; I believe that many California exchanges operate under this program. What it involves is that each student at their original university pays the whole year tuition fees as they normally would had there been no exchange, and the students just simply 'exchange places' for that year. It remains to be seen whether the UK pursues this type of approach with the EU.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.641051 | 2020-07-05T10:00:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151401",
"authors": [
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Pat-S",
"Peter Mortensen",
"Szabolcs",
"cag51",
"gerrit",
"henning no longer feeds AI",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11907",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/123673",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31917",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/473",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51415",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79875",
"mlk"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
182213 | Can a tenure decision be overturned a month before the decision letter is sent to faculty?
I am a grad student with an untenured faculty. Her tenure dossier was discussed last year and I have heard through the grapevine that she may be denied tenure the primary reasons being her lack of productivity (one article published, one in review at the time of ptc meeting in fall now accepted, 2 preprints both currently in review but not at the time of ptc meeting, all in 7 years) and not having graduated a student.
She threw me under the bus with a months notice that I absolutely had to defend by the year end, notwithstanding that my paper isn’t published and I can’t move on without it to any postdoctoral positions. She is now demanding that my paper ‘absolutely has to be accepted’ within 4 months (first round of reviews with major revision decision received in mid December) again for her tenure. This is nearly impossible given my experiments.
I am finding it very hard to find any sympathy for her because of her generally irresponsible behavior toward me since it is extremely unlikely she wasn’t aware of these tenure expectations before, and because she got a year of tenure extension because of the pandemic while I slaved in lab through it regardless.
My questions are:
if she is going to be denied tenure is even a last minute paper acceptance going to change the decision? I am concerned if we send out a less than thorough revised paper we will be rejected which will also have very negative consequences for me.
is it not considered her responsibility to see her student’s papers through to publication since I have killed myself for it over six and a half years? Does student outcome ever factor in making tenure decisions?
I will point out that you certainly want to graduate as soon as possible if your professor does not get tenure. You have more than a little interest in getting that paper published and your PhD in hand.
There seems to be a lot of side-information and it makes your question seem more like a rant than an actual question. I had trouble finding anything representing your title question in the body of your question. Can you take a step back and try to clarify what it is you are actually asking? It seems like you're asking if a paper published late in the tenure process can influence tenure; that does not sound like "overturning" anything to me.
@JonCuster That certainly depends on the exact circumstances, including questions of whether the current supervisor could continue the supervision despite being denied tenure, and/or whether another faculty member could take over the supervisor role.
@lighthousekeeper - sure, but neither situation will be ideal - the current supervisor will be busy finding someplace else, and another faculty member will have a start-up cost associated with bringing them up to speed. Likely better to get going while the going is good...
@JonCuster Rushing the completion of a PhD thesis is surely also not ideal. It's a real trade-off where the best solution depends on the exact circumstances.
@lighthousekeeper - I think the language used in the question already indicates the situation is far from ideal, even should the professor get tenure (or even without there being a tenure decision period).
Yes I agree about my post sounding like a rant perhaps because I feel distressed and I’m sorry about including perhaps irrelevant details. My question indeed was if a paper is accepted a month before tenure decisions are communicated would it help my advisor given this is a justification she is using to rush my paper. The answers seem to agree with what I instinctively feel, that it is unlikely. My best course of action perhaps is to just complete and leave asap. Thank you all for your time and responses!
A related question though what are my chances of landing a postdoc if it is known that my advisor was denied tenure if she is? Do potential postdoc advisors factor this in when judging applicants?
The request that you defend and submit a paper may be for your benefit. Things can move awfully fast following a negative tenure outcome, and having a student finish up may be the best thing for a student looking in the face of a sudden lab closure and no advisor
There are many questions in your post, so let me answer just the one that your title is about. I'm going to take your "grapevine" as truth, though as others have pointed out, the grapevine is rarely reliable. With that, let's get to it:
No, getting a single paper published is not going to change anything, especially if it is late in the game.[1] This is particularly true if the department (and at this time of year) the dean have already made their decisions and written their letters that accompany the file as it makes its way upward in the university. I cannot imagine a situation where a department would go back on its decision, retract the letter, and write a new one that states the opposite just because a single paper has been published after the original letter was written. Tenure decisions are generally not made on the basis of a single paper, but based on the entirety of the evidence. In other words, if someone has not been productive over the course of six years, then that is the evidence, and a single paper is not going to change the general pattern.
As a consequence, your adviser is clinging to straws believing that that paper is going to make a difference. That may be understandable from a human perspective, but the straw is not going to keep her afloat.
Of course, all of that puts you into an awkward spot. Others are already commenting on that part of your post.
[1] The usual caveat applies: Tens or hundreds of thousands of people have over the years gone through the tenure process. Surely there are cases where a single paper, accepted late in the process, made a difference. But just because it has happened does not mean that one should take into account as something that might apply to the current case.
if she is going to be denied tenure is even a last minute paper acceptance going to change the decision?
That is exceedingly unlikely. One article in seven years is a huge problem. Only an extraordinary achievement can fix that. Details vary by university and discipline.
Does student outcome ever factor in making tenure decisions?
Yes.
First, don't believe the grapevine. It may be accurate or not. The decision will be made by the normal faculty rules and I doubt that you would have much impact, especially via a submitted paper that you don't think is ready.
You are in a tough situation. I suggest that you talk to the administration (head, dean) about what your options are. Her tenure decision ideally shouldn't impact your graduation, but only they can say. You might require a "fill in" supervisor to get over the hump and the head/dean might be able to make that happen.
This is one reason that I always suggest students work with tenured faculty for dissertations so that this sort of thing won't occur. Too late for you now, of course, but the university has an obligation to provide you a path.
Ask the head about the effect of a paper and about the effect of a plea. Often, BTW, faculty who fail to obtain tenure get one more year so that they can get other employment. Probably not universal, but common. So, you may wind up OK if you can finish in a year without switching advisors.
I hate to suggest putting a guilt trip on the head, but...
You aren't responsible for the plight of your advisor and shouldn't suffer because of it.
When you discuss things with the head, if you can, make the conversation about your needs, not your advisor's failings as you see them.
1 for You aren't responsible for the plight of your advisor and shouldn't suffer because of it.
+1 for "talk to administration and/or dean about options." I have friends who had to scramble when their advisor left academia. It's a pain, do whatever you can to prepare for it.
Trying my best to navigate this and have received a lot of helpful advice from this community so far. Then again I am hoping she doesn’t actually get denied tenure.
I am aware of at least two situations where negative tenure votes were successfully appealed at a high-ranking R1. I shared an office with the lab members in one case and they pushed hard to get all papers that were in process as far along as possible. This did seem to make a difference and the faculty member was granted tenure.
One additional note: the case I am referring to was also one where there was at least one year of stop the clock granted. (I believe there was part of the appeal related to this- some of the negative voters were not accounting for this.) A stop the clock does not imply that no work should have been happening. (You seem to think it was unfair that you worked during this times) It implies that the work is not at a full level and a 7 year time frame should be treated as a 6-year one for judging productivity.
Our case is a bit more complicated by the possibility of a grant renewal being denied too, and that the professor hasn’t been able to recruit many students we are at the end of seven years a three person one PI lab (several students have rotated close to 17 of which 2 joined). Could these be mitigating factors that can raise the chances of denial after reappeal too?
I really can’t speak to those factors. In the case I am thinking of they were not factors. The faculty member was beloved by students and lab members. No difficulty recruiting students. No difficulty getting grants, although always as part of a team of PIs and so there were some people who wanted to see solo PI grants.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.641482 | 2022-02-10T15:02:58 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/182213",
"authors": [
"Bhuto Banana",
"Bryan Krause",
"Dawn",
"Jon Custer",
"Richard Erickson",
"Scott Seidman",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/151383",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20457",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33210",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48413",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"lighthouse keeper"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
151437 | Label to report percentage of recurrent/new authors in conference submissions
We would like to report some stats on the submissions for a specific conference, but we are unsure whether similar statistics have been reported elsewhere, and if we should consequently adopt an existing label.
More specifically, we are interested in reporting the (i) % of submissions with all authors being recurrent; (ii) % of submissions with at least one recurring and one new author; (iii) % of submissions with all new authors. Recurrent authors denote those who have submitted to the conference for > 1 year. The idea is to learn e.g. whether recurrent authors have brought new ones to the conference.
I've been looking into reports of the CHI and AAAI conference series but found nothing related. Any pointers would be appreciated!
I don't think you need to obsess over this.
If you don't like "new" then maybe "first-time authors" would work? I've seen a number of conferences provide guidance to "first-time attendees".
@Anyon Perhaps "submitters"? "First-time author" would imply it's their first conference poster, which is usually not the case.
@AzorAhai--hehim I guess it could be specified further, e.g. "First-time FC paper author", where FC=Fancy Conference. "Submitter" seems awkward to me, since I'd interpret submitter to be the person actually submitting the paper (so each paper has exactly one submitter, but potentially multiple authors). Maybe the interpretation would be field-dependent though.
@Anyon Fair point. I think "new FC authors" works fine
Thanks - good points indeed! @Buffy: I won't worry too much, but I don't want to overlook the obvious.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.642627 | 2020-07-06T13:52:39 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151437",
"authors": [
"Anyon",
"Azor Ahai -him-",
"Buffy",
"Chris",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126073",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17254",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
151474 | What is a suitable job title for someone responsible for creating large data sets?
I write and record hundreds of sentences and format them in a way so they're ready to be fed into an AI model used in a chat bot. What job title would you consider this to be?
Welcome to Academia SE. Please [edit] your question to elaborate why you want to know this. Otherwise it is very difficult for us to help you. Moreover, your question does not appear to be related to academia, so please beware that it may be off-topic here.
"Data entry clerk"
Have you checked your contract for this information?
Who do you want to tell/impress with the Job title?
I think you are a "data curator."
This paper indicates that US participants consider a data curator as one overseeing the entire data management cycle, while their European/Australian counterparts have a narrower view focused on technical aspects of archiving in the final stages of the data cycle.
Below is an excerpt:
The use of the term data curator and its broad understanding was quite prevalent among the US professionals, while Australian and European participants made a clear distinction between data curators and data managers and did not use the terms interchangeably.
Participant P stated: "Data manager is for the first part of the data life cycle and data curator is in the last part of it. The data curator reviews, migrates, and enhances data and metadata, whereas the data manager helps with data collection, metadata standards, and creating coherent and authentic data sets (that ideally subsequently need less curation). A data curator rather works with the final data objects, to optimize them to a final version that can’t be manipulated anymore after that.
+1. To me, at least, "data curator" implies that at least a bit of scientific judgment and research expertise was used. In contrast, a researcher could hire someone to do the "grunt work" of transcribing and recording (without knowing anything about the research goals); I might call this person a "lab assistant" or "clerk" or "transcriptionist" or something along those lines.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.642799 | 2020-07-07T10:49:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151474",
"authors": [
"Dmitry Savostyanov",
"Wrzlprmft",
"cag51",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17418",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48413",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79875",
"lighthouse keeper",
"user111388"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
12733 | When can a museum be considered an academic institution?
I must admit that although I deeply believe museums, no matter how small, play a very important role in almost any sort of research, proving their scientific character can be sometimes quite awkward. Is there any set of fixed criteria that would allow a museum to be considered as an academic institution if met?
Hi Wydawnictwo Kle! I'm afraid I don't understand your question, as there is no single definition of “academic institution”. Looking at the definitions of academic in a dictionary, many of them could apply to some museums as well: “relating to education and scholarship”, for example (New Oxford American Dictionary). I'll add that many large museums have both teaching and research activities, and would definitely qualify as academic institutions in my view.
Thanks for your reply, lack of clear definition of what is an "academic institution" is one of the reasons of my question. Another, a possible situation when museums are explicitly treated as non-academic almost by definition (what definition?) which excludes their personnel from certain grants, privileges, government funding etc.
There is no single definition. Grants and other funding sources clearly specify (sometimes in fine print) what institutions are eligible. “Academic institution” is a vague term, and not one used in legal documents. Asking for a precise definition of a vague term is not constructive. If you want to ask “Can museum employees apply to NSF grants, and under what conditions?”, that would be a valid question.
If one takes into consideration that the institutions that are considered "academic" are usually evaluated in terms of a) scientific work produced by their staff and b) postgraduate educational programs (but only if they do have such programs), I would say that "scientific work from staff members" is what would count as a criterion.
The OED definition of academic
Of, relating to, or characteristic of an educational institution or
environment; concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and
scholarship; scholarly, educational, intellectual.
has a focus on education. The wikipedia definition of academic instituion
Academic institution is an educational institution dedicated to
education and research, which grants academic degrees.
also has a focus on education and a requirement to grant academic degrees. To me degree granting is critical to being an academic institution. I do not think of any non-degree granting institute as being academic. Places like the German MPIs and US National Laboratories are cutting edge research institutes, but not academic-institutes.
Non-academic research institutions often have a grants office, just like their academic counterparts. Further employees at non-academic institutions that wish to conduct research can often get a research appointment at a local university.
I strongly disagree with the degree-granting requirement. I know some large institutions, which I consider academic by the definition of that word, which do not grant degrees. Academies of Science, and French and German research institutes, definitely count as "academic institutions" in my head. In short, every one has their own definition, as I said in my comment.
@F'x I don't consider the MPIs as "educational" which to me is critical to be academic. I added the OED definition if that helps (but it probably doesn't).
The American Museum of Natural History in NYC grants Ph.D. degrees.
@DanielE.Shub I work in a research institution, and we train PhD students who work in our research groups though do not award the degree (their university does award the degree). I do not consider us non-academic.
It seems to me that any definition of "academic" that excludes the IAS is obviously incorrect.
My answer is "localized".
In France there is a distinction between museum of arts (arts in a broad sense, antiquities being arts for instance) and museum of natural sciences (biology, paleontology, etc.). The latter is considered an academic institution: part of the people working there have the title of associate or full professor, and they can have PhD students.
In some european countries (France, UK, belgium at least), some museums are part of a university, so I think we can say that they are academic places.
The real question may be then "are you an academic if you work in an academic institution", and I guess the answer is no.
I think a better definition of an academic institution is whether they contribute to peer-reviewed research.
If museum staff often have academic input to peer-reviewed research, then perhaps they could be called an academic institution (in a pragmatic, not legal, sense). However if the museum staff merely serve as a repository of knowledge rather than a source of original ideas, then I would hesitate to call the museum an academic institution.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.643042 | 2013-09-16T09:26:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12733",
"authors": [
"Alecos Papadopoulos",
"Brouwer",
"CopOnTheRun",
"F'x",
"G Philip",
"John Kennedy",
"Jorge Morales",
"LB--",
"Nik Kharlamov",
"Noah Snyder",
"Rohit Patel",
"StrongBad",
"Wydawnictwo Kle",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32253",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32254",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32313",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32323",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32860",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33173",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33214",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33215",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33217",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33228",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8575",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8628",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"jCisco",
"mrarm",
"zhidayat"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
37102 | Should I apply for financial assistance to go to conferences?
Many conferences offer some form of financial assistance, covering travel, registration, accommodation, or combinations thereof.
My university will only pay for one conference travel expenses over the course of my PhD.
While I live in a first-world country, I am not financially well-off. I can't easily afford to fly to conferences in my own country, let alone some of the more exciting international conferences.
A lot of conferences I am really interested in are of side-note to my research -- things like SciPy. Or conferences from related fields.
Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases?
Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations,
or to people researching the primary area of the conference,
or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?
Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex?
it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.
Are these awards highly competitive?
While your university might only pay for one conference, often times travel is budgeted for by principal investigators when writing grants to support their research. So you should check with your advisor to see if she has funds available to help support your travel to conferences beyond what your university is willing to fund.
Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases? Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations, or to people researching the primary area of the conference, or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?
Every conference has its own specifications for what kind of applicants (if anyone) is given preference for travel grants. Sometimes paper authors are given preferences, sometimes they are de-prioritized. Sometimes participants from underrepresented groups (whether in an academic, racial, geographic, etc. sense) are prioritized and sometimes only US citizens are eligible. Refer to the conference website for details.
Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex? it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.
No, it's not usually long and complex. Generally it involves some or all of the following: a statement from you on why they should give you a grant, a letter from your advisor indicating that your attendance will be to your benefit and the conferences' benefit, and an estimate of your expenses.
Are places highly competitive?
Depends on the conference. Conferences that many people want to go to tend to be more competitive.
Another option is to get external funding for conferences. There are some programs for funding student travel to conferences, particularly (or mostly) for underrepresented minorities (including women). For instance, in Computer Science, the ACM-W offers conference scholarships to female students, for any conference. If you are a woman or minority, try searching a bit to see if you can turn up a scholarship in your field whose criteria you fit, and/or ask your advisor and other students in the department if they know of any. Even if you're not a minority, you can search a bit to see if you can find anything. These are often somewhat competitive, but the chances are usually much greater than 1%, and there isn't that much effort involved.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.643443 | 2015-01-19T15:22:27 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37102",
"authors": [
"Amir Tal",
"ArcaneAnomaly",
"Curious student",
"Marv",
"Sergio",
"Sev N",
"TheKnowNothingFool",
"aeismail",
"fuzzybear",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100982",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100983",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100984",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100987",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100988",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100996",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100997",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101002",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101251",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"serginhofogo",
"user101251"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
101305 | Can a professor I didn't mention in my application accept me as his M.Sc. student?
A professor that I contacted earlier as a prospective student replied to me (and asking for interview) late when I already have submitted my application. I didn't mention him in my application, since I thought he might not be interested and deadline was near and I mentioned other professors who replied to me. If the interview is successful, can he still review my application and admit me under his supervision?
Note: I can't edit my list of Professors on my application, but I can still edit my SOP (maybe mention him only in SOP?).
The simple answer is: yes.
At many schools it is often the case that professors discuss the applicants outside of the official application system. Other professors may have recommended your application to the professor in question, which is why they are asking for an interview with you now. I suggest you concentrate on doing as well as you can for the interview.
Don't worry about the details of their internal process - you don't have any control over that. If the professor wants to work with you, there is usually a way to make it happen.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.643717 | 2017-12-29T18:50:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/101305",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
106643 | How to be confident that my background for my research is adequate?
I am a third-year PhD student in Computational Algebra with a B.Sc. in Computer Science.
While doing my research, I often need to check my old textbooks for definitions, and I am concerned that I may not be adequately prepared despite having done the course work seriously. Due to this to me I feel like I should read a textbook for 2 weeks then start doing the research.
Others have suggested to only read a book when you need a particular lemma/proof/etc., however I am conflicted on whether this is good advice.
Question: What should I do?
Please note that my supervisor told me that you know enough for research. Is this kind of feeling common among PhD students?
This kind of feeling is the definition of being a PhD student.
This kind of feeling is the definition of being a researcher.
To add a grain of salt: this is one of the major reasons for the imposter syndrome. But yeah, "crap, I need to read up this" is a normal feeling.
If your primary symptom of concern is that you lack an encyclopaedic knowledge of your subject matter then I wouldn't worry - it would take a rare specialist with a very special brain to have that level of knowledge of an academic subject. Checking definitions is common in research and it is rare to memorise academic material in a level of detail that would render checks unnecessary. For most academics it is usual --over time-- to develop a solid knowledge of key concepts and results, with the ability to check more tangential matters, or particulars of definitions and proof, by reference to academic texts and papers.
The best thing you can do is to prioritise the importance of concepts and results in your field, and try to commit important core concepts and results to memory as well as possible, while making note of where you can get information you are likely to forget. Unless you are going to become a specialist mathematician it is generally unnecessary to memorise proofs of theorems, and even for people in this category, they might know a few proofs off by heart, but for most they will remember that a certain technique is used, without remembering all the details. For mathematical work it is useful to remember the substance of important theorems and remember the techniques that are applied to prove them. It is perfectly okay to forget the exact conditions of theorems or the exact details of proofs, but if they are really important, you should try to remember the substance of them, and have the capacity to find the details when needed.
Over time you will find that you learn your field more comprehensively and you become more used to the methods and techniques used in that field. For a mathematical subject you will usually find that most things are proved with variations of a relatively small kit of proof techniques, and you will start to recognise them well enough that you can remember roughly how to prove things without much cognitive load. As a result of this you will find that you can absorb material faster and so it will become much quicker to refresh forgotten knowledge with textbooks and papers. A refresher that took you two weeks at the end of your PhD might take only a single morning once you are an experienced researcher. That takes time!
This is definitely a normal feeling. To address the feeling of not being prepared, you might want to realistically revisit where your skills and comprehension were a few years ago. If you can feel the progress you have made already, you may be more likely to believe that you will make the progress from the confusion you feel right now to having defended a dissertation.
Do you ever have a chance to tutor undergraduates in upper-level classes? Could you sit in on an instructor's office hours for classes you took at the end of undergrad? This might help you see that you have made a lot of progress.
It may feel like your colleagues are ahead of you. You might have a few of them who truly are, who know their own specialty and everyone else's specialties at an expert level. If you look at the rest of your cohort who are not doing Computational Algebra, though, you probably know more about the details of your field than they know about it.
You can remind yourself of what you do know. Map out some of the big concepts that are related to the work you want to do. Actually draw a picture about how ideas link up. This can be half brainstorming, and half a chance to see that you have a much broader knowledge of your area, and how things fit together, than you used to. (You can come back and do this at the end of every term, perhaps, and you'll see how your picture changes and grows.)
You've chosen to surround yourself with smart, talented peers and professors. Comparing yourself to them may make you feel like you're behind, but comparing yourself to yourself will remind you of your ability to learn and grow.
Yes, it is common and it is completely OK. Here is an article that is worth reading: The importance of stupidity in scientific research.
Your research answers a few questions about a certain problem. In other words, you are giving one or more solutions to the problem your research is all about. When you have enough answers to these questions or problems you are done.
On the other hand, reading the whole book is not wrong for learning to be more confident about basics in your field. What you read more serves you as a researcher in a certain field. Therefore, the more you read, the more you become expert and have good background. But for Ph.D. you only read what helps in answering or solving the problem you aim to solve in your research.
Hope my answer was helpful.
Have a nice day!
A number of these mistakes due to speed in writing
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.643854 | 2018-03-17T16:00:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/106643",
"authors": [
"Farah Yousef",
"JeffE",
"Oleg Lobachev",
"astronat supports the strike",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46265",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49043",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/90509"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
94918 | Is it okay to file administrative complaints about problems with the facilities and services in an academic settings?
Background Information:
I am a doctoral student at a premier institute which is also a hospital. Most of the administrative positions are handled by professors who are also clinicians and researchers. Sad as it might be, there are a lot of things for which the bar is quite low. Three specific examples:
the cafeteria on campus has absolutely rock-bottom level of quality/hygiene standard
similar low standard when it comes to maintenance of washrooms etc.
impossibly poor standards of on-campus residences
These are usually taken care of by administrative staff but at the end of the day are under administrative control of one or the other faculty (honorary "in-charges"). Not only these set a very poor impression when we have visitors but it also lowers the morale of the research staff. Sustained exposure to such a pathetic environment impairs productivity and there is always a prevalent air of gloom among students on the campus. Somehow it seems that the administrators are not interested in remedying any such situation and things seem to have become worse in the recent years.
Question:
Is it potentially harmful* for students to send formal complaints to the administrators requesting action to be taken? In case the administrator does nothing, should it be sent higher up in the hierarchy? How should attention be brought to such things so that they are resolved?
*harmful in terms of being bullied by senior faculties in the future; having carrier plans blocked because the same faculties might be on your review committees, et al
What I have tried to do:
I have sent anonymous emails to which I have either not received any reply or else have received a reply explicitly asking me to disclose my identity. In either case, complaints have never been worked on. I have tried to speak to my advisor about this but he has never been encouraging about the idea of formally writing complaints because of similar concerns mentioned above.
I don't think this is a question the Internet can answer for you. It depends on your particular institution's culture and the personalities of those in charge. We have no insight into that.
Sorry to hear about your troubles though - I would suggest talking to someone local whom you feel you can trust.
Potentially harmful? Yes, anything is potentially anything.
Do the problems also influence patients at the hospital, or are their washrooms all clean and only the ones for staff or in the student residences are dirty?
The maintenance is sort of just okay; there are no facilities as such: tissues, sanitary napkins, liquid soap (only solid non-disposable soap that everyone shares), etc. Since this is a government setup with extremely high load of patients (and where most of the patients are from poor socio-economic background) just basic cleanliness seems acceptable to the administrators. In comparison to other government hospitals, the standards might seem high (which is what tends to be a benchmark for the administrators); imagine the horror experienced by international visitors to research site though!
Your best bet is to use safety in numbers: a single complaint won't lead to much of a response and may cause some friction for you in the future.
If you can organize a large number of students to complain, though, it may be possible to achieve much stronger results. Moreover, it is unlikely that the administration will be able to retaliate against a large group at the individual level. (You might not want to be perceived as the "ringleader" if you are worried about possible repercussions.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.644317 | 2017-08-22T22:24:38 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/94918",
"authors": [
"Dirk",
"Kimball",
"Nate Eldredge",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72684",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/78832",
"troubled_grad"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108792 | What is the "goal" of the PhD?
I am little confused about the goal of PhD in the middle of my PhD. I used to think that PhD is equal to Research but in the middle of my PhD I find out that it is much more than only research. It involves TA work plus some other academic work and research also. Before joining the PhD my goal was to publish something revolutionary during my PhD but I believe that PhD is a process in which you do three things ( according to my seniors )
Work on some problem you find interesting
Write and submit to some conference
If rejected again submit after modification
This is a typical PhD process. The above three steps will help me to get me a PhD, but it does not let me make a significant contribution which will help in finding job after PhD (postdoc, etc.).
Question: What is the "goal" of the PhD? Is it more than the above three mentioned steps? How to ensure that at the end of PhD I will have something significant research contribution? Do I only need to worry about this or my research supervisor also?
My opinion: A Ph.D should evolve you into a professional researcher. Having a Ph.D is an indication that you can successfully understand a potentially large research topic to that amount, that you can contribute to it and keeping it "move forward". It also makes you the worlds best expert in a very small topic(your dissertation)
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
To that I may add that a PhD is your formal first step towards being an academic. Of course, some may (and many do) go to private industries but for a large number of PhD students - it is with this goal in mind.
A PhD is about research. Of course, there are some other things - for example, in some universities you have to take classes because it is assumed that they help you with your research. TA is - in the universities I know - necessary to get money. Some supervisors also see their PhD students as their assistants and assume they help them with things not related to the research (e. g. with teaching, without compensating the student).
The goal of a PhD is to write and defend a PhD thesis. If everything is done correctly, this implies that the PhD student has substantial knowledge about her subfield and has made a groundbreaking contribution (but the ground that she breaks may be small!) Moreover, the student should learn in her PhD to be a professional researcher. This includes things like publishing, going to conferences etc. Those are then the things a PhD graduate will be evaluated on if she applies for academic jobs.
Your supervisor should, of course, also help you to become a successful researcher. However, it she does not care about you, the only thing you can probably do is to change your supervisor. However, you being successful is also good for her career.
What did I do wrong? Please explain, downvoter!
The goal of a PhD is to make a contribution to the body of human research. This involves, not only doing the actual research, but reporting it, too. And it can involve verifying the research of others, because any real research should be verified by peer review.
Writing publications is the process by which research is reviewed and reported. A series of smaller publications is less risky than one big one, especially for a new researcher, but it is not unheard of to present all the work from your thesis in a single peer reviewed publication.
You cannot always do research in a vacuum. At the end, to have impact, someone must at least read the research. Your PhD will be judged on your novel contributions to your field and these will be that much stronger if they are peer reviewed and published (or in the process of such).
