Do universities maintain secret textbooks?

I have never heard of a textbook being "secret" in the sense that it was being kept intentionally hidden to give students of one organization an advantage.

I have often, however, encountered draft textbooks that a professor had not yet completed or published, for which students were partly acting as "beta testers."  These are often not released for general use (for obvious reasons), and may be in preparation for many years, which could make them act something like a "secret" textbook.

Indeed, as the stage and organization of such documents becomes earlier and less formal, the boundary between "textbook" and "lecture notes" becomes unclear, and there are certainly some professors who are effectively writing a private textbook and just never get around to putting in the effort (or relaxing their perfectionism) to make it public.


Sadly, I am an American postdoc in an American lab, and I am experiencing the same issues. The details are different, but the sentiment is the same--the laboratory is not conducive to work. At all. It is a noisy, distracting place with coworkers of all varieties doing any number of distracting activities. And right now, I have to write, and i have to write a lot. My PI/boss likes to be able to also come into lab and look over our shoulders, to make suggestions and check progress. This is entirely unnerving to me. it's compromised my ability to be productive and keep those standard hours in the lab. So, I employ strategies- noise-cancelling headphones. Working from home. Telling everyone I'm writing and getting the biggest headphones and possibly sporting a slight scowl in general. It's not fun and i'd love an office. But for me, the bottom line is what I have to show for this experience when it's over. And I'm willing to do whatever it takes, because this is a great opportunity to advance my career. And i need it and i want it badly enough. But, that said. ...it is difficult and the environment works against me, daily. It might be something you encounter in an ideal setting.

And what i've found...is doing 'whatever you must' to be productive, might get some odd looks. People might talk or be judging. Someone might not like you working from home or keeping odd hours.

But you will have those first author papers. And that matters. That matters to your boss, the department, and for your career--far more than whatever situational annoyances arise in the process. You've got to get yours.


Should one list the journals of submitted papers on a CV?

Opinions differ on this issue.  The advantage of listing where you have submitted the paper is that it gives a clue as to how good you think the paper is.  If you submit to the Annals of Mathematics, then you are suggesting it's a wonderful paper.  If you submit to Advances in Pure Mathematics (not to be confused with the reputable journal Advances in Mathematics), then you might as well have generated your paper using random text.  Listing this information gives you a tactful way to indicate what you consider to be your best work even before it is published, and this may be helpful to someone who wants to take a look at your papers but has only a little time.

On the other hand, submission is not nearly as meaningful as acceptance, because you are a biased judge of your own work.  Furthermore, you could deliberately submit to an unrealistically prestigious journal just for the purpose of writing "submitted to the Annals".

Listing the journals can also come across as presumptuous, like you believe the papers will obviously be accepted and you are already bragging about the presumed outcome.

I'd recommend against it.  I think the benefits are small, and it's not worth the risk of looking arrogant or manipulative.  On the other hand, it's something people sometimes do, and it doesn't seem to do them much (if any) harm, so if you like the idea I don't think it would be a big mistake.


The traditions of writing a monograph as a thesis vs. writing a thesis based on a number of papers/manuscripts and a cover paper to tie everything together vary between university systems (academic cultures). Because many aspects of academia including evaluations for positions and grants to a large extent is based on published papers, the latter system is gaining interest. In my country, Sweden, it has always (in modern times) been the norm. So in your case the reaction can be caused by one or both of tradition and local academic culture.

The professor has a good point in that the aim of writing a thesis should not primarily be to publish papers. Graduate school is about learning both practical and philosophical knowledge of how to conduct research properly with the aim to become a functioning research individual. At the same time, writing papers is a vital skill that must be included in such education so one does not preclude the other and my guess is that the response, hence, mostly is the result of tradition and culture rather than right or wrong. To be offended seems a bit over the top in terms of a reaction but I do not know the person to judge where such a reaction might originate.

I know of many who have defended a monograph but written and published papers on the material included in the thesis. A monograph allows inclusion of much more details on experiments and results than the paper format does. This can be seen as an advantage of the monograph. On the other hand, a thesis consisting of papers usually also contains a cover paper in which the same type of details can be included.

