How to get a postdoc without publications in "top" venues?

If your CV is weak and you are worried about being filtered out based on that, you can ask your advisor to contact people and recommend you directly. Additionally, you could try contacting senior scientists that you met in conferences and were excited about your work.


For paper based on thesis, should I list my university as affiliation or the name of the company I currently work for?

I will take a somewhat different view from @jakebeal's answer.

The primary question is: when did you work on the paper? Did you do all of the work while you were a thesis student, and then the paper has slowly made its way through the system? Or did you actively work on it as part of your new job? Did you use institutional resources from your new position to do any part of the paper?

If the answer to the latter is no, then you should only list the old institution in the actual affiliations, and then list your new job as a "present address", if you so choose. If you worked on the paper as part of your new job (beyond rote submission and minor edits), then you should list both workplaces as "active" affiliations.


Is it appropriate to mention that authors refused to provide code samples when asked?

would be advisable to add a note that the implementation of THEIR algorithm is our implementation

Absolutely yes. This provides important context for your experimentation and as such, is valuable information for the reader.

Even better, you could make your implementation of their algorithm publicly available, so that future groups of authors will not encounter the same situation as you did (and will cite your paper).

  and that we reached out to them for their code and they declined?

That is the more delicate question to ask. It would surely be legitimate to do so, as it would represent the situation accurately. But such a statement has a social implication, which is that the authors appear in a slightly negative light (perhaps rightfully so). Proceed with caution.


If you disclose an invention, are you still able to file for trade secrecy?

No. Trade secrets are not registered. Voluntary disclosure pretty much destroys trade secret status. If you want to have a trade secret, don't tell anyone without a non-disclosure agreement in place. A patent may be available to you depending on your jurisdiction. Consult an attorney in the location where you want to protect your invention.


Talking to professors without attending that University

Okay, so this might sound a little bit too honest.

You can email them, and if you're sufficiently interesting or intelligent, they will write back. For example, if you asked things like "what is the best sorting algorithm? Can you explain why that is?" they probably won't respond, because it's boring. You have to realize that the professors usually also get a lot of "crank" messages (false claims to amazing results) to which they don't respond to. However, if you actually read and understood their research, and had something that you could contribute to, then they probably will respond. Your pedigree isn't extremely important, as far as I am concerned. It is true that the top scientists are available for free, but only if you are worth their time.

The university system requires the professors to talk to the amateurs that they normally wouldn't talk to (i.e. students). My university had a student who claimed to have proven P vs NP problem. Normally if someone sent me a proof of that by email, I'd have deleted it without reading it, but since it was a known student, the professors still looked over the proof (it was actually quite clever, albeit wrong), and the student was eventually offered a summer research position. So I wouldn't say that the university system is pointless.


How to go about "record of teaching excellence" as part of an application for an academic position when you don't have teaching experience?

Include what teaching you have done as a TA. Space permitting, I would also include some details of what your teaching comprised, e.g. setting and marking coursework, small group tutoring, class tutorials etc.

As the application calls for a record of teaching excellence, try to identify aspects of what teaching you have done that meets some reasonable definition of "excellence". Do you have evidence of positive student reviews? Any lecturer/tutor assessments?

Do not include a statement of teaching philosophy if it is not called for.


Citing a paper under review in 2 different conferences

Normally, you can update citations until the proofreading stage.  I've done that at more than one occasion.  When submitting the article, I cite Myself et al. (submitted 20xx).  Then the manuscript goes through peer review, revisions, subsequently typesetting, etc.  By the time the final proofs come out, I probably know whether Myself et al. is rejected or not, and can probably provide an updated citation.  In the worst case, I can replace it by a short text that this will be considered in a future publication.


Should scholarship/fellowship monetary amount be listed in CV?

In general, I would leave out the financial amounts of scholarships and fellowships from CV's. If it's a small dollar amount, putting it on diminishes the amount of the award. If it's a well-known award (such as an NSF fellowship), or at least well-known in your field (for example, a fellowship or scholarship by your field's professional society), the details are already sufficiently well-known that they don't need to be mentioned.

I might only list them if they were (a) rather substantial in value and (b) not well-known enough to be on most people's radar screens (at least in your field). At the same time, listing just a few sort of calls attention to the fact that the other awards might not be so large. So again, I'd lean towards not including them at all.


Is it normal to get an angry review that does not address any point of the work?

Getting angry reviews that, in your opinion, fail to understand your work is normal. It's sadly part of the territory.

It's hard to say why someone writes an angry review. Maybe they're an angry person, maybe they had a bad day and didn't like your work, or maybe they're one of those "tough love" people and get a little harsh when they disagree about something.

Your best approach is to ignore the tone of the review. If your paper got accepted, celebrate your publication. If you get a rebuttal, try to address their underlying concerns by politely pointing out why they are wrong and you are right.

If you are certain that your work is correct and the reviewer is wrong, think about what in your paper might lead them to believe what they did. If one person thinks you did something wrong, others might too. Consider rewriting that part of the paper to clear up any misunderstandings. It may be time consuming, but it will make your paper all the stronger in the long run.

Not to make any assumptions as to your research ability, but if this is your first time submitting a publication on your own, it is entirely possible that your technique is wrong. You can be rigorous in your approach and still do things incorrectly. It may be worthwhile to approach a more senior researcher that you trust and get their opinion on your paper with respect to the review.


For biomedical publications it is possible to do using Europe PMC API (I work for this database). You can query the database using the DOI like this and extract (authorId type="ORCID") field. Here is the same query using JSON is you prefer.


Want to change university, but concerned about "downgrading" from institute head, and about colleagues learning about my job search

First of all, you need to decide what's best for you long term. If you decide to abdicate and apply elsewhere, then do it and don't look back.

During this process, you'll want to choose letter writers you trust, and ask them to keep it in strict confidence. You'd do the same for them, no?  People move on, it happens.

Despite your best efforts, word will always get out...hopefully slowly.  But, see my first point. If you've decided, you've decided, so it's just a matter of time, uncomfortable as it may be.


How do I explain to a student why departments that do similar things have seemingly different names?

I would say instead that it would be much more surprising if these departments all had the same names, particularly for relatively new and cross-disciplinary areas of work like in your example.

The domains of science are broad and overlapping, and there are many ways that the whole domain can end up being parsed into departments by different institutions, just like there are many different ways that the domain of colors are parsed into color names by different languages.

Given that there are many reasonable possible clusterings and names, the actual determinants tend to be very contingent and historical.  Among these are:

Interdepartmental politics, including which part of a university wants to sponsor the new department, which faction of an old department wants to split away.
The viewpoint of the faculty forming the department
Popularity of subjects over time: small departments merge and large departments split.

There are many other possible causes as well.  Thus, the question is not: "Why are they different?" but "Why would you expect them to be the same?"


How do I reference an unpublished article in my paper?

Referencing such a document is a well-know proof technique, often stated as follows (cf. proof techniques):

  Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
    The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in
    a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.

In your case, the quality of the work seems to be a non-issue due to the reputation of the mathematician, but what is an issue is the long-term availability of the document.

I ran into references to unpublished works a few times. For a particular example in my mind, everyone could find it, apparently, several decades ago, but now the document is gone. I must say I really hate it.

So, provide the reader with all the information you can find that would help them to get the manuscript. E.g.:

  Abra K. Dabra, On the importance of being published, 1883, Slovenian Philological Society, unpublished technical report, retrieved from the author's Web page http://www.example.com on 2018-02-30.

or

  Abra K. Dabra, On the importance of being published, 1883, Slovenian Philological Society, unpublished technical report, available from the library of the Slovenian Philological Society, street house-no, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.

or

  Abra K. Dabra, On the importance of being published, 1883, Slovenian Philological Society, unpublished, retrieved from jstor.org/... on 2018-02-30.

etc.

In addition, as @darij-grinberg says, you may ask the author to store his/her paper with an independent service for long-term archival purposes.

If you reference hard claims with their proofs, you might wish to copy the material to the appendix of your document to make your document self-contained. Of course, get the permission from the original author first, acknowledge him or her properly, and mark the corresponding part as a citation.


Applying for (externally-funded) postdoc position: how to follow-up after 1st email?

There's not a lot of specificity in this question, so I'll raise a few issues that struck me as being relevant:

You seem to be more interested in joining the department rather than working with a particular professor. The way you're describing it, you've contacted one professor but are prepared to contact another should this not pan out, heading down the department's staff list until you get a hit. I'm not going to comment outright on this technique or motivation. However, if you wish to be efficient about this, why not contact the head of department and state your case: you've got a fully-funded post-doc fellowship and would like to work in such-and-such area?
Your assessment of the chances of getting funding are not absolute and there might be some hesitation in the mind of the professor about the benefits of receiving the grant money on the one hand and your track record, competence, work ethic or some other factor on the other. It's not only about the money. What downside are we (or you) not seeing?
Not all fellowship awards are created equal. Money from some sources are prohibited by some labs. For example, if you came to us with money from British-American Tobacco, we'd be ineligible to even apply for, let alone receive grant money from important sources in the future.
The lab may simply be full. That is to say, someone has made a decision to impose a hiring freeze for reasons other than money. In my previous university, this happened just before "restructuring" took place resulting in major job losses.
Sending out email and expecting a quick response at this time of the year is extremely dicey. In my area, people go on holidays and don't emerge until in January or February. This might be poor timing.
Do you have any networks that extend to this lab or department? It might be worth your while mining them to see whether someone who knows someone can link you. A friendly introduction from a mutual acquaintance is much more effective than a cold call.