Answers
The aim of a PhD is to make a contribution to research. It is more than having papers submitted (accepted), your papers should report the results of your research so your peers can review your contributions. Peer review will validate your contributions, ensuring their significance and correctness (or plausibility). It is YOUR research and it will result in YOUR thesis and YOUR contribution (or publication list). But I’m sure your supervisor will correct you or point you in the right direction if you go astray. As far as a job afterwards is concerned, academics are judged on their impact factor, which is often based on their publications. Some (industry R&D) places will use a PhD requirement to narrow down the candidate list and ensure the ability to understand complex problems and educate yourself.
In my field (Computing Science), I’ve seen some thesis where each chapter has been published as a paper: a review paper plus two or three experimental papers. I’ve seen another which resulted in a single journal paper covering most of the thesis, but if you spend years gathering a dataset, the major contribution is the dataset itself, not the publication that describes it (although that’s important, too). Some advice has been to view the thesis as a series of sprints rather than a marathon and "publish or perish".
The goal of a PhD is to make a contribution to the body of human research. — I disagree. The goal of a PhD is to learn how to make a contribution to the body of human research. The purpose of a PhD program isn't to produce research but to produce researchers.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.. A successful PhD thesis will make a worthwhile contribution to research while developing the student as a researcher.
Of course, it's impossible to become a good researcher without doing good research. But it is possible to produce good research without developing the knowledge and skills and habits required to continue as a good researcher. The goal is not to make a painting, but to become a painter; not to win one race, but to become a runner; not to kill one bear, but to become a hunter.
The goal of a PhD depends on who you ask. From your advisor’s perspective it is to prepare you be a competent, accomplished academic that will be competitive on the job market - including research, writing, mentoring, teaching, etc. But, this need not be your goal. Perhaps you plan to leave academia for industry. Perhaps you plan to take a teaching position.
The reason the above is important is that it gauges what ‘important contribution’ means. If your goal is to run a lab at Harvard, your contribution (publications) will have to be very high caliber (and probably numerous). But this need not be satisfied in order to earn the degree - your department will have minimum criteria; some don’t even require publication.
Assuming you wish to stay academic, how do you ensure ‘significant contribution’? By identifying holes in the literature you think you can fill, doing a strong study, and writing a persuasive article documenting it.
It would be nice if your advisor worried about this too, but the onus is mostly on you to push forward.
My experience so far being a PhD student is the following that somewhat attempts to answer your question "What is goal of PhD?"
It is first step towards starting a career in academics
It is far more than just publishing articles in conferences and journals
It is the degree which builds your team skills, time management skills
Teaches to learn to have patience
Teaches how to handle rejection
Reduces unnecessary egoism (or sometimes egotism)
Teaches to think and express in clearer fashion
At the end, provides the satisfaction at the end of the day (!)
I think you would find the book Advice to a Young Scientist by Peter Medawar useful.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.644754 | 2018-04-27T16:02:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108792",
"authors": [
"Captain GouLash",
"David Ketcheson",
"JeffE",
"MHL",
"Pam",
"Udank",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56718",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91596",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91884",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91979"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108169 | Don't last-year PhD students need supervision?
I am a PhD student currently in the middle of my PhD. After talking to some senior PhD students, I came to know that during the last or second to the last year of PhD, advisors don't advise their students (advice to very small extent ). There are many things last year students have to do on their own. I don't know if this is true or not in general.
Question : Don't last year PhD students need supervision?
You might clarify whether you mean advise on research &c, or advise on the process/paperwork needed to fulfill degree requirements. My limited experience is that one needs much more of the second than the first.
On the one hand the amount of support needed on how to do research should decrease as the PhD student progresses. On the other hand, at the end is "crunch time" and a lot of projects come to an end at the same time. Each project should require less support by the advisor, but now there are more projects to discuss... Moreover, there is the process of finishing the dissertation, ceremonies, etc. etc. So the amount of time I spent on a PhD student would follow more a U-shaped curve: a lot at the beginning, then decreasing, but increasing again at the end.
While my answer is specific to CS, might be general enough. After writing it, I noticed that I'm mostly focused on the writing, the technical parts were never an actual problem for me...
Personally, I try to decrease my involvement with Ph.D. students over time. The objective is for them to be independent researchers by the end of it after all.
First years usually require a lot of supervision and hand-holding. Often they don't really know what they want to do, or how, or how to properly write it. I found that putting them to help as "middle authors" of more senior PhDs is a good idea so they get a sense of the process.
When they start writing "by themselves", I usually do not directly edit the text, but rather comment on the PDF explaining why I want stuff changed. Each review takes forever, but at least they should be able to extrapolate the rules and develop a "sense" for it...
By the third year, I fully expect them to "lead" a paper, but I still keep a close watch, albeit with less interference... I see most of what they do but intervene only when unavoidable. Most are starting to develop their own writing style there.
4+ should know enough by then to deal with their own issues and help the "lower" students, so they require minimal supervision if any. And they have a dissertation to finish. Except for a few "dissertation specific" details, I never had to touch the dissertation, especially when it is in the "collection of papers" format.
Of course, that is just the general lines. I had students leading papers as undergrads and hand holding on the fifth year of their Ph.D.s, each person is different, stuff happens, and the advisor needs to be on top of it to "personalize" the supervision.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.645317 | 2018-04-15T13:24:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108169",
"authors": [
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27365",
"jamesqf"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95059 | What does it mean if the status of manuscript changed directly from "editor assigned" to "reviews completed"?
I submitted a manuscript to a journal a month ago but the status was changed to "reviews completed" after "editor assigned," with nothing in between. What does that mean?
To be concise, brace yourself to receive a rejection.
My money would be on a reject after a quick technical screening by the handling editor.
It means that the reviewers have completed their work and submitted their reviews. The editor will now make a decision based on her judgment as well as the opinions of the reviewers, and you should expect to hear back from the journal shortly.
Thanks a lot, but directly the status changed from editor assigned to reviews complete. Usually it must be changed to under review after editor assigned and then it changes to reviews completed.
@R.Behmanesh Is it possible you just didn't check it while it was under review?
No, I have been checking.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.645583 | 2017-08-25T16:35:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95059",
"authors": [
"Azor Ahai -him-",
"Coder",
"CrepusculeWithNellie",
"R. Behmanesh",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53762",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/78966"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95205 | Is it OK to use "Group A, B, C ..." in a manuscript?,
I am currently preparing a manuscript which lies in the biomedical field.
My study has five groups, and their identification is a bit tedious to describe in a full term (something like "'abcd' medicine + 10mg of 'efgh' medicine group").
Therefore, In the results section, I want to maximize word economy by not directly lettering out the specifics of the group, but just referring it to Group, such as A, B, C, D, and E. I am planning to propose a table that clearly explains the initial letters (A, B, C, D, E) of the group and its specific descriptions in the materials and methods section.
However, upon my research, many articles just endured the inefficiency of fully describing the group whenever it has to be mentioned. Is this some kind of a rule that has to be kept when writing a manuscript?
At least use reasonable acronyms for the names that are easier to match to the full description than a random letter of the alphabet. Otherwise one has to keep going back to your table for every figure with labels. It would deter me from finishing to read, in the worst case. It might work for experts in the field that can easily keep the relevant combinations in mind, but I have to read a lot of stuff that uses this kind of things and it is very hard to remember all treatment groups when they have informative names already. With noninformative ones I would just forget which groups are there.
In general, on the biomedical field Latin letters (A/B/C or a/b/c) are reserved for the figure panels (e.g. "Figure 1 A and B clearly show..."). Typically, biomed articles tend to have a lot of panels per figure, so it is suboptimal to use these letters for anything else. It is much more handy for the reader, if experimental groups have human-readable names that are clearly defined in the method section. A little fantasy may be helpful. For example,
Group 1 - placebo control - "Placebo"
Group 2 - 10 mg Blabla drug - "B10"
Group 3 - 25 mg Lalala drug - "L25"
Group 4 - Blabla drug + Lalala drug, once per day - "BLI"
Group 5 - 20 mg Blabla + 30 mg Lalala - "B20L30 and etc.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.645712 | 2017-08-28T07:51:40 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95205",
"authors": [
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14198",
"skymningen"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
107561 | How should I highlight extensive changes in a revised manuscript?
I revised and resubmitted my manuscript (rejected with the chance of resubmission) to the same journal. I listed all my answers to the reviewers' comments at the beginning of the document. Later, the editor asked me to highlight the changes in the text to make it easier to track them. Since I almost rewrote the entire paper (I mention it in the resubmission letter), about 85-90% of the text would be colored.
I have two questions:
Should I fulfill the editor's request even if almost the whole manuscript turns into let's say red? I'd prefer yes.
Should I place color tags in the Latex source file, or should I highlight changes directly in the pdf file? Which of these or even other choices are the most appropriate?
I did not ask how to track changes in Latex. I would like to know if it is acceptable to highlight changes in PDF instead of Latex (the source files need to be uploaded as well). And if it is awkward to color almost the whole manuscript.
Ah, yes, you're right: I've misread the question. I now retracted the close vote.
I wouldn't touch the latex source, there's a good chance you'll loose track of changes and end up with two versions. Speaking from experience here. Colour the pdf.
You might wish to color the old text only and tell the editor that the new text is in black.
Just to check, are you positive the editor meant to literally highlight the changes, or to emphasize the major changes by adding a thematic overview/summary of what you did? The latter is certainly what I thought when I first read that sentence.
If the editor's already asked you to highlight the changes, then you should highlight the changes even if it's 85-90% of the text.
As for color tags, it's up to you. Both are equally good. I would highlight on the PDF since I find it easier to do, but if you prefer color tags that's just as good. Be sure to pick a color like red or blue - something that makes it easy to discern the changes from the rest of the text.
A text that is 90% coloured won't help the editor or reviewer.
I agree with @Karl. What about highlighting what did not change?
No, but it's what the editor requested. I would consider it pretty impudent if I directly request an author do something and they don't do it (without a very good reason).
It's a dilemma, and the one way out of dilemma is communication. Make it clear to the editor he's not going to like what he asked for.
That I can agree with.
Let's try to move away from the letter of the request, and focus on the need behind the request: the editor wants to be able to distinguish between parts that changed and parts that didn't. Highlighting the parts that didn't change satisfies the need behind the request. Explaining to the editor why one did it this way should be sufficient to convince them.
@Matteo I would make sure to highlight the explanation, then because, like all of us, editors are creatures of habit.
I recommend that you submit multiple files, which should fulfill the practical solution of submitting the more useful unmarked file for review while also explicitly fulfilling the editor's request. Specifically, I recommend that you submit:
The revised manuscript with no revision marks. This should be your official resubmission file.
The colour-highlighted PDF file in fulfilment of the editor's request: this should be an additional file for reviewers only. Since the editor requested it and you are submitting it as a supplementary file, there should be no problem even if it is 90% highlighted. Concerning your second question, I think highlighting the PDF is sufficient, if it is easy for you to do. However, if it is easier for you to highlight the Latex version (e.g. via diff), then you could do that instead.
The Latex source of your final version: You mentioned in a comment that you are required to upload this, so you should do so regardless. Concerning your second question, I don't see why you would need to highlight the Latex if you submit a highlighted PDF version.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.645932 | 2018-04-04T10:04:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/107561",
"authors": [
"Allure",
"Karl",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Matteo",
"Orion",
"SnOwl",
"aeismail",
"cactus_pardner",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4018",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45983",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62035",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79300",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/84834",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/88197"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5079 | Are there hacks or smaller scientific search engines offering you context-sensitive/semantic search?
The many upvots on Gerrit's answer show how the majority of researches currently does search, filter, read scientific journals and books, as the best way, a context-sensitive search(X Algorithm near to Y algorithm near to Z database) is not available in scientific search engines to my knowledge? A lot of time has to be wasted for filtering out uninteresting content.
An google WEB search example would be:
etching AROUND(4) redeposition
Search hits will only show sites where etching is separated from redeposition by not more than 4 other words between those two. While many research papers often contain many keywords in intro and abstract of a paper (for retelling recent history in a field), which makes finding papers in a special context impossible (measuring effect X with method Y on material Z), in principle the AROUND(x) operator gives you this power back.
The problem is, google SCHOLAR hasn't implemented the AROUND operator, therefore I currently use it sometimes in google WEB search when searching papers (unfortunately only titles and abstracts are indexed by Google, but main body content isn't searchable) in a very specific context.
I'm really wondering if there are secret hacks for free (google scholar, scirus...) and commercial (ISI, scopus) search engines giving you the power of context-sensitive search, as it would make a lot of reading, searching, filtering, rating, sharing unnecessary.
My current way to solve this is downloading many highly-cited papers (withoud reading) as gerrit's answer shows and indexing it with my own desktop search engine (Copernic desktop search software) which has a similar operator. It really ticks me off, that a search technology that is available for years is not brought to the place where it would be most useful?! Maybe we should similar to thecostofknowledge just start to build our own search engines? There are some business reasons (traffic, downloads,..) that make the non-implementation of this operator in commercial search engines very reasonable to me...
So, am I missing some secret hacks or search engines that are near to context-sensitive/semantic search?
A citation based, context sensitive web-finder(search engine) would be interesting to implement!
Google's around operator looks typically like a Hamming Distance implementation between two strings loaded as vectors.
I know it's disappointing, but here goes: I am not aware of features allowing context-sensitive search in scientific search engines, with two exceptions:
Web of Science has a SAME operator, which matches “records where the terms separated by the operator appear in the same sentence”. Given that Web of Science supports a whooping number of 4 search operators (AND, OR, NOT and SAME), it is pretty safe to say this is sadly the full extent of its context-sensitive search features.
SciFinder attributes some meaning to prepositions, which have a role in restricting results to “closely associated” matches of operands. This basically means “same sentence” (details in the linked page).
Yes, these features are poor and we should hope for better search capabilities. At the same time, it's a start and it can be useful.
thanks, I've asked on cs.se what limits implementation of such an operator for full-text, as both Web of Science and Scifinder only seem to index titles and abstracts reading your links. But good to know at least Web of Science offers it for abstracts!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.646286 | 2012-10-31T18:45:38 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5079",
"authors": [
"Hauser",
"Naresh",
"Nhan Ly",
"Yue Guan",
"edn13",
"gen",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12992",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12993",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12994",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13212",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13214",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/213",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3983",
"user3394051"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
63397 | How to greet when having a PhD panel interview?
What is the most proper greeting for when you enter a panel of faculty members for a PhD Interview, and what for when you leave? I'm in the UK, in case that's relevant.
Hi, and welcome to Academia.SE! Can you please give some indication of what country you are talking about? Customs may vary greatly.
"Hello, my name is AgosGag!"
This seems to be unrelated to Academia, unless the OP presumes we have different greetings in Academic interviews than in any other interviews.
@J.J: This assumption can actually be somewhat reasonable. In some languages/countries, it is customary to address people with their academic titles. Likewise, academic institutions are among the few organisations that, in many cases, publish complete lists of their employees online (with photos etc.), which is quite unusual in commercial companies. Therefore, there might be some particuliarities in academia.
Pretend that the group of professors on the other side of the table are actually human beings and treat them accordingly.
@Davidmh, not that it is true, mind you ;-)
Assuming you're referring to the proper addresses of faculty members at UK institutions, the general form is "Doctor" for faculty members who are Lecturers (known as "assistant professor" in some other countries) or Senior Lecturers (known as "associate professor" in some other countries) and "Professor" for faculty members who are Readers (varies between "associate professor" and "full professor" in other countries) or Professors (known as "Chairs" in some other countries. In some UK institutions, the North American standards have been adopted, so it's not completely uniform.
If you're uncertain as to the academic rank of the person, defaulting to "Doctor" will not likely offend. If someone is introduced as "Professor", then use "Professor" in such cases.
In terms of matters of greeting not related to the proper address of the members, there are no formalities upon entering or leaving that you should be concerned about. A general "Hello" / "Thank you. Goodbye" or any variant are perfectly fine.
Don't overdo it. Just greet them in general, not individually. If they are presented personally, say by the chair of the committee, just greet each one in turn courteously, like you would do in any other formal setting.
What "other formal setting[s]" are you thinking of?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.646608 | 2016-02-15T13:42:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63397",
"authors": [
"Austin Henley",
"David",
"Davidmh",
"Ethan Chan",
"Frames Catherine White",
"Ilesanmi Dele Alaba ",
"JetBlack",
"Joseph Zhu",
"Kashika Jain",
"Manos Mavrakis",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Sajid",
"Umoh",
"V9bet",
"VroomVroom123",
"Wetlab Walter",
"Zum",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177624",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177625",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177626",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177648",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177649",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177650",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177651",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177659",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/177675",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/186440",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/186441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/186442",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/186449",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28355",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8513",
"jakebeal",
"twjaymes",
"vonbrand"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
94515 | What is a typical teaching load?
Are four 3-credit classes a typical burden for full-time faculty? Assume all are in-person courses, no new preps, no new books, no TAs, 15-25 students per class, no research/publishing required, and committee work is required.
I moved the question to the front and added the clarifier "for full-time faculty", based on a line from the comments. If that is incorrect please edit.
What is your location and field? (Reposting my comment seeking further clarification; mods: please, do not delete this.)
Without further details this question is too broad, and I voted to close.
It's probably reasonable. The teaching load for a full-time lecturer with no research responsibility tends to range between 10 and 15 units, equal to two or three 5-unit lecture courses, perhaps one more if some are 3-unit. What constitutes a full-time load at any given school is largely dictated by the financial reality imposed by their average class size and, thus, the tuition revenue per course from which you and all the other expenses must be paid. If their class sizes are really small, as they are at your school, they pretty much have to load up each instructor to make it work.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.646982 | 2017-08-13T16:52:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/94515",
"authors": [
"Mad Jack",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
89538 | Can faculty in the United States get access to your grades without your explicit consent?
Note: This question is aimed at "in general, in the United States, given the laws (including FERPA) and typical practices of US Universities".
I'm wondering if my schools' departmental advisers can give my grades to faculty members without my permission. Say a faculty member is talking to the department advisers about me. What is standard procedure here?
Closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/84931/in-us-universities-how-much-academic-information-does-a-professor-have-about-gr/84936#84936. Short answer: wide variation. It's entirely possible that faculty could get your grades, or might already have direct online access. No laws restrict sharing of grades within a university, so long as it is for educational purposes (which includes almost everything).
Data point of 1: I can access the grades of any student that is attending / has attended my university. (So, e.g., when you go talk to your faculty advisor, and they ask you how things went last semester, just tell them the truth.)
Faculty are almost always bound by rules governing their access to student records. For example at my university, I can access any student record on campus if I have a justifiable reason. If I were to access student records that I didn't have justifiable reason for accessing that would be a major violation of policy.
I'm wondering if my schools' departmental advisers can give my grades to faculty members without my permission.
Yes. The school's own policies will determine how, when, where and why. Your permission is never required for communications about you within any school between faculty, staff and officials as long as it is pertinent to their job.
Say a faculty member is talking to the department advisers about me. What is standard procedure here?
The procedure is school specific and will usually be spelled out in either the faculty handbook or employee handbook. You will not be able to access either of these as you are neither.
It would be unusual for faculty to not talk to advisors about students, although that partly depends upon how the role of "advisor" is defined. It is common for faculty to be required to provide to advisors any form of academic warning regarding students. Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you were taking "Introduction to Microeconomics," and were struggling with the algebra. In many schools, the professor would inform the advisor that the student should take appropriate math courses in future semesters. How can they give advice if they do not know what is going on?
It also goes in the other direction, an advisor that became aware of an issue with the student should, where appropriate, pass that information on to the faculty teaching that student.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.647117 | 2017-05-15T18:03:00 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/89538",
"authors": [
"Mad Jack",
"Nate Eldredge",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11192"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
75271 | Asking a company for permission to use website data for research
I'm a researcher, and I want to scrape a website (specifically, TripAdvisor) to collect data in order to use it for a research project. However, in reading the website's terms & conditions, I found that the company prohibits the user from:
...copy any content or information of this Website using any robot,
spider, scraper or other automated means or any manual process for any
purpose without our express written permission.
-- Prohibited activities, bullet (ii)
As such, I want to contact the company to ask for permission. I've had a difficult time finding any information on how to contact the company in order to ask for permission to use data. That said, my question is, when making these sorts of requests to companies, what is the best way to ensure that I am contacting the right department/person?
I foud only their physical mail adress. I need their e-mail.
Okay. I will leave this option as last alternative. Thank you
This is both too localized and not on topic. At best, you could edit to say "how to approach online aggregators to use their data for research", but I suspect that question would only have answers that don't help you ("find the email and email them"). FYI tripadvisor has a whole help center website where your efforts are probably better spent.
I have attempted to make the question more general, but it may need some additional tweaking (or it may not be a good fit for this site).
Ok. thanks all for your help. Very interesting.
You might also try to use LinkedIn a bit. If you can at least figure out the name of the department that sounds realistic for this type of request, you might have a better shot.
I always thought that the use of data could be beneficial for both parties.
By using Tripadvisor as benchmark Dataset, I think that the company will gain more visibilty in the field of scientists as a reference in benchmark dataset. And concerning the "Sounds realistic", I would say that I come here just to find help to get email, and not to covaince anyone to help me ;)
@Superbest - I've made a few edits to make the question more general. I think there's a good question to be asked here that's probably relevant to quite a few researching hoping to get data off public websites with similarly restrictive TOS.
@MOHBOB: "I foud only their physical mail adress. I need their e-mail." - well ... why? Why not simply send a letter (yes, on paper)? Deleting an e-mail is still a little bit easier to do than "erasing" a physical letter.
And, just for the sake of completeness, here is a forum thread on tripadvisor.com where another researcher wanted to get some data access in April 2016.
Thank you for your help @O.R.Mapper.
I live in a country where a letter to USA risk to take months to arrive. I wish if I could send simply a letter :)
@MOHBOB: Maybe that only applies to "normal" letters and there are priority services that can reduce that time to one or two weeks? Also, aren't there any web-based virtual-to-physical mail services that would let you upload a file online and then print it and send it physically from within the U.S.?
@O.R.Mapper:Thank you for your idea. Indeed it could be a solution. I'll think about it.
Firstly, recognize that they probably placed that ToS there for some or all of the following reasons:
They want a legal basis for suing someone who tries to steal stuff from their site.
They want a legal basis for suing some idiot programmer who brings down their site because of a poorly programmed bot he wrote "for a project".
Their lawyer told them to put these ToS up because he saw them on some other large site and thought they looked good there.
...?
You likely fall in the second category (and maybe the fourth, I don't know what other things they're protecting themselves from). To that extent, you have to convince them that you aren't an idiot who will run amok on their servers. If you're aligned with a well-known university then maybe you'll have more luck, but even then it'll be a stretch... this is a for-profit company, not a research institution. Even if you can convince them that you're not a total idiot, they still have very little reason to want to grant you this permission. Your pet project will gain them nothing, and may in fact demonstrate something bad about their site that they don't want public. The "I'll share my findings" argument really doesn't go very far... companies have their own interests, governed by many things, including politics, agendas, egos, and what have you. Your powerpoint presentation that may be done in a year or two that will probably be too technical for a business VP to understand anyways won't give them any business value.
The point of all the preceding words is just to convince you that you have quite the uphill battle here.
All that said, I would just start calling every "contact us" number I can get my hands on. Definitely start with the numbers on the "Contact Us" page. Don't be afraid to send a written letter! For phone calls, I like the phrase Jack St Claire used in his comment: "I have a weird question."
Success is easy to determine. Check your mail... do you have a letter (written or electronic) from the TripAdvisor legal team permitting you to perform the research? If no, then you haven't succeeded yet. Keep trying! Perseverance will be key here.
"but even then it'll be a stretch" - while your counter-arguments may be true in principle, I still think that statement sounds overly pessimistic. Research projects getting some temporary access to a company's data are by far not a rare occurrence ... or maybe that is my impression, given that I am from a field that is more likely to simplify usage of a company's services than reveal any undesirable details. In any case, my impression is that the companies' primary concern is less that a "pet project will gain them nothing" (that is somewhat compensated for by the simple fact that they'll ...
... get another little bit of publicity, (mostly) for free), but rather, that some of their data is not meant for public access (user data, paywalled data, ...), and that, once they have agreed to provide data, it can still be a bit of a struggle to actually get something moving.
That is exactly my opinion @O.R.Mapper.
@eykanal : I work on recommendation systems, and I see very often academic research projects using data from Tripadvisor.
For the argument "won't give them any business value.", it seems that Tripadvisor have the habit to give access to researchers, but request the findings as a counterparty.
I think that projects like recommender systems could be very beneficial for their type of service.
@MOHBOB - If TripAdvisor has a good reputation here, awesome! That's much to your advantage. From both my experience and that of my colleagues, most companies won't even bother to give you the time of day.
@O.R.Mapper - Having worked for now three of those companies, my experience is that (1) they are very conservative as to whom they share their data with, (2) they have a very dim view of academics, and (3) their impression is that any publicity you'll get them is just as likely to be bad as good. As such, they will be very unlikely to share data. Some companies will be different, of course, but that's my general experience.
@eykanal: Thank you for sharing your own experience with us. I think that a will use dataset from https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/ . I think that is more suitable for an academic project, and it's free (request citation only).
I would suggest 2 things.
1) contact other academic researchers who got this data previously (you mention in the comments this has happened) and ask how they did it. This is really your best bet and the only thing that has ever really worked for me.
2) Use LinkedIn to figure out who is likely to handle such a request. For TA it could be someone in their legal department or in their machine learning group, perhaps. You can at least get the sense here of what the departments are. I have used this method in the past to get responses to my requests, although they were "no".
Also I will note that I once had permission from a company to scrape data and then the company did not shut me down, my university did because it thought I was a "hacker from China". Then both legal departments got involved and took the data back. So try to get a dataset directly from the company, not permission to scrape.
I finally find help on ResearchGate.com. One researcher provided me some email addresses that he founds on this page and suggested that I email a request to the CEO (Steve Kaufer) asking for permission. I've emailed him a request, and I'm waiting his response. Hope this can help anyone in future.
Two comments: (1) The email address you posted is not necessarily correct (e.g., I found another one here... I suspect they're just following common email address formats), and (2) emailing the CEO of a $9B company asking for permission to perform a research study is almost certainly a dead end. The likelihood of your getting a positive response is practically zero.
Not trying to discourage you, but definitely trying to encourage paths that are more likely to be productive.
This is really not the person you want. You want someone like the head of research or the head of analytics.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.647373 | 2016-08-16T15:35:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75271",
"authors": [
"Charleen Walker",
"Dawn",
"Diksha Tripathi",
"Dr Demudu Babu Gorle",
"Jianzhk",
"Joris van den Hoek",
"Kevin Binns",
"Mad Jack",
"Maya",
"Moh_BOB",
"Muhammad Shahid Farooq",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Petko Petkov",
"Sean Bond",
"Song-Shun Lin",
"Superbest",
"Terri Stemen",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210981",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210982",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/210983",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211009",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211011",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211067",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211193",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211197",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211202",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211203",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211207",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/211485",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74143",
"xu ye"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
94426 | How to foster ideological pluralism in teaching?
It is common in Economics to have introductory courses based on one-sided ideological textbooks (e.g. the most famous being this one, ToC here). The problem of course is not the particular ideological orientation they have, but that most of these textbooks explicitly omit alternative ideological readings or understandings of the science. For example, the aforementioned book covers mainly neoclassical economics, and a bit of Keynesianism, amid a wide range of alternative schools of thought. The lack of acknowledgement of this wider picture nudge students to think that the science itself is defined on what the textbook presents. "This is Economics and nothing else".