In the end the thesis you write will follow the local traditions or rules and my suggestion is to follow these but to aim to think about papers in parallel. Hopefully you will have an advisor that agrees.


Write "ongoing research projects" in a CV

It's not a standard practice to list "ongoing research projects" (from which you don't yet have any papers) on your CV.  I wouldn't even say it's standard to list papers that are "in preparation" (some people do, some don't; I personally am not a fan of this).

The point of a CV is to give a summary of your academic history, accomplishments and experience.  It's not a place for people to get to know your hopes and dreams.  And I think it will look strange on an academic CV, so I would recommend against including listing ongoing projects.

If you're asking about this in the context of job applications/promotion/etc, the place to write about this is in a research statement (and possibly a cover letter if you think it's really relevant).  If you're asking about this in the context of grants, the place to discuss this, if it's relevant, is in your proposal.

Two things you can do, if you really want to, is have a line about "research interests" and have a section listing collaborators.  (On a related note, some people also group papers by research topic, making research interests clear, though I personally don't like this in most contexts.)  These aren't typical, but they won't look so strange to make people think you are weird for including them.


Are search committees biased in terms of a candidate's looks, such as long hair for men?

First, let me place my answer in the context of American academia.  I'm sure that in some other parts of the world social conventions are different.

Contemporary American academia is one of the more formally progressive and tolerant subsets of western society.  There are American schools which recognize a student's right not to have any gender!  Although this is an extreme point, academic culture places a premium on toleration of personal differences, to the extent that most hiring committees are instructed not to take such "irrelevant things" as personal appearance into account.

But do they?  I think all human beings do, in some ways.  I do believe that people who are more physically attractive make more attractive job candidates, all other things being equal (and there are lots of studies to back this up).  Recently for health reasons I lost a substantial amount of weight, and I think that my relations with undergraduate students are noticeably better, e.g. resulting in higher evaluations.  Of course this probably has at least as much to do with the way I (nonverbally) communicate that I perceive myself: being more comfortable in your own skin shows.

As a result, if long hair feels natural and good to you, then I would recommend that you keep it.  Like Samson, it may somehow be a source of strength for you.  I was going to say that even the fact that you're asking about it seems slightly strange, but then I remembered that as a graduate student I would shave my goatee every fall (when I was teaching) and let it grow every spring (when I wasn't).  I have now had a goatee continuously since getting a PhD in 2003!  I also used to dress more nicely for class than I otherwise would.  While I still think that one should not wear clothing which is especially ratty in any professional context, I have long since learned that nobody cares whether I wear sneakers or a jacket or anything like that.

The other thing is that it is not 1964 anymore: the men who were long-haired youths in the 1970s are now some of the senior people around, and many are still proudly growing long what remains of their hair.  Both of the men who have been department heads in my time at my present job grow their hair longer than what conservative mores would recommend, and the current chair has hair halfway down his back.  It is really no big deal.

Let me say finally that the odd faculty member who mutters something sour about your hair probably had other reasons not to like you.  And if not, do you really want colleagues who are so superficial and intolerant?  Times are tough, but I think one needs to make feeling comfortable in one's own skin a high priority.


Including a research experience with no recommendation letter

I see no reason to omit it. I see no reason to have the supervisor write a letter of recommendation either. They are independent things. You want the best letters you can get and they seem to be from others here. You also want to show that you have some research experience even if it wasn't sufficient to result in publication.

I assume you mean undergraduate research, of course, which is limited in time and scope. The limitations are, well, limiting in what can be done. With more scope you might have gone further, as you would be expected to do with a more open ended program in a doctoral degree.

List it, even list the name of the supervisor if he has some prominence. But have the letters attest to both your background accomplishments and the probability of your future success.

Most places would consider it improper to contact someone that you didn't include in your application materials. But if they do, and you are questioned on it, just be honest about the situation. Conflicts happen. People know that.


Many master's programs do have a term limit associated with them. However, many master's programs may require additional classes, particularly for students coming from other backgrounds. So you should definitely check the specific programs you're interested in enrolling in, to see what is specifically allowed.