Good luck.


This appears to be a mirror of the CORE conference ranking. It's "official" in the sense that it is (if I remember correctly) maintained by a non-profit sponsored by the Australian government and heavily used in Australia. Everywhere else it's just an opinion point, like every other ranking. My impression is that it's one of the more widely accepted conference rankings, but of course there is still plenty to argue about.

Note that having the "one universally accepted ranking" is impossible to achieve. Different researchers value different things, and a conference that may be modestly interesting to one may be of highest quality to the other. Acceptance rates are also a fairly useless metric of assessing competitiveness, as many middling conferences (at least in my field) get overproportionally many terrible papers, which apparently the authors did not even try submitting to the top conferences.


How does a software application idea become a research project?

Your software idea may be able to become a piece of research if you can come up with a few things:

Research question. Ask a question relating to your software idea - for example, "How can we do X?" "What is a better design for X?" etc. Check the literature to see what has been said about this question (and related questions) by others.
Research result. What is the actual, novel contribution of your work? Is it a new technique that hasn't been done before? A rule of thumb for designing certain kinds of applications? A much better way to do a certain kind of task (for some reasonable definition of "better")?
Validation of research results. What kind of convincing evidence do you have that your result is sound? Depending on the type of result you claim, your evidence may be in the form of performance benchmarks of your technique relative to state of the art, user studies from users of your application, or something else entirely.

The best way to get a better understanding of what constitutes a research question, research result, or evidence, is to read a lot of papers in your field of interest.


What is the best way to tell a professor that my research interests are not limited to a specific topic?

I guess the answer depends on what kind of information you want to convey, and for what reason you want to make it clear that your interests are not limited to X area. "My research interests include X" is already non-exclusive - just because you say that you are interested in X doesn't mean that you aren't also interested in Y and Z, and most professors realize that students (and all their colleagues) have more than one small narrow area of interest. So you can just say that and be fine.

Basically, my point is that it's absolutely fine to tell a professor that you are interested in one specific area, as long as that area is sufficiently broad in your field. The goal is to find a professor whose interests match or are complementary to yours, so when you say "I am interested in X" he thinks "Ah, I have always wanted a student who would study X!" or at least "Hmmm, it might be good to have a student in my lab/group who studies X."

However, I would not say "My main research area is X, but I am open to other subjects as well." That makes it sound like you would be willing to change your area of interest if the right PI came along or to get into a specific program, and you don't want to convey that, as counterintuitive as that may seem. It makes you sound wishy-washy. You want to be regarded as a serious scholar with a deep interest in a particular area.


where to find the year and conference of a scientific article?

Background: Many researchers put their articles for download on their personal web pages. As most publishers insist on not allowing the researcher to put the "official" version there, but rather only the self-made PDF, this leads to articles often not having the journal/conference information on the first page (as this would require changing the article a bit, which is a bit of work to be done). Also, self-archived versions often appear before the conference, so that page numbers can only be missing, and might not be updated later.

Actual Answer: For CS, a good strategy is to just type "DBLP " into your favorite search engine. Many papers nowadays are listed on the DBLP page, which also allows you to just download the bibliographic information.

If a paper is not listed on DBLP, just searching for the paper title often yields the publisher's page of the article, which should have the information available.

If searching for the title does not yield any results, then the paper could be a limited circulation pre-print, which is stricly speaking not citeble. However, in such (hopefully few) cases, it makes sense to ask the person who gave you the article for bibliographic information.


Aggressive stalling of a publication: how do I publish?

I'll provide a different perspective. You do say that they are engaged in the process, ask for things and make changes. That doesn't look to me like they're actively trying to prevent you from publishing. Why would they spend time on the paper at all if their goal is to not have it published?

So, to me it sounds like the problem might at least partially be with you. So be constructive:

Draw up a list of things you still want to change on the manuscripts
Ask them what they still want to change
Create a timeline for this to happen

You're unlikely going to get anywhere by being antagonistic, and you need the papers for your career. So relax your stance, be pragmatic and flexible, and see whether you can elucidate what their concerns are and how they can be overcome through a concrete set of steps everyone can agree upon.


What does EE processing in peer review process mean?

Check out the canonical question, What does the typical workflow of a journal look like? Since EE is probably executive editor (per Nate Eldredge), that means your paper has passed the initial check. An editor has also been assigned. The next stage is editorial assessment:

  The editors decide whether the paper should enter the review process or should be rejected directly, e.g., because it does not fit the journal’s scope or requirements on importance or quality. A rejection at this (or the previous) stage is called desk reject. The paper may also be returned to the authors for reasons other than rejection, such as to request more data or clearer figures prior to formal review.

That's the stage your paper is likely at.


Applying for a PhD after taking a year off

I am in an academic field -- mathematics -- which must have one of the highest rates of "going straight through" of any academic field.  E.g. in mathematics it is quite common to get your PhD before the age of 30, which makes it almost impossible to spend significant time off.

The most important word in the above paragraph is significant.  Taking one year off between degree programs does not -- even in mathematics -- generate a blip on most admissions people's radar.  What that means is that you waited to finish the program you were in before applying to the next one: that's really quite reasonable.

I would mention how you spent your year off in your application materials precisely if it paints the rest of your application in a positive light.  E.g. if the job you took is relevant to the program you're applying for, go ahead and mention it.  If you just took that small amount of time to find yourself and generate sufficient resolve to attend a graduate program: no problem, but unless that fits perfectly into some narrative you'd like to spin I wouldn't dwell on it much in your application.

TL;DR: This is really not a problem.


What differences should an early career UK academic expect when moving to Australia (e.g., research culture, funding opportunities)?

I happen to be a PhD student in Computer Science in one of top 8 universities in Australia. I don't know much about the available grants, but there seems to be an early career research grant. More information about that and the grants in general in here: http://www.arc.gov.au/discovery-early-career-researcher-award

The Australian Research Council (ARC), in general, is the go-to source for information about government grants. Apart from that, if you are female, there are additional opportunities available such as this one: "APEC Women in Research Fellowship" and for Women in STEM through WISE program.

I don't know about the academic culture in the UK, but here is Australia research staff usually have a teaching load which is about 0.5 of your FTE. It can be more or less depending on the academic, but I'm not sure how it is decided. There are research only academics as well, with no teaching load, but they have a publication target to meet, I'm not sure what happens if they don't, most probably they receive teaching load.

In our university, there is a formal annual review for academic where you fill a form much like the one PhD students fill, but you have to meet targets on publication, teaching and PhD completions under your supervision.

Other than that the academic culture depends on your local research group. I am not sure about the expectations; I think it can depend. Most academics have a crew of PhD students and postdocs and these pump out publications like there is no tomorrow. A few others just chill and hang out, and I have seen them doing that for the past five years that I have been here, no publication or anything and they seem to be doing fine. So I think the expectations depends on non-trivial factors.

Congratulations on your move to Australia. I am just a PhD student so hopefully some academic can give you more detailed information.


Could it be more productive to work independently after PhD?

In academia, he might have

more exposure to interesting ideas (especially cross-field pollination),
better access to students and colleagues to exchange and refine ideas with,
as well as external pressure to be productive (which might be a good thing.)

While administrative work has never inspired me to have an interesting idea, teaching and mentoring students certainly has.

It all depends on the context he's able to set up for himself as an independent researcher. If he works better in isolation, maybe he'd be better off. If he can afford to hire other researchers and create an interesting intellectual environment, that might help.


Is it appropriate to email a professor during summer for a difficult question?

Let me try to answer some of the questions in the body of your post:

  In general, how do professors react to this? If you are a professor (who is not someone who doesn't care about students) please comment below. Are they annoyed, or are they ok with it/delighted? What if they are busy?

Of course the answers are "it depends". What does it depend on? Here are a few factors:

The tone of your email: of course, people tend to respond better to polite requests than something that seems demanding or pushy. You say the professor "might well be busy". I can guarantee you that he is busy. He may or may not make the time to answer your question nevertheless, but you should make clear that you understand he is not under any obligation to do so.
The difficulty of the question: you say your question is "rather difficult", but what is rather difficult for you may not be for a professor who is expert in the subject. If your question really is something complicated that will take a long time to type an answer to, people will be less inclined to spend that time just to satisfy your curiosity.
The clarity of the question: if you choose to write and ask, you should be absolutely sure that your question makes sense and is clearly and unambiguously stated. Nothing is more vexing than putting in time to answer someone's question only to have them change what they are asking.
Personality: some people just enjoy answering questions more than others; some people guard their time more closely than others.