Naturally, that is a deeply misleading view of a very diverse field, and particularly damaging (in my view) for those just starting to learn the subject.
Given this context, which are the best methods to foster pluralism in teaching, particularly introductory courses?
That is a very interesting question. I am sure there has to be a lot of experience on this in the philosophy departments out there.
@xLeitix Thanks. Regarding your last point, don't you think it provides some context upon which the question is relevant? In a sense, less effort is put on teaching because faculty is less interested, meaning the strategy required to foster pluralism might face extra complications than in a department which is primarily teaching-centered.
You appear to have very black and white views of your field, and of those in the field. That is your opinion, which is fine. But, you are projecting a great deal on others, so answering this question is ultimately very opinion-based.
Regarding your last point, don't you think it provides some context upon which the question is relevant? — Not without some evidence that disliking teaching is correlated with disliking pluralism. Those dislikes look orthogonal to me.
There's a lot happening in your post (texts written with a particular bent, instructors set in their ideologies, teaching as a burden), but at the risk of settling on just one aspect of the question, you might consider contacting someone who has authored an introductory textbook, asking them why they made certain choices. If it's true that basic texts become popular because they are general and require less of instructors, then it is not unlikely that an author you contact may know of other, more "plural" texts, and can give you reasons why they did not take that route in their book.
@AaronBrick It is asking advice from a general perspective, without need to get into the details like a list of schools of thought to be taught. Taylored economic specific answers are surely welcome.
Erm... When I click on the "download" link in your reference, I just see some stupid set of three pictures instead of the book content. Can you post the link to the full text (and, if possible, refer to particular pages and passages) so that I could understand what exactly is the "ideological one-sidedness" you refer to before saying anything?
@fedja Added link to ToC. There is a wide variety of schools of thought in economics. The book covers mainly neoclassical economics, and a bit of keynesianism.
You need a Economics Science Educator Stack Exchange :-). Cf. https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/ and https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/
Tom Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" takes an economist's point of view that might be helpful from a personal perspective, Robert Heilbroner's "Worldly Philosophers" give an interesting and fun tour of diverse economic philosophies. Exposure to others is the key.
How refreshing to see someone who recognizes a spectrum of ideas and wants to teach it!
Science in general and economics in particular could be said to revolve around observation of phenomena, theorizing about causes, and research to verify or falsify the theory.
Try addressing topics in this framework: Here's the phenomenon, here are some of the theories to explain it, and here is some research on it which supports / refutes particular theories. This will provide a model for your students to learn the subject without descending into rote recitation of the professor's favorite dogma.
Ok, took a look at the preview. The key problem is, of course, that you cannot teach everything in one semester. The book starts in an absolutely correct way stating clearly what assumptions they make and what viewpoint they will explore in some reasonable depth. It is inevitable for any one-semester presentation even in such "uncontroversial" subjects as mathematics to be lopsided: you decide what highest points you want to achieve and essentially just combine the shortest routes to there allowing yourself some leeway for improvising occasional funny deviations when you feel like it. It is just the words "This is what the economics is about" instead of "this is the point of view that we will accept throughout this course to keep the exposition uniform and the conclusions consistent" that irritate one (especially if repeated more than once).
So, what I would suggest is to start with finding the depth-width compromise you want to make, to select sufficiently many points of views that you can explore in sufficient depth. Then, once you figured that out, choose the topics you want to present from these points of views and run some comparisons. That is a huge headache if you want to do it right and the goal is to give a clear picture of several approaches and their comparisons and interplay instead of just totally confusing the students so that the only thing they have in their head in the end is "everything is relative and you can come to any conclusion from any assumptions if you accept a convenient point of view" (I cannot really create such mess in mathematics, but I can easily make it if I ever give lectures on problem solving techniques, so I suspect your case is somewhere in between).
From what you said, it also looks like there will not be any single textbook you'll be able to use, so my advice would be just to lay all books aside and to plan the whole course without consulting any (I occasionally do it for graduate courses and for terminal undergraduate courses like "history of math" where I'm not bound by some particular curriculum requirements). Then you have two options.
The first one is just to declare a "no textbook course". The students usually squeak rather loudly when you do it (in the USA, at least; in Europe it is a more widespread practice) but if you have tenure, it shouldn't bother you too much. If you do it and you really care, you'll have to make at least some handouts emphasizing the main points, keep longer office hours, etc. I've done it several times with undergrads (I'm teaching math) and it worked more often than not, but it is again a headache.
The second one is to search for 2/3 textbooks and to assign all of them clearly stating in the syllabus what will be covered in each one and in what order. I have never done it (I hate to force the students to pay 3 times the usual price and I cannot legally just tell them to download everything from you-know-where) but it is still an option.
In any case, the point is that fostering pluralism in one course by one person comes at an enormous cost. If you are willing to pay it, by all means go ahead, but remember that the more traditional way of fostering it by spreading various points of view over different courses taught by different people works not too bad either ;-)
Excellent answer. I believe the "depth-width compromise" is the key here, and you treat it really clearly.
Thanks. You seems to focus specially on the issue of textbook (perhaps because I give that example). Are there other good ways to foster pluralism in a course? For example, debating?
@luchonacho Debating requires that the participants have some clear alternative points of view elaborated to a certain extent. If I tell you that the Earth is flat and rests on three elephants, you would know how to debate with me, but if I tell you that the the only way to get the $L^2$ boundedness of the Hilbert transform is by complex analysis techniques, I doubt you can debate this in a meaningful way (though, perhaps, I underestimate you :-)). Debating something without clear alternatives in mind is called "non-constructive criticism" and it is counterproductive more often than not, IMHO
@fedja yes, you are right, I don't understand why OP disregard science and already well established techniques in pedagogy
University Bayreuth offers a Bachelor-Master program in Philosophy & Economics. Their approach to economics is plural by choice. I haven't found any teaching material on their website, but most professors will be glad to share their experience when asked by a colleague. A list of staff can be found here: http://www.pe.uni-bayreuth.de/de/pe_team/index.html .
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.648157 | 2017-08-11T08:12:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/94426",
"authors": [
"A rural reader",
"Clément",
"JeffE",
"Jon Custer",
"SSimon",
"fedja",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/136702",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19627",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69863",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81161",
"luchonacho",
"user138719",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
19034 | How to get better at identifying research gaps?
One of the crucial skills of a scientist is to identify research gaps. Unfortunately, students rarely receive much formal training in this skill during their studies. How can one get better at identifying research gaps?
Some problems that I have seen which make identifying research gaps difficult:
The best problems are already identified or solved by other people.
Authors of publications sometimes avoid being overly critical of their own work, and try to phrase their publication so as to make it seem definitive, and avoid admitting that they failed to explain a phenomenon.
Some scientists are wary of being scooped, and avoid mentioning what they see as future projects in the discussion section.
Due to publish or perish culture, there is pressure to split research efforts into minimal chunks - such chunks may seem like they are steps along the way to a solution, but in reality, trying to work on the apparent next step is risky because the author is likely to scoop you.
High-profile journals such as Nature, Science or PNAS probably prefer papers which answer many questions, rather than presenting many uninvestigated open ends.
Lesser journals may have publications that have only solved part of a problem, but those may be buried under a sea of uninteresting publications. (also the lesser journals are much more numerous and harder to get abreast of)
It is easy to confirm that an idea has already been done, but it is difficult to confirm that an idea is truly novel.
What does a "research gap" mean to you? Gaps in the body of knowledge of the field? Gaps in one's own knowledge? Gaps in proofs or other arguments? ...
@PeteL.Clark Questions which can be researched and published as an original publication.
I made a major revision to the question, which added some content that hopefully be useful to answerers. I am interested in feedback on whether this extra content should be altered or removed.
Join academic committees and attend their meetings. Most often, members discuss current issues "knowledge gaps" in their fields.
Finding good research "gaps" is indeed a challenging and important task. It has different components that all require slightly different skills.
Above all, a useful research gap is interesting, feasible, and unexplored:
interesting: I think this part goes without saying. But how do you determine 'interestingness' ? This is a complex mix of structural aspects of the field and community opinions, so it varies a lot from area to area. But probably the best way to understand what's interesting is by talking to people, asking them what they think is interesting, and why, and also understanding how even the basic questions in your field came to be deemed interesting (an advisor/senior researcher can often help with the latter).
feasible: It's not hard to list the "top 10 open questions" in your field. And for some researchers, that constitutes their entire research program. But that's not realistic for most people, and especially for students. Feasibility is about determining whether the tools exist to even make a dent on the problem. This requires a lot of experience in using different methods and understanding what they can and cannot do for you. It also involves thinking somewhat "sideways" about tools and problems, because it's likely that the obvious approach to an interesting problem has been tried. You will have to read papers very closely to find little gaps, or missing reasoning steps, that might suggest that a technique could get used. And you have to learn how to "fail quickly" when trying a new idea.
unexplored: While it might be educational to work on a new direction that has been explored before, you don't want that to be the fate of all your research explorations ! Here again, being plugged into your community and understanding what people have tried (or not) is also helpful. There are often "folklore" statements of the form "Oh this doesn't work because...". Sometimes it's true. and sometimes it's not. But it's best to understand what people have seen and what they're trying. Related to this is the idea of knowing your strengths: you'll accumulate a set of tools over time that you're an expert at. Make sure that you can use them: that gives you a competitive advantage.
We get a lot of questions here about whether anyone can do research (even if they're not in a formal academic environment). The answer of course is yes. But where amateurs (in the sense of people not being paid to do research) can often slip up is in identifying gaps that are feasible and unexplored (finding interesting gaps is usually not that difficult to do on your own) because they're not plugged into a larger commmunity.
Update: In response to the edit, here's an interview with John Baez that directly addresses the first point (of all the good problems being taken). John Baez's other suggestions are very good as well, and form a nice 'counter' to the Hamming article linked above.
I think you raise an insightful and useful point in contrasting with amateur researchers; I had not considered this (hence the +1). How do these three factors rank? Should I start by saying, "I have the following tools - let's see what problems I can apply them to"? Or should I find good problems and then look for the tools? When searching for an interesting, feasible, unexplored problem, in what order should I filter my search space? Find feasible problems, and see which ones are interesting? Find interesting problems, see which ones are unexplored?
@superbest: There's no one right answer. Any of these approaches can be successful.
What @NateEldredge said.
The only way I know is to read, read, and then read some more. The more you know and truly understand about your field and other fields, the better you'll be at identifying gaps. There is no shortcut to this. It takes a lot of hard work and experience.
Obviously identifying gaps in published research involves reading the published research. However, I find it hard to believe that reading indiscriminately is the most effective approach.
No one said to read aimlessly. You have to know about your field and you have to know about related / tangential ("other") fields. There is no other way to identify "gaps". As you develop knowledge about your research area, you'll develop intuition that will help you make intelligent guesses as to what may constitute interesting original research. It involves reading however. The only other way is to ask someone who has already done the reading.
I find that when lots of the other authors working on my topic area note what "future research" should address, it's a good indicator that there's some headway there. It's not a very good answer, but I am finding that the more I read and the better acquainted I get with the field and trends, the better I develop a sense of where there are "gaps".
Gaps could be a hindrance when creating a change in practice because there is no research to support the change or the use of an intervention. A thorough review of literature should be performed to identify validity and reliability before considering implementing a change in practice. A critical part of reviewing literature is identifying gaps, and when they are found an outline should show those areas of research that is incomplete. Sometimes gaps are a help if further research information can be found on the topic. So, there is a potential for further study or independent research. Also, a researcher can produce their own interpretation and suggest how future studies may carry on or what actions could be taken to fill those gaps to improve the topic outlook.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.648850 | 2014-04-07T18:24:27 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19034",
"authors": [
"Appguy1",
"Christopher",
"Mitchell Williams",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Nick Tullos",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Rohan Bhardwaj",
"Superbest",
"Suresh",
"The Guy",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13911",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/50533",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51793",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51795",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51799",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51801",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51812",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51829",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"ivanmilara",
"ntaj"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
29137 | Reference on availability of source code used in computer science research articles?
I have several questions related to open-sourcing the source code used for a research article.
Is there any research/study that addresses any of the following:
What percentage of research articles are provided with their source code? (i.e. the source code is made available somewhere online)
What percentage of research articles provide the source code at or before the publication date?
What percentage of research articles who promised they will release the source code actually do so?
What percentage of research articles provided the source code at some point but then the latter disappeared?
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science > machine learning, and English-speaking venues.
If you're looking for answers based on research/supported by citation rather than speculation and educated guesswork, please specify as much in the question, and add the [tag:reference-request] tag.
Certainly the algorithm should be published, if that's what's novel about your paper... but the implementation can be argued both ways. On the plus side, it means others can in theory check your code for errors. On the minus side, it means others may use your code without checking it for errors.
@ff524 Thanks for the suggestion! Yes survey/study/research would be much better than guesswork.
@FranckDernoncourt Great question! However, "how much time does it take to release the source code?" deserves a separate question thread.
@PiotrMigdal Sounds good I'll do it a bit later today (unless ff524's paper which I'll read in a few hours totally answers the question)!
@PiotrMigdal Done: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/29233/452 Let me know if I need to change anything and feel free to edit.
@FranckDernoncourt Great! :)
While they are not answer, see also http://www.artifact-eval.org/ (also from the PL community) and http://reproducibleresearch.net/ (from closer to the machine-learning world).
Excellent question! I'm surprised that even in 2021 people are allowed to publish papers without original code/data.
@JonathanReez especially when funded by the taxpayers.
Here's a relevant study on computer science systems research that addresses your first question, "What percentage of research articles are provided with their source code?". The study is described in a tech report:
"Measuring Reproducibility in Computer Systems Research." Christian Collberg, Todd Proebsting, Gina Moraila, Akash Shankaran, Zuoming Shi, Alex M Warren. March 21, 2014.
The authors of this study observed the following protocol to determine code availability:
We downloaded 613 papers from the latest incarnations of eight ACM conferences (ASPLOS’12, CCS’12, OOPSLA’12, OSDI’12, PLDI’12, SIGMOD’12, SOSP’11, VLDB’12) and five journals (TACO’9, TISSEC’15, TOCS’30, TODS’37, TOPLAS’34), all with a practical orientation. For each paper we determined whether the published results appeared to be backed by source code or whether they were purely theoretical. Next, we examined each non-theoretical paper to see whether it contained a link to downloadable code. If not, we examined the authors’ websites, did a web search, examined popular code repositories such as github and sourceforge, to see if the relevant code could be found. In a final
attempt, we emailed the authors of each paper for which code could not be found, asking them to direct us to the location of the source. In cases when code was eventually recovered, we also attempted to build and execute it. At this point we stopped — we did not go as far as to attempt
to verify the correctness of the published results.
Here is a summary of their findings:
Total papers examined: 613
Papers that appeared to be backed by source code (not purely theoretical): 515
Of these 515 papers, 105 were excluded from consideration so that the resulting set of papers had no overlapping author lists. That leaves 410 papers, with results as follows:
Papers with link to source in the paper: 85
Papers not in above category, where source was found via web search: 65
Papers where author shared source following email request: 81
Papers where author declined to share source following email request: 149
Papers where author did not respond to email requests for source: 30
More details of methodology and results, as well as all the data and other materials used in this study, may be found at this web site.
There is an "Anecdotes" section appended to this tech report, which I think you may find very interesting, as it relates to some of the other points in your question. It documents the author's struggles to get authors to give up their source code :)
Thanks a lot! Brilliant study, lamentable results. I need to go shake my head for the next few months.
@FranckDernoncourt Re: the suggested edit, I deliberately did not copy images/tables from the TR in this answer because (ironically) I could not find licensing/copyright info for them
No pb, I wasn't sure either :/
From http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/missing-data-hinder-replication-artificial-intelligence-studies (mirror):
In a survey of 400 artificial intelligence papers presented at major conferences, just 6% included code for the papers' algorithms. Some 30% included test data, whereas 54% included pseudocode, a limited summary of an algorithm.
(Source: " At the AAAI meeting, Odd Erik Gundersen, a computer scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, reported the results of a survey of 400 algorithms presented in papers at two top AI conferences in the past few years.")
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.649840 | 2014-09-29T03:15:27 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29137",
"authors": [
"Abhiue Anand",
"Blaisorblade",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"JonathanReez",
"L.O.Ugwuanyi",
"Mohamed Adel",
"NateH06",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Tanishq Jaiswal",
"Yin-Tung Kuo",
"bekir yilmaz",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/104019",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79728",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79729",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79730",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79736",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79739",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79740",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79741",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79970",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80110",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8966",
"keshlam",
"lost faith in stackoverflow",
"mezzaluna"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
29923 | Reference for annual journal subscription costs paid per university?
Is there any resource that lists how much each university pay in journal subscription fees? I am mostly interested in US universities (E.g. Harvard: $3.5M/year in 2014, MIT: $4M/year in 2006 for science and engineering journals alone), but still curious about other countries (e.g. French universities paid 172M EUR/5years to Elsevier, Finnish research organisations paid a total of 27 million euros in subscription fees in 2015).
By the way, the $3.5M figure from the Guardian is based on an very unclear Harvard memo, which stated that journals from "certain providers" cost Harvard nearly $3.75M in 2012 and that in 2010 the corresponding costs were 20% of the periodical subscription budget. They didn't explain which providers those were, or what fraction of the periodical budget might be considered academic journals, so this leaves things rather uncertain. But the total for journals at Harvard is almost certainly higher than $3.5M.
@AnonymousMathematician I totally agree, I was expecting over $10M/year.
Another thing that is unclear about Harvard's numbers is that they were most likely released as a leverage in a negotiation with large publishers. They preceded a bogus threat to 'suspend subscriptions'. I'm at Harvard and can access all journals from the big publishers via the library, and they most likely never had the serious intention to deprive their researchers from accessing the best journals.
Huh, looks like your $10M/year estimate was on target ($9,248,115 for Harvard in 2008, $16,391,638 in 2012).
MATLAB and NAG (two brands of computational software) also adopt this shady practice of negotiating their prices individually with the institutions and keeping them secret.
There is, in fact, a resource with the information you asked for, for institutions in the United States.
Detailed information on individual academic libraries' expenditures (by university) is available from the National Center for Education Statistics in the United States, as part of their Libraries Statistics Program.
The data from these surveys, including the individual responses from each university, are available for download in plaintext format at this link. The most recent year available is 2012.
To take your example, according to that data, Harvard's expenditures for library resources in 2008 included $9,248,115 for serial subscriptions. In 2012, this number was up to $16,391,638 (the most of any library in the survey).
If you're interested, a set of related information on amounts paid by selected public universities to specific major publishers can be found in
Bergstrom, Theodore C., et al. "Evaluating big deal journal bundles." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.26 (2014): 9425-9430.
(see especially the supporting information for the latter.)
I know you're primarily interested in the US, but others reading the question title may be interested in other countries. For the UK, see
Wiley/Springer/T&F/Sage/OUP/CUP (collected by Stuart Lawson and Ben Meghreblian)
Elsevier (collected by Tim Gowers)
For some information about New Zealand universities, see Mark Wilson's blog post and spreadsheet.
I don't know for sure whether there's a database that shows total journal spending at a fairly comprehensive list of universities, but I doubt there is. There's not as much transparency around university budgets as one might hope (especially at private universities, but even at public universities). [EDIT: As ff524 found, I was wrong about the existence of such a database.]
There is certainly no large-scale database that breaks down library budgets to show the amount spent for each publisher. In fact, many bundle contracts explicitly keep this information secret. Taking advantage of open records laws, Bergstrom, Courant, McAfee, and Williams managed to collect information about a number of contracts with public universities, leading to a paper and further information. However, there are still many universities at which this data is officially confidential.
Some more data from https://ropengov.github.io/r/2016/06/10/FOI/:
Finland paid in total 131.1 million EUR subscription and other fees on scientific publishing in 2010-2015. The overall breakup of the
costs is available as a separate table. The average annual costs for
in Finland were 22 MEUR in 2010-2015; this is one third of the annual
subscription costs in Austria (70 MEUR; Bauer et al., 2015), and
two thirds of the annual expenditure (31 MEUR) in New Zealand.
Data for the top-10 publishers in the UK 2010-2014 is available in
Lawson, Meghreblian & Brook, 2015 (Table 1). During this period the
UK paid altogether 4319 MEUR (rough estimate based on the exchange rate June 12, 2016) for the top-10 publishers. Finland paid 61 MEUR
for the same top-10 publishers in the same period, which is roughly
17% of the UK expenditure per capita (unexpectedly low?). The costs in
the other countries seem unexpectedly high compared to Finland.
Some graphs from http://www.vsnu.nl/en_GB/cost-of-publication showing costs incurred by Finnish universities for books and journals by publisher:
FYI Why don't major research institutions systematically publish their subscription fees to scientific journals?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.650345 | 2014-10-13T23:24:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29923",
"authors": [
"AbuQauod",
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Cape Code",
"Cellcon",
"Federico Poloni",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Gabriel",
"Jaideep Khare",
"Julia",
"Ne Mo",
"Phoenix roofing And solar",
"Saad",
"Suhaib Alomari",
"Web Designer cum Promoter",
"Williams",
"baqalavaluestore",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/201852",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/202311",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82510",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82512",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82514",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82516",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82545",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82558",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82559",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82560",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82561",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82562",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82590",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"user8846574"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108112 | Proving that the PhD work was done prior to someone else's patent
I'm in a peculiar situation, which I'll try to describe as concisely as possible.
Around three years ago I worked on something and I published a preliminary conference paper, which described the idea in great detail. I'm currently working on a PhD that's about this topic I published 3 years ago. Today I found out that there exists a patent that was accepted last year and it's like 50% about the same idea I published in that conference paper. Not 100%, it has some unique stuff in it and I'm pretty sure they didn't try to steal my idea, they probably came up with it on their own, that's why it has some additional features that I don't even need. But it's similar. I still haven't finished my PhD, but I'm worried—can this patent be a problem for me? I can prove with that conference paper that I was working on this idea years before the patent was submitted and published.
What would be the best course here? I was thinking of citing this patent in my PhD, but if nobody said anything about it until now, I'm worried I just might start opening too many questions.
Any kind of ideas are greatly appreciated. I'm really, really worried that my PhD thesis can become invalid because of this patent. Is that possible?
I feel like more information about how your work and the patent relate would be helpful, as well as the field. Is this a "I invented an algorithm and someone else patented a functionally equivalent algorithm"? Is this a "I had a physics idea and someone has patented a device that uses that idea"?
@Stella Biderman: I don't want to go into too much detail, for "security" reasons, but it's definitely the latter, although I later set up a similar "device" which overlaps with the one that was patented in about 50% or less. Although I was the first with the idea, the article proves that.
How, exactly, is this patent creating problems for you, again? You established the original idea with your conference paper and you're not the one trying to make money on that idea, right?
my PhD cite and use ideas from patents, I dont understand why is this an issue? you are aware that publishing and having a patent is different?
https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41198/ssimon it's one thing to cite a patent and another to develop a similar device
You are right to be worried about a patent in the same field as your thesis research.
You do have some protection in the form of having "prior publication" that shows your work predates the thesis. But this is not necessarily sufficient to protect your future work.
I would get into immediate contact with your thesis advisor, as well as the legal department of your university. They are trained in handling such issues, and can advise you as how best to proceed so as to protect yourself.
Note that the goal of talking to the legal department is not to file a lawsuit. The goal is to understand what are your rights as a researcher working in an area with an existing patent, and how you can show that you are avoiding infringement.
The patent I'm talking about was posted by a large firm so I don't think anyone wants to involve lawyers here, especially not my department. I've talked to my mentor and he didn't seemed that concerned, considering the published articles I have in this field. I'm not exactly sure what you mean with "But this is not necessarily sufficient to protect your future work."?
It is public knowledge, with you having an early publication and them a filed patent (publicly visible), so I estimate it will not block off your publications (you need to cite them, though) and will become only a challenge when trying to commercialise. You can try to file for prior art if you are commercially interested - not fun, but that's how it is.
@WorriedAF See my edit above. You want to talk to a lawyer to know your rights, not file a lawsuit.
But this is not necessarily sufficient to protect your future work. -- If OP does not want to patent anything, I don't see how this even affects future work.
There is no reason to fear that your PhD thesis will be invalidated. It is entirely possible for independent work to happen simultaneously, and so long as your work is technically sound, the thesis and defence should not be affected.
However, looking ahead, if you want to further develop your device (assuming it is a device for simplicity), you may run into difficulties. If you are looking to monetise it somehow, you will certainly have a conflict with the patent and legal advice will be necessary. I believe this is what @aeismail meant with regard to future work.
While this may not be an immediate concern to you, I think the department would do well to look into it and protect it's IP if the idea has potential for further development, not necessarily commercial development alone. So while your PhD seems safe, you may still like to pursue these options because you may not want your work to be appropriated by someone else at a later stage.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.650798 | 2018-04-13T20:46:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108112",
"authors": [
"Captain Emacs",
"Mad Jack",
"SSimon",
"Stella Biderman",
"WorriedAF",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12660",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45857",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91369"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
661 | How should multiple Harvard references with same first author but different coauthors be made?
This question was written by a friend of mine. I'm helping them by posting it here, with permission.
How should I use the name-year referencing system (loosely speaking, the Harvard system) in such cases where there are multiple works that have the same first author but a different set of coauthors?
In such cases where the maximum number of authors among all articles sharing the same first author is not more than three, or perhaps four, the solution is very simple. Just mention them all inline and use the reference list as usual. E.g. the following:
"... the complex formation was observed by Miller and Nelson (1991)"
"... cf. Miller, Nelson and Byrne (1993)"
However, if there are more authors in any of the articles, this gets quite tricky, since listing a huge number of authors inline is definitely not an option to me. I'd rather change to number references.
Now, making the references unambiguous is not a problem. For instance, the following references could be addressed to inline as "Barton et al." without in any way losing the one-to-one relation between inline citations and reference list entries. That is, the articles are differentiated, as the other is "Barton et al. (1980)" and the other "Barton et al. (1985)".
Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.
Barton, D. H. R.; Dowlatshahi, H. A.; Motherwell, W. B.; Villemin, D. V. (1980). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.
What really is the problem is the alphabetical order in which the references should be sorted in the reference list. If the articles listed above are referred to just as "Barton et al.", the reader does not know the exact position in the reference list where to find the articles.
One solution might be just ignoring this slight complication.
Other solution is to use "et al" in the reference list, too, if absolutely necessary. Thus, in the example above, the first article would be referred to as "Barton, Crich and Potier (1985)" inline, and the latter as "Barton et al. (1980)".
In the reference list, they would be expressed and arranged according to the inline cites:
Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.
Barton, D. H. R. et al. (1980). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.
Any other recommendations?
Please don't suggest Google, since I did not find an answer after 30 minutes of search. There are perhaps hundreds of "Harvard citation guides" available, but I found none that addressed this problem.
This will typically be dictated on a journal-by-journal basis. As you suggested, some journals use first mention, some go alphabetically. It varies significantly by journal (e.g., Nature Neuroscience, seventh paragraph in linked section; IEEE (pdf), fourth page). Check with the specific journal of interest to see what their guidelines are for article submission.
Honestly, this is why I use a bibliography manager program. It saves you from having to worry about this sort of stuff.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.651191 | 2012-03-09T11:34:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/661",
"authors": [
"ElCid",
"Immanuel Weihnachten",
"Murphy316",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1517",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1518",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1520",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
16991 | How to approach potential PhD advisors
What is the correct way for a new PhD student to approach an interested faculty member to discuss becoming their student?
Is it better to come with a few thesis project ideas prepared to pitch? Or is it better to come in expecting to have the faculty member to pitch them to the student?