But extending the master's or PhD program just to take classes seems like a poor use of resources. One of the goals of advanced education is learning to become an expert in a new subject. After a while, you should be able to get much of the same content that you would from enrolling in a class through self-study.


Should I leave my PhD in year 6 or just take a bit of a leave and try to regroup?/ What is an "appropriate" level of angst to go through with a PhD?

I have just completed my PhD, so the angst you speak of is still fresh in my memory.  I will say that it is good that you are thinking about your options instead of making a rash decision.  We can not answer whether or not you should leave your PhD, that decision is yours and yours alone to make.

Having said that, a few things to consider (some of which you have alluded to already):

Your enjoyment of the research topic - is it stronger than the frustration hat you feel?  You mention that the move between schools and the internal politics has had a negative effect on your research productivity, reflect on what is causing that.
Your career goals have shifted, so is the PhD relevant to what you are planning to do?  More so, is the PhD in any way holding you back from achieving the career goals?
An important question with regards to your PhD, is what is it leading to?  What is the 'end game' of it all, so to speak?
Will taking a year off having a negative effect on your funding etc? Conversely, will the year off allow you to, as you say, regroup - and also perhaps explore that career path.

I am 36, and just finished my PhD - so your age is not that important, you're still young.  Never feel that you are 'obliged' to complete the PhD in a certain time frame, if at all - you have to look out for what is best for you.


Religious supervisor wants to thank god in the acknowledgements

On a coauthored paper, it's perfectly reasonable for the acknowledgments to specify who is thanking whom when it's just a subset of the authors, and this is not uncommon (e.g., "X and Y are grateful to the A Institute for hosting their visit" or the like, when author Z wasn't actually there).  This is the approach Ritz suggested in the comments, and I'd strongly recommend it.  For example, in this paper one author thanks God, without including the others.

I'm sure nobody would hold this against you personally, and I can't really believe anyone would discard or disbelieve the paper because of the acknowledgments.  It might indeed get some attention: even in mathematics, I've heard people comment on an author's tendency to thank God (nothing negative, just a "gee, that's unusual"), and I can imagine it might get more attention in areas where religion is more contentious.  However, I don't think you need to worry that your career will suffer because your coauthor thanked God.


Are USA math graduate students ready for graduate school in math?

Actually, since they do make the transition regularly, the answer is yes. But that doesn't mean that they are immediately ready to take comprehensive exams or begin thesis work.

Note that most US undergrads go to US grad schools if they move on. Each country's educational system is different. The fact that a US math major takes only about 1/3 of her/his credits in mathematics doesn't affect anything, since US grad schools expect that.

The natural progression is to go from a BS to an MS and then to a PhD. Not all schools, however, require the master's degree for admission to the doctorate, but those that don't will have a system of courses and exams that assure that the student is ready for research when they start, whether or not an MS is part of the progression. Many schools that directly admit doctoral students will offer an MS as a painless "stepping stone" as part of the studies. Sometimes all you need to do is fill out a request form, but a short thesis or exam may also be required (as it was in my case).

The prelim/comp exams, however, aren't based, for the most part on the undergraduate material. For example, I didn't study measure theory or delve too deeply into topology until I was a grad student. My undergrad was heavy in analysis and secondarily in algebra. But the early graduate courses built on the undergrad experience and so I was ready by the time it was necessary. But comps didn't come until late in the third year of grad study and little research was needed until that time.

The system works as long as you stay in one country or move to a country with a similar system. Moving from an undergrad major (in any field) in the US to a grad program in UK might be a different story though, since the undergrad program in UK is much more specialized by field.

But at the end, the students wind up in about the same place. You get a comprehensive view of the breadth of mathematics and a very deep dive into a specialized part of it so that you can do research.

The US system isn't inferior, as the question seems to imply. It is just different.


Background section for research statement

No, I don't think this is a good idea.

A similar issue arises with the "statement of purpose" essay for grad school applications: students often want to include stories about early experiences that were influential in their education.  But there seems to be a consensus among academics who actually read those applications that this is not helpful.  See for example this answer by aeismail.