Speaking just for myself, if I received such a question over the summer that was clearly written, not overly complicated, and phrased in a polite way, I would be pleased (maybe not "delighted"), and if I had time, I would try to answer.


How to cite a bookchapter that is accepted and To appear?

I'd suggest the following:

Accepted for publication

I've seen it several times and I usually use it like this. You could also use:

In press


Should I reply to emails for grad school that appear to be non specific?

You had taken an ETS-driven exam,already, and let ETS give your email address to the universities... These kind of emails would often be received by many graduate applicants, all over the world...

Hence, you should not assume that these emails are just for you, specifically based on your situation. There are just a bunch of advertisements to catch your attention for potential apply into them.

Furthermore, with due attention to the intrinsic information-based characteristics of these emails, one could assert that there is no need to take any reply into account.


Can I not ask my advisor for recommendation letter if I'm applying for an industry job?

It also sounds like you are considering giving up your doctoral studies. Let me suggest something different.

It seems to me that you want to try to maximize your future options and realize your potential. I recommend that, for now, you just follow your advisor's direction and get the degree finished and then move on to whatever it is you want to do. You should have plenty of time for a transition to another field after completion and holding the degree will leave you positioned for either an academic or industrial career.

It may be galling to have to submit, but the advisor has a certain amount of power. Think of him as a door that you need to get through to be a success.

At that point your immediate problem may go away and he might write you an appropriate letter.

On the other hand, not having his letter now would probably seem unusual to most employers, so you'd better have a good and honest explanation for why you don't have it. Disagreeing with and advisor isn't an especially valuable trait in the minds of many employers and they may not really understand the situation.


What is the difference between "introduction" and "motivation" sections

Introduction: WHAT
The introduction of a scientific publication is where you explain the background of your research. What are you building on? What does the reader need to know to properly understand your presented work? What is your hypothesis (if this sort of thing is relevant to your field)?
Motivation: WHY
The motivation section explains the importance behind your research. Why should the reader care? Why is your research the most groundbreaking piece of scientific knowledge since sliced bread (or CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing)?
Some people do combine the introduction and the motivation, it really depends on the research and the researcher. There is generally a fair amount of overlap between introducing related work, and then saying that your work goes above and beyond this previous research. Remember that these are just two of the big questions you need to answer with your paper. Others include:
Methods: HOW
Results: WHAT HAPPENED
Discussion: SO?


How can I make the introduction of a paper more "scientific" and less "popular"?

This is a common issue when inexperienced people write their first papers. It's tempting to write down everything that went into your personal understanding of a subject, rather than just starting from what's known and focusing on the new things you did.

Imagine if you looked up a recipe for a pie and the first 80% of it detailed the history of wheat cultivation, how wheat is made into flour, the way the tablespoon and teaspoon were defined as units of measure, statistics on the average consumption and enjoyment of pie throughout the 20th century, and so on. Imagine if you looked up the text of a new regulation and it started with "This law could be passed in our state legislature because, in 1773, the Boston tea party...". Imagine if a car repair manual started with the history of the wheel.

It's important to tell the public why science is important and why your studies make sense, but a paper isn't the place to do it. It's also not the place to give a full exposition of every technique you used. If you must, just put references to review articles or textbooks.


What to do when I suspect Research Integrity Office of covering up malpractice

Your first mistake was to report the irregularities to the relevant university. If that was the university of the offender, then their primary interest is to deflect/reduce any possible damage to their institution. Clearly, publicly uncovering unethical behaviour within its own university does not serve this purpose.

There have been documented cases in the UK, where the public reporting by the head of department (HoD) of plagiarism resulted in the sacking, not of the offender, but of the HoD, because of damage done to the University.

If you're seriously concerned, you should expose this to the editors of the respective journals or, better, to the public. The problem with the latter is, of course, that you may make strong enemies. One option may be to find allies, i.e. influential senior researchers in your field who are prepared to co-author any publication and/or to support/sign your letters to relevant editors.

In the end of the day, malpractice like this is drowned in the scientific discussion. If the results cannot be reproduced in independent studies, then they loose credibility and will be ignored. So perhaps, you should not spend too much frustrating effort on this.


Short Answer: Instead of looking for scholarships yourself, try to find a funding through academics and/or university in the UK. There are always funding available for talented students; and if not you can apply for a scholarship through an academic.

Longer Answer

Ok, I did my fully funded PhD in the UK so I can help on this. Do the following:

Find a Supervisor: First and foremost you need a solid supervisor that can help you through research, at the topic you want to work on; and understand that money is an issue.
Funding Through Supervisor: Then see if the supervisor has some money, he/she might not have 100% of the funding but can afford less say 50%.
Funding Through Research Group/University: Then you need to look into any funding available through the research group or the university. This might cover the rest, or close to 100% of the funding.
Take Classes Through PhD Studies: Academics always help PhD students, if they need some extra cash, they let them to help them in laboratories and/or marking. This is not too much but at least you can get couple of meals out of it.

Note On Location: If you can't find a funding in London or surrounding cities, try the northern cities as well. They are also cheaper to live compare to London and southern cities.

Note On Courage: I had a hard time financially, and so many of my friends. So keep going and you shall find a funding one way or another.


A friend helped me with a presentation – plagiarism or not?

My friend helped me with my assignment...I copied his table...does this constitute plagiarism?

Yes: You copied his work, doing so without attribution is plagiarism.


How to work on a joint math paper effectively?

As mentioned before, by other answerers, there is no way to answer this question accurately - it is a matter of taste, and the preference of  who you are working with. The best suggestion I think I can give is to use Overleaf

You need to work collaboratively on maths - Overleaf uses LaTex as its back-end, and allows real-time collaboration. Google docs also allows realtime collaboration, but you will likely suffer from formatting issues. Change control is done with git, which means you can also work offline and use git for conflict resolution in the content. You can use either the gui or the command line.

The rest of the questions (2-4) are purely issues of this particular paper, and thus impossible to answer definitively.


Tips on how to format a manuscript in marine biology and physiology

The general formatting advice from @CapeCode is sound. Generic font (certainly not anything odd) and 1.5-2 line spacing is fine for the text. Tables and figures should go at then end. Many journals ask for figure files not to be included in the manuscript file at all, follow such advise. If figures are separate all figure captions go at the end of the manuscript file.

Regarding line numbers it is not a major issue unless the journal specifies something special. Some manuscript systems provide only PDF-files of the manuscript. Some reviewers then prefer to have the line numbers to locate their comments. If the journal provides the Word files then as @Cape Code states these can be more of an issue. So try to see if you can figure out what the journal sends out but in the end I do nto think it is a major issue.

In addition, I strongly want to push following any instructions for authors to the point. Make sure your use the proper reference formats and follow other journal formatting details. If no explicit instructions for authors exist then look at recent articles to see what styles the journal uses. A manuscript that follows the journal style looks more serious than a manuscript that does not.

As for length, I would say that 6000-8000 words incl. references is a reasonable size for a regular research paper in your disciplines, shorter is possible but longer should be treated as a warning. If you really want to know just count the words on a page and guestimate the total for the article, you will not be far off.


1) Make a list of what is most important to you: Is it the reputation of the university, the quality of the students, the cultural environment, the outdoors? Those things you cannot really negotiate, but they may drive your decision. Or is it research support, salary, title, teaching load, etc? All of these things you can negotiate. If you want to bring these up, prioritize. Don't just list everything, simply because you have heard that other people have negotiated these aspects of their position.

2) Be positive, be open, and be straightforward. People get annoyed with you if they think you are wasting their time, or if they think your just a habitually disgruntled academic. When you ask for X explain how this will improve your productivity, and help the department/college/university succeed.

3) It's totally o.k. to talk salary, but try to be informed. What is the salary structure in your current/new department (this is public information in public universities, and not exactly a secret in private institutions)? Where do you reasonably fit in, in terms of age/accomplishment/etc? Ask for a little more than your looking for, but not something ridiculous.

4) If there is an issue that dominates all others, say so (standard example: spousal hires). But if you do make one issue central, you have to be prepared to walk away. And again, be positive ("I love this place, but if university X makes an offer to my spouse, I will take the job.")


Course design: basics first or teach "as you go"

I assume you know your students better than I do, but this would depend to a certain amount on what sorts of things they expect. At base, it seems like they are expecting/wanting a course in robotics. Starting out with something different might disappoint them and turn them against you in a way that could be hard to "make up" later. This implies doing statistics/probability "just in time".
However, students who are used to, and comfortable with, highly theoretical courses might be fine with "basics first."
But another alternative is to give them, early on, a set of readings on probability that you advertise as being essential a bit later in the course, while you focus on the robotics part. The better students might spend some time scanning, at least, those readings, making it easier to do the probability stuff when it becomes essential. You might even be able to find a vehicle for responding to questions on the readings without cutting too much into the time you spend on robotics early on.
And, of course, if their expectation is that robotics is just "applied probability" then theory first would likely be better.
But, think first of the student expectations and work to satisfy that as much as is reasonable.