Typically, the student has a year or two after joining a group to formulate an actual research proposal - but at the beginning of the program, when approaching potential advisers, there is only limited time, and limited knowledge of the lab's current focus and planned future projects.
Of course, the answer depends very much on the actual faculty member in question. But in what ways does it depend? Are there any aspects to the decision that remain invariant?
I am in the physical sciences (biology) but to make the question useful to more users, perhaps it may be better if we could have answers covering the peculiarities and commonalities of this question for different fields.
This will also depend on individual department cultures. For example, my grad department (Chemistry) ran a reverse lottery. Students had to meet with a number of faculty. Faculty generally tried to sell their research to the students (and not the other way around), who then ranked their top three choices. Faculty took every student who ranked them first if there was room in the group.
@BenNorris for my field (biology), it is common for students to do "rotations" to briefly work in a few labs, before deciding which one they like best. While often there are seminars where they present research to all students (to attract rotation students) I wasn't sure how it works after the rotation. Perhaps this would be a better question if I rewrote it to make the context of rotations more clear?
possible duplicate of Details an applicant should include/exclude in an introductory letter to a prospective grad school adviser?
(This is for Computer Science and Medical Informatics, I suspect that most STEM fields are similar.)
Is it better to come with a few thesis project ideas prepared to pitch? Or is it better to come in expecting to have the faculty member to pitch them to the student?
In my experience, if a faculty member is looking for a PhD student, they already have one or more projects in mind.
I think one reason for this is funding, and what faculty need to do to get it: The process of coming up with a grant proposal, submitting it, and getting a response takes months, and some grants can only be applied for once a year. That means that when you, the student, are joining the lab, there already is funding for you from a grant, and some general research goals are outlined in the grant proposal that your research needs to fall within. Some grants are more general than others, and there are also "training grants" out there the goal of which is to train you in a field (almost no constraints on the research topic).
The other reason is that faculty also have research interests.
I seriously doubt that you will need to pitch an idea out of the blue. It's possible that the faculty member will give you a general idea of what the direction of the research will be, since it would be under the constraints of their own interests and under the constraints of whatever grant is funding you, and then you would need to propose something more specific within those constraints. It's also possible that they will have something much more specific in mind and it will just be a matter of saying whether you're willing to do that research.
[A]t the beginning of the program, when approaching potential advisers, there is only limited time, and limited knowledge of the lab's current focus and planned future projects.
That's why you need to read up on the potential advisor's interests, look at their publications, look at the publications coming out of the lab, and figure out what the research focus and direction of the lab seems to be.
Thanks, although obviously one may question the wisdom of making a decision because "someone on the internet said so", I think you've answered my question by providing a clear argument phrased such that I can easily verify and reason about (especially the point about how grants tie in to the project selection process). I do of course try to perform my due diligence and understand their research, but you can only glean so much about their future plans from papers detailing what they have done in the past.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.651472 | 2014-02-15T06:41:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16991",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Ben Norris",
"David Mo",
"Superbest",
"ephackett",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45831",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45832",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45833",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45868",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/924",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"pikkewynn",
"richie"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
19676 | Is there an alternative to traditional exams?
It seems like the traditional exam model (two midterms at 30% and one final at 40% of the grade, closed book) is flawed. For instance:
Students are not allowed to access resources, whereas in reality they would
Students get only a few minutes per questions, whereas in reality they would get days
Students are not allowed to collaborate, whereas in reality they
would
Students cram for the exam the day before, and forget what they
learned after the course is over
Students focus on the exam to the detriment of learning the material
and understanding real-world applications
It is difficult to claim
that the exam score demonstrates mastery of the course material in
contexts other than an exam
But in practice, is it possible to improve on these flaws, without introducing major increases in workload for the instructor? Is there any system of evaluating student performance in an undergraduate course which is an improvement over a traditional exam approach?
One argument against some of those points is that exams are meant to test knowledge, not ability (the difference being I have no idea what Henry III did, but I can easily look that up--I'm being tested on whether or not I can personally tell you anything about Henry III, not my ability to type Henry III into Google).
@waiwai933: I assume you mean "mastery, not knowledge".
@BenCrowell It's not too rare for even upper division and graduate level courses to be graded on a similar rubric, where "knowledge" (as per waiwai933's example) is a (or often the most) significant factor.
"Students cram for the exam the day before, and forget what they learned after the course is over" - That's right, but the next time they need the knowledge, the re-learning process will be much quicker than the initial learning. Such is the nature of all learning, not just for exams.
That is way there are also assignments.
Collaboration poses an issue. What if there is only - student taking the course? Or students are only studying via distance? Actually the midterm exam is foreign to me. All subjects that I have enrolled in and also taught have had 2-3 assignments and 1 final exam.
Take-home exams that test the student's ability to apply the course material to a small set of real problems. The exam takes a few days, not a few hours. Students can access resources, students can study while the exam is in their possession. Just clearly limit collaboration among students (plagiarism). I have found this most effective for upper level classes, where students are generally honest and care about the course material.
On my uni, most courses were project driven group tasks that took all the semester (sometimes even two or three semesters) coupled with a few customized oral tests for each group regarding what your project was about in a informal, free form talk with the teacher where you had to explain what your project did and what was your part on it. Sure, it was CompSci stuff, but those courses stuck like glue with me. The format was way more intense and productive than the regular tests.
One alternative that's been gaining momentum in actual classroom use is standards-based grading (SBG): http://www.fwps.org/teaching/sbe/grading-system/
In SBG, the instructor establishes a list of milestones that students are expected to attain throughout the course. The students then can provide evidence of any sort -- within parameters set by the instructor -- that prove they have met the standard. Student evidence of attainment of a standard is marked on a scale usually from 0 to 4 (unacceptable, novice, progressing, acceptable, and mastery -- or something like this) and grades are assigned at the end of the semester based on how many of the milestones have been met at "Acceptable" level or above.
For example, in calculus, one standard might be "Take the derivative of a second-degree polynomial using the limit definition". A student might show that they know this by doing a problem on a standard timed test. But maybe they don't have it down as well as they should, and on the test their work is marked as a 2 out of 4 (progressing; maybe they got the definition right but did some of the resulting algebra wrong). This isn't the end of the story. Later in the course, the student can show evidence again that they've learned what they need to learn -- for example, they can schedule time in office hours to come work a problem or two to show you they've met the standard. Or maybe take a short quiz in class, or work a problem during unstructured group work time in class meetings, or whatever avenue the instructor allows.
The point of SBG is that we want to assess students based on what they know, and give them multiple ways to show that they know it. SBG can therefore be a superset of traditional timed testing -- students that do well in timed situations will do fine in SBG, but students who struggle with timed testing can have multiple chances to get their act together, and as long as they can prove they've mastered the material by the end of the course, that is what matters.
I don't personally practice SBG but I would like to. I'd suggest this blog post by my colleague Jon Hasenbank who is a big SBG proponent: http://profjonh.blogspot.com/2014/02/sbg-mia14.html
+1 This is the only answer so far that details an alternative to traditional exams, as requested in the question.
+1. This is what drives me to learn as a student. I couldn't care less about my measured worth based on a 1-2 hour test. What I accomplish is really important to me, and exams have never been an accurate measure of what I have personally accomplished. I feel that working toward a goal (completion of a project, demonstration of principles in practice, etc) are worth much more than answering questions on an exam. While exams are an "objective way to test performance," so are personal projects/(work in general) which demonstrate the obtained knowledge.
I think this answer needs some updates. ;) The last paragraph is severly outdated, after all.
Although exams have the flaws you described, there are also many positive aspects you have not discussed:
Exams are actually an objective way to test performance, in a "hard to copy" environment. Although one may disagree with what is actually being tested, objectivity is usually not questioned
They are fast. It takes 3-4 hours to test hundreds of students
They are universally used and most of the students are accustomed to them.
It is an excellent way to prepare students to perform under stress, a skill which is extremely useful in any work environment. All works / skills have some sort-of-testing (e.g. presentations, interviews). Even getting your driver's license requires testing. So, learning to do well in exams is a crucial real-life skill.
The only complementary (but not good enough for actually completely replacing exams) tool I can think of, is project assignments. Especially in CS, projects are a very effective tool to prepare students for real-work assignments. But they are not a good enough method on their own without some sort of personal written examination. They allow too much collaboration, copying and usually when done in teams, the good students do most of the work while others slack. While a professor might take measures to minimize this, it is impossible to avoid it 100%.
So, I do not think there is a universally better way to test students' performance than written exams. One may complement it with projects, assignments, oral examinations but in most of the cases, completely abandoning it is probably a mistake.
The objectivity can be questionable when the exam is not good, something that as a student I felt unfair many times.
@Davidmh Were the exams not objective, or did they not test the right skills? Most bad (written) exams fail in the second category, but I don't think that many exams are actually subjective in the sense of the word.
One example from QFT: "Question 1 (20%), apply this mildly obscure theorem to get a classical quantity in this situation. Question 2 (80%): express the solution to ex. 1 in terms of creation and destruction operators." You can say that it is objective (either you know how to apply that theorem or you don't), but you don't really get an objective feeling of the knowledge of the student. I guess it is mostly a matter of terminology.
Others are poorly worded. When I was asked "historical meaning and experimental evidence of Maxwell equations", I explained the most important experiments and landmarks, all the way to Einsten's tensor; it got a low grade because they were looking for "$\nabla \cdot \vec B = 0$ means there are no magnetic monopoles". Others were "the definition is correct, but you didn't give an example, as you should have implicitly understood from the question, half points". [But I am tending to rant here].
@David - I once took a college course called Tests & Measurements, an entire semester devoted to the art and science of constructing fair tests that accurately measure student comprehension of course objectives. It was one of the best (and most useful) courses I've taken in my life, and it addressed pitfalls such as the one you mention here. The course was designed for K-12 educators, but I think a lot of profs could have benefited from the material in that textbook. Your initial comment is on the mark: as a measurement tool, not all exams are equally accurate, and some can be outright bad.
@J.R. that sounds like a very interesting course. Is there published material? I must say that, as a student, I felt very good when I got a well done exam, regardless of my actual performance (a deserved failing is not as bitter).
@xLeitix Research shows that many are, in the following sense: For the same written answer, different raters will assign widely different marks.
This answer is mainly focused on defending the statu quo and does not seem to address the question.
@user11596 - It's worth pointing out that about 75% of this question is taking swipes at the status quo, so defending the status quo is not irrelevant, but pertinent to the matter as posed by the O.P. There's more to this question than the bottom-line question.
@J.R. I see how this preamble might rub people the wrong way and why many seem to feel the urge to object or to voice their disagreement by upvoting these extended comments but that's still not the question being asked.
@user11596 - Is there any system of evaluating student performance in an undergraduate course which is an improvement over a traditional exam approach? Ans: Yes, by complementing the exams with projects and assignments. Is it possible to improve on these flaws, without introducing major increases in workload for the instructor? Ans: No, I do not think there is a universally better way to test students' performance than written exams. How does this NOT answer the questions posed by the O.P.? (Or are you only looking at the question in the title?)
@J.R. As I said, it's mostly focused on defending the statu quo. There are a few relevant bits but they are not even as clearly stated as in your latest comment. I would simply need more of the relevant stuff and less irrelevant (and, to me, self-serving and unconvincing) commentary to consider this answer usefully addresses the question and upvote it. See for example the answer by Robert Talbert.
@David - The textbook we used in that course was Measurement and Evaluation in Teaching by Norman E. Gronlund. Each chapter is replete with examples and checklists, and there are suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter. (If you don't mind buying used, I noticed you can get newer editions than my hard copy for a mere few bucks on Amazon.)
@user11596 - You also said this answer "does not seem to address the question" – I guess we'll have to disagree on that. Anyhow, methinks you have an axe to grind.
@J.R. Maybe I could have added an adverb in there, does it really make that much of a difference? I think I already gave a lot of feedback about what I think is missing, what's irrelevant and how a good answer could look like (which is what comments are supposed to be about). What's unclear about that?
Students are not allowed to access resources, whereas in reality they would
Not necessarily so. Instructors can allow "cheat sheets," or allow open book exams.
Students get only a few minutes per question, whereas in reality they would get days
Not necessarily true. My boss often asks me questions and expects me to give prompt answers. I don't always have the luxury of asking for a few days to research something. If we are in a high-stakes meeting with customers from out of town, my organization's effectiveness might well hinge on my ability to ask or answer intelligent questions on the fly.
Students are not allowed to collaborate, whereas in reality they would
True, but exams are designed to measure individual ability and performance, not someone's ability to contribute within a group, or accomplish some objective as a group.
Students cram for the exam the day before, and forget what they learned after the course is over; students also focus on the exam to the detriment of learning the material and understanding real-world applications
Perhaps so, but that's what we get when we test on the minutiae and the trivial, as opposed to testing on the synthesis of high-level concepts (more on that later).
It is difficult to claim that the exam score demonstrates mastery of the course material in contexts other than an exam
Maybe so, but it's not difficult to claim that, as a general rule, if students are given identical exams, students who score above the median probably understand course concepts better than those who scored below the median (with some possible exceptions, due to factors such as test anxiety, and perhaps even a little luck).
In short, you bring up some possible shortcomings with what you call "the traditional exam model," but you can address some of these simply by redefining your parameters. Instead of two closed-book exams that count toward 70% of the student's grade, give three open-book exams that count toward 50% of the student's grade. Make one of them a take-home exam, and you at least put a dent in the "few minutes per question" problem. By reducing the exam percentage from 70% to 50%, you have an extra 20% to play with, so assign a group project worth 20% of the grade, thereby addressing the collaboration problem you mention.
As for cramming and concentrating on the wrong things, that's what students will do if you structure an exam that requires them to commit a lot of petty knowledge to short-term memory. I try very hard to make my exam questions address higher-level concepts, rather than nitnoid facts. I ask them to explain these concepts, often by weighing in on hypothetical debates. (Sometimes these debates aren't even hypothetical; I'll find a online discussion thread where a debate is raging, then paste it into my exam and ask them to chime in). In other words, insofar as I can, I test on what I want them to remember five years from now. If I want them to solve a problem, but don't care if they've memorized a requisite formula (because they'll be able to look it up anyway), then I'll just include the formula in the exam. I often tell my students, "Anythihg you would need to memorize will be put in the exam itself. If it's something I have trouble remembering off the top of my head, I don't expect you to memorize it for the exam."
But in practice, is it possible to improve on these flaws, without introducing major increases in workload for the instructor?
Ah, now, there's the rub. If you followed my suggestions here, look what I've done! There are three exams to grade, not two. These exams don't have a lot of multiple choice questions, and then there's that new group project I mentioned (which needs to be drafted up, assigned, and graded).
It's hard to get something for nothing; most meaningful improvements are going to come with some cost.
The first point is important: allow students to bring material but ask harder questions, in particular not only knowledge-recitation questions. It's hard to succeed in exams that require independent thought by "cramming".
For the most part, this answer does not seem to address the question, instead focusing on unconvincing rationalizations.
@user11596 - I'll grant you that my answer here focuses more on the premise of the question than on the question itself. However, if the premise doesn't portray an entirely accurate story, I think there is some benefit in addressing that.
In courses that focus more on real world practical ability, assignments (like creating a project, software, etc) are a suitable alternative. It can be done during more time, using literature and, if preferred, in a small group.
A student still needs to defend an assignment (demonstrate it working and answer enough questions to be sure the work has not been copied from somewhere).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.652003 | 2014-04-22T19:36:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19676",
"authors": [
"Ana",
"Bart",
"Charles M. Burgess",
"Chris Cirefice",
"Davidmh",
"Dr. user44690",
"J.R.",
"JDI",
"JeffE",
"Kogesho",
"Raphael",
"Relaxed",
"Sheralee Bottali",
"Stephen Tierney",
"Superbest",
"T. Sar",
"Todd Glassey",
"chafik",
"global animal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11596",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17275",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/322",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53704",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53706",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53709",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53711",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53720",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53722",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53763",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53773",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60045",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7773",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8091",
"recursion.ninja",
"waiwai933",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
34580 | Do contemporary publications cite more sources? Why?
When I read very old, classic papers in biology, I am struck by how few sources they cite. Watson and Crick, 1953 cites 6 sources. Luria and Delbrück, 1943 cites 9. Sanger, 1977 cites 14.
This is in contrast to contemporary papers, which often have a whole page, in very small type, listing the sources.
What is going on? Am I correct in concluding that over the past century, the number of sources referenced by each paper has increased? What does this mean? Is biology (and perhaps other sciences) simply maturing and becoming more collaborative? Has the availability of computers and the internet made it easier to find more sources? Are standards higher nowadays about grounding your work in literature? Is it just that stuffing your bibliography with copy/pasted sources has become fashionable?
'stuffing your bibliography with copy/pasted sources has become ------' dangerously easier! Tracking references in the library used to be a drag.
jakebeal has pointed at the more technical reasons for the increase of references. We should, however, not forget some of the more subtle, but perhaps also, more fundamental changes that has happened.
First, there is a gradual change in how science is communicated. Scientific papers have developed from letters that were read aloud in front of scientific societies and also published as personal letters. The scientific debate was more closely akin to debates between persons making observations. Obviously this was possible for the reason that there were very few involved in any one research question. So, in part the development seen is due to a development of publishing driven by changes in the form and volume of debate.
Second, research questions have become more complicated involving larger and larger groups of scientists with varying expertise. This increase in complexity also means references are no longer required to cover just a specific question but also information from adjacent or supporting fields.
Third, science is disseminated in smaller parts today that what was the case back in time. This is partly out of necessity related to the second point above. Additionally, and this is perhaps not the greatest aspect of developments, there is the pressure to publish due, mostly, to the fact that academic careers are measured in terms of number of publications and number of citations. The number of publications has thus increased for several reasons and hence also the number of somewhat relevant papers to cite. I will not get into bad behaviour such as self-citations here but it is clear that any system will have flaws and some people will make use of such flaws to benefit themselves.
So at least some of the change in number of publications is due to developments in the way we perform and communicate science and also changing pressure from the academic world on researchers to publish and be cited.
If science is disseminated in smaller parts, shouldn't this reduce the number of citations? Surely a tiny discovery would have less background work to reference than a large one?
Contemporary publications definitely cite more sources. There are likely quite a number of different forces in play, and I think that you have touched on a number of them in your question. In my experience and opinion, however, much of it can be derived from the basic purpose of citations: to acknowledge the context and foundations of a piece of work. Over time the "density" of context has increased in at least the following ways:
The number of active researchers has massively and progressively increased over the past century. This means that for any given area of interest, there are likely to be more people doing work that pertains to that area.
Frequency of publication has been increasing for a number of reasons, including the continually increasing ease of manuscript preparation and (more recently) the increasing use of publication metrics in evaluating researchers.
Improvements in information systems mean that it has become progressively easier to become aware of and obtain copies of the publications of others, such that there is less "excuse" for not citing a relevant publication.
Each of these increases the amount of information that can reasonably be considered relevant context and that a researcher is expected to be responsible for knowing about, and thus naturally the number of citations.
Because as time goes on, more and more research is performed, and knowledge is accumulated and published. Early on, the literature is not abundant. Also, it is easier to identify and locate relevant literature now.
I tend to motivate this mainly with two facts:
As science advances and topics become more complex, research papers become more specific, so that one may need to put together many "little" pieces in order to deduce and/or motivate new insights.
Thanks to the internet and more advanced channels of communication, it is nowadays easier to discover and exploit the work of other researchers
Luckily, we have the second point! Otherwise we would be lost ;-)
I like to think of this as a world-sized brain which keeps on growing, where every researcher plays the role of a single neuron, and the network between them makes it possible to expand our knowledge.
Although other answers have already mentioned this as one factor, I believe that the main driver for increased citations is simply the fact that it is much, much easier to rapidly and exhaustively search academic literature now than in the 1940s or 1950s. (In economic parlance, the "search costs" have decreased.) Academics who are operating now can easily use online search resources like JSTOR or Google Scholar to find papers on a topic of interest, and it is extremely simple to identify large numbers of related papers very rapidly. In my experience, I can begin research on a topic where I have no previous knowledge of the literature, and within a few hours I can comfortably identify twenty or thirty relevant papers.
If one compares this to the difficulties of research through libraries in the 1940s and 1950s, the difference is quite staggering. In those days, even finding one paper would have required travelling to the library (no sitting on your computer in the office for you!), searching printed index-cards, and finding physical copies of the paper in the stacks. It could also require journals to be physically transported between libraries before being available to you. Obscure works might be present in only a small number of libraries, and it would be difficult to be alerted to their existence at all. While it is certainly true that there are other factors at play (e.g., the accumulation of more work over time), my suspicion is that most of this is down to diminished search costs.
Indeed, it is easy to forget what searching the literature was like. I spent hours and days in the library when I was in graduate school, seeking all possible papers relevant to my work. Twenty-five years later, I revisited one of the topics in my dissertation. It took about five minutes on the internet to find several papers I had missed in my pre-internet search.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.653267 | 2014-12-20T00:23:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34580",
"authors": [
"Cpt Kitkat",
"Fax",
"Haresh Shah",
"Janjan",
"Manuel Pena",
"Nizar",
"Questioner",
"Superbest",
"Terry Loring",
"artourkin",
"chris",
"harperville",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/110722",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4275",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94848",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94850",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94854",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94859",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94862",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94867",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94875",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94953",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94989",
"tony"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
19199 | What are the obligations of a principal investigator?
Obviously a Principal Investigator (PI) has many responsibilities toward his or her subordinates, including mentoring them, helping to direct their research, providing funding, and resolving difficulties.
But, in practice, it is often possible for a PI to avoid many of these responsibilities and "get away with it". By this I mean that failing to address these responsibilities has little effect on the PI's own career.
For example, it is often understood that a PI should have some input when PhD students are writing manuscripts. A PI with a large lab may have a policy of leaving students to fend for themselves in this regard. With some intelligent selection at the hiring stage, this PI may ensure that most of his or her students are already capable of writing papers with no assistance. The few that slip through will fail to have a productive PhD, but this will not directly impact the PIs career all that much.
Similarly, a PI may be unable to come up with good research ideas, but this can be compensated for by actively seeking out graduate students who do have good ideas. Since it is rare to explicitly state in science who had the idea for a project, the PIs CV will still look good thanks to the papers the students end up publishing.
However, an example of an obligation is applying for grants. If a PI is ineffective at securing grants, it is very unlikely that their career will not suffer. Students and junior lab personnel simply don't have the knowledge or experience needed to put together a good application, and while post-docs can secure their own funding, the majority of funds in a typical lab is brought in by the PI. If the PI decides to not bother himself with obtaining funding, the lab will become financially hamstrung, research will suffer, and even to a casual outside observer it will be obvious that the scientific output of the research group is appreciably constrained.
My question is, which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI without necessarily producing severe negative consequences? If after a cursory examination, a PI's career seems to be going well, which responsibilities can we be certain have not been neglected?
That's actually a pretty good summary of how things actually work in my experience. At least, this question could be like a mini-instruction manual for the people I have "worked for" in the past. I also think you have answered your own question for the most part. Are you asking what responsibilties in addition to grant-writing cannot be avoided? Well, teaching comes to mind. Also, "which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI cannot be avoided". You have some repetition in there.
I've never seen the phrase "obligate responsibility" before, nor does google seem to know if it. Did you invent it?
I'm also curious about your reason for asking this question. Of course, that is not something you need to specify.
@FaheemMitha Thanks for catching the grammar mistake. Since I am not myself a PI, I was wondering if anyone on here would point out something I hadn't thought of. "obligate responsibility" is not an actual widespread term as far as I know, by it I tried to describe responsibilities it is practically impossible for a PI to not fulfill.
@FaheemMitha As for my reason, mostly curiosity. Clearly, just because two people are both eminent professors with an impressive body of published research, doesn't preclude them from being very different in many ways (for instance, management style). But in what ways can we know that they must not be different (since we have the non-trivial information that they are successful scientists)? In other words, you could say I'm asking about common features which all successful PIs can be expected to have, by virtue of having been able to attain success.
I see. A more blunt way to put it is - if "two people are both eminent professors with an impressive body of published research" doesn't preclude one of them being a crook, and the other one being talented. :-) Anyway, it's a good question.
@FaheemMitha Maybe the OP meant 'obligatory' instead of 'obligate' ?
@xLeitix Perhaps. That does get some Google hits.
The word is "obligation". I've edited accordingly.
My question is, which responsibilities cannot be avoided by a PI without necessarily producing severe negative consequences? If after a cursory examination, a PI's career seems to be going well, which responsibilities can we be certain that they have not neglected?
In my (extensive) experience with large labs, the only responsibilities that a senior professor can never delegate are networking, certain types of review work (e.g., reviewing for well-respected grants) and certain committee / administration / board work. Basically everything else seems to be fair game.
I find it interesting that your prime example are grant proposals - in many groups in my field, writing grant proposals is mostly a postdoc responsibility, so that is certainly not a duty that is never delegated. However, that might be an european speciality.
I would say your question is actually standing on ill assumptions. You assume that successful profs. are distinguished from no successful ones via the things that they still do themselves. In practice, this is generally not correct. In my experience, most large labs work well because the prof. has a track record of acquiring good people to do things for her/him, not because (s)he does so much her/himself. Further, successful profs. are able to establish mutually beneficial relations with those good people. That is, if you want long-lasting success, you cannot expect e.g., your postdocs to just write grant proposals for you all day because you told them to. You need to find a model how it is actually in their best interest to do so. All successful profs. I know are supremely good at binding strong people to them via the power of mutual interests.
Now, all of this is not to say that a prof. has to delegate everything, or that any given professor even wants to. I know many successful professors that would never delegate some aspects of their job (for instance teaching), either because of a sense of responsibility or because they just honestly like doing certain things themselves. This is just to say that I have seen almost anything being delegated in different large groups.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.653901 | 2014-04-10T22:41:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19199",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Chris B",
"Faheem Mitha",
"Photon",
"Sektor",
"Shahdat",
"Superbest",
"aidanjacobson",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/285",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52296",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52298",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52301",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52328",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52329",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52330",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52343",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52344",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/52396",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"roetnig",
"sreeram",
"user52344",
"wisc88",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
23364 | Who benefits from the anonymity of the peer review process?
I was reading an answer to another question, which says on the topic of a reviewer potentially contacting an author under a special set of circumstances
Some would say you should wait until it is public, so as not to break the anonymity of the reviewing process. Others think it is fine to reveal yourself and contact the author directly
My first thought was "The anonymity is there to protect the reviewer, so of course he can give up the protection and initiate contact". But then I realized that maybe there are other people whose interests might be hurt if this happens.
So, let's assume that the anonymous person (the reviewer, and in some cases also the author), always benefits from his own anonymity. Is there somebody else who is interested in the reviewer remaining anonymous?
possible duplicate of In single-blind peer-review, can you reveal your identity without the editor's consent?
I think this is a different question: "Who benefits from referee anonymity?", not "Can I, as a referee, reveal my identity?"
As JeffE said, I didn't intend to discuss whether the identity should or shouldn't be revealed. This is just the background of the question. I am asking exactly what I said in the title: assuming the anonymity is kept, who has benefit of this.
@JeffE If the question is considered different, is it fine to (almost) copy-paste an answer from the other question?
The readers and the editors can benefit.
I know this is a contended issue, and there are many different views.
But as you've asked specifically whether there's somebody else who is interested in the reviewer remaining anonymous, let's just look at that.
As a reader, I want the peer review to have been fair and thorough.
If the reviewer is able to review freely, without fear of comeback, then they can be much more frank. They can shoot down a bad paper, even if one of the authors or one of their colleagues could hold some kind of power over the reviewer, whether it be funding, future job applications, peer reviews with the roles switched, whatever. Anonymity may enable reviewers to be more frank, more honest, and more direct in their reviews. And that directness can be of benefit to the editors, too.