So if this sort of thing would be unhelpful for a statement of purpose (which is intended to contain at least some amount of introspection) that goes double for a research statement (which really is not).

The people reading your research statement are trying to evaluate your potential to be a successful researcher.  They want to know:

what you work on
evidence that it is a worthwhile field (publishable, interesting to other researchers, likely to attract funding support, etc)
your research accomplishments to date
what you plan to do in the present and future
why they should believe your plan is likely to be successful.

Stories about how you got to where you are don't really add to any of these points, and I don't see how they are likely to convince someone of your potential to be a successful researcher now.  Maybe if you were conducting high-quality, publishable research as a high school student, and it has some connection to your current research program, you could mention it.  But even that is weak evidence at best: everyone in academia knows of young prodigies who went on to do nothing of note.  Who you were and what you did 10 years ago is irrelevant; concentrate on who you are and what you are doing now.

It is reasonable to have a "Background" section in a research statement.  But it should give background on your research, not on you.


Do graduate schools in mathematics typically send out acceptance letters all at once?

The short answer is "no" or maybe "it depends what you mean by "wait list." "

Take a moment to think about how graduate admissions works: departments have a relatively fixed number of slots that they have money for, and it is a serious nuisance if you go much above or much below those numbers.  However, because of how the deadlines are structured (with everyone having April 15th), you essentially have to make all your admissions decisions having very little idea of how many people will turn you down (because it's rational for them to wait until April 15th).  In my experience, the admission committee will do one round of admission letters that they hope is enough to fill their class, but which is probably a little on the conservative side. Right now would seem a little early to me (many schools haven't even finished their winter break), so it's possible you're seeing people who are getting early ones for some reason.  Even after that, it's still quite possible that they will decide to admit more people if for whatever reason they decide that they are not likely to get enough from their initial round.  Those admissions could happen basically any time; I've seen it happen once on the morning of April 15th.

Whether the pool of people who might still get admitted actually receive a letter saying that they are on the waitlist is mostly up to random bureaucratic chance, but if you haven't received a rejection yet, and someone else has an acceptance, you should regard yourself as on the waitlist.


How to tell my professor there's a system issue and remind them of writing the LOR at the same time?

Explain it just as you described (avoid acronyms though):

Hello Dr. Smith,
I want to thank you again for agreeing to write LoRs for me for graduate school. This is just a reminder that they're due on December 42nd. Please let me know if you anticipate any difficulties with meeting this date.
In addition, please be aware that the computer system at the University of Mississippi at St. Louis at Berkley at Gondor may be having problems -- at least one of the other individuals I asked for a recommendation has had a problem uploading their LoR. If you have difficulty as well, please let me know as soon as possible so I can get in touch with the university's tech support staff.
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Lavender S.


Any good source of information on EU based postdoctoral/researcher funding opportunities

I would suggest two options 1) applying for your own funding and/or 2) apply for a job where someone has aquired funding and is looking for a postdoc. Option #1 is far more desirable - though also more risky.

For option 1) There are several EU funding options (many country specific). Not knowing your field, you might have a look the EU call; http://europa.eu/about-eu/funding-grants/

For option 2) Academics post positions for postdocs all the time. Akadeus.com is a good starting point. https://www.akadeus.com/

I hope that helps!


PhD application question: "Why do you want to join my research group?"

Essentially, what the potential advisor is asking you to show is that you've "done your homework" before applying. Why do you want to apply to Prof. X's group? What is it about their research that is attractive to you? Why do you think you'd fit in to the group? If you just send a generic email that inquires about positions and don't have an outstanding CV and transcript, you're not going to get very far. However, if you make it clear that you've looked into the group and can explain why you're interested, you'll have a better chance of getting a response.


Is it possible to obtain a PhD in Canada without having to attend courses for a master degree?

Canada is different from the USA, in that direct entry for a PhD after a bachelors degree is rare. The typical path is a bachelors, followed by two year masters, followed by four to five years for a PhD.