How can I politely remind my professors about a recommendation letter they promised?

Dear Professor X,

  Just a friendly reminder that my recommendation letters to schools A, B, C are due on [dates].

  Thanks very much for writing letters for me.  Please let me know if any questions come up.

  Sincerely,

  Your Name

It's as simple as that.  No need to overthink this.

Note that it's pretty normal for professors to wait until close to the deadline to write recommendation letters, and shouldn't in itself be cause for concern.  Part of it is the natural tendency of people to put things off until they are urgent.  In the case of recommendation letters, there are also a couple of rational reasons for it.  One is that in case something significant happened to you between March 14 and now,  either good or bad (published a paper, received an award, failed a class), they'll be able to mention it in their letter.  Another is that if you had changed your mind about applying to some or all of your schools, they wouldn't have wasted the time writing and submitting an unnecessary letter.

Anyway, you don't get to be a professor without having a lot of practice in successfully meeting deadlines, one way or another.  It is unlikely that they've forgotten about your letter, but still, a reminder doesn't hurt.


I've seen it many times on applications, and it made not a shred of a difference. We did occasionally have Iranian applicants, which is probably the most problematic case, but again it made no difference -- if we wanted to hire someone because of their qualifications, we still did not care about visa issues because that's someone else's problem. For any other nationality, it was a non-issue that wasn't even talked about.

To show you what else doesn't matter: Because I'm German, I put my nationality, birthday, and marital status on my CV for all my postdoc and assistant prof applications. It made no difference: I got invitations to interviews and offers regardless. I don't do it any more because I've learned that that's not typically done in the US. But it really made no difference one way or the other, neither legally nor as far as the hiring committee is concerned.

In summary: You're overthinking the issue :-)


Are IELTS past tests available for students preparing for the exam?

You may use the books available in which some preparation exams (sample tests and past tests) are published and you can study those exams and sample tests. Some of these books and preparation materials are available in How do I prepare? page on IELTS official website, Cambridge English Exams and IELTS books and books about IELTS by other publishers.

If you are seeking for free online sample exams and studying materials, there are some preparation materials for exam available in different websites over the net, which you can find by a simple search.


Options to publish a paper "as is" without being able to produce "more results"

First: Put your paper on the arxiv. It's a preprint server. Then the work is "out there" and you are still free to submit it to any reasonable journal (as noted in the comments, not every journal takes papers that are already on a preprint server, so check that in advance). So my short answer is: do both.


What distinguishes acceptable use of a preprint server from unacceptable dual publication?

Although there is conceivably that "archival" issue, involving the potential question of "which is the authoritative version?", I don't think that is the genuine point here.
So far as I can observe, the contemporary issues here are two: first, about "getting credit" twice for "one piece of work", and, second, about making referees (working for free) waste their time and energy.
In mathematics, in the U.S., decades ago, while it was nice to have more papers rather than fewer, it seemed to me that the real gauge of a person was not paper-count at all, but the aggregate of their work/ideas. The idea of worry about "self-plagiarism" did not make much sense then, and it still does disturb me, insofar as it seems to me reasonable to write/speak about one's ideas "endlessly", without having to promise to never repeat oneself. For that matter, some things are worth repeating, after all.
The not-wasting-referees'-time objection is more legitimate, to my mind.
In particular, then, in math, in the U.S., putting things on arXiv scores no publication-status-points (in math, currently), for many purposes. So it cannot possibly lead to double-counting in any score-keeping game. And there's no refereeing, so no waste of peoples' time.
Similarly, if one does a pay-to-publish publication, whoever's time it may or may not waste, it doesn't score any points status-wise, so there's no double-counting. (Unless one imagines that one's CV-readers don't know the differences among journals/venues.)
Back to the "archival" issue: conceivably traditional journals will maintain their documents longer than others...? Unclear.


Google Scholar - how to make English profile name show same citations as Cyrillic alphabet search results?

just saw this question on Twitter by chance, and I think I can answer it. At the moment, Google Scholar search results are not affected by the fact the person you're searching has created a Google Scholar Citations account. The correct way to search for this Russian researcher on Google Scholar would be:

author:"[cyrillic spelling]" OR author:"[latin spelling]"

That way you would get both sets of citations.


How can I better deal with position papers?

Writing position papers does not require any special innate talent or disposition. You can develop these skills through the combination of systematic method and frequent practice.

First, you need to understand that a "position paper" (a.k.a. "analysis paper") is very different from a "survey paper" or an "essay".  A position paper is somewhat similar to a legal argument for each side of the question.  Your only goal is to communicate and evaluate the arguments for and against each alternative.  You don't have to describe the whole issue, its history, its cultural setting or social significance, or many other issues. Deconstructing the question or alternatives is not in-scope for a position paper.  Neither is your impressions, experience, or personal value judgments.  Don't go "meta".  (Those are in-scope for an essay.)

Here's the method, boiled down to its essence:

Be clear about the scope of the question and alternatives. Make
assumptions if you have to fill in blanks.
Identify an ideal advocate for each alternative or position, even if you imagine a fictionalized advocate.
For each alternative and idealized advocate, make an outline of the following:

Their strongest argument in favor of that alternative
Their strongest argument against the other alternatives
Their counter-arguments to the criticisms of the advocates of the other positions

Once your outline is complete, rewrite it in sentence and paragraph form.
Finally, add introduction paragraphs setting up the debate and conclusion paragraphs that evaluate the relative strengths of the various arguments.

From your professor's point of view, the most important paragraphs are the conclusions where you decide which of the arguments is most compelling and with the least number of unanswered flaws or voids.

In your example:

  Learner-centered approaches should replace teacher-centered approaches

Who best advocates learner-centered approaches?  Who best advocates teacher-centered approaches?  What arguments do they advance to support their positions?  What criticisms do they level at the other?

In examining these arguments, the following questions might come to your mind to compare and contrast the positions: Do they both agree on the criteria are for "best" or "better"? Whose values and needs are most important? Do they both agree on what the implications are for "change" vs "status quo"?

What evidence does each advocate have to support their position?  What credibility and relevance does the evidence have?  What are the uncertainties and voids (lack of information) in each position.  (No argument is perfect or free from some uncertainty.)

The best way to learn this is to practice it frequently. The best way to practice it frequently is to start a blog and write a post every day or every other day on a topic area that is important to you. Aim for 'minimalist' position posts, which are probably four paragraphs.

After you do this for a couple of months, you will find that you are no longer seeking your professors' feedback regarding whether you are giving them what they expect to see.  Your confidence and efficiency will rise.


Is it advisable to upload your PhD thesis on Biorxiv?

This is not allowed on bioArxiv, consider using Arxiv instead:

https://www.biorxiv.org/about/FAQ

  bioRxiv does not permit the posting of news, product advertisements,
  teaching materials, policy statements, theses, dissertations, student
  projects, recipes and simple protocols.


Is it a good idea to go to a university just because of its high international ranking?

Is it a good idea to go to “National University of Singapore”

It may be. I have recently visited NUS, and talked to a lot of smart faculty and some truly outstanding students. Personally, I can only recommend both NUS and NTU Singapore. Singaporean universities are well-funded and offer a reasonable research environment. Singapore itself is also a nice place to live, with a quite interesting mixture of different cultures, lots of food, high standard of living, etc.

  just because of its high international ranking?

Oh god no.

If you want to go to NUS, then because of the reasons stated above. It think convincing the world that university-level rankings are a good thing is the largest disservice that the US has done to research. Let me make this clear - if you graduate from NUS and do uninteresting research, nobody will hire you. If you graduate from another reasonable university and do good research, you will find a post.

  Do you think that going to the NUS can help me to get accepted into world top universities in the future?

Only for the reasons stated above - NUS has an environment that certainly enables you to do world-class research. For this reason, NUS may certainly help you get into a top university, but it does not make you accepted. The hard part (being a good researcher) will still be required from you.


I think there is a TeX.SE question that deals with this. The details are not clear to me, but it appears that with a little work you can use TikZ with LaTeX to draw a plane:

This TeX.SE example used a variety of tools including Inkscape, Sketch, Blender, and Cinema4D (of which only Cinema4D is not FOSS) to produce:

From what I can piece together from this TeX.SE answer, details of how the above diagrams are made is available in Italian here. A Google Translate version of the abstract is:

This article shows how you can use the power of LATEX and PSTricks and TikZ packages in the production of advanced illustrations . The creation of designs that represent the three-dimensional scenes with directions of scientific content is made possible with LATEX . The author shows how it is able to manipulate and arrange three-dimensional objects in a scene with the program Sketch of Eugene Ressler edil its intuitive scripting language , getting a ' output in the form of PSTricks or TikZ commands . The proposed working method allows to overcome the limitations that users of a package as PSTricks , which also has relatively advanced three-dimensional drawing capabilities , meet whenever are going to want to draw and manipulate three-dimensional scenes containing objects simple and primitive .
The teaching of a subject such as engineering Flight Dynamics is a field in which he operates, and which they refer to the specific examples given in the article

which suggests that Cinema4D may not be critical.