I'm not saying this is the way. I'm not saying this has to be the way. I'm discussing possibilities here.
It would be great to have some solid evidence on the pros and cons of anonymity. At the moment, there seems to be a great deal of discussion, but I don't see much science on the subject.
Since I do not see benefits this answer will in essence not answer your question. It is possible to imagine benefits but reality is what counts and that tells a different story in my experience.
So, from my experience as editor, author and reviewer, I have to say, I am not impressed by anonymity in this process. Anonymity has a tendency to free some people from much of their socially acceptable behaviour and the review process is not the place for anything other than objective criticism. I should also add that in my field reviewers are more often known than anonymous and the general trend is towards more openness.
When I receive reviews as an author, I find that i am far more likely to take suggestions seriously if the reviewer is known than when there is an anonymous reviewer. There are probably several reasons for this. If I know the reviewer (as a peer in the subject) I can better read between the lines and understand from where the comments come from. with an anonymous review you loose that possibility. If there is a name at the other end, it becomes more of a person than otherwise so I believe anonymity makes it easier to disregard from criticism or take it less seriously.
As an editor, I can see many anonymous reviews containing quite rude remarks. As an editor, you have the right, perhaps obligation, to convey what you perceive as being constructive information to the authors for their revision. If I get a rude review, I may not convey the entire review to the author, or more commonly, I will excuse for the poor behaviour of the reviewer and highlight the parts that the author should focus upon. So an editor has a moderating role in such cases. But, most bad (in one way or another) reviews come from anonymous reviewers. In some ways reviewers may of course feel awkward for providing a very negative review that they wish to remain anonymous.
So to try to look at the big picture, I would say that most reviewers do a good job but anonymity seems to bring out the worst in lots of cases and in ways that are not founded in what should be in a scientific review.
What sort of rude remarks do you see in reviews? I've only seen this once as an editor (when the author turned out to be plagiarizing the referee's work), but maybe you're thinking of a lesser degree of rudeness than I am.
The only rude remarks about my work I've ever seen (in contrast to frustrating ones) all had the person's name attached.
@AnonymousMathematician I am sure you realize the impossibility of answering your question?
@PeterJansson: I don't mean to ask for specific quotations, but I'm curious about what sort of rudeness. For example, are you talking about deliberate insults? ("The author writes like an undergraduate.") Sarcastic comments? ("This paper fills a much-needed gap in the literature.") Harsh, blunt judgments? ("This paper is completely worthless.") Mainly, I'm just surprised since rudeness in reviews isn't something that seems common to me, so I'm curious whether we have the same experience (and are just describing it differently) or different experiences.
I have met many rude people, both in anonymous circumstances (including a review so vitriolic the memory still stings even though the paper got published), and in person. I have worked with them, lived with them and loved them. And none of them was a sadist who liked torturing others when he thought he can get away with it. Rather, they were arrogant jerks who were convinced that they are right and their behavior is above reproach. And they did not shy from exhibiting it face-to-face. So, while I believe you that rudeness in reviews is a problem, I don't think it's enabled by anonymity.
"If I know the reviewer (as a peer in the subject) I can better read between the lines" - that is a valid point for some reviews. However, I would also consider it as a flaw of the respective reviews if there is such relevant information hidden between the lines (as that may mean editors and authors receive quite some different information from the same review).
"Anonymity has a tendency to free some people from much of their socially acceptable behaviour" -but the referees are not anonymous to the editors. Even without disclosing any detail, I would assume socially inacceptable behavior in a review would bear quite high a social cost.
I always thought the revised paper will benefit, in that objective comments will be taken into account based on what they say rather than who wrote them. My impression is that keeping reviewers anonymous serves to avoid a certain bias that would be present if certain referees were recognizable as much more senior than others.
When referees are known, a nonsensical suggestion by a well-known researcher might be applied out of the authors' respect for the "big name". Likewise, a well-justified comment by a junior researcher could be ignored due to the perceived irrelevance of the referee.
Along the same vein, I feel remarks that might come across as "rude" are easier to ignore that way: You can simply discard the respective statement without having to consider the ramifications about a fellow reeearcher's personality or their stance towards your work (which means, probably, overthinking things, anyway). Instead, as an author, you can fully tocus on the provided suggestions and weigh the indicated justifications.
In this sense, the effect of making referees anonymous towards authors mirrors the effect of making authors anonymous towards referees. In both cases, an intention is to avoid a bias based upon the writer's name.
The other answers and comments are completely reasonable, and/but, seriously, there is the obvious synthesis, which we all really know, namely, that human behavior has a certain range...
So, yes, ideally, it would even be better to have a double-blind system... or, wait, ideally, no one would behave prejudicially. :)
Ok, start over. So, assuming people might react prejudicially, the typical single-blind system only protects the reviewer/referee, not the author, from subsequent complaints. No, it does not protect authors from the many different possible prejudices of referees. Yes, it does allow referees to be bitchier than they'd be if they were in a public place. This conceivably has some purpose, but, also, it might just be venting.
And, then, there's the point that with substantial work, the coterie of competent referees is small, and that an observant author can infer the referee by use of language and other mathematical details. "We're not stupid". :)
At this point in my life, I think a not-at-all-blind system would work better. In particular, referees would be culpable for blocking competitors' work, or for gratuitously disparaging novices' work.
Next, we can ask why the traditional publishing houses control scholarly "publication" ...
... nevermind...
To be fair, I've been in situations where giving a negative review publicly would have been a serious issue: I was a doctoral student at the time, and the researcher was rather famous in his/her field. This means that a well-known scientist in my field would have been in a position to hold a grudge against a young(ish) student. The opportunities for abuse in this situation are endless.
@cody, I agree, there is potential for abuse, probably in any version of the game. Probably an editor should choose a referee whose "status" is close to, or above, the status of the author, whether blind or not.
@paulgarrett I just compared your answer here with that in the question linked in the OP. What caused your change of heart?
@sgf, I think it's not that I had a change of heart, but that there are two distinct questions. The other thing (linked-to) refers to a situation in which the default is single-blind, and the question is about stepping outside that. Here, the question is whether the assumption/context of single-blind is a good idea itself. So the other thing was about "failure modes" of single-blind.
The only one who benefits is the community, or, if you wish, the science itself. Blind review allows more fair reviews, the reviewers need not to fear getting revealed (in the ideal world).
I don't see how I as a reviewer benefit from it. When blind review is dropped, I start to make not-really-honest reviews because I don't want to be frowned at by my colleagues, no gain nor loss for me personally, it's loss for everybody. Unfortunately, the authors often think that the reviewers are responsible for the fact that the article is a crap, which causes all this. We aren't able to accept honest opinions.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.654552 | 2014-06-13T17:17:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23364",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Benoît Kloeckner",
"Fomite",
"JeffE",
"Mitms",
"Nate Eldredge",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Peter Jansson",
"Profanity",
"allison",
"aurodas",
"cody",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/103",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1471",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3963",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62448",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62449",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62460",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62485",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/67258",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/946",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"paul garrett",
"rkedge",
"rumtscho",
"sgf",
"user3769181",
"yo'"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
15344 | What to use instead of academic 'we' when describing an experiment?
My research is in software engineering, but in a sub-field which is very close to social science. My papers normally contain sentences like "We conducted a study with 56 participants." and "Our previous study showed that [some assumptions are true]" and "We chose to use Cramer's V as the association measure, because [explanation why we thought it is better than other association measures]".
Now that I am close to my Ph.D. thesis, I am writing more texts alone, and the thesis is legally required to be my own work. So "we" is factually wrong. But using "I" feels immodest, and it is certainly unusual. But I don't know how to change my texts to avoid it.
I can't imagine how to apply the advice from that other answer to my case. "One conducted a study with 56 participants"? "The conducted study had 56 participants"? "A study was conducted, with 56 participants"? Unlike describing a mathematical proof, these sentences sound terrible. And how to explain my decision to use Cramer's V, when it is based on personal opinion?
Any advice how to deal with the matter outside of the world of mathematical proofs?
Another example why "I" might be needed. It is not only vanity; in the not-so-exact sciences there is sometimes lots of leeway involved. Say that I code some data. This is a very subjective process, and can be error prone. It is important for the readers to know that a coding was done by a single person, as this is considered less reliable than having somebody else repeat it and discuss any differences, and also because the coder has to take responsibility for any unusual decisions or errors.
There is a more general question on the same topic. But the accepted and highly-upvoted answer is from the point of view of a mathematician, it says that the writing style is best constrained to declarative sentences such as "Since p, it follows that q.".
I am almost sure this is duplicate of http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2945/546. The only difference I can tell is that you're working on PhD thesis. Have you talked to your advisor yet?
@scaaahu it is a dupe, thank you for pointing it out. But the answers there don't help me, as the highly upvoted one assumes that I am making a proof. I can't say "One performed a study with 56 participants", etc. :( Maybe I will think of ways to re-write my question.
@scaahu I rewrote it completely, to point out how it differs from the situation to which the answer of the other question applies
The study included 56 participants. For each sentence, identify the key verb. You are off track because you have focused on conducted as the key verb. Maybe you can aso avoid mentioning a person if you make the subject the study or the paper.
The use of the authorial 'we' is very common in academia even for single-author papers, as argued by many and properly referenced in the other question that you mention.
Personally, I would keep 'we' also for the thesis without bothering. I doubt anyone would misunderstand, but if you wish you can include a quick remark in the introduction: something like Despite the use of the 'authorial we', common in academia, this thesis is the sole work of its author. In many cases you are required to state that you are the only author anyway in some boilerplate forms in the front matter.
This looks much better to my eye than changing every sentence to a contorted passive form. Readability matters.
Related: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1305775/why-do-single-author-math-papers-use-we-instead-of-i
There are customs and habits that differ between disciplines, between research groups and between individuals. I would endeavour to claim that the trend is away from passive phrased (e.g. "was made" etc.) to active we and I but perhaps also from royal we's and expressions such as "this author" in favour for being to the point using "I". The key, however, lies in how the "I" is used. (in fact, "this author" may even be confused by the author of the latest referenced paper)
If you write a paper you can safely use I whenever you report on things you in particular have done. In methods sections, it concerns the choices of methods you (and nobody else) has made and in the results section it concerns the results you (and nobody else) has obtained and your choice which ones to highlight. In the discussion section you can use "I" whenever you make a point that you stand by, you can use we in parts where you perform a discussion with the reader; we meaning you and the reader. In short, the "I" signals your contributions and puts you (and nobody else) on the spot for criticism. So as I see it "I" is not a way to brag (which seems to scare many), it is exposing the fact that you alone stand for what is written.
I suggest you try to find good (recommended by peers) papers written in different styles and think about the styles with the aim of finding your own comfort zone. It is a matter of style, not right and wrong.
To cap off I want to highlight a couple of books that I personally, being a non-native English speaker, have found very useful:
Glasman-Deal, H., 2012. Science research writing for non-native speakers of English. Imperial College Press, London
and
Day, R.A. & Sakaduski, N., 2011. Scientific English. A guide for scientists and other professionals. Greenwood, Santa Barbara CA
I'm not sure about the conventions in social science, but the problem seems to be very close to what natural scientists face when writing a methods section, i.e., how an experiment was performed. If you look into the publications, you will see that these sections are almost exclusively written in the passive voice. The idea behind it is to take away the focus from the subject performing the experiment, putting more emphasis on tthe process instead. So you examples would become:
A study with 56 participants was conducted.
Cramer's V was chosen as the association measure, because...
"Our previous study" is still fine, when the previous study has several authors.
Yes, that is, "passive voice" in verbs avoids first-person pronouns altogether.
Interestingly there is a parallel debate(?) in screenwriting, whether it is appropriate or proper or not to use "we see [character] suddenly jump back." in action text or screen direction.
I want to add two thoughts based on APA style. While the passive voice may help in some circumstances (as demonstrated in other answers), overuse of the passive is sometimes considered bad style. The Publication Manual of the APA (6th) even says on page 77:
Prefer the active voice.
Furthermore, the APA manual contains something about attribution on page 69.
Inappropriately or illogically attributing action in an effort to be objective
can be misleading.
Thus, if you did something, it may even be misleading if this information is hidden using some stilted writing. And APA explicitly mentions the usage of I for single-author pieces on page 69:
For clarity, restrict your use of we to refer only to yourself and your
coauthors (use I if you are the sole author of the paper).
In summary, I think a good balance of passive and active is considered good style, and the usage of I (where appropriate) is slowly becoming acceptable.
I am in cognitive psychology and frequently use, "In the present investigation." There are sometimes workarounds you can use to avoid passive voice such as, "56 adults participated in this study."
If any co-authors, you need to use we since the readers don't know who the I is.
Use I, as needed for sole author pubs. I like I because it is a strong statement--there is a definite person to hold responsible. Don't use "we" if there are no co-authors (what you got a mouse in your pocket?) If you feel too hesitant about a bold I (or get static) than go to passive voice. But a "we" for a sole article is distracting.
Do not use I when it makes more sense to make the objects of the research, the subject of the sentences. For example NOT "I observed pitching as the stall angle was approached", but "the model started pitching near the listed stall angle, about 35 degrees". The reason is not for modesty but because (a) it is tighter writing and (b) the proper attention is on the model in the wind tunnel--your observation is not the point, here.
I recommend to avoid the passive voice, but some people will recommend it or expect it. Certainly if an editor requires it, just do it, don't argue. "The reactants were combined in a boiling flask..." Note, it does have the benefit of putting the attention on the science, not on you as an actor.
Some math writing uses we because the reader is included as an observer in a derivation, "after completing the square, we see...blabla".
We in PhD thesis typically mean: I am as an author and you as the reader. It is used in the sense that we together explore the topic. And it is just a kind of writing style to incorporate the reader.
Writing "We conducted a study with 56 participants" or "our previous study" can be considered as a bad writing style. Since it has not the same meaning and could be easily transferred in passive voice.
I asked my supervisor directly. She said that she is OK with using "I" in the dissertation, but that it is "uncommon" to use it in articles. As she is always a co-author on our papers, I guess none of her students had to deal with the problem in the context of an article anyway :) And because she did not mention internal reports even though I specifically asked about them, I think that she doesn't care what I use in them.
This is just the opinion of one professor, and the answers here show me that there doesn't seem to be a good convention. So, my take-home message from the whole problem would be: ask your professor, he will probably have a position on it and it is wise for you as a student to follow it.
I'm facing the same problem, though in German language/natural science (conventions may vary somewhat).
The main problem with the passive construction is that it doesn't say at all who did it. Consider:
The algorithm was implemented.
How can the reader be sure it was you as opposed to your colleague giving you his code (particulary, if the corresponding paper is authored by multiple coauthors)? I'm told I cannot expect the reader to look up the source where the author is explicitly stated.
So for some (ver key points where I need to make really sure everyone gets the fact that I actually did work myself that is fairly common (e.g. in other groups in my field) to be done by colleagues, collaboration partners, students or technicians I use "I" even though is so uncommon that I get comments about the use of "I".
Assuming that commonly studies like the one with 56 participants have someone planning it, someone (else) doing the experiments/collecting the data, and someone (yet else) analyzing the data: make sure you properly acknowledge the contributions of your collaborators in the acknowledgements.
You can also use constructions like:
A study with 56 participants was conducted [ref]. This thesis focuses on [whichever part you did]
Otherwise, "This thesis shows that..." or
Throughout this thesis, Cramer's V is used as the association measure, because ...
get you a long way.
For disciplines where passive voice is used, there's an English grammar convention that tells whether you or somebody else performed the work. You: The algorithm was implemented. Somebody else (or you, in a previous paper): The algorithm has been implemented. And of course, if you reference other people's work properly, this will also answer the question.
@PeterShor: good to know. Not knowing this, I've produced papers for a decade that may be misleading... That being said, I'll try to remember this, but considering how many non-native English speakers publish (and not knowing which native languages have a similar concept of using time to denote contributions) I will not rely on this convention when reading papers. I'm anyways a big fan of a "contributions" paragraph at the end of the paper.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.655587 | 2014-01-04T11:02:39 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15344",
"authors": [
"Aaron_H",
"Anton Eliseev",
"Chinna",
"Dawn",
"DuckMaestro",
"Jason",
"MikeGolem",
"Nobody",
"Pacerier",
"Peter Shor ",
"cbeleites",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/103",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13926",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/370",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42095",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42098",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42099",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42100",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42129",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42137",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5912",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"paul garrett",
"plaidshirt",
"rumtscho"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
15110 | Can I use a Google map in my PhD thesis?
I want to use a map downloaded from Google maps in my PhD thesis. Does Google allow me to do this? Do I need permission from Google?
Same here, have you found an easy way to do that?
Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/77933/permission-to-include-a-segment-from-google-maps-as-a-figure-in-a-publication
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.656830 | 2013-12-27T10:46:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15110",
"authors": [
"Chuqing",
"Felipe G. Nievinski",
"Pedro77",
"Takashi Nakamura",
"Unfocused Dad",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28125",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37706",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39343",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39344",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39345",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62144",
"kiran kumar"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
11125 | Should I tell my advisor that our paper is full of mistakes?
Okay, I'm in a nasty situation. I'm about to receive my master's degree in two months. Also, I am a third author on my advisor's paper, and the paper is completely awful and full of mistakes. Contradicting results not reported etc., it has it all. The thing is, my advisor will take it personally if I give comments that would put him to a bad light in front of the other co-authors. Very probably, he would let his anger to be seen in the evaluation of my master's thesis.
Really, I have no idea what to do. Should I be quiet, hope the paper gets rejected, and then RUN FAST, or just write a long email about every error there is? Which one is less harmful? I really don't want my name on that paper, nor a biased evaluation of my master's thesis.
(For background, my previous advisor left the university about 6 months ago, and then I got this new one. So, I could probably get a letter of recommendation from the previous advisor.)
why your advisor doesn't want to correct the paper mistakes?
Must the paper be submitted before your thesis? Do you have other faculty mentors besides your advisor?
You do not want to be associated with an awful, incorrect paper at this stage of your career. That is, unless you plan to leave academia for good or the paper is published in a place where nobody will ever read it.
If the paper is really bad, it will get rejected. What reputation harm does happen to you because of that? Nobody knows you were one of the co-authors right?
What about the other authors of the paper? Do they share your opinion or can you at least talk to them about the issues?
Isn't your thesis evaluated by a faculty committee? If not, how is there any mechanism to protect students against spiteful (or overly generous) advisors? And if it is, have your old advisor write to your committee on your behalf, if you do expect your new one to try and tank your defense.
Your name is on the paper; you should be able to take a look at the draft, and suggest improvements.
The paper is completely awful and full of mistakes. The thing is, my advisor will take it personally if I give comments that would put him to a bad light in front of the other co-authors.
Okay, there are two ways to address this. You can pubically say, "This paper is awful and full of mistakes," paint your advisor in a bad light, and face his ire.
Or, you can take each of the mistakes, and tactfully offer an improvement. That is, you could privately say, "I think the paper might have a better chance of acceptance if we made these changes."
In other words, don't edit as a critic; rather, put some work into the paper as a co-author.
There's a fine art to editing work in a way that isn't off-putting for the primary author. People tend to get defensive when their writing is critiqued – it's a very natural reaction. However, if each of your suggested changes is offered constructively, as an improvement to an initial draft, rather than an indictment of it, you stand a better chance of incurring thanks instead of wrath.
On the other hand, if the paper is so bad that it's not salvagable, then I'd suggest requesting that your name simply be removed from the author list.
@VahidShirbisheh I don't think being a scientist makes a person any less likely to get defensive when he is critiqued. The word for that is maturity. Some scientists have it and others don't. Maturity seems to be correlated only weakly (if positively at all) with scientific ability.
You wouldn’t be asking this question if, instead of errors on a document, your dilemma involved a source of personal injury, such as a hole outside the front entrance folks could fall in and never crawl out of! (Facetious I know, please accept my apology.)
Aren’t you asking “At what point should I point out errors?" Below that arbitrary point I find errors acceptable, above that point, prohibited. Unfortunately, our conscience doesn’t come with a warning lamp. :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.656942 | 2013-07-13T23:39:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11125",
"authors": [
"Aseem Dua",
"Bitwise",
"Dan C",
"Heavy",
"JeffE",
"Lukáš Luštiak",
"Sayan",
"Wrzlprmft",
"bartektartanus",
"hmdeep",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1069",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27636",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27637",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27638",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27650",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27651",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27652",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27747",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/532",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6820",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6862",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"seteropere",
"tomjedrz",
"user13107",
"wsc"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
38980 | When can I make assumptions in scientific papers?
I would like to know if assumptions are accepted among the scientific community. especially in the field of theoretical computer science.
To be more specific, is it OK to say something like: "The behavior X might be explained by . . ." when you are not 100% sure that it is the correct explanation, or you are not able to explain it mathematically or statistically.
Edit:
Indeed the possible explanation I'm talking about is not the main point of the paper, but a small part of results discussion that is, from my point of view, important for future investigations. Also, if I take the time to run some additional tests it would be off-topic and very time-consuming.
@L What about "Possible explanations include, but are not restricted to, ..."?
It depends on what you mean by "is it OK". If you write "The behavior X might be explained by...", it's certainly OK in the sense that nobody will be offended or automatically reject your paper. You are acknowledging some uncertainty, so there's nothing to object to (while there would be if you claimed greater certainty than your work justified). On the other hand, speculating about possible explanations is not as good as giving a compelling explanation. It's reasonable if this is not the main point of your paper, or if the speculative explanation is awfully clever. However, if the main point of your paper comes down to speculation that you just haven't investigated carefully enough to resolve, then it will probably not impress readers. You could end up with a paper that's not objectionable but still isn't very good.
This is not so much an assumption, but a hypothesis. If this is the bulk of the work, then it is not likely to be acceptable. But if this is part of the discussion of a larger piece of work, then it may well be acceptable. Your paper needs a contribution beyond the hypothesis.
Ultimately, hypotheses are fine in papers. Good questions drive research forward.
Just make sure you call it a hypothesis. State the main claim of the paper (the one you prove) clearly as such, and do the same for the hypotheses and assumptions.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.657397 | 2015-02-16T19:48:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38980",
"authors": [
"Afifa Mim",
"Ash",
"Bamm Bamm",
"BfD",
"Duc Nguyen",
"Pantelis Sopasakis",
"Peter Bloem",
"Tobias Kienzler",
"Usman.T",
"Yusuf Talha Tamer",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106586",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106588",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106591",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106601",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106620",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106621",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106623",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/442",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6936",
"user3737411"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
175857 | How do I deal with an extremely difficult master thesis with poor basics?
I am a master physics student in a German univerisity. I started with my master thesis topic in May 2019 and at that time I had wrong evaluation about the pre-requisite and difficulty of the topic I chose. Later on, I found most of the problems/papers that I need to solve/read, I almost do not have any pre-requisite knowledge for them and I have to learn from the basics each time by myself, and I encountered many problems while self-learning the basics which I do not know whom to ask (due to the pandemic, I have to work alone in my hometown in my country and I do not have a suitable friend I could think of to ask questions) and I felt my interest for the master thesis topic got wiped out after these very difficult processes.
I have long time depression, and had been taking anti-depressant regularly before, but then I stopped taking them due to the negative effect of being sleepy and other negative symptoms which makes me hard to concentrate on study.
I also face a lot of pressure from my parents, and I am often told to finish the thesis as soon as possible though I have explained that it is too difficult, so I currently moved out from my home and live outside in order to get more concentrated on study and avoid receiving the pressure from my parents.
My current situation is that I have already taken more than 2 years in the thesis (where normally it lasts for 1 year) and I have applied several extensions for my thesis topic but I felt the extension is not bringing too much help for me, as I am still depressed and the problems are still difficult. Each day I cannot control myself well and waste a lot of time doing other non-related things, and I feel very demotivated and I do not see any hope to solve the endless difficult problems in order to complete this thesis.
I wish to know if any of you could give me some advice/share your experience in how to dealing with my situation. Thank you very much for reading.
Firstly, I'm sorry to hear you are in such a bad spot. Your question strongly depends on individual factors (which is why people are voting to close). Given your circumstance, it would be a shame for us to give you no advice, so I am going to sneak in an answer before this gets closed. The most important thing to do here is to speak to your supervisor and lay out all these problems and see what your options are. Universities commonly face cases where students are out of their depth, and dealing with concurrent depression.
There are a lot of separate issues here, but the aggregate effect seems to be that you are no longer making substantial forward progress on your topic, and you are unlikely to be able to complete your thesis. Postgraduate university degrees sometimes have a mechanism to allow you to "drop back" to a lower level program in cases where you are unable to complete the requirements of your present program. In this case, it might be possible to negotiate to drop back from a Masters degree by research to a lower-level coursework program (e.g., Graduate Diploma, Masters by coursework, etc.). If such an option exists, I recommend you take it eagerly and don't worry about the drop in level. If such an option does not exist, you should ask about options for taking extended leave from the program. If this is not possible, you will have to make a difficult decision about leaving the program entirely.
Given your circumstances, I see little point in trying fruitlessly to progress on problems that are too advanced for you; the likely effect is to aggravate your depression, waste your time, and damage your status in your program. You should consider putting aside your advanced research topic and dropping back to learning introductory and intermediate material that is within your present capabilities. Try to remain active, go for walks, eat healthy, get enough sleep, and do what you need to do to make your life more manageable and enjoyable. And again, talk to your supervisor. Good luck.
(Please feel free to email me if you would like further general advice or just a sympathetic chat.)
Thank you very much Ben! I am grateful that you took your time reading my post and gave me these tips and I am willing to take some of them to try to improve my current situation. All the best wishes to you!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.657623 | 2021-09-24T12:43:40 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/175857",
"authors": [
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/147319",
"jack"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108606 | Do social behavorial and economics (SBE) PhD students get funding in the US?
I am a Banking and Insurance graduate from India with 7.5 years of banking experience. I wish to pursue a combined MS and PhD in the SBE field. Do universities in the US fund such PhDs? By the way, I am on an H4 visa.
Yes, U.S. universities often fund these Ph.D. positions, though my sense is that there are fewer funded positions than in STEM fields. It would be very rare for a MS to be funded, as far as I know, and often opportunities for teaching assistantships (funding through teaching classes to (usually) undergraduates) are reserved for people in doctoral programs as opposed to master's programs.
Also, usually I hear these fields referred to as "social science," with the NSF being the only entity I associate with the term "SBE".
Thanks a lot. Can you point some "social science" disciplines that are more in demand than others? I was thinking about psychology.
@user65003 In the context of your question, I believe you should decide your field of study based on what you're most knowledgeable and passionate about, rather than what's in demand. Funded graduate study usually requires a lot of demonstrated potential for doing research in that specific field.
If I were to apply for a combined MS phd, would the intake for both of these be separate? Or acceptance to the MS equals acceptance to the phd program?
Acceptance to a master's program would almost never imply acceptance to the PhD program in U.S. social science programs I've heard about. (Usually you'd apply to the master's program, then afterwards apply to a lot of places for Ph.D. programs, or you would apply directly to a Ph.D. program, and potentially (maybe) get a related master's degree on the way to the Ph.D. For instance if you're in an Econ Ph.D. program, there may be an opportunity to get a Sociology Master's degree based on additional coursework.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.657964 | 2018-04-24T00:02:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108606",
"authors": [
"cactus_pardner",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/88197",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91812",
"user65003"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95715 | How to cite a modified figure?
I took Figure 1 from this article
and made a few changes to it.
How should I cite it?
Do I have to cite it?
Should I cite it like "from [source] (modified)"?