As far as I know, no typical Canadian PhD program also grants a masters, as in Canada, it's sort of implied that you already had one going into the PhD.

This is of course, based on my understanding of the sciences: Humanities and Engineering may vary.

EDIT: One note about courses: Course requirements vary dramatically from program to program, university to university. Some will require relatively few courses, others, many more.


Is GRE really required to get into a good university for MS in CS

There are a number of different exams that comprise the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).  There is also the TOEFL exam, which may be required if English is not your first language.

Each university has its own set of requirements, and you will have to look on the websites for individual programs to find  out this information.  Here are the exams you may have to take:

The GRE General Test, comprised of three sections:

Verbal Reasoning (i.e., English reading and analysis skills)
Quantitative Reasoning (i.e., math skills)
Analytical Writing (i.e., English writing skills)

The GRE Subject Test, which (in your case) would be the Computer Science, but it looks like the computer science exam is being discontinued as of this month.

The bigger question is not necessarily which exams you have to take, but which exams will make a difference.  In computer science, your verbal and analytic writing score will count for much less than the quantitative score (which in some case is a shame, because analytical writing skills are very important for reading and writing papers...).

  What should be the right approach?

Study for the exams.  There are many online study guides and practice exams, and books to purchase.
Take it as many times as you can before applications are due.  This can get expensive.

  The problem is that I am not good at words

You'll need to work on that, and it is very possible to improve your skills and ability with hard work.

  ...plus I am not very passionate about learning them also.

You'll have to change this attitude if you want to be successful.

  I also feel that they should not really matter considering I want to do research work in the field of Computers.

As I said above, the quantitative exam will matter the most (and the CS exam will matter more if you take it).  The verbal and writing exams will matter, but you can afford to do worse on them than on the other exams.  Unfortunately, your personal feelings on the matter won't get you accepted, and you have to work within the system and do the best you can.


Is it alright to cover some information in the defense but not the written thesis?

n+1 methods were trialed; Method X [the one you ended up using] was the most promising [say in what sense], so it was chosen for further study.

I would not plan to cover something verbally without documenting it in your written thesis.  However, if someone asks you about something that's not in your written thesis, you may go ahead and answer to the best of your ability, even if the thesis doesn't have the answer in writing.


What early career development questions to ask during a Postdoc Interview? Is is polite and acceptable?

During my own post doc interviews (and PhD interviews), I asked what the situation would be like.
I've included examples for your questions:

What kind of polite, professional questions I can ask this Professor during the interview?
My main concern is how much he supportive of career development and giving opportunities?
Also, what are other questions I should be ready to answer and ask him during the interview?

Ask the Professor how they run their research group. Specific question might include:

How many people are in your group including post-docs, grad students, undergrads, and technical staff?
How do meet with your research group? One-on-one regular meetings? Weekly meetings?
What is your management style? Are you hands-off? Hands-on?

Ask how the professor has mentored previous post-docs.

What do they view the goal of a post-doc to be? Do they view it as mentorship role? Do you they view you as a labor source?
Where do their previous post-docs end up?
Do post-docs get the freedom to ask their own questions? Are you only limited to the PI's question?

Ask what the professor wants from you.

For example, do they expect X publications per year?
Ask what they expect from their post docs on weekly basis. Do people work 40-hr weeks? 80-hr weeks? Are they expected to be in the lab on weekends?

For more ideas, I suggest checking out the Ask the Headhunter newsletter.
He offers good tips for interviewing.
Last, reach out to current post-docs in the lab and ask them if they would be willing to have a call about what it is like to work for the professor.
Other answers on this page such as this one describe what you ask the previous and current lab members.


In different fields, the order in which authors are listed may be interpreted differently, that is true. In some (math, CS) authors are generally listed alphabetically, so you can't conclude anything from the order. In some fields the final author listed is the head of the lab in which the work was done. This person may be responsible for a lot or a little of the actual contributions.

In some fields the first author listed is understood to be the one that did the majority of the work, but in some of those fields the first author listed is also just assumed to be riding on the coattails of the last (supervisor) author.