Duke University's sports mascot is the "Blue Devil"  The library's logo references this mascot.


Fixing mistakes from math's thesis and put that to the Internet?

Yes, several people have done that (including myself, though the errors were typos). It is almost always looked upon positively in the academic community.

Will the industry look positively upon it? Not sure. On the one hand, it's a positive that you are taking responsibility for what you wrote and correcting the record despite not being required to. On the other hand, it's a negative (for them) that you are still doing research despite intending to leave academia. Most realistically, they won't care or even notice.

Do you have to disclaim that it is your thesis? I don't think so. Writing "corrected version of my thesis" or "thesis (updated)" should be perfectly enough; I don't recall anyone getting in trouble for it. Out of an abundance of caution, I would remove whatever parts of it signal that it is literally the version you submitted -- such as the university's logo and whatever statement you made on the first page about it being your thesis. (Readers won't care about them anyway.)

Don't declare it "learning material", though, unless it has genuine expository value.


Mathematics is a highly specialized subject.  Unless you're an exceptional mathematician, you are not going to do research in all of mathematics.  You're not even going to do research in all of algebraic topology.  Rather, you'll become a specialist in Glauznov operators on stable homotopy groups of Alberti spaces (example entirely made up).

As a (rather unfairly wrong but not without merit) starting point, you can assume that mathematicians are all solipsists interested only in their own problems.  A seminar talk serves as an opportunity for one mathematician to advertise their problems and solutions in the hope that mathematicians in the audience will find the ideas they hear useful in their own work, or, even better, mathematicians in the audience will actually become interested in the speaker's problems.

The truth is that, as far as leading to publications is concerned, 95% of the seminar talks I go to will be a waste of an hour.  However, it's also true that I won't solve 95% of the problems I make initial attempts on.

As a first year graduate student, you are not going to get much out of the technical details of seminar talks.  What you can get (at least if the talks are good) is some flavor of different areas of mathematics so that you can make a more informed choice about what to specialize in.  At some point, you will need to spend a year or two reading up on the background to something you hear about in one seminar talk.  If you go to a lot of seminar talks, you will have a better idea of what you will want to end up spending a year or two reading up on.  In addition, you will get some idea of the broader range of ideas that might be indirectly useful to whatever problem you end up working on, so that you will know which experts to contact and what to learn if you need help on some aspect of your problem that is not directly suggested in the prior literature.


Should I consider legal action if my attempts to persuade my university to allow me to complete my PhD prove unsuccessful?

My broad diagnosis of your situation is that your time in your PhD program was too short and too long ago to give you a clear understanding of what the process of getting a PhD entails.  That lack of understanding is definitely going to cause you problems so should be addressed right away.  What other problems you may have, if any, is hard to tell at this point.

Let me now try to address some specifics:

  Nobody has told me that I cannot complete my PhD yet. The university has not responded yet, and I suspect they never will.

I'm already a bit lost.  The university will certainly respond to halfway reasonable questions directed to the right people.  Whom are you asking?  You should start by talking to people in your department: your advisor, the director/coordinator/chair/whatever of graduate studies, the department head....

  I am considering legal action. I'm wondering whether I shouldn't just force the institution's hand with (at least) the threat of legal action, rather than expecting someone else to fight my battles for me. At the same time, however, I don't want to start issuing threats. I would do anything to avoid legal action, to be frank.

Please read this over yourself.  It's conflicted bordering on contradictory.  But let me chime in: no, you should absolutely not try to "force the institution's hand" with the threat of legal action -- certainly not at this point, and in my opinion and experience, virtually never for someone in your broad situation.  The institution knows its own rules and policies intimately and you don't seem to know them at all.  The institution employs a team of lawyers; you do not.  A legal threat is not going to spook them into any positive action.

Also, IANAL and doubly not a lawyer in the UK, but in order to bring legal action you need to have some legal basis: a law they broke, a contract they breached, something like that.  You didn't mention any such thing.  Timing out your PhD may not be very nice, but that's not the same thing at all.

  If I were allowed to do so, I could likely complete in October 2018, so three years late.

You haven't been in academia for several years, but you think you could complete your PhD within three months from now?  Unless you have a completed thesis ready to go (or better, already submitted to your committee) that is basically impossible.  Your unrealistic time frame is a bit worrisome to me.

  I made a breakthrough in my second year, which would be the subject of my thesis. This work has been ratified by colleagues both within and outside of academia.

This is a key point in regard to how close you are to finishing your PhD.  "Ratified" is a strange word to use, and "outside of academia" is not very relevant either.  If your "breakthrough" resulted in a publication in a strong journal, then you're going in the right direction.  But you still need to work out with your thesis advisor whether the work of this publication alone is sufficient to be written up into a thesis (such writing may or may not take substantial extra time).  If you haven't spoken to your thesis advisor about this -- or, and here I am cringing as I type and hoping I am way off, if you don't have a thesis advisor -- then you are much less close to finishing than you think, and whatever acclaim you have gotten from people outside of your department is good rather than bad but not nearly so directly relevant as you seem to think.

Let me end where I began: please talk to your advisor or other sympathetic department personnel.  Please do not try to strong arm the institution at this time.  Good luck.


What should someone do if he/she found a very similar published paper to his/her thesis work?

There is no question about how to tell your advisor. Just do it. He or she will help you decide what to do. If the work is independent and the other paper is obscure enough you might have no problem with your degree, but might not be able to publish this work as is.

Not to tell your advisor would be a serious breach.

However, if it is work that you should have known about (literature search, etc), then you may be unable to use it at all and have to revise your research plan. An extension of the work might be one option.

At the doctoral level the answer would be a bit different, leaning more toward abandonment of the work, but, depending on your advisor and any committee involved, you may be ok.

I'll note here as I have other places, that parallel work (and overlapping work) is very common, especially in fields with a lot of research activity. Your advisor will know about this, I'm sure.

The age of the other work is a bit of a problem, of course, but it can reasonably happen this way in certain cases.


Permissions required for using an app for a study

Yes, of course you should mention the name of the app. You have to provide details of your methodology. You should also cite the app (I see this commonly done by citing the app store page for it, but maybe your field has a different convention).
I have never heard of a researcher obtaining permission to run a study involving particular software. I have led or collaborated on about ten human-subjects studies involving a variety of free and commercial software.


While the formal title is Dr. des., there are good reasons to simply use the form of address you would use to a “final” doctor: the title is only temporary, and the person will eventually have the title or Dr.; moreover, PhD candidates having freshly attained their goal will probably enjoy you using it.

For those who wonder what Dr. des. is, it's a temporary title, like US presidents are “president elect”:

  Following a successful defence, the title of Doctor designatus (Dr. des.) may be used until the doctoral degree is gained.


Shoud I accept an offer as editor of a journal as an undergraduate?

No, you should not accept an editorial position as an undergraduate, or as a graduate student.  It probably will not be good for the academic community, and it almost certainly won't be good for you.  There are multiple clear reasons:

Editorial work is service to the professional community.  To be done well, it requires a significant time investment.  Early in your career (meaning: until you get tenure), your time should be focused as much as possible on research.  Senior people in your field usually recognize this and editorial positions are usually offered to people at the associate professor level or higher.
The journal is probably not reputable.  I know I'm contradicting your claim, and I may be wrong in your particular case, but I will be right in saying this at least 99% of the time.  Very few undergrads know what journals are reputable.  I received a few invitations to editorial boards as a student, but not from any reputable journals.  No reputable journal in my field has a student (undergraduate or graduate) on their board.  Even if the student were brilliant (or especially in that case) point #1 above would dictate that they avoid this.
You aren't qualified.  Again, you may be the most brilliant person in your field, but that's not the main requisite for editorial work.  To be a good editor you need extensive experience in reading and writing papers.  You need a network of colleagues you know well whose expertise covers a broad swath of your field, who you can invite to review papers.  I've never met a graduate or undergraduate student who had both of these things already.

For context, I can think of a brilliant friend who published a lot of papers as a student, won prizes for some of them, and even skipped the postdoc phase, going straight into an assistant professorship at a top-notch research university.  He certainly wasn't qualified to be an editor when he was a grad student, and accepting an editorial position before he became an associate professor would have been a mistake, for all the reasons above.

Note also that if the journal invites you to apply for an editorial position (i.e., if you need to send them a CV) then the journal is not reputable and you should stay far away.  Respected journals will know who you are and have already considered carefully before inviting you to the editorial board.

You probably should not accept an editorial position when you are a postdoc, and you should perhaps think twice about it as an assistant professor.


Normal length of time taken to arrive at a phd admission decision?

In my experience it's common for academic departments to have a graduate admissions committee that meets periodically to make admissions decisions and decisions on financial aid.  Sometimes decisions on financial aid are made separately from decisions on admission.