You should indicate that the figure was taken from an existing article and that you have modified the figure. My usual means of doing so includes
Figure adapted from Fig X. in Ref. YY.
inserted at the end of the caption.
You should also make sure to include whatever copyright notice the journal or repository in question expects to be added.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.658132 | 2017-09-09T18:21:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95715",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95779 | Resubmission - Dealing with rude reviewer
I submitted an article in September 2016; after that, I got an invitation to submit at a conference. In January 2017, I got my first round of reviews. The first reviewer had "no comments" as his sole input and the second reviewer was very positive, so my submission is rated as "Minor corrections needed." Meanwhile, I graduated (March 2017).
In July 2017, I got my second round of reviews. The first reviewer “woke up” and shot down my article by vetoing it. Of the 12 points he mentioned:
• 5 were previously addressed in the first round of reviews.
• 4 asked for origin of data clearly labeled (i.e. references were already provided and clearly labeled)
• 2 were ad-hominem attacks.
• 1 highlights a lack of understanding of elementary principles.
(The second reviewer was positive and said that the modifications following the first round were acceptable.) It feels really, really unfair to be dismissed like this, on no scientific grounds, and I was not even given the chance to defend myself!
How is this even possible? How:
• Can an article go from "Minor corrections needed" to "resubmission required" without any checks?
• Can the first reviewer say nothing on the first round of reviews, only to come out with guns blazing?
• Can the editor let the borderline remarks pass?
• Can the editor not have a critical thought on this second round of review?
I’ve reached out several times to the editor and to the senior editor, and any of them won’t even answer my mails. I’m not in a position to resubmit the article myself in the immediate future as:
• I’ve started a (non-academic) full-time job.
• I don’t have access anymore to the computer framework to run additional simulations or refine existing ones.
My former advisor says that another student will rework it, but I will not be primary author anymore. As it will mostly remain the same (my work), I also see that as unfair. I have an amicable relationship with my former laboratory, but I will oppose the decision of removing me from primary authorship if the modifications are only cosmetic.
I'm not sure what the (major) question is. Perhaps "how can I still get this paper published"?
It is possible that reviewer #1 had confidential comments during the first round that were not at all positive, and still wasn't positive about the paper in the second round. Or it could be that he mixed up the "comments to editor" and "comments to author" fields, hence the first review had no comments.
It's not clear that it's actually the same reviewer as before. Sometimes journals will bring in additional referees on a revised paper; I know that I have certainly been asked to do so on a few occasions.
That said, if your review was so biased as you state, then you should be able to write a convincing response to the criticisms made by the reviewer. Be firm but also polite—trading insults or being rude will get you nowhere.
Overall, though, it seems that the editor is not a very good one, and you may find more luck submitting to a different venue. (I also don't see why you have to be in an academic position to be the one to resubmit the paper!)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.658214 | 2017-09-11T12:19:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95779",
"authors": [
"Mark",
"henning no longer feeds AI",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31917",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
96396 | Changing university and advisor midway through PhD
I have read several posts regarding this question such as "Is transferring to another university an option for an unhappy PhD student?" and
"Changing University in First year of Phd", but none of them apply to my situation.
Background: I am a first-year computer science Ph.D. student, I started my Ph.D. in the spring semester and so I am in the second semester. I am fully funded, but the problem is that the income I get from the university is very low and I did not know that I have to pay about 2000 each semester for insurance. My mind is always busy thinking about how can I provide this money. It's hard, as I have the potential to do really well but most of the time I am struggling with financial issues.
The second but minor issue is my advisor, she isn't an expert in her field, we just go forward with trial and error, and I am the kind of person who needs to read deeply to understand all aspects before trying. We have to have a strong reason to test an approach so before testing we should take a good amount of time, but she just likes to force me to test without in-depth understanding. It's disappointing for me. Most of the time the results are not good. I said this is a minor issue as I am self-learner and I will find a way to do the way I like.
I talked with my advisor regarding this, she said we have to survive in this time, and I don't have any other sources, she tried to make me happy by not giving me the TA of a subject that I don't like, but it does not work for me. I need to make my mind free and focus on the research.
With these explanations, how can I convince another university and professor to accept me?
Given the possible conflict with your advisor, may I first suggest you to change your SE profile, name and picture, to avoid being recognized?
@MassimoOrtolano thanks yea I have to do it, but I have heard that saying conflictit with the professor has the negative context and should not do it, they may think I am not some one put up with the situations, or someone that complain all the time, but really I am not. I am very patient but found myself really broken and helpless, though even my professor likes the way I am thinking and most of the time I have something to offer in terms of idea
I think the advisor part is less of a concern, assuming she is an experienced researcher with quality publications. For example, my students quickly become more of an expert in a topic than me after 6-12 months. Trial-n-error is fine but you can minimize going down a rabbit hole by first getting a better understanding of the method/problem yourself. Then provide evidences to your supervisor why it is good/bad. As for the financial issue, there is no easy fix. Best of luck.
@Prof.SantaClaus many thanks for your advice, yea I agree with you that supervisor part is really not important and I mentioned that. I just said that to give you a big picture of the situation.
@Prof.SantaClaus also somehow she isn't very experienced in publications, though she has been a professor for many years. but its not like a concern as far as im self-learner, do you think I can explain about the financial difficulties here to professors and convince them>? or its unreasonable
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.658485 | 2017-09-23T17:10:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96396",
"authors": [
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80236",
"marak"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
17495 | Tools for data organising and processing
Suppose we perform experiments with input parameters (temperature, humidity, processing time...) and collect resulting data (thickness, structure, mech. properties...).
Is there a tool (or set of tools) to organize, process and export data from such experiments?
Key features are:
Structured files decomposition (raw text files).
Basic math operations.
Filter and sort by given parameters (show/export data from samples treated at given temperature and humidity for various times).
Generating tables with given parameters and list of "constants" (table of times, mech. properties and thicknesses and list containing temperature, humidity...).
Vector graphics output and/or output suitable for MATLAB (graph of thickness as function of time).
Automated (or easy-to-create) LaTeX output (report sheet).
If not, any idea, hint or recommendation how to create it is appreciated. Right now I'm thinking of a spreadsheet (Excel) as core database and MATLAB as the processor (filters, sorting, graphics).
Check out R and one of its function Sweave, which can integrate R analytic command into LaTeX codes. Users can run the code first in R, and then LaTeX to obtain a report with all tables, statistics, and graphics already nicely embedded.
Org mode lets you combine the data, text, and processing. The processing can be done in whatever language you want, and even in multiple languages (i.e. wrangle data with awk, process with Python, display with R, all in the same file). Everything (or everything you want) can then be exported to LaTeX, or various other formats too.
I would store data in CSV (i.e. text file with a table, with values separated by commas) rather than XLS files (the first is easier to import from and export to anything). Otherwise many tools will do the job (if you are familiar with MATLAB - why not using it)?
For general data processing and manipulation, Python (with SciPy stack) is capable of everything you mentioned. In particular IPython Notebook is great for data exploration and presentation (you can use code, comments and LaTeX in such notebook - also for reports). For tabular data, use Pandas (R-like DataFrames).
For reports also you can create files in Markdown (with LaTeX), and then convert them to pdf with Pandoc - may be much easier than generation of LaTeX code. (To get you some taste what is Markdown - look at StackEdit.)
And alternative to Python is R, with knitr for report generation. If you are not sure, if to choose R or Python, then for your task R seems to be an easier and better way to start (especially with RStudio as an interface).
For a bigger list and links to tutorials, take a look at a list of software for scientists.
Having worked with R and Python, I'd suggest using R for the bulk of the data analysis, building an <input> -> csv shim that's as thin as possible in python. For some munging tasks, python is much better, but for data processing R is often much stronger (especially when combined with ggplot2).
So the answer is NO... I thought of .csv, but with MATLAB I can't use it as table with head (meanings of columns) and MATLAB can read .xls and .xlsx files easily.
@Crowley http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19613232/reading-csv-files-with-matlab
@PiotrMigdal Thanks. I'll look closer at RStudio. It seems powerful enough and I like it's licence and OS mobility.
I find Google Sheets is easier and more powerful in many ways than excel. I have done a couple of projects with a sheet of raw data coming in via csv, then other sheets to process it. If you're clever, it can be done so that when the raw data are updated, everything else falls into place. Google Charts is basic but has some neat features for looking at data. The Transpose, Filter, Sort and even query (SQL) is very cool if you have lots of data.
You can collaborate in teams, commenting on interesting findings, etc. Graphs output to PNG or PDF look great in latex. Data are available in the cloud, not just on some file server in a lab. Tables are a special kind of graph that can be shared on web pages and have user-selectable options for sorting, etc.
Before starting with google docs make sure their terms of service (http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/), particularly the section "Your Content in our Services" agrees with your needs.
I should have mentioned I use google apps for education (my uni has a domain) so those terms are likely different than the "free" services.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.658776 | 2014-02-27T17:06:42 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17495",
"authors": [
"Alexei Karas",
"Can",
"CodePoint",
"Crowley",
"Ezra",
"Fuhrmanator",
"MBG",
"Matthew G.",
"Mohammed N. Murad Kaki",
"NmdMystery",
"Penguin_Knight",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Vasilis Keleris",
"cbeleites",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1165",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/185",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3859",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47227",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47228",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47229",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47237",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47238",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47251",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47260",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47411",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47412",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47456",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6450",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9200",
"il_maniscalco",
"mankoff",
"mesgarnejad"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
18148 | Which discrete math journal should I choose to publish my findings?
I have some results, related to imposing group structures on subspaces of finite fields with a metric, and I would like to publish my work. My advisor asked me to choose a journal, but I have no idea how to decide.
I have some further results on a paper published in Linear Algebra and its Applications. I have resolved a few open question they pose in their paper.
Is it advisable that I publish my results in the same journal? What other options do I have? How do I know if it is a good journal?
possible duplicate of How do you judge the quality of a journal?
Why not putting it on http://arxiv.org/ and then asking question (more people would be able to give advice). Maybe asking on https://scirate.com/ under your post won't hurt. But in case of doubt, why not journal which you cite the most, or one from which comes the result you push further?
One good place to start is the journals in which your most important references were published. (The authors of those references would be good candidates if the journal asks you to propose referees.)
Or: ask other people that work in the same field what journal they would suggest. (While you are at it, send them the manuscript and ask them for comments, nicely.) Have you presented your results at a conference? Do you recall anyone there working on a similar topic? Ideally someone who sat in on your presentation?
Your advisor should have at least a passing acquaintance with your field, so he should be able to suggest something. That he does not do so suggests to me that he is watching how you cope with this situation :-) How about other students of your advisor, does anyone work in this field?
It is not easy to judge whether a given journal is good. @EnergyNumbers' comment is helpful.
No one in my lab works in my field, including my advisor. He is very reputed in other fields and he is extremely sharp. Perhaps he is testing me! Thank you for your comment.
"Perhaps he is testing me!" I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I don't like the sound of it: you don't want to be playing mind games with your advisor, I promise you.
@PeteL.Clark: It was in reference to Stephan's comment:"That he does not do so suggests to me that he is watching how you cope with this situation :-)".
In all likelihood, I think my advisor believes I have a better idea (which I dont), since I worked on the problem alone. I will talk with him anyway;And, also there is no mind games with him, he is very cool.
Helping you choose a journal is exactly the sort of aid your advisor should be giving you. Often in the relationship between an advisor and a graduate student there is a lack of clarity and/or a miscommunication about what the student should be doing on his own and what his advisor could be helping him out with. I remember that one of my students gave as part of an oral exam a talk on an important paper. He asked me about it a little bit, but not as much as I was expecting. When he gave the talk it was excellent, except that at one point he presented a sort of black box and said "unfortunately I didn't understand this". It was (to me) no big deal, but I had to wonder, "If you understood everything except this one thing, why didn't you ask me about that thing before the exam?" He must have had different ideas about the amount of independence that was being asked of him.
The point of the above story is this: given what little you've said, I am not yet persuaded that your advisor is unwilling to help you choose a journal for your paper: why wouldn't he be willing to help? In general, here is a good strategy for getting help from any faculty member: rather than saying "I'm stumped; please advise," try something and then get feedback on the merits of what you tried. In your case you have the idea of submitting to Linear Algebra and its Applications because you answer some open questions raised in a previous paper in that journal. To me that sounds like an excellent idea: I have several times submitted to journals with the same idea (unfortunately, acknowledging that you have successfully answered questions from a prior paper does not guarantee that they'll want to publish your paper; I've had it happen both ways) and most of the journals that I've submitted to have been for less logical reasons than this (the other common strategy, related to yours, is to look through your bibliography and see whether any journal comes up more than once; if it does, if your paper is similar in subject matter and scope to any of those journals, then it's at least reasonable to submit there).
Here's an idea: why don't you come up with one or two more ideas for where to submit your paper which feel different from Linear Algebra and its Applications: e.g. try a journal which does not specialize in a mathematical subfield; try a journal which is of significantly higher quality -- e.g. Discrete Mathematics; if it doesn't sound ridiculous, maybe try something like the American Mathematical Monthly. Then bring these specific journal suggestions back to your advisor and ask for feedback. If you don't get any feedback from this, that's strange, and it is probably worth asking (as sunnily as you can possibly muster) why you're not getting help on this.
Thank you for your insightful comments, especially the idea of trying a journal of 'significantly higher quality'. If that means better peer review, I would love to send it there.
To be clear, when I suggested trying a journal of significantly higher quality, I meant trying the idea of submitting to such a journal out in front of your advisor. This will help you to find out what he thinks about your work.
Yeah, of course. I first submit my draft to him anyway.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.659180 | 2014-03-14T17:14:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18148",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Ajay Singh",
"Andrei Rînea",
"Mostafa Nasr",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Spai",
"Vladimir Nabokov",
"Water",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13107",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49065",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49066",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49067",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49089",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49098",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49099",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49100",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49102",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"irenemeanspeace",
"ngb",
"user49067"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2557 | Conference management software (preferably open source) with custom fields
I've been told to set up software to organize a workshop. Is there (preferably an open source) conference solution that allows for:
Abstract Submission
Event Planning
Arbitrary user data-fields
Apparently managing "dietary requirements" is a really big deal for the organizers.
According to the developer, the non-free version of easychair can support something like this:
We have a similar functionality in the registration module (non-free).
All your requirements are related to conference registration, not to
paper submission.
However, the "registration module" is very difficult to find.
Open conference systems supports a nuanced registration module.
While arbitrary checkboxes are not supported out of the box, there is an area for "optional registration types" which we have repurposes into an area for us to track the various optional things we need.
The rest of the system supports abstract management and scheduling.
Also, this forum post has literal instructions of how to hack registration.
SAdly this software doesn't work anymore, it's archived at https://pkp.sfu.ca/software/retired/ --- it's "retired" as you see from the URL, has old security problems, and doesn't run on PHP7 (maximum is PHP5.6). So, Indico or OpenConf it is seemingly. I once had a (paid-for) WP plugin but that was a nightmare.
I just found out the existence of Indico, an open-source conference management software developed at CERN for their own needs. I have just played with the sandbox for now, but it seems impressive.
EDIT: six years later, I have used Indico as an organizer for two small conferences and as a user for 3-4 more. I confirm that it is powerful and simple to use; for my needs (in applied mathematics) it seems the best choice. I confirm it supports custom fields in registration, in particular, as OP requested.
How did you "use" it? i.e., did you have to set up a dedicated instance on your own web server, or were you able to piggy-back on someone else's?
@LouKnee I used it on self-hosted servers in our university, but small events can be hosted for free on CERN's public server, upon request. This lets you try Indico without installing your own instance.
You can use OpenConf for your purpose. It is free but you have to buy license for upgraded features. Going through the demo, it seems impressive. Bear in mind that you have to host this on your event website.
does OpenConf have abritrary registration fields?
I think it has that option, you better take a demo tour - http://www.openconf.com/demo/openconf4/openconf.php
The link from @ShadowWarrior doesn't work. You can find the demo at https://www.openconf.com/demo/
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.659761 | 2012-07-23T06:58:11 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2557",
"authors": [
"Brian Ballsun-Stanton",
"Ella Dotan",
"EnricoGiampieri",
"Every kiss begins with kale",
"Federico Poloni",
"Freedom_Ben",
"Joe Waldin",
"Lou Knee",
"Rasheel",
"ShadowWarrior",
"Steven Chan",
"Stockfisch",
"Tuomo Lempiäinen",
"Yatharth Agarwal",
"afterburner",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/125504",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/164116",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/167993",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/206565",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62964",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6358",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6359",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6375",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6376",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6377",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6409",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6410",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6412",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6442",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6444",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6445",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/675",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"kanzure",
"kyticka",
"mdg",
"omarArroum",
"user1053510",
"user3445853"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
9267 | How are graduate students funded over the summer (in US)?
I know that there are often summer courses through TAing, but those are much rarer. Many departments don't even offer summer courses.
In that case, are graduate students over summer always supported by RAships? And does an adviser have to have funding in order to support these students (in US)?
Do these standards also vary between professors at public schools and those at private schools? Especially schools that have guaranteed five-year funding?
Do these standards also vary between professors at public schools and those at private schools? — Yes. Also between schools with an even number of letters and schools with an odd number of letters. Every department is different.
Please specify whether it is US, UK, Europe or sth different. I think that it may change situation wildly... (and then, JeffE's comment).
In my experience in math in the US it is not expected that the school or the advisor provide summer funding. Many people do make money in the summer in a variety of ways, but it's much less formalized than during the year. Personally, I was funded by the NSF half the summers I was in grad school and worked at a summer math program for the other half.
Depends on the field. In engineering, the expectation was that students were fully funded for the entire year, including summers.
In an engineering discipline, it is not hard to be funded for most/all of grad school. I was a research assistant almost my entire time (at 2 different universities), minus one semester as a TA. Most of the time this was working for grants that my professors had already secured. While TAs may not have as much work in the summer, RAs can work whenever as long as the advisor has money. This works best if you have an advisor who is well-connected and has a large group with several grants from which he can shuffle money around. Newer professors may simply not have available funds for all of their students.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.660043 | 2013-04-10T02:23:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9267",
"authors": [
"Ammar Ameerdeen",
"Chris Okyen",
"JeffE",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Pranjal",
"Tachyons",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22680",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22681",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22683",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22684",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22694",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22698",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22699",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"mojovski",
"omerio",
"recentgrad",
"zpr"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
474 | How many weeks of break (per year) should a graduate student reasonably expect to have?
Here are the details for one of my schools so far:
At UChicago, my prospective adviser said that I should expect to have around a month off per year (probably 2 weeks in winter and 2 weeks in summer).
It's probably fairly reasonabl, though it came as a bit of a shock at first but that was because I was used to being an undergrad where I had at least 2 months off EVEN if I included courses during summer quarter.
I'm on a fellowship for my first two years, but I'll still be pushed to produce results (I'm basically being trusted to do a highly ambitious project).
Well, I suppose I take about 4 weeks or so per year, so that's pretty accurate.
When it comes to the comparison, rather take as a reference a 'normal' job than undergraduate studies (it is unlikely that you 2+ months of holidays). However, often it is case-dependent and somehow flexible (see e.g. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1459).
The official answer depends on where you are located, and the applicable laws in your jurisdiction. For instance, in Germany, graduate students are almost always employees of the government, and are therefore accorded vacation benefits commensurate to that (between 23 and 29 days per year, depending upon age). In contrast, the United States technically does not have any requirements on annual paid leave, so the answer in principle could be as little as zero, but normally is two weeks per year.
Unofficially, that's a matter to be worked out between you and your advisor. Some advisors will be willing to let you take days off here and there as needed, so long as they don't interfere with either your long-term progress or meeting your day-to-day responsibilities. Most advisors will be rightfully displeased if you ask to take two months of leave all at once, but most will not mind a three-day weekend here and there as needed.
aeismail's answer is very good. Just to extend it a little, you should not expect to take breaks with the undergraduate schedule; spring/summer/winter break does not apply to graduate students. Almost all (US) graduate students will take off the week of 12/25-1/1 or thereabouts. At the end of the day, it really depends on your advisor's dispositions towards your taking time off from lab.
I guess one can take 4 weeks off per year if they want to and can. But you hardly have the time to do so, especially if you are working in a wet lab. I probably took 2 weeks max per year, and that also not all at once (more like one of two days here and there to fit my experiment schedules).
Having this small amount of time off seems very unhealthy to me
Unhealthy, but very common in the lab sciences.
This answer is very anecdotal… maybe you could expand it a bit, or link to external resources on the point you highlight (which is interesting)?
What is a wet lab?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.660250 | 2012-02-29T03:14:16 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/474",
"authors": [
"Anuj Patel",
"Ben Norris",
"F'x",
"Michael ",
"Paul Hiemstra",
"Paul Nathan",
"Piotr Migdal",
"azurespirit",
"davidlowryduda",
"gerrit",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1056",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1057",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1059",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/127",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13629",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4091",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/924",
"user1729"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
137170 | Are lay articles good enough to be the main source of information for PhD research?
Doing PhD in new field that does not have enough resources in it. Most of the information I find are articles written in websites such as medium.com.
I really feel awkward citing a website article, as I feel it is not good enough. It is not from university, it has just the author name, not much info about him/her, and the way it is written is for non-academic purpose.
Is it ok to have many of these articles as the source of my information in my PhD? If it is not ok, then what can I do? there is no reliable resources! The field is Artificial Intelligence.
To be more specific: It is not about AI in general, it is about a topic in AI that has not been explored thoroughly, the only place that has done that is Google and they keep the research they have done private and not accessible for public, i have contacted them but they rejected to help with their research
Edit : I know that there are millions of AI researches in the internet. but there isn't anything I was able to find on the area i am studying. google has a product and they are selling as a service and they are not publishing the research they have done on that area, i have contacted google and they did not allow me to look at their research.. there are other researches on other areas may touch that field but none i found on that field specifically.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
is your topic about machine learning? :D
Is it about hospital patients?
W topic guessing
It sounds to me that there's a confusion between two things:
Motivations of the research: imho it's completely fine to use non-academic sources to justify why the research is being done, especially in the case of a new application/domain. This part can even require a thorough analysis of what it would be used for, by whom and what are existing solutions (for instance commercial solutions available). Such work might even qualify as a (probably small) contribution by itself, in the form of some preliminary work to introduce a new application for example.
The actual research contribution, i.e. what is being done and how: it's quite unlikely that a non-academic source would provide all the necessary background (especially theoretical) on which the application is based. Even if it did, its scientific validity could be questioned. So for this part it's difficult to imagine a case where one doesn't rely mostly on regular academic sources, typically in the form of a literature review of existing related works. Note that related works don't have to address the exact same problem: as long as they share some similarities (e.g. similar method for a different task), they are relevant. In this part it's important to provide details about the similarities and differences between the existing work and the contribution.
I find the entire premise of the question quite odd. First of all, to answer your question: I’d say that in most cases I’ve encountered the answer would be no, you can’t use popular science articles as a primary source.
That said, I seriously doubt that they’re all that’s out there. Google works on this problem: they came up with it and no one else ever heard of it or studied it? How did the popular media hear about this amazing idea that has somehow eluded the entire AI research community except Google and your advisor? I feel like you’re either looking at the wrong sources, your advisor is not pointing you in the right direction, or something else is off.
It might also be worth noting is that in AI, and CS more generally, research tends to get presented at conferences in addition to (rather than?) in journals.
In that case, the paper would be available in a conference proceeding and could be cited in a scientific publication.
@DenisdeBernardy That makes no difference. These conference publish peer-reviewed proceedings, which are just as citeable as a journal article. Typically, the peer review is much less rigorous than it would be for a journal, but popsci articles aren't peer reviewed at all. And, in any case, the advisor should be fully aware of the existence of conferences in their own field!
From the way you describe, this sounds really strange especially since there is a lot of real research in AI.
I cannot believe you could only use those articles. However, your supervisor is the right person to ask - most likely, they alone will decide whether or not your dissertation is enough.
It is not about AI in general, it is about a topic in AI that has not been explored thoroughly, the only place that has done that is Google and they keep the research they have done private and not accessible for public, i have contacted them but they rejected to help with their research
@asmgx So, what does your supersupervisor say?
@asmgx And what are the sources of your news articles?
articles does not put references or citation.
@asmgx: sounds extremly fishy and nonaxademic. Did your supervisor say you should study those articles? If yes, youmight want to find out how reputable they are.
Answering for anyone who comes across this question from social science etc. as it is a bit different. We can use popular media sources, but only for certain things.
As someone who uses popular press articles as a "source" for my research, and who advises students who do the same, there is an important distinction to be made and a significant amount of methodological explanation required before you can use much popular media.
The distinction: you can use popular media as a source of information: of facts, or, perhaps, as a source of contemporary public commentary around a subject. You cannot use popular media as a source of analysis. So, for example, you could use popular media articles from the time period, in conjunction with legislative records, to understand the details of and popular sentiment about a change in Australian tax law in 1980. You can't (only) use a post on medium as a sole source of analysis as to why that tax law change was academically significant.
The explanation: you have to indicate that you are fully aware of the drawbacks of using popular media as a source of information for analysis, that you have considered the issues with doing so. You then have to show why it is methodologically necessary to use the media source. I use a lot of local Latin American crime reporting in my research, which I cross reference with government records that I have access to. The local reporting adds context, flavour, and a bit more detail to the government records, sometimes revealing types of information that don't exist in official reports. Media sources also provide names of people that I can follow up with. I note this when I explain my research methods.
Let me provide an example that may be analagous to your current situation.
GPGPU (general purpose GPU) programming first started taking off in its current form when NVIDIA released the GTX 8800 graphics card family and the CUDA programming language back in 2006 through 2008.
This represented a step change from the previous GPGPU techniques in that it was the first true dedicated programming environment that didn't require a connection to a traditional graphics rendering pipeline.
The details of the GPU hardware architecture were not well understood and the only material available on the details were some marketing materials from NVIDIA.
Various research papers started cropping up at the time that attempted to work out the details of the underlying hardware architecture. Basically, they tried to take proprietary NVIDA R&D, understand the how it was done and explain it to the academic community. A good example of this is this paper:
Hong, Sunpyo, and Hyesoon Kim. "An analytical model for a GPU architecture with memory-level and thread-level parallelism awareness." In ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 152-163. ACM, 2009.
These early papers tended to reference two major sources of information:
Marketing and technical publications from NVIDIA (in your case, from the Google product / service)
General technical material on GPUs, hardware architectures and specialized programming languages (in your case, AI in general and the math or other techniques your specific AI applications build on)
This is a good example.
Hope you don't mind me adding the full paper reference - I found it a bit odd that one would use an incomplete citation (on a site dedicated to academia) - kinda similar to forgetting to label your coordinate axes :)
@penelope Thanks!
There's nothing wrong with using popular articles as a source of information - for example if I were trying to get a sense of a new field, Wikipedia is one of the first resources I make use of. But using these as primary sources is very iffy. These popular-level articles are written by people who read the research works and then simplified them for laymen. If you're working at PhD level, surely you can read and understand the research works too.
The situation you describe is rather weird. If you're just looking for a reference for "Google has done this", then it'd work as a source. However if you want something more substantial, and if Google is holding some private information which they're not telling others, then the popular-level articles aren't going to help. They won't contain the relevant information either, and you won't be able to duplicate their results using only those. What are you hoping to get out of them then?
In any case your advisor is the best person to ask about this, because he/she will have a better idea about what research question you're hoping to answer, and how to go about answering it. It is plausible that your advisor wants you to reverse engineer Google's product based on the popular-level article, and if that's indeed your goal, then the answer to your question is "yes".