It is very complicated. In some fields people fight over the ordering very bitterly and many questions come here for "resolution", which we can't provide.

In some fields, sole authorship of work derived from doctoral studies is the norm and others who help get acknowledged, but are not co-authors.

There have been a few papers, in the sciences, in which the list of authors is longer than the paper itself. I think there was one case where there were so many authors that it ran afoul of the journal's page limit. Imagine how many people contribute to major work at CERN, for example.


My paper has been rejected again, what should I change?

Welcome to research. Trust your work and rewrite the paper. If the only problem is the English, after a few revisions the writing style should be greatly improved. Also, consider asking someone who is either fluent in English or an English teacher to proofread the paper.


What can I do if I submitted a paper believing a journal to be free for authors, and after acceptance I'm asked to pay a fee?

Yes, you may tell the editor that you were unaware of the author fees, and that since you can't pay it you are going to withdraw the paper. (They may agree to waive the fees, but if they don't, you certainly have the right to withdraw your paper and submit it elsewhere.)

In the future, you should check a journal's own instructions to authors rather than (or in addition to) third-party sites, which don't always have complete or up-to-date information about the journal.


I contacted the ASME staff and they said

  "You can submit the LaTeX files with the figures embedded and we will accommodate."

I guess that makes life easier and solves the problem.


Another instructor is pushing me out of the classroom right after my class ends

You should first find out what is the standard convention for when you have to vacate the room.  Since the other instructor is in your department, you can take this up at the department level: talk to your advisor and/or a trusted faculty mentor about it.

In my experience though this is often left a little fungible and people need to be reasonable about it.  In my opinion it is reasonable to expect to have access to the room five minutes before your class begins.  Ideally the previous instructor will have vacated the room at that point; if not, s/he should be occupying the room in a way which doesn't interfere with your own use of it.  (For instance, a lot of times students will not enter a room if an instructor is still writing on the blackboard.  It can be annoying to come to your class a few minutes before you want to start and find everyone waiting out in the hall.)

In the absence of a clear directive about how to split the time, it seems reasonable for the departing instructor to take half of the time, as long as they leave at least five minutes for the other instructor.  In your case 20 minutes is a very nice cushion (in my university it's 15 minutes), to the extent that I find it a little strange that the other instructor is arriving 15-20 minutes early.  What is she doing with that time?  Do more than a few students arrive that early?  If you are using the time to talk to your students and she's using the time for nothing, then I think you are morally in the right and should push back on it a bit.  You should be able to stay for the first half of the 20 minute break.

How should you do that?  As above, I would find out what other people do.  If the standard convention is that you can take those 10 minutes, then talk to the department head (or other departmental authority figure; e.g. whoever schedules the teaching) about it and get their support.  (You don't need to phrase it as a grievance or even identify the other instructor by name.)  Assuming you get backed, then you should pay a visit to the instructor in her office and explain that you looked into the matter, that you have a clear instructional purpose for how to use the time, and that the head (or whoever) has confirmed that this is a standard practice.  Definitely do this outside of the classroom so that you two can have the conversation you need to have not in front of the students and so that there is not a direct confrontation to be resolved.

In my opinion it is probably not worth trying to seek redress for your poor treatment by this instructor.  We are not obligated to be nice to each other; it's just better if we are.  If you respond to the treatment in a professional way and show that you are neither going to get pushed around nor retaliate in any personal or emotional way, then you're basically just rising above.  What some random person who you're only going to see for one more semester thinks of you isn't really so important, is it?  Especially if you're confident that you're in the right?


In which regions of the world do graduate programs typically require a GRE score?

Besides the United States, I have not heard of any country and any topic requiring it.


Why do Swedish postdoc ads typically have a requirement that PhD date must not be more than 5 years ago?

I don't know about Sweden, but in the US there seems to be increasing mood in Universities to end, or at least not contribute to, the "perpetual postdoc" cycle.  I don't know that there is real pressure from the funding sources, so much as a tough love from community leaders to stop taking advantage of a relatively cheap labor source by dangling prospects of academic success over them.