In our department we review applications as they come in and typically respond with a decision on admission within a few weeks.  However, decisions on financial aid are made only a few times per year.  For example, we'll meet in early April to decide on assistantship awards for the fall semester.

Under this system, if you applied for admission now, we'd review your application and reach an admissions decision by the end of January, and you'd either be told "no", or "you've been admitted but we'll make decisions about financial aid in early April."

I've seen other institutions where all of the applications are held until one meeting where both admissions and financial aid decisions are made at the same time.  Under that system, you probably wouldn't hear anything at all until the committee met and made its decisions.

A couple of other comments:

Applications are often sent to a central office ("graduate studies" or something similar)  and then distributed to the departments to make admissions decisisons.  In my experience, there are many incomplete applications received by our graduate office.  We don't see them in the department until and unless all of the required materials have been submitted.  You can and probably should check with the office where you sent your application to make sure that the complete application has been received.
Christmas (December 25) and New Year's Day (January 1) are important holidays in the US.  Traditionally, fall semester classes end before Christmas and spring semester classes don't start until after New Year's Day.  Many colleges and universities are effectively closed for a few weeks around these holidays.  You shouldn't expect to hear anything from any university in the US until after New Year's Day because of these holidays.


Anyone who cares what these courses are will know what a Special Topics course is, i.e. that it's a course placeholder in the scheduling and reservation system for courses that may be taught infrequently or even once, and ask you about the topic(s). This is a very common construct at universities in the US that I am familiar with, and shouldn't be a problem for you since you will have an opportunity to tell them what the topics were.


Is it possible to do a Master's in Mathematics after a Bachelor's in Economics?

If I were in your position, I would look at the requirements for admission to Master's programs at universities you're interested in and see if you can find a way to fit their requirements into your required curriculum.

For instance, here are the admission requirements at my university. I'm not sure if it's top-10, but definitely top-20. At this school a degree in math is not required for admission to grad school. It looks like they require up to an analysis course and some abstract algebra. This is likely only a few classes beyond your required calc+linear algebra classes for your economics degree.


How direct should I be in my email to a potential Msc advisor?

It's a bit of an art and a stochastic process because depending on the personality of you and the recipient same tactic can have opposite results. With that in mind, you can aim for an approach that is most efficient, courteous, and professional.

First a disclaimer: my experience is only relevant to the U.S. Generally, most researchers are wary of saying yes to supervising anyone without knowing the person. So, asking if he/she will supervise you from the get go can lead to a high rejection rate. And in the same time, you want to use your time efficiently so going in as a 100% academic consultation may not be the best for your interest, as some researchers may be interested to talk to you, but they may not have any funding or effort available to guide you.

To increase the success rate, I'd recommend starting with an introduction to describe who you are and what you are planning to do in the next academic stage. Then, ask for a defined amount of time  for an information meeting (30-minute is a sweet spot for me, 45-min is also fine but I'd avoid asking for any commitment for more than an hour). Lay out the major items you want to discuss, include using part of the meeting to ask academic questions that are pertinent to the researcher, and express the interest to learn more on optimizing your application process and tips in looking for an advisor, etc.

If you have a short, well-formatted resume, by all means attach with the e-mail for the recipient to "better understand your background before the talk."

The overall goal is to make the e-mail low-risk but with clear purposes. During the meeting if they are interested they may mention any opportunities that are available. And if they can't be your supervisor, they may still be able to connect you with somebody if you have impressed them enough.

Another tip is try to seek for a referral if possible. For example, if someone you want to meet has collaborated with one of your professors with whom you are in a good standing, check with that professor and see if he/she will be able to introduce you.

After the meeting, regardless of the result, send a thank you e-mail or a thank you card for their time and advice.

Good luck!


Should I thank the editor for accepting my paper?

I don't see anyone reason why you shouldn't. Although, don't thank them for accepting the paper. A good editor will accept an article by someone they dislike or they wholeheartedly disagree with but which makes a good argument. It's their job. It's not a favor to you personally.

In addition, you can mention it where you acknowledge everybody else who contributed with their comments. It's not uncommon to see papers whose authors thank editors or (anonymous) reviewers for their comments if they went beyond what is ordinarily expected of them.  This seems to be the case here.


When does a statistical consultant become a co-author or collaborator?

This is not an easy question, as are many other questions about coauthorship. To an extent, all answers will be opinion-based.

I am in a similar position. I work in industry but advise many of my wife's clinical & biological psychology students on statistical matters.

My personal cutoff point is somewhat later than yours seems to be. I'll happily invest three or four hours to help students clean up and understand their data, do some exploratory data analysis and plots and some simple models and release them into the wild with an initial R script. If that is the full extent of my engagement, I would be uncomfortable with coauthorship (but an acknowledgement would be appropriate).

Often, things go further than this. After this initial session, I'll code up more complex analyses, more sophisticated graphics, maybe research special models or approaches and/or read up on stuff. This usually involves some work on my own, multiple email exchanges and more personal meetings. At this point, we usually agree that I get coauthorship, and as you write, this means that I'll be a lot more involved in the rest of the manuscript's lifecycle.

I'll usually not write up the statistical methods section as you appear to do. My take is that the first author should have full ownership of the manuscript and should essentially understand everything in sufficient depth to describe even the statistics himself. After all, he will be the one to present it at conferences and/or thesis defenses. (It helps that psychologists get a lot of statistical training.) Of course, I'll go over and correct the methods sections, and I happily rarely find that the student fundamentally misunderstood the statistics.

If things have progressed far enough for me to be a coauthor, I'll usually be quite involved with the rest of the manuscript, too. I am rather anal-retentive and will happily nitpick the entire structure of the paper, the internal logic, grammer and punctuation. I don't know whether nitpickery is more generally a specific skill of statisticians, though... Of course, in maybe half of all submissions, reviewers ask about the statistics, and I often have to revisit the statistical analysis and/or at least its description.

Coauthorships arrived at in this way are actually pretty low-effort for me. Other people on the author list have spent weeks interviewing people in African refugee camps, juggling noxious chemicals in a lab and/or digging through prior publications. I, on the other hand, spend maybe one full work week altogether (sometimes more), sitting in a comfortable chair at my computer with a cup of coffee within reach. It's comparisons like these, and I'd guess that most statistical engagements are similar, that make me uncomfortable starting to discuss coauthorship after only one hour.

Laying down ground rules early on, as you suggest, is an excellent idea. Part of these should be how much time you can afford before thinking about coauthorship, whether this is 20 minutes or four hours.

One other thing, which the blog post you link to discusses, is that you as the statistician will need to understand the scientific context, so the researcher will have to spend some time explaining the situation to you. This time will need to come out of the initial "budget", since time does not grow on trees. Your client will usually try to handwave this away and insist that he only has "a little statistical question". This will usually not make much sense. If a client insists, you can always point him to CrossValidated for his "little question". If he gets a good answer there, great.


How to sign your email to students, so to avoid their immature behavior?

Like JeffE's comment, I always prefer students to call me by my first name. My male and female, Asian and white colleagues also prefer to be called by their first name. There are some exceptions where they insist on some title according to local custom for showing respect. However, I do not have the problem you describe (students expecting unreasonable things and acting in completely unprofessional ways). The reasons that I do not have to deal with these problems is because I simply do not accept them.

Actually, I am fairly strict but also fair and I always try to be open, transparent, and predictable to my students. They know if they arrive to class late, they are absent. If they submit late, they fail. They want more time, they won't get it.

I do not see how what I allow them to call me (excluding rude names) would result in overly familiar behavior. Indeed, many of my Asian colleagues are far closer to students than I would ever allow myself to become. The ones who demand more formal forms of address are the ones who seem to get the closest with students. Perhaps this is how they remind students that they are still the teacher.

In short, student behavior is driven by your attitude towards them and you can convey a tone of seriousness in the relationship without requiring formal salutations.


How to cite primary source that's also featured in a book

You might write something like "chef X pointed me to this recipe for {dish}: book Y, page Z".


When changing fields from undergrad to PhD, which department should recommendation letters come from?

I agree with blackace that you should probably be OK, but let me sketch what some of the drawbacks are:

Ideally, an application to math grad school will have recommendations from mathematicians.  The further you get away from that, the less meaningful the letters are.  (For example, at least once per year I see a letter from an English professor, which is utterly unhelpful.)  The basic issue is that you need recommenders who really understand what it takes to succeed in math grad school and as a mathematician.  Fortunately, physics is close enough that physicists can do a pretty good job of judging this, so you should be OK.  In my experience, the admissions committee will worry about two things:

One is that physicists may not appreciate certain math-specific issues.  For example, the expected coursework and background.  A physicist may not fully understand the extent to which someone's background is nonstandard or deficient for the math program they are applying to.

A second reason is the belief that most people's standards go down a little when making recommendations for other fields.  If someone is applying to the top schools in your field, you know very well what the standards and competition are like, and you have something invested in the system and your own reputation as a recommender.  In practice, recommenders from other fields seem to be a little more cavalier about making strong recommendations based on a feeling that the applicant is smart, rather than a comparison with the rest of the applicant pool.  This means recommendations with be taken with a grain of salt.