With all due respect, I believe you are mistaken. There is a lot of published research on AI, including the work done at Google. Of course, they don't publish every piece of work they've ever done, but there's a lot out there. For example, if you were interested in something related to AlphaGo, you should look into
Silver, David, et al. "A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play." Science 362.6419 (2018): 1140-1144.
With that said, I see a lot of people, especially those new to the field, finding the papers hard to read, or hard to track down the paper that answers their question. If one wants to learn about how to use a particular implementation of a particular method, I've heard many times now that it's much easier to read blog posts than to read research papers.
If that's what you're doing, that's fine; technical papers aren't always the best place to learn "Hello World". In whatever paper you write, you generally don't cite the website that taught you how to use the package you used, but rather the paper associated with the package you used. For example, if you are using TensorFlow, you should cite
Abadi, Martín, et al. "Tensorflow: A system for large-scale machine learning." 12th {USENIX} Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation ({OSDI} 16). 2016.
rathe than citing
https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials
even if that's where you learned how to use the code.
I know that there are millions of AI researches in the internet. but there isnt anything I was able to find on the area i am studying. google has a product and they are selling as a service and they are not publishing the research they have done on that area, i have contacted google and they did not allow me to look at their research.. there are other researches on other areas may touch that field but none i found on that field specifically.
@asmgx: Ah, so it sounds like you are interested in specific proprietary AI services provided by Google? If so, that's a pretty interesting "what to do" question.
I can suggest a case in which it might be appropriate, but in general, it would be risky. As you say, the sub field you are exploring is new and little if anything has been published.
Suppose you find a claim in an article that you can base your research on - either proving it or refuting it. The "idea" for the research comes from a reading of the article. Research that refutes a published claim might be stronger than supporting the claim, I think. This is because the person(s) making the claim may have done unpublished research and have some "proof" that it was correct. If you merely confirm it, you are just following, not leading.
But, you also don't say how far along you are in your research. If you are at the beginning, things may change and other publications may speak to the same issue before you finish. So, the question may be moot. But if you are near then end then you do what you can.
Certainly a "green field" topic will find little to cite other than the general literature on the larger domain.
I like this answer. If a proposed research project relies on information from possibly shaky or unreliable sources, then perhaps the project should start by verifying that information in a more rigorous way?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.660587 | 2019-09-15T13:00:16 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/137170",
"authors": [
"Ben",
"Cliff AB",
"David Richerby",
"Denis de Bernardy",
"Eric",
"Syed M. Sannan",
"Time4Tea",
"asmgx",
"eykanal",
"gcvt",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106525",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/110418",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/114084",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/114187",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/165310",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20424",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4249",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73420",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/97136",
"penelope",
"user114084"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
65410 | How much does it cost the publisher to transform the draft of a textbook as given by the authors into a final publication (for web or print)?
I wonder what are the actual costs of translating a manuscript of a textbook as given by the authors into a final publication (for web or print). I.e., ignoring the costs of marketing the textbook, and printing the textbook, and serving content via web.
I am mostly interested in the fields of computer science and maths, English-speaking venues, and the United States, but I am curious about other fields, languages, and countries as well. I am looking for referenced numbers, not guesses.
Given the number of downvotes and close votes from people who seem to think it's impossible, here is an example…
This is not a meaningful question. Manuscripts vary in quality from being near-production-ready to being completely unsalvageable, and in between, one might span a couple of orders of magnitude of cost.
@EnergyNumbers Sure, I'm ok with a distribution, or a dataset containing several samples. I guess we have a different definition of meaningfulness.
I doubt that anyone has tracked this sell enough to compile meaningful statistics. Try approaching publishers yourself, tell them you're doing an industry survey paper, promise them a copy of the results, and ask them if they have this data or would be willing to estimate or gather it for you... Then write that paper; it might even be publishable somewhere if you do it right.
@keshlam Maybe some transparent publisher would have compiled and released some data? (example)
@EnergyNumbers basic copy editing costs about 4 cents a word while technical writting usually costs 1 dollar a word. I would be surprised if there could be an ORDERS of magnitude difference in costs per word.
I fail to see how this is too broad. While the actual cost covers a wide range, there are a only a few things that a publisher potentially does which cost money. I believe the fees associated with those services are well defined.
@StrongBad Copy editing is the least and the last of it. A bad manuscript might need months of developmental editing.
@EnergyNumbers "developmental editing" would probably be closer to technical writing which is "only" a dollar per word.
@BenCrowell Sure, I'm ok with a distribution, or a dataset containing several samples.
The costs are going to depend on three factors: (1) how long the book is, (2) how well written the book is, and (3) how much layout work the publisher does.
For example, in Math, the publisher might provide a LaTeX template and expect you to hand tweak underfull and overfull lines, float placement, and hypenation. In other fields it is more typical to give the publisher plain text with minimal markup.
The Editorial Freelancers Association publishes recommended editing fees. A typical book might have a round of "line editing" at 4 cents per word, a round of layout at 4 cents per word, and a round of basic copy editing at 2 cents per word.
If the book is poorly written, two rounds of line editing might be needed. If there is automated layout, the layout costs could be saved. There is also the cost of creating an index at 2 cents a word, which depends on who makes the index.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.661509 | 2016-03-19T14:36:03 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65410",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Lloyd Garmeriah Mafela",
"Robert Chisholm",
"StrongBad",
"Taylor",
"TheLearningExperiencePowell",
"Vanhanen_",
"codesnerd",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183665",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183666",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183667",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183670",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183689",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183707",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/183727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"keshlam",
"ttt",
"zebda"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
135919 | Why did it become so much more expensive to start a university?
In 1873, Johns Hopkins University was started with an inflation-adjusted $144.5 million. In 1884, Stanford University began with an inflation-adjusted $139 million. Meanwhile, in 2009, KAUST was started with $10 billion. There's a difference of two orders of magnitude.
Why did it become so much more expensive to start a university in modern times?
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
Besides all the factors that the other answer already lists, the elephant in the room is that KAUST has explicitly been designed to be a world-class university (rather than organically growing into one, as was the case with your other examples).
In short, it is not so much more expensive nowadays to found just any university - in fact new universities get founded all the time, virtually always spending considerable less money than $10 billion - but founding a university with the expectation that it will compete with the best in the world in a very short time frame is expensive. You need to compensate for all the natural growth in budget and prestige that established universities had over the last one or two centuries.
Are you confident about this answer? The financial records of e.g. the University of Cambridge gives an annual expenditure of 1.760 billion pounds a year, which is also well above the Stanford/JHU founding budgets, and it doesn't even include the cost of construction etc. In fact just the staff costs 787 million pounds/year. (https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2018-19/weekly/6530/section4.shtml#heading2-13)
I am not sure why this is inconsistent with my answer.
In other words, Stanford and Johns Hopkins were modest institutions at the time of their founding, by today's standards.
@xLeitix with a starting budget of $144 million, one would not be able to sustain spending of £1.76 billion, no?
@Allure, I'm not sure how much sense it makes to try to adjust budgets from the feudal 13th century to today, but Cambridge started very small and it doesn't take much budget to sustain a dozen or two lecturers whose only expenses are food, lodgings, parchment, and ink.
@Allure According to Wikipedia, Stanford started with a total teaching staff of 35 and 555 students, while Cambridge had an academic staff of 7913, 12 340 undergraduate and 7610 postgraduate students in 2016.
@Allure What I tried to say in my answer is that traditional top universities had one to multiple centuries to grow into the state that they are in now. If you found a university today your frame of reference is not how these universities started ages ago, but what kind of resources they have today (e.g., in terms of endowment).
"rather than organically growing into one" was simply an effect of the brain drain from Europe after the end of WWII, it has nothing of organic in it.
@JohnB There was also the pre-WWII brain drain of refugees, which greatly helped US universities.
Besides having centuries to grow, the now-leading universities had much less competition for most of that time. New universities today are competing in an extremely crowded field of established institutions. The situation isn’t remotely comparable.
I'm accepting this answer because on further searching, it does seem the $10 billion price tag on KAUST is an anomaly. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/bay-of-plenty-times/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503343&objectid=12205925 new campus for University of Waikato $55 million (NZD), https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/york-university-campus-markham-1.4153777 new campus for York university $127 million (CAD), both comparable to the JHU/Stanford startup budgets.
KAUST doesn't have a starting budget of $10 billion; it has an endowment of that much. Endowments aren't spent; they are invested so that the return can be spent without touching the principal.
@chepner I.e after inflation they’re probably getting around 500 million a year. A much closer figure.
I would add two other factors to the good answers already available.
Growth of science into multiple fields and disciplines have resulted in increased costs. Back in the day, for example, mathematics was considered one field. But nowadays, there are many diverse subfields within mathematics (e.g., pure maths, statistics, computational math, etc). Creating a university with various departments and faculties results in more human resources cost as well as facilities and equipment costs.
To make scientific and technological advances possible, research has become more relient on expensive lab equipment in the late 20th century and 21st century in comparison with the early 20th century and before that.
"Expensive lab equipment" includes things as commonplace as computers, when you're comparing with 1873. The original mathematics departments at John Hopkins or Stanford needed lots of pens, paper, and blackboards; a new mathematics department today needs computers for all the staff, plus servers/clusters/supercomputers for running simulations/models.
@Stobor: I agree, although I don't consider personal computers for common day-to-day tasks as part of the research equipment. They serve multiple purposes such as communication, documenting, studying, and research simultaneously. However, you are taking about HPC and supercomputers, they are part of equipment dedicated solely to research.
I suspect that you’d probably need to look at the budgets for the institutions in question to get a definitive answer, but I can think of a few potential causes:
Increased administrative and bureaucratic costs. In the days when those universities opened, HR departments weren’t a thing, and there was significantly less regulation on businesses in general.
Increased cost and quality of facilities. Technology marches on - and the cost of building a university building before indoor plumbing was a thing is radically different to building a modern university building with electricity, running water, IT infrastructure, projectors and cameras for the lecture theatres, and all the inspections and certifications being done to make sure that all the work is being done in accordance with code.
Computers, in general. That’s an entire field of costs that didn’t exist back then - not only do they need the physical infrastructure and desktop computers for the staff and students to use, but they also need to pay for licenses for all the software that the students would use for their classes, for the university website, for their online learning system, for their class and room allocation system, for their centralised marking and enrolment system, etc.
Land cost. You want your university to be located in an accessible location, and that may involve buying out existing land owners, and they will want to cash in. Another is the huge cost of hiring talents. Talents don't join a new, un-ranked university unless there is a HUGE incentive.
@Prof.SantaClaus Land cost generally has not gone up by 100x in ~100 years. If that was the driving factor, it would cost 100 times the amount to start any business, and not be unique to universities. Talent cost also seems like a very minor factor - setting all salaries 50% above the market rate would be a huge incentive to attract talent, and would increase the overall budget by a few dozen percent at best, not anywhere close to 1000%
Computers, in general. — Even with all the licensing costs, computers are significantly cheaper than chemistry or biology labs, athletic facilities, modern dorms, bloated administrations, or Elsevier subscription packages.
Computer costs are negligible. A graduate student with salary, health insurance, a desk to work on, etc, costs ~$50k per year. They need a laptop worth $1k every three years.
@NuclearWang I disagree. May be you should try renting/buying a place/land in big cities. Also, you should check out how much top universities pay for top talents; they easily exceed $1 Million USD per year, not including funding for scholarships, labs, etc. Also, some disciplines require expensive equipment, and huge on-going maintenance cost. So everything adds up.
@wolf while I agree computer costs aren't a huge factor, there are many more expensive computers that universities use than a stack of laptops for grad students
@AzorAhai -- sure, but you should be able to start a university with a very sizable supercomputing center that costs you $1-2M, serving everyone on campus. That's relatively small potatoes compared to what it costs to just start a chemistry department.
@WolfgangBangerth Fair enough.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.661967 | 2019-09-10T04:22:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/135919",
"authors": [
"Allure",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"Arnaud D.",
"Azor Ahai -him-",
"Ehsan",
"JeffE",
"John B",
"Nuclear Hoagie",
"PLL",
"Peter Taylor",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Richard Erickson",
"Stobor",
"Tim",
"Wolfgang Bangerth",
"chepner",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/108082",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1277",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15387",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22995",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33210",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33494",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34226",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47464",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54150",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80004",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/84834",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
568 | What percent of assistant professors generally receive tenure, and how does this percent vary depending on both school and field?
Are new assistant professors more likely to receive tenure in an expanding field, like biology? And are they less likely (percentage-wise) to receive tenure at elite schools?
The joking description of the Harvard Tenure Model: (1) Make a totally ordered list of every single researcher in the candidate's field. (2) Call each person on the list, in order, and offer them a job. (3) If the candidate is the first person on the list to accept, they get tenure! (Note: Harvard does not actually use this model.)
This is actually quite a difficult question to answer specifically. Here is a brief paper reviewing some of the reasons why good data is unavailable on even very basic questions, together with some references to what is available. In the U.S. case, everyone agrees that, in general, the higher-ranked one's university, the more difficult it is to get tenure. Departments at some elite schools are notorious for their unwillingness or inability to grant tenure to their junior faculty over a very long period—in some cases, decades. (Just last year in my own field, for example, one of the leading departments tenured one of its junior faculty for the first time in more than twenty years. This is an extreme example, but you get the point.)
Beyond the well-known general patterns and the (sometimes widely-reported) particular horror stories, though, many very interesting questions remain difficult to address systematically—including your one about expanding versus stable fields. The question is complicated by the fact that the institution of tenure itself is changing, as is its role within the university. As Wikipedia notes, in the United States "The period since 1972 has seen a steady decline in the percentage of college and university teaching positions in the US that are either tenured or tenure-track. United States Department of Education statistics put the combined tenured/tenure-track rate at 56% for 1975, 46.8% for 1989, and 31.9% for 2005. That is to say, by the year 2005, 68.1% of US college teachers were neither tenured nor eligible for tenure; a full 48% of teachers that year were part-time employees.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.662623 | 2012-03-05T04:58:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/568",
"authors": [
"Igor Carron",
"JeffE",
"Robottinosino",
"abhixec",
"ashwinsakthi",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1281",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1282",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1300",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1304",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1305",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"kena",
"miura"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
670 | Skimming through a math paper with a group
I am an M.Sc. student in mathematics. I was recently invited by some Ph.D. students and Post-Docs (a group of 5 people, including myself) to join their study group. We are reading a specific text, which should get us ready to read some more advanced work. This work is relevant to the research of some of the other people in the group, but my main goal is to experience this learning methodology with the added advantage of getting to know a few aesthetic results in mathematics.
We met around 6 times, and it is not what I'm used to from courses in the sense that we don't completely understand all the details. Nevertheless, we go on reading.
For example:
We encounter a definition and we can't find out its exact meaning. In this case we usually know of an example of a mathematical object satisfying this definition (because it's mentioned in the text) and we just try to see how the propositions in the text apply to the specific example.
A proof is given with very few details - we manage to fill in some of the gaps, but not all of them, so we just take an example again and simply accept the statement of the theorem so we can use it later.
An excercise is given in the text and we only solve part of it.
We allow ourselves to skip some details because this text is only meant to get us ready for some more advanced, but more specific, material. My question is how we can find out whether or not we are gaining anything, and how we can gain more given the fact that we are all busy and don't want to invest much more time in this specific reading (we have a 3 hours meeting every week).
I have a feeling that I'm "getting used" to some ideas and facts while reading this text (in contrast with "completely understanding"), but I'm not sure if I'm really gaining anything or whether it's just an illusion and I'm not sure how to test my gain of knowledge. The exercises in the text allow us to test our understanding of the details, but not of the general ideas.
EDIT: I will clarify what the question is, in response to aeismail's comment:
As Charles and Nunoxic say, the question of whether shallow-reading is useful is separate from the fact that we are studying in a group. So, the 2 separate questions are:
When reading without understanding all the details, how can I find out whether or not I'm gaining anything?
How can we make the process of studying in a group for 3 hours a week most efficient?
These 2 may have better been asked as 2 separate questions, but I did not notice that (in my mind they were related because the group study was the first time I encountered shallow-reading).
To summarize the answers I got so far:
It is possible, for some people, to gain knowledge from shallow-reading and one way to test it is to see if you understand why each topic is being developed and why the text is structured the way it is.
When studying in a group, one should test his ability to work out the details himself after the group sessions.
I think the answer I got for (1) is excellent and the answer for (2) is somewhat lacking so far.
@Nunoxic: Each of us goes over the planned reading once before the meeting, and then we read it together again. Sometimes we give an assignment to complete an exercise we started solving together or to find a definition in the literature. Anyway, the work we do out of our 3 hours meeting is kept rather minimal.
user302099: Welcome to Academia.SE. At the moment, I have to vote to close this question, but only because I don't know what you're specifically asking for. Do you want tips on improving the process? Do you want to know what other approaches there are? You need to provide a specific question to be answered.
@aeismail: I thought I was specific in the sentence: "My question is how we...". There I asked for 2 things: 1) a way to test whether or not this is working. 2) a way to gain more in this process given the time constraints. I will try to think how to make it more specific and if you can explain why this sentence does not make a specific question that would help too.
@aeismail: Additionally, Charles answered my question partly by saying "it works for some people" and Nunoxic gave a way to test my understanding by asking for the reason something is being developed. Both of them separate the question of studying in a group from the question of shallow-reading, which is an important observation.
@aeismail: Question changed accordingly.
Okay—thanks for the update. I have to admit that on first pass, I missed it; perhaps because it was buried in an unusual location, and nothing made it stand out. I think we probably should make some sort of statement in the FAQ to ask users to highlight the question (e.g., with italics) if it's not in a "standard" location (first or last paragraph).
There are two positive points of group reading and shallow reading that I feel were not stressed enough by the existing answers: acclimatization and motivation.
By acclimatization I mean gradually learning as to what is interesting and what to pay attention to in a particular field. When you read by yourself (shallow or deep) you only have your own knowledge and intuition to guide you. As a junior student, you might not know what is considered interesting in a given field. If you read by yourself, it is very difficult to spot what is new and what is interesting, especially for some of the less-than-stellar papers that often comprise the bulk of your reading (sure, if you only read the greats they might make things clear, but usually if you can just stick to the greats you are probably reading something old). This was mentioned in @Nunoxic's answer, by attending the group are you learning how to ask questions? How to use the lingo of the field?
By motivation I mean having the extra commitment that helps you to read more. As graduate students we are highly self-motivated, but that doesn't mean we can't benefit from external motivation. By committing to a group, you force yourself to keep up with your reading and work. Some people can replace group meetings by an equal (or even greater) amount of individual work, but I doubt those are the norm. I always schedule a certain number of group meetings and projects to keep myself committed. This makes sure that even on slow weeks where every proof I try fails, and every idea I have is derivative, I still have something to motivate me: the commitment to the group. Further, when I am the junior student in a group, I usually feel the extra pressure to not "be dumb" and tend to invest more time and effort into understanding the material better. The pressure helps me, but it is definitely not for everyone and you should see what works best for you.
Of course, this shouldn't be taken to the extreme. If it is clear that you can accomplish more in those 3 hours (and associated preparation time) by yourself, then you should stop attending.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.663097 | 2012-03-10T09:02:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/670",
"authors": [
"Eric G",
"You Can Win",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1547",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1548",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1558",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1609",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/61",
"tricasse",
"user1547",
"user302099",
"user67275"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
111335 | How can I know if I am able to pursue a PhD?
I am a 3rd-year computer engineering student at a mid-tier state school with a high GPA (3.97/4.0), top of my class, and 1 semester worth of research. I am also currently participating in a very prestigious REU program, so I do have a decent amount of research experience. I have also taken the GRE and done pretty well (mid 80s) percentile in verb/quant and 99th percentile in AWA. I've also basically narrowed down my research interests to 2 fields, so I have a general idea of what I'd like to specialize in. My goal is to become a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and I'm starting to contemplate applying to grad schools. I really want a PhD because I know that it is absolutely necessary for my goals.
My only problem is that I am afraid of doing the PhD, because I feel that I won't remember everything (or a good amount) of everything from undergrad. This especially scares me because despite my successes in undergrad, I'm not sure that I could pass the qualifying exams. I guess I'm just afraid of the unknown; do you think that I should just go for it?
Thanks, sorry if my question comes off as rambling; I really want to earn a PhD so I can be a professor or faculty member at some point and knowing that I could fail is very scary.
Don't worry. You are capable.
Talk to your professors. They've been through PhDs themselves, and they know your capabilities much better than anyone else to boot.
Having said that, if you have both a very high GPA and research experience (which you did not dislike), you should be more than qualified to do PhD studies. If you aren't qualified then nobody else in your cohort is qualified, which is not believable. Besides, if you want to become a professor, you'll need to get a PhD - since it's something you must do, you might as well attempt it (or change career goals).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.663625 | 2018-06-17T06:10:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/111335",
"authors": [
"gefei",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9829"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108683 | Choice between A13 Z and E13 for a post-doc position in Germany
I received a post-doc offer in physics from a German University. The position has a fixed three-year term, which might be extended up to three more years. The original position description says that this is the A13 Z position, Akademischer Rat auf Zeit. It corresponds to a Beamter, or civil servant position. Since I am a foreigner, the inviting professor is asking, whether it would be OK for me to switch it to E13 instead (researcher), since my profile for the position in this case is not needed to be checked by the federal government and the documents would be prepared much faster and easier for the inviting University. The salary would then be increased, to match those of A13 (let's assume the same net amount).
What are disadvantages and benefits of E13 compared A13 if one ignores the difference in the salary scale?
Which one is considered better in a long term?
Some more information on the personal situation:
Let's assume I'd like to stay in Germany afterwards.
I'm going to marry before starting the position. My partner has two children from the previous marriage.
I am not a citizen of the EU or the Schengen group.
A E13 position may have a little shorter working hours per week, for eaxample in North Rhine-Westphalia you have to work 39 hrs 50 min/week as "Angestellter" (E13) and 41 hrs/week as Beamter (A13). At least until you are 55 years old, as the working hours for Beamte get gradually reduced as you grow older. But I guess this would not apply to a post-doc position as academic work groups usually do not record the time of their scientist (this means, they often work longer hours without recompensation).
As posted by Roland in his comment above, a Beamter has to get a private health care plan which can be expensive, depending on your age and health status, but as the state pays approximately half of your health care bills, the conditions Beamte get by the private health care companies are much more favourable in comparison to the ones offered to "regular" clients and in the end a Beamter has a higher net salary.
A Beamter has furthermore to pass a health test and perform a vow on the German Grundgesetz (constitution) and the German laws and is not allowed to go on strike. In case of permanent positions, the pensions for Beamte are significantly higher than the pensions for Angestellte. So if you are planning (or hoping) for a permanent position I think a position as Beamter might be more beneficial.
Your family status is also relevant for your salary as Beamter, this means, if you are married with children you will get a higher salary.
Family status is also relevant for the health plan: As Angestellter, the public health plan automatically covers (non-employed) family member. As Beamter on a private health plan each (non-employed) family member will cost extra. As far as I know you also get a higher salary if you are married and have children as Angestellter. (You will have a higher net salary for sure since you'll pay less tax.)
The health care costs are a significant issue to consider, and they are required in Germany.
If you are a Beamter, then you cannot go on the public health plan. To elaborate on drudolf's answer, not only are private health care costs dependent on age, but there is also no protections against pre-existing conditions. You can and will be charged additional costs for coverage if you have a prior health issue. Moreover, unlike the public plans, coverage needs to be extended to each individual member of your family. For a family of four, this could easily be 20% of your net income (or more). While tax changes and Kindergeld allowances can make up some of the shortfall, it probably doesn't cover all of the extra expenses.
So you will want to look at the budgetary issues before making a decision.
It is correct that you need to extend the coverage of a private health plan to the individual members of your family. But if your spouse is working as well and has a public health plan, the children can be covered by that. So it is possible to evade that additional cost, as public health plans in Germany have a fixed cost depending on one's salary.
Depends on your income. Kids have to be insured with the parent that earns the most money, so if your partner makes less money and is on a public plan the kids would still have to go on your private plan.
Depending on the family situation, the income of a spouse and especially their salary (from 2-3 years ago...), the "Beihilfe" rate will also change, and can be extended for your spouse (unless they earn more than approx 20k). Also, with more kids, the Beihilfe will cover a larger share of your health plan, such that you may only need to cover 20% yourself, which would be a lot lower than public health insurance at the same salary (not even talking about coverage).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.663807 | 2018-04-25T11:36:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108683",
"authors": [
"Andrew",
"Dirk",
"Mark",
"drudolf",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/164579",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/529",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/61885",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
16533 | How can I improve my attention and make fewer mistakes?
Throughout my life, I have always had some issues with what I, my peers and my teachers referred to colloquially as "paying attention". By this I mean a very specific ability to not make mistakes. Some very good examples are:
A mathematically competent adult getting a calculus question wrong because of a simple arithmetic mistake, such as 5+3=15.
A well-prepared student getting a multiple choice question wrong because it was asking "which of the above are not true", but he mistakenly selected the ones that are true.
A skilled roboticist damaging an expensive circuit because he accidentally wired the components incorrectly.
Mixing up two terms which refer to different things, despite understanding very well the concept that either term refers to.
Typos and simple grammar errors.
Note that I do not mean attention in the sense of being able to concentrate on and pay attention to a topic. I am specifically talking about the ability to not make mistakes (where mistakes are simple errors, which you know are wrong but do not notice at the time - not errors you committed because you lacked understanding of a key concept or because you didn't know any better).
While this "attention" obviously influences ability to do well on tests, it also affects my day-to-day work in 2 key ways:
When performing an involved experiment, things such as mixing up samples, accidentally skipping a step of the procedure, forgetting to clearly label the samples and so on may ruin the whole experiment - either because the experiment no longer works when that simple mistake is made, or because the mistake has made the results uninterpretable.
When working with a tool that does not provide much automated error checking, I can end up producing data or programs that are incorrect due to some mistakes I made. It may take me a very long time to detect these bugs - and until I do, all conclusions I draw from my results are unreliable (and I am not aware of this!). Even after I discover the bug, the work done up to that point is still wasted.
So, my question: Is "attention" in this sense (ability to make few mistakes) a skill, or innate? Is there any way for me to improve this skill? Can it be trained, or is it an invariant quality of a person that they can only accept and accommodate?
Note that, for the "making mistakes when doing something complicated" problem, there exist the solutions of
"break it down into simpler chunks which you are less likely to make mistakes with"
"restructure your complicated activity such that mistakes are rendered obvious".
I'm not very interested in these sorts of solutions, because restructuring the task is not always possible, feasible and efficient. Some things simply cannot be made any less complicated than they are.
Also, while I welcome discussions of the physiology of this problem, it is very unlikely that my problem is ADD or a similar disorder. As the saying goes, to err is human - but some humans err more than others, and I am interested in understanding why (and more precisely, what strategies are available to make oneself err less).
Are you talking about absent minded?
Everybody makes mistakes, particularly in "pressure" situations such as tests. I've made the "0 * x = x" type mistake before just because I was too worried about finishing the exam.
@scaaahu Pretty close, but "absent-minded" usually implies a persistent state of unawareness. I am more interested in momentary lapses of, well, attention (for lack of a better word) which result in mistakes (that the mind should normally catch) slipping past.
@aeismail Exactly. Obviously one can try to remove the pressure (or even to add more pressure), but let's say that pressure is not under your control, and it is at a level such that it is causing you to make too many mistakes. Is there anything that can be done, or is it a hopeless situation?
If you don't have time to check your work as you go along or at the end, I can't think of a fail-safe way to avoid errors.
@aeismail That is a good point, but to be clear, I am not trying to get out of checking my work. I am asking if it is possible to improve the efficiency of this checking (checking is also subject to mistakes and missing errors, moreover, it will probably miss the same errors that you missed on the first round - someone else checking your work would be far more effective in this sense), and/or reduce the frequency of error generation in the first place.
I do not believe this question belongs here (in academia.SE). It sound more like a medical issue, or cognitive science.
Note: many successful research mathematicians are especially prone to stupid mistakes, while many others are much more careful (say doing routine calculations while teaching a course), so this issue is not an academic career killer.
The given examples suggest dyslexia; I hasten to add, I'm utterly unqualified
I was unfortunate enough to grow up in an academic upbringing (almost from pre-school up until university) that is a) purely competitive and b) relies solely on multiple-choice exams.
We were drilled for years to try and avoid such small mistakes, since they prove to be extremely costly when millions of people take the same test.
My only advice to you is to make a habit of checking your work, with a clear set of mind. I know it's not always possible (usually due to lack of time) but it's a very important skill to keep in mind that such mistakes do happen from time to time, and having some time at the end of a test/experiment entirely dedicated to checking your work is "money".
To my knowledge there is no fail-safe way to avoid such mistakes. Humans aren't really designed (from an evolutionary point of view) to stay focused for extended periods of time, especially when implicit calculations occur. Which brings me to a "corollary" advice; make a habit of writing out all your thoughts/calculations explicitly. The benefit with that is that it allows you to immediately spot irregularities in your work when you go back and check your work later prior to the point-of-no-return (i.e. you hand in your exam, or turn on the electricity switch or whatever).
I agree with this advice completely. I was like you to some extent through my early 20's but when I made the commitment to slow down and think things through I noticed I would make far fewer mistakes. Over time this habit has become so ingrained that I rarely have to think about it any more and now I get through the same work in about the same time with much greater accuracy.
My experience comes from theoretical physics and I do not know how well that can apply to you but I will anyway post my experience.
When dealing with calculations, one should evolve certain intuition for what can be right. For example, if you are calculating temperature of a gas in a problem from thermodynamics and you get a value of -20 kelvin, you must have done something wrong. Most of the time, it will be more difficult to know if one did an error in the calculation but one can still check if a given calculation scales with given parameters in an expected way or not. Such an approach is usually much faster than going through the whole calculation step by step (you just need to look at the result). On the other hand, it requires a good understanding of the problem you are solving (so that you know what you should expect) and some practice. Moreover, it can be used to find incorrect trends only; if you overlook a prefactor of two or three, you won't find it in this way.
This approach also works with any numerical problems. By varying parameters of the calculation, you can check if you get the expected behaviour. The time requirements there might be worse, though; If you have a complicated calculation, running it several times with different parameters can be very time consuming.
I agree with the earlier answer, but I disagree with the questioner's non-acceptance of "restructuring problems".
There are two main classes of checks I employ: plausibility checks mentioned above (which give you a high-level sanity check of what you could hope to expect) and self-imposing structural constraints which limit your ability to make undetected mistakes.
You talk about tools with error checking. In programming, there are many ways of organising code in such a way that will make it difficult to fit together parts which should not go together. It is similar to putting in a special plug that will go only into the correct corresponding socket, and thus will avoid a short-circuit.
In programming, apart from using strongly typed languages, for internal software, I am so paranoid that I litter my code with "assert" statements for any nontrivial assumption I make. This catches many bugs in the making. There are many tricks of that kind. When organising activities, developing a check list and following it, ideally with some kind of physical "cursor", can avoid mistakes. Generally, externalising your activity status can help, such as marking all terms you have operated on in a calculation.
For highly critical processes, I usually create a parallel checking line, such as an independent line of computation or estimate. I'll give a more detailed concrete example of such a parallel check:
I once had to use a formula from literature to estimate a quantity known from literature, but using my own experimental data. I didn't trust it, and did the recomputation from scratch, which took me two weeks of intense work. It paid off, though, as my computation resulted in a factor 2 discrepancy from the original publication. Then I plugged in my experimental data and everything fit beautifully with what was known till then. Had I tried the experimental data first, I probably would have wasted weeks on trying to uncover where the wrong factor 2 would have come from.
Note that I intentionally did the theoretical computation first, without knowing that my experimental data would have given the factor 2 wrong value with the literature formula. This, to avoid temptation to fine tune the factor post hoc. However, in all likelihood, I would probably not have done that, either, and rather would have dropped the whole line of investigation as inconclusive.
This checking procedure was very time-consuming, but the payoff was that it prevented sloppy work and erroneously dropping the hard-won experimental results as useless. I detest debugging after the fact, and generally find it easier to submit to a rigorous discipline to build up my results systematically. I specifically mention this strategy of mine, because the popular "debugging after every substep" (aka "test-driven design") may violate the questioner's constraints about how problems can be structured.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.664313 | 2014-02-04T08:13:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16533",
"authors": [
"Kimball",
"Laura Brognoli",
"Maherov",
"Nobody",
"Pete",
"Prajwal U.",
"Quora Feans",
"Ram",
"Raydot",
"Rifki Luthfi",
"Superbest",
"TechWizard",
"Trp",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13535",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/166652",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22768",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44374",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44375",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44376",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44381",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44382",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44383",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44385",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44387",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44426",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8970",
"namphuongbaobi",
"user2768",
"user2859527"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
32855 | Should I start my CV by telling about myself?
Currently, in my CV, the first section is the About me section. It goes like this (I'll reserve the format of the text):
Broad knowledge, is why my friends are proud of me.
Never stops asking questions, is what my advisor values in me.
I wonder if writing like this gives makes me look bad. Will the recruiters see me as a confident person, get a better picture of me (which is the impression I want to convey), or will they see me as just arrogant, lacking self-esteem and paranoid?
Next sections are Education, Research Experience and Activities. They are about one page and a half long.
What do you think? Please be frank. Thank you so much.
Thanks to the many people who answered my question, I get that I should save it for the SOP. However, there are some occasions where I'm only asked to send my CV and not a cover letter with it. Should I still keep the "About me" section as a mini SOP in such cases? If it sounds like "platitudes, clichés, and self-compliments" (thanks for being frank, I do need it), how about this idea I just came up with?
I chose science because I want to know everything. I chose physics because I think it is the buttress of other disciplines.
I can make it better later.
Whatever happens with this first section, do have your native english friends proofread your entire resume before you submit it to anyone!
Wow, I have checked the grammar so many times and still make it wrong? Can you tell me where should I improve it? Thank you.
Broad knowledge, is why my friends are proud of me. — Unfortunately, nobody cares about your friends and what makes them proud. Stick to specific, tangible highlights about your skills and interests and why you make a great candidate.
I agree with @StephanBranczyk . I found at least 7 and up to 11 (depending on how strict you are) grammar errors in your post (I'll submit them as an edit). Many employers would be severely put off by such basic errors, so you can probably improve your CV much more than with your idea by just fixing the grammar. Easiest way to do this is to ask a native speaker for help.
Also, generally, I feel like you are trying to put the cart before the horse. "Looking arrogant" isn't something to worry about in a CV (when you get an interview, then you can worry about the best level of confidence). A CV is for presenting the facts of your past life in a clear manner. Besides qualifications, what employers probably look for in CVs is just that they "not be weird". It sounds like what you are trying to do is weird, and you've failed the very challenging task of making it weird in a good way. I'm not an employer, though, so take this with a grain of salt.
@MadJack I disagree, friends can be an excellent resource for understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. Using your friends as a reference in a CV is of course another manner, and I don't know if OP literally intends to mention his friends (which he shouldn't!).
Depends what kind of CV. i did a course on making a 1 pag e CV targeting a particular job. she guided us to write an awesome CV. on the presumption that each CV gets about 2 minutes of perusal, make it super clear format. we started with 6 or 8 work skills that we have, prior to employment list. skills like, data archiving, programming, customer service on phone, trilingual, words per minute on keyboard etc.
What your advisor thinks of you should be presented in a letter of recommendation from your advisor. See Appendix B of this article for an example of a cover letter.
@CountIblis: wow, the example is right to the point. I'm speechless.
1) This is nonstandard, so people are likely to view you as odd, or at the very least unfamiliar with academic norms.
2) On a CV, you should prioritize specific, tangible achievements over things that literally anyone could say about themselves. You say you have broad knowledge, but will anyone believe you? It doesn't do anything to differentiate you from people who could also claim to have broad knowledge. Save that for your letters of reference.
Thank you so much. I have updated my question. Can I know what's your opinion?
@Ooker: "I want to know everything" is the hallmark of a scientific n00b. Any real scientist knows that advancing the frontier of human knowledge is an uphill, incremental battle. It may be okay to say this in high school, but if you're applying to graduate programs you're expected to know better.
Yes, I know that I can't know everything. What I want to do does not necessary that I can do that. Is this approach good?
@Ooker: Saying your ambition is to know everything portrays you as someone who hasn't done a lot of actual science and doesn't really know what he's getting into.
Yes, I'm just a graduate student. But if this makes the CV be unprofessional, I'll strip this out. Thank you for your help.
My pleasure. Good luck with your apps!
sir, I just read a quote from Stephen Hawking and I want to ask you immediately: "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all". What is your opinion?
@Ooker: It's kind of pretentious to quote famous scientists in your CV, and you're not allowed to talk like that unless you are a famous scientist, in which case you can do whatever you want.
I'm not allowed to talk like that unless I'm a famous scientist. I laugh a lot. +1
Also, will quoting famous scientists in the SOP be a bad idea?
@Ooker: Yeah, generally.
I think I should ask an separate question.
My sense is that broad platitudes, clichés, and self-compliments like the ones you've included are not going to be particularly helpful. I would skip them.
Stick to the basics. There are many websites and templates online that will help give you a sense for what is appropriate and expected. In general, the risk of trying to be creative, especially when you don't have a good sense of your audience or what is expecting, will probably outweigh the potential benefits. If the problem is that your CV is short and weak, there are other questions like this one that might be of some help.
Most importantly, make sure that you have your CV carefully proofread by a native speaker. Both of your two examples sentences are written in poor English. If you put those sentences at the top of your CV, you're going to be sending a message that you probably would rather not.
Thank you so much for being frank. I have updated my question, what's your opinion?
@Ooker: My answer was a general one and my feelings on the matter still stand. I say skip the personal statement. This website is not a free resumé consulting service but a place for asking general questions.
I get that. Also, I do aware if I become a Help Vampire
In a résumé, you want to list facts and what you achieved.
I do not think anybody cares about what your friends think of you.
Those sentences look extremely cheesy because of their structure, in addition to being grammatically wrong. If you write that, you WILL scare whoever reads your CV.
They are also useless as they do not mean anything specific and are not verifiable, they do not contain any HR-drone buzzwords either.
I would skip the About Me section, you can list any meaningful hobbies you have under Activities or whatever that means.
If you want to, you can add a "Profile" section at the top, but just do a brief sum up of your professional profile.
Remember that you can write about yourself and how your characteristics would make you a good fit in the cover letter.
Thanks for your answer. I have updated my question, can you come back and see? Also, I want to ask this question: do I scare you?
If you can't submit a cover letter and are applying for an academic position, include a top section where you briefly describe your achievements and specialties before listing the other stuff, in that sense it's more like a real CV sensu stricto.
You don't scare me but someone who writes "I want to know everything" sounds immature to me, no offsense intended. Everyone specializes in something in his life.
I would stick to facts and achievements.
Go on the personal websites of the professors in your university and look at the short CVs they put there to see what I mean.
This answer will be somewhat U.S. centric. In the U.S., almost everyone except academics makes something they call a "résumé". But people applying for academic jobs make something else that they call a "vita" (a curriculum vitae). There is a significant distinction between the two documents, so if you speak with people in the U.S. you have to be clear which one you mean. And, if someone asks for a vita, you need to get a sense of what they are looking for.
Quoting briefly from Wikipedia's article "curriculum vitae":
"In the United Kingdom, most Commonwealth countries, and Ireland, a C.V. is short (usually a maximum of two sides of A4 paper), and therefore contains only a summary of the job seeker's employment history, qualifications, education, and some personal information. ... In the United States a C.V. is used in academic circles and medical careers as a "replacement" for a résumé and is far more comprehensive; the term résumé (a French word which literally means "summary") is used for most recruitment campaigns. "
A U.S. academic vita is essentially just an objective list of the things you have done in your career. For example, here are vitas for Terence Tao (math) and Julia C. Lee (physics). There is no direct "sell", and the vita is not customized much (if at all) for specific applications. It's just a summary of your life. Sometimes, well-established people make a "summary" vita, which is just a shorter vita that omits less important information. There is very little "personal opinion", and very little to no commentary. "Just the facts."
I think there is no big different between US and the rest of the world
@ooker - In fact there are significant differences, esp. in what information is considered relevant and how much tolerance there is of subjective information.
You should not have just one CV, but you should tailor your CV based on the recipient. The distinction Veblen makes in his answer between resume and vitae is useful to bear in mind (although I do not make this distinction in what follows), and it is also important to bear in mind that expectations about what should appear in a CV vary between countries and industries. For example, CVs in Germany tend to be very long (e.g., I have just edited a German CV that is nine dense pages long), exhaustively documenting every post held, with every committee you served on at each post, every professional society attended, every journal for whom you have refereed, etc; and furthermore there is a strong expectation in Germany that the CV contains only objective information. In the UK, by contrast, CVs are expected to be short, most typically two pages, and it is quite acceptable to list only your most significant places of employment, and to add subjective information, such as what you consider to be your biggest achievement during the period you held a post.
In general, testimonials may be valuable in some applications, but they should be attributed, it should be clear why the testimonial is credible, and they are probably better in your cover letter than a CV, and if you do put them in your CV, I recommend that you have a testimonial section in your CV. They are more acceptable in the US than in Europe.
You ask about occasions where I'm only asked to send my CV and not a cover letter with it - this is a place where putting more and more subjective information into a CV may be useful. It is common for recruiters to want just your CV: be aware that the standard of ethics in the recruiting business is not high and you should not be too dependent on their services.
If in doubt, contact the human resources department of the institution to whom you apply before sending anything. Doing so demonstrates initiative, often will yield useful tips on an unofficial basis, might give you insight into what and how many applications there are for the post, and may help you avoid what the intitution regards as mistakes in a CV.
It is possible to provide supplementary information about your career if you have a page on a website, and provide the URL to this page at the top of your CV. It's common to link to Linked In pages, although bespoke pages offer more flexibility for you to tailor your presentation, include more subjective information, and probably will have higher information density and attractiveness than these networking websites can offer. I do not recommend putting exhaustive information about your career online: this material can be abused.
I wish I could give you more than one upvote
To me, it seems you are trying to include in your CV the content that belongs to your cover letter.
As previous answers highlighted, a CV is mainly to present actual past achievements. This should be a document that looks as objective, removed of feelings and subjective opinions as possible.
That's why the cover letter is a natural complement to the CV: this is where you present your achievements and yourself in a more human aspect: you describe not only your achievements, but also why and how you did them, how do you work in a team, etc. However, you still have to be, or at least sound like, as factual and professional as possible: the interviewer is not your pal, he/she doesn't want to know what your friends think of you, but how you will handle your work and how you will fit in the professional setting.
This is not to say that you cannot put a bit of subjective info in your CV, for example some people put at the head of the first page (just below the name and contact details) a short description of their academic education and their short-term and long-term goals (eg, "I have a PhD from the Amazing University, and I intend to work in the field of subquantic fields for panoptic pathologies." -- this is total gibberish, but you see the point).
So the bottom line is that if you want to give some insight about you, you should provide a cover letter, do not add this info inside your CV.
Isn't cover letter the place to show more about your research, not yourself?
Actually both, but more about you and your prospects than just detailing all your researchs, that's the place of your CV (where you can include the abstracts of your most important works as appendices if you want to detail your work).
When I read a CV, I'm looking for why I should hire you. In particular, I'm looking for two things - how useful you're going to be in the first 90 days (how relevant is your experience right now!) and how easy you will learn things for the next 3 years (how broad is your experience, implying you can learn things as this field changes). I'm in computer programming, but I've found this holds for most fields.
I don't care about what your friends say about you. I care about what you have done. So, skills, experience, then education/other (in that order).
Remember - this is a sales pitch. You are marketing and selling yourself. Anyone who tells you a CV is anything else is wrong.
Since this website is Academia.SE, this question is presumably about an academic CV for an academic position (otherwise it would be off-topic here). Academic CVs have a very different format from standard CVs.
@ff524: yeah, but they are CVs after all. I think Rob Kinyon has given me some useful tips
@ff524 - I did miss that this is Academia, but the point about a sales pitch is still valid. What's valuable, though, will differ. 90 day viability is less important, I'd imagine. :)
Actually, academic CVs are typically not as sales-pitch-y as non-academic CVs. They are usually a very formulaic listing of all the academic things the candidate has done, with no editorializing or embellishment (see this random example of one of our users). The "sell" is reserved for other parts of the application.
@ff524: good example. I just afraid that I can't write that long.
You are probably on the wrong stack exchange site. Maybe Workplace is the right place for you.
In particular, academic CVs almost never list "skills", and always list publications and similar academic accomplishments (which you omit to mention). @ff524 is right that there is no explicit sell.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.665214 | 2014-12-07T17:10:00 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32855",
"authors": [
"Ben Bitdiddle",
"Berkelana Di Bumi Ini",
"Charles Stewart",
"Count Iblis",
"Formagella",
"Jack Donz",
"Mad Jack",
"Majety Sashank",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Nobody",
"Ooker",
"Prakash",
"Rama ",
"Rob Kinyon",
"Spammer",
"Stephan Branczyk",
"Superbest",
"bandybabboon",
"borgr",
"dushyanth",
"ff524",
"gaborous",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11434",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14341",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/148171",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17479",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24348",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24716",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24914",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25278",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3971",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5962",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91728",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91729",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91731",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91732",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91738",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91739",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91804",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92012",
"mako",
"rzhang",
"saravana shankar",
"wu nengneng"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
21872 | Comparative quality of articles in questionable journals
This question on citing from publications on Beall's list got me thinking...
The list itself details predatory publishers, who follow bad practices or bad business models. However, is there any evidence that the papers themselves that are contained within those journals are any "worse" than articles in non-predatory, low impact factor journals? I'm not comparing to Science or Nature here, just any other run-of-the-mill journal. By worse, I mean:
Poor research practice
Lack of citation of previous relevant research
Higher incidence of fraud
Non-academic writing
...?
Does anyone know of a study that looked at this?
One of Beall's criteria is "publishes plagiarized papers" so the list does self-select for that.
@ff524 although not all of the publishers/journals listed by Beall have a documented history of plagiarism.
@Jigg not at all. I'm just pointing out a self-selection bias that might make it less meaningful to compare the incidence of fraud in Beall's list journals vs other journals
@ff524 - Interesting. I wonder how he identifies that.
@eykanal spot checks of a couple of issues, usually. Occasionally a reader brings a specific plagiarized article to his attention.
What strikes me, is the seemingly consensual opinion that citing articles published in these pseudo-journals is perfectly ok.
Maybe what I'm about to write was obvious to all. But just in case:
As I understand it, a "predatory journal" is a journal that will accept anything that is submitted to it so as to financially profit from the authors (and the buyers of the journal, perhaps). Moreover, they are not forthcoming about this practice because that would drastically lower their submissions (not to mention sales!). I would guess that most predatory journals would not want to accept papers of the sort created by Nate Eldredge's wonderful mathgen package: although it did happen at least once, I'll bet that incident was embarrassing (or rather, recognized as working against the game they are trying to play) for the Advances in Pure Mathematics. If that journal published a full issue of gibberish papers, then I think it would seriously jeopardize their profit line and possibly cause them to fold (and yes, get replaced by the next journal, but evidently people like Beall are paying attention not just to the journals themselves but the publishing companies behind them and even the people behind the publishing companies).
Sometimes predatory journals will still publish your paper if you tell them that at the end that you can't or won't pay. I found this strange at first, but I think I understand it better now: these journals want some papers that are actually for real in order in order to acquire a penumbra of plausible legitimacy for all of their papers. At the higher end you get journals most of whose papers are written by real researchers who need their work published somewhere and for various reasons they have chosen not to go through the time and effort of a selective journal. (I don't mean to imply that this practice is not still shady: of course pretending there is contentful, critical peer review when in fact there isn't is highly, highly academically inappropriate.)
What's my point? I don't think there is going to be any uniform sense in which papers submitted to predatory journals are worse than papers published in "real" journals. Demonstrably, some of these papers are real papers. However, if you agree that part of the definition of a predatory journal is that they accept virtually 100% of all submitted papers that are not too clearly gibberish (as well as some that are!), then it would be an amazingly strong indictment of the peer review process not to believe that the papers which have gone through a selection process and are among the X% of accepted papers for some number X bounded away from 100 are going to be, on average, better in every way than papers published by predatory journals.
Is there any evidence of this? I sure think so. Any kind of statistical study is either going to concentrate on a very limited range of journals which need not be of direct interest to any given reader or going to take a massive amount of work. I would rather suggest: select a predatory journal in your field and a legitimate, though run-of-the-mill journal in your field. Page through, say, the articles published by each one in 2010 (or some reasonable subset thereof). First evaluate the articles yourself: can you see the difference? Then look at official reviews of the article (in mathematics there are two internationally recognized services that write reviews of every single math article published -- except that certain journals they drop as not being worth their attention; I believe that similar things exist in many other academic fields). Then track citation statistics of the articles. Is there a difference? Is the difference subtle enough to warrant statistical analysis, or does it just stare you right in the face? I have done a little bit of this practice myself. I am getting inspired to try it more systematically.
'If that journal published a full issue of gibberish papers, then I think it would seriously jeopardize their profit line' That would be the case if they had any sort of readership and if the bulk of the authors actually cared about anything else than an additional line on their CV. Most of the time, authors just want a cosy position in a government agency and have no scientific interest whatsoever. The journal will just go on harvesting the money of despair from the next academic drone, not caring about the occasional honest (and naive) author.
The problem is that whoever is hiring these people have themselves no concept of what a decent scientific article is. All of this is a pretense of academia, and frankly should not affect the actual academic community that much, because legitimate researchers and scholars know which are the good journals in their fields.
@Jigg: I know what the good journals are in my field, yes. But I don't know exactly where the border is between journals which are predatory and journals which are merely very undistinguished. Given that some predatory journals occasionally quite solid papers by perfectly good researchers (who have frequently published in mainstream journals), I suspect I am not alone and that this mixture of the illegitimate and the legitimate is an essential part of the phenomenon.
Your observation that this is would be a damning indictment of the peer-review process is spot on. I'll restate my question: is the peer-review process functional for low-impact journals? I would hope yes, but I'm not sure, and it's probably tough to answer either way.
I agree with the 'mixture of illegitimate ant legitimate' and would be very interested in the result of the systematic analysis that you consider doing.
@Jigg: I was struck by your comment "That would be the case if they had any sort of readership and if the bulk of the authors actually cared about anything else than an additional line on their CV. Most of the time, authors just want a cosy position in a government agency and have no scientific interest whatsoever." Just now I checked all 30 papers published by Advances in Pure Mathematics in 2014: based on Nate Eldredge's experiment, I think we can agree to call this journal predatory. The results were very interesting....
Of these 30 papers, for 28 of them the authors listed an academic affiliation. Of these 28, 26 were from Africa or Asia and 2 were from Europe. The 2 unacademically affiliated papers were both from Americans who had earned PhDs in mathematics at American institutions many years before.
@eykanal: I wonder how we confidently identify journals that are low-impact but not predatory? I know of at least one journal in my subfield -- the JP Journal of Algebra and Number Theory -- for which I am not really sure which side of the line it falls on.
Can you formulate an opinion based on what you saw? I can't judge the content of these articles because it's not my field. As for identifying predatory from low-impact-non-predatory, I think that there is probably a form of continuum, but I would look at the article processing charge.
@Jigg: Yes, probably, but let me get back to you on this.
@Jigg: It turns out that I am having a hard time figuring out how to suitably respond to this, both because (i) such a detailed subject-specific study is not an answer to this or any question on this site and (ii) I feel like I either have to make vague statements that anyone could reasonably question or "call out" various authors for papers which are (I believe) sincerely submitted and not completely trivial but do not meet my own standards of publishability. I wonder if you have any suggestions.
I understand your reserve. But do you know subscription-based journals in the same field where the demographics are similar to the one you mentioned above and have a similarly low percentage of papers 'sincerely submitted and not completely trivial but [that don't] meet [your] own standards of publishability'? Anyway, I guess some countries have different academic/political systems than the one I'm used to. I imagine some of these people are doing in good faith what the local system is pushing them to do.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.666469 | 2014-06-03T13:06:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21872",
"authors": [
"Cape Code",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Spencer Scott",
"Trinadh Gupta",
"Tynoky",
"WilliamBTwo",
"b2vincent",
"eykanal",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60013",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60014",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60015",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/60054",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
42 | What are the common productivity measures of a scientist, like h-index?
I am aware of h-index. I was wondering what other types of scores are both widely and rarely used to measure the impact of a scientist?
related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/13/66
exact duplicate?
not really a dup. It's a larger topic, and it can include the "einstein index" in the answer. I remember a very interesting paper or blog post on the comparison between h-index and the einstein index.
The h-index is common (and the g-index, which corrects for self-citation), as is the Journal Impact Factor. Johan Bollen has a good review of the various metrics.
However, it's important to point out that all those measures are just different ways of counting citations. They don't account for things like code you've written or talks you've given and they can't address systematic bias in citation practices such as coercive citation or citation mutation. Also, any citation-counting metric will penalize younger researchers simply due to the time it takes to publish one paper and for other papers to get published citing yours. In order to keep academics from having to publish a paper just to describe some code they've written or a dataset they've accumulated, aggregators have been built to pull in these various metrics and consolidate them. Total Impact is a good example of such a system. The general field of study looking at incorporating these broader metrics is called #altmetrics, and you can find a collection of research on the topic here.
There's the g-index and the h-b-index. Another thing is (in conjunction with the number of publications) the number of coauthors, i.e. has somebody only worked with one group (perhaps at the same university) or have they collaborated with lots of people from different institutions.
Beyond the h-index, I don't think there's any definitive parameters used in practice. However, some other common factors used to evaluate research faculty:
Publication count
Quantity of funding
Number of invited talks & invited journal articles
Lab size
Note that these apply to the fields I'm familiar with, neuroscience and engineering. I suspect that these answers will vary according to field.
The number of patents is also sometimes useful.
To add to other answers:
How often one publishes in the most prestigious general journals (e.g. Science and Nature) and most prestigious journals in their field (e.g. Physical Review Letters).
I think that nowadays publication in the most prestigious journals is not as good as it used to be, this because of people trying to do it just because of popularity.
Take a look at this open article in Scientific Reports for a measure that attempts to discard productivity as a factor in evaluating the output of research.
I believe the answer to your question depends very strongly on the field. In mine, mathematics, the most used quick proxy for quality of research is the prestige of journals one's publishes in (which is not measured by impact factor, although there is a correlation).
In some humanities fields, books are the most prominent research outputs.
For a PhD student in biology (especially molecular and cellular, at least in some labs in France), time spent in lab in the evenings and week-ends seems to overweight everything else.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.667269 | 2012-02-14T22:07:37 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/42",
"authors": [
"Artem Kaznatcheev",
"Dr_bitz",
"JRN",
"Joost",
"Mark Meckes",
"Rauni",
"Robert Cartaino",
"Stefano Borini",
"Zhong Yuan Lai",
"abatkai",
"dmeister",
"firstname gklsodascb",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/112",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/130",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19748",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/281",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/287",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4366",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/64",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/66",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75806",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/99",
"nicoguaro",
"sjcockell"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.