So if you have equally good prospects for letters writers from math and physics, you should choose the mathematicians for math applications.  On the other hand, a physicist who knows you is still a good choice, much better than a mathematician who doesn't know you.  (But a mathematician who doesn't know you is a better choice than an English professor who does.)


Yes. I would have a separate section of your paper entitled something like "Further exploratory analysis", report what you did and what you found, and note that until a study has been design to specifically test your hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis, but suggest that it might be an attractive target for further study.


Is it ok to call the professor in this situation?

First, ask yourself whether you are sending the right email.

One of my professor mentors had a very useful heuristic for ensuring effective communication with busy people.  For any busy person, email typically gets triaged into three bins:

Email that can be safely ignored.
Email that can be responded to with trivial effort, thereby clearing it from their "todo list."
Email that requires non-trivial effort to respond, and must be put off for later... and later may be a long time, because now it's competing with their other "large" duties.

If you want a response from a busy person, write a short email that includes precisely one question, and make sure that question is easy to respond to.  For example, in your case, if you send email saying:

  Here is my research proposal, as discussed.  Can you please send me feedback?

then that might get no response until the professor has the feedback ready, and preparing your feedback may get pushed off and pushed off again.  The professor might also misremember the deadline and have a lesser sense of urgency.
If instead you write:

  Here is my research proposal, as discussed.  Please recall that I must submit before the deadline of XXX, and I would like time to revise if necessary.  When can I expect your feedback?

In this you've posed an easy question, which should get a response, and also gotten them to commit to a specific date.  If you don't get a response in a day or two from an "easy" email like this, then you need to wonder whether this person is actually somebody you want to work with.

What, however, if you send the right email, get them to commit to a date, and then they fail to either respond or tell you they need more time?  At that point, I would recommend against either emailing or calling on the phone.  Instead, go find the professor in person.  I have found that with busy people who fail on their commitments, that finding them in person is the best way to get yourself back in their queue.  Again, however, you should ask yourself whether you really want your whole Ph.D. to be this way, because it is likely to be a pattern...


How to pay for or avoid publishing cost without research funding and without limiting journal choice

Can the cost be shared among co-authors? Is it common for the first author to ask money to the co-authors to pay for the publishing costs?

It is not common to share the fee of one publication. However it is common to ask for a collaborator to pay the full fee if he has a funded project and then you pay for other publication in the future.

  Are there certain journals that might waive the publication fee given the financial circumstances?

Yes. I am from a country which suffered several cuts in science due to the 2008 crisis and my research center was left without funding for several years. Due to the lack of fundings my supervisor started to ask for fee waiver and he got several waivers from Open Access journals, such as: PlosOne, Plos Computational Biology, Nature Scientific Reports, etc.

In the PLOS journals he is used to get 50% of discount and in the Scientific Reports he got 100%. The Sci.Rep. staff asked for the research center budget in order to deliberate if they would give a discount or not.

Usually you can find the waiver policy in the website of each journal.


The problems seems to me to have started here:

  Nevertheless, I applied since I believe the value of a phd is up to yourself, not the popularity of the supervisor.

I think we can both agree that a research group in anthropology would also have very few publications related to your topic. But you can also see that doing an electrical engineering PhD in an anthropology group would be a horrible choice. They simply wouldn't have the expertise to help you and could offer no possibility to cooperate with your research.

To a lesser extent the same is true for different sub-fields of a large discipline like electrical engineering. If your topic of interest is far removed from the rest of the group, the rest of the group won't have the expertise to help you or the possibility to cooperate with you. This is a very bad thing.

One way to (partially) solve this problem is to modify your topic or switch topics to be more in line with the rest of the group. This seems to be what is proposed here to you.

Your proposed solution is to ask them to send you abroad and to continue with a topic that is not really related to their research. The question now is: why should they agree to this? They invested resources in you by either paying you or at least supporting you and spending time on you. In return you offer to do research at a different institution on a subject that doesn't really touch any of the research done at the group. That would mean that at the end of your PhD, the group would have spend (considerable) money into research they aren't interested in. That sounds like a very bad deal for the group.

If I were to summarize this: you applied and got a PhD at a group without looking at what that group does. After a year of doing a PhD there, you now realize what the group does and conclude that the group is a bad fit.

You have 2 options now as I see it: continuing with this group and focus your topic to be more in line with the research of the group. The other option is to quit now. In that last case the group would see (considerable) resources go to wast because you neglected to properly look into what the group does beforehand. This as you worried looks very bad, because why wouldn't something similar happen at a new group? If you quit, then I hope you can find a good answer to this question when applying to any future PhD.

As for the communication and language issues: I would find this a separate and smaller issue. Here an open and honest conversation about how you perceive the communication in the group and what problems you encounter could work wonders. The problems regarding research topics however is much more fundamental and more serious.


Waiting for approval from professor to write letter of recommendation

Rather than contact the other university, make sure that the professor in question is aware of the time situation. But, if everything else is in place for your application, it seems unlikely that the university would withdraw the position for any single piece of information that isn't completely in your control.
You might want to consider asking an intermediary, such as another professor or the department head, to make contact with the professor to provide a bit of a nudge.
Let the other university know, perhaps, that you have requested the letter from Prof XYXXY.


Apply for PhD positions with only one (or no) reference (letter of recommendation)

The answers to your questions relatively:

No. He is currently very angry with you. Because probably he lost a lot of reputation. A letter of recommendation does not only mean "Take this guy, he's great.", but also means "I entirely trust this guy and I guarantee that he will not leave you in the lurch." By getting acceptance and not taking the offer is usually interpreted as hesitancy. Thus, people from the labs you've turned down will consider your advisor as someone who easily recommends a student. They will think that a student does this even at the beginning will easily give up on tough research duties.
Conspiracy theory: the subsequent rejections may be the result of grapevine. In my country, top universities' professors are usually classmates or former colleagues. If a student applies with a good background and strong recommendations, they call each other and ask about that student. You know, if that they ever heard about that guy, who is considerable. And guess what if one or two of them told: "I accepted him and he ended up not even starting."

I think, for a short period of time, you should lower your standards. Try applying a lab in your field.

Don't send consecutive mails to your advisor. Talk to him face-to-face. Ask him if you can do something to make it up. At that point, you should be prepared to take no for an answer.


3 3-hour exams in a row with no time in between. What can I do?

Whether this is a standard practice or not highly depends on your university. However, the attribution of these exam period is an automated process and some situations like yours are bound to happen.

If I were you, I would consult the specific rules of your University. I know at that my previous Canadian University in Montreal (École Polytechnique), there was a rule that limited the amount of exam hours you could have in a 24 hours period, ( I believe it was 6 maximum per day). If such a thing occurred, you could ask for the exam to be moved as this was judged to be unfair.

You can also consult with your student committee (of your department or your faculty) and your department since you say that you are following a standard path. In that case, there will be many students in the same situation and they should prove to be understanding. The student committee can usually present a uniform front and defend the entire class as a whole concerning this issue. There is absolutely nothing impolite about this if you proceed politely and you act as soon as the semester begins. The sooner you handle this issue, the easier it will be to solve.

I believe you are right in saying that this will not allow you to perform to your full potential, and you are right to ask for a more humane schedule.


Is it beneficial to publish papers from previous labs during grad school?

I struggle to see how having papers outside of your PhD field could be a negative - demonstrating you have knowledge, interest and expertise in a range of subjects can be a bonus. But as mentioned above, they must be of a standard you are happy to publish. Your PhD thesis (plus papers published along the way) will show your expertise in your main field, so why not show off your other skills too?

Plus, I imagine a lot of time and money has been invested into your previous work. I think you should use that for the benefit of your co-authors as well as yourself. But if you find the extra work is having a negative impact on your current studies, prioritise what is right for you.


Being editor of a journal where authors can provide preferred and non-preferred reviewers, I can provide some "inside" thoughts on the subject based on what has happened in "my" journal. Note that it is possible to suggest names for review but also provide names which are not preferred. The latter can be because of a scientific disagreement, personal issues or whatever. Such suggestions appear but not often and we usually follow the suggestions (not that we have to!).

When it comes to the preferred or suggested reviewers, I have been tempted to use such reviewers on occasion when it has been hard to identify reviewers directly. Sometimes because the topic is local and where it would make sense to have local input. In these cases, I cannot remember a single reasonable review that has come out of such reviewers. This can be for several reasons but most often the review is a close colleague who might have an incentive to help the author. In some cases the preferred names have been very senior scientists who, I am afraid, has lost touch with the subject and provide poor and in some cases almost non-existent reviews. Out of all immediate "Accept" review recommendations I get, the vast majority have come from these reviewers. So, I not longer trust these names and avoid them at all costs unless I personally know or know of the reviewer and his or her good reputation.

In addition to what I just describe, I also must state that it is often the weakest manuscripts that have listed several suggestions. This can be identified by the disparate review results, sometimes one accept (by the suggested reviewer) and one reject.

Now, in principle, there is nothing wrong with suggesting reviewers, I have done so myself when being requested. I have then as a principle gone for established and well renowned names in the community. The problem lies in suggesting names for a purpose other than to get a fair and objective review.

It is clear that the system can and is abused and since I became Editor-in-Chief, I have come to rely less and less on these suggestions and now mostly look upon them with suspicion and make selections from my own understanding of the field and investigations into the subject literature. The best suggestion, I can provide is to not avoid mentioning names but pick names that in your opinion can provide good constructive critique on your work (and not just favorable).  A note on why you have selected names as preferred or non-preferred would greatly help as well since it puts your choice in a perspective.


Is there something I could do considering I'm not really happy with my master's thesis?

Have an honest conversation with your advisor.

  I appreciate the support you have been giving me, but I have to be honest that I'm getting increasingly frustrated with my project.  This isn't the area that I hoped to work on, and I'm struggling to really get into it.

Note that this is nothing against your advisor.  Be careful not to frame it as a criticism of your advisor; it's about this project's fit to you.  If you put it this way, it shouldn't be offensive.

Also, presumably your interest now is also your interest for your career path in the future?  If so, I would highlight the impact of that:

  In addition, I'm hoping to go on to a [PhD/career] studying [fundamental physics--insert the appropriate term here.  I'm not a subject expert]. I'm worried that I'm not developing the skills and expertise I need to move in that direction.

In my mind, this is the most important point.  If it's just a matter of enjoying your current project, sticking it out for the next year might be the best option.  But if your current project is limiting your future options, it's important to address.

After sharing your concerns, what to do about it?

If at all possible, I would try to explore with your advisor whether your project can be tweaked to better fit your interests.  Could it focus more on theory rather than computing examples?  Could it bring in some other related thing that is more what you want to look at?  Again, I'm not a physicist, so I can't help you on the specifics. The cost of changing projects would be high.  It's preferable to modify the current one if at all possible.

It sounds like so far your advisor hasn't been very flexible.  However, given that you accepted a project and worked on it for four months "just to be nice", it also seems likely that he doesn't know how you really feel about the work.  Perhaps he will be more flexible once he understands.

If there isn't flexibility, then you have a tough decision: take the "safe" route of completing your current project, or try to switch projects (and probably risk delaying your degree).  But I would try this as a first step.


Why do universities tolerate uploading papers on their websites?

Why the university officials do not take action over this copyright violation?

Because they can't.  There is no way to tell whether a given electronic preprint violates the publisher's copyright-transfer agreement or not.  Different publishers place different restrictions on authors' rights to redistribute their papers.  Some allow posting pre-edited versions; some allow posting the official camera-ready version; some allow neither; some only require an exclusive publication license and leave copyright in the author's hands.  These restrictions change over time, and may depend on whether the author paid an open access fee to the publisher.  The only way to determine whether an electronic (p)reprint is posted illegally is to read the actual copyright-transfer/publication contract.  But this contract is directly between the authors and the publishers; universities have no record of these agreements.

Because they don't have to.  At least within the US, university web sites generally fall under the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires copyright holder to request removal of the specific items to which they claim copyright.

Because the publishers don't care.  Scary legal language notwithstanding, academic publishers in many fields have zero interest in pursuing legal action against individual researchers for posting copies of their own papers in violation of copyright transfer agreements.  (I have heard this said specifically about ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and Springer, by people with connections inside each of those organizations.)

Because it's not in their best interest.  Both universities and the public benefit materially from the public availability of research by their faculty, students, postdocs, and other researchers.  Universities have no incentive—aside from a potential legal threat that they know will never materialize—to proactively censor that research.  Many universities, and more recently many governments, have adopted open-access policies that either encourage or require their members to amend publication agreements and make their work publicly available.

Because researchers would revolt.  Even if academic publishers started sending DMCA notices to universities, and even if universities required their members to take down copies of their papers, in violation of research community expectations, the people whose research is being censored would simply take their business elsewhere.  Those publishers would receive fewer papers, and those universities would receive fewer graduate school and faculty applicants.


How should I present awards I won as a co-author in my resume?

You are pretty free to format your resume as you like. If you list the publications in the publications section you can also refer to them from the awards section noting that it was joint work. Depending on your field, conference presentation could be worth a lot, or not. In Computer Science, they normally have high value.

But in the awards section you could say something like "Optimal Widget Factorization listed above was awarded the Best Paper award at CCCSC, 2017"

There are a number of other ways. One would be to footnote the paper in the publications listing with a footnote naming the award or even listing the award in parentheses in the listing itself.

Don't worry too much about how you do it, just so you don't give the impression there are two things when there is only one.

I'm assuming that it was the paper that won the award, as opposed to the individuals who wrote it. That would be the standard thing.


Is it a good practise to involve a child in a statement of purpose?

No, the statement is about your motivation in doing research and about your research goals, not about your private life goals.

Having a child is undoubtedly a joyful event which can definitely change your perspective on work-life balance, but now that it's changed, simply state what  your current research goals and motivations are.


Problem with undergraduate research supervisor, how to proceed?

I'll be honest with you, remarking that this is only my opinion, by no means I'm right.

  Undergrads are a pain to supervise.

Mostly because, in general, undergrads require a lot of "hand-holding" and training (proper research procedure and writing are not usually covered before that), which takes time (even worse if it is a good student that challenges you.... rewarding, but takes even more time).

You are right in thinking that undergrad research should be simple, self-contained, and well planned out. Properly planning stuff takes time, professors never have it. And simple means that the research is unlikely to have high impact.

I know several professors that don't accept undergrads simply because they think it is not worth the effort. The ones that do accept, pin them to a Ph.D. student (or a postdoc) and that's it. The Ph.D. students usually are busy, worried about their own things, and do not have the experience to deal with "underlings".

Yes, your project should be well defined, with clear goals and schedule. That never happens. Not as an undergrad, MS, Ph.D., postdoc, or professor. There might be a few unicorns around, but, usually, you have no idea where you are going. Ideally, you could use this opportunity to train the most important trait in a researcher: independence.

Instead of expecting to be handed goals and schedule, create them. It will be challenging for you, but you would learn how to do it, and get familiar with the field. Then you could go to the Ph.D. student and ask "Do you think this is a reasonable plan?" instead of "what should I do?". Worst case scenario, that plan can be a starting point for a better one. Bonus points if you include solutions to tangential problems of her research (stuff that would be cool/easy to do, but isn't a priority, so she would never do it herself).

Quoting a far better man, and professor, than myself:

  "Be honest, be kind, be useful, be responsible, work hard, treat everybody with respect."

I'd advise you to go around the Ph.D. student only as last resort.


Read the fine print on the acceptance letter and any links provided.  I doubt you'll find a problem there.  By double-checking, you will be able to proceed with more confidence.


Good style for frequent references to some paper

Check your target journal's style guide or advice to authors, but my approach is to use the citation format the first time I mention it and then just mention the authors by name or pronoun when I refer to them later. E.g:

  Our work compares with [A & B, 2000] on the following:
    - The approach presented by A & B makes (x) assumption on (...)
    - The (something) differ from those of A & B on (...)
    - Performance of X was not reported by A & B

Even that can get redundant. You might say say:

  Throughout the following section, we compare our work to [A & B, 2000]. In their work, they make assumptions about (X) ... Additionally, (Y) differs between A & B's method and our because ... They also do not present performance of (Z) in their work.

It depends a bit on your own style, but my approach is always a bit more conversational.


If I get a bachelors degree without a high school diploma, will I be able to study masters or PHD?

The general philosophy of university and graduate admissions is that your most recent experience counts most heavily. Your secondary school experience is important to getting in to a Bachelors degree program, but, as you note, there are exceptions.

But if you successfully complete a BA/BS or equivalent you will be considered for graduate school along with any other candidate with the same degree. It would be very unlikely anyone would ask for earlier work. But even if they did, it would be inconsequential compared to your work on the Bachelors.

There should be absolutely no worries about this issue, provided you do well in the Bachelors work. Your performance there matters, of course.


Canadian External Examiner for UK PhD Viva advice

Many academics and other subjects experts from all corners of the globe are invited to be external examiners for PhD degrees. It is not uncommon, and the process is designed for this situation. In the UK it is also common that a viva panel is governed by a neutral chair who ensure that all the examiners are familiar with the procedures and regulation for conducting the examination and that the questions and conduct are fair for all parties concerned.

Those panels that do not use a separate chair, then it is often the internal examiner that ensures the external understands the scope and process of the examination.

It is important for the (world-wide) standard of PhD's that the foremost experts at any particular field can be called on to participate in the PhD examination process. You should feel it a compliment to your work that the university reached out to find a suitable specialist to read and comment on your work. The fact that they are willing to cover the not inconsiderable expenses to bring this examiner to your viva demonstrates the regard they have for your work. It is a positive thing for you.