For example, our policy is to keep the total postdoc tenure to 5 years.  If you come in having done a 3-year postdoc, that leaves you with two more years here.  After this time limit is reached, the lab has to find means to fund you as an employee on the scientific staff if they want to keep you around.

Not all faculty love this, and some point out that by nature of some fields, postdocs tend to be longer.  For example, if you're recording from single neurons and need a large data set, this can take forever.  Despite such arguments, I haven't heard of any cases where the time limit has been waived.

The postdocs are not necessarily hung out to dry.  We have a number of programs designed to help them find satisfying employment.


Do we explain a graph in results or discussion?

It may depend on your field or specific journal, but typically:
In the results section, describe the pattern quantitatively, with perhaps just a mechanistic matter-of-fact interpretation.
In the discussion section, revisit the pattern but interpret qualitatively within the scope of your research question, tying it into your overall narrative.

For publications with severe space limitations (e.g. Science, Nature), jump straight to qualitative interpretation and present quantitative results in the figure caption.


As a computational chemist, which online resources are available for Ph.D. level jobs?

One of the best resources for jobs in computational chemistry (not limited to PhD level positions) is the job section of the Computational Chemistry List.

Another place where I've regularly seen relevant postings is the "Computational Chemists" group on LinkedIn.


Publishing a paper in a low impact journal when I already have higher impact publications

What does an academic researcher do?  They contribute to academic knowledge by (i) doing new research and (ii) publishing it so that others can benefit from it.  You have an academic work that is not only completed but has already been peer reviewed, with the following verdict

  The findings are still valuable and do offer a minor contribution to the field

So you've made a minor contribution to the field...if you get the paper published.  If you don't get the paper published, you've engaged in almost the entire time and effort of the research and publication process, but without completing the final, key step of broad dissemination.  Since the next thing you have to do is just resubmit the paper -- apparently without any change at all, since

  the paper is fine (in terms of writing, methodology, and results)

from the ground-level perspective of what academic research is all about, it would be pretty strange to stop now.  Indeed I do advise you to resubmit in a lower tier (but still reputable; there are many tiers of reputability) journal.

You ask specifically:

  My question is: from the perspective of grad admissions (and possibly future career), would I be better off not publishing this paper?

No, I don't think so.  Some considerations:

I strongly believe that completion rate of projects is one of the things that separates successful academics from unsuccessful ones -- I know some people who are brilliant and hard-working but somehow never manage to finish anything.  Obviously you are not such a person since you have already published multiple better papers, but still you should be thinking in terms of the time you put into various projects and what the outcomes are.  To work on something for months and years and have nothing come of it is a big problem for an academic.  To be fair, to spend time on something that turns out to be mediocre could also be a problem -- it may be keeping you from doing better work.  But that's a great argument in favor of choosing your projects more carefully; it's not a great argument in favor of bailing out on an already completed project.
I want to add that the above viewpoint is not universally shared.  It is much more common in technical, STEM-like areas of academia than it is in the humanities: e.g. many famous writers have novels that they have completed and decided not to publish.  (Sometimes novels get published decades later, and it gets very interesting: in some cases you can see why they were not originally published, and in some cases you really can't.  Most of the work of Franz Kafka was published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod, against Kafka's wishes.  These wrongly published novels are some of the highlights of 20th century literature.)
My own field of mathematics is somewhere between the humanities and the hard sciences in its publication sensibilities.  Many of the very greatest mathematicians publish much less than second or third rate mathematicians.  Gauss's motto was pauca sed matura ("few but ripe").  I am in the same mathematical field as Andrew Wiles, the person who solved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1994 and recently won the Abel Prize in mathematics.  He is 23 years older than I am, I have more papers than he does, and his mathematical contributions are immeasurably greater than mine.  But "even I" do not publish every result that I get, and "even I" sometimes referee papers and see results that I knew how to prove but didn't find valuable enough to write up.  However, I don't think that applies here, because you already submitted your work for publication.
In the current academic climate, the vast majority of people are served a little better by having one more paper, even if that one more paper is not as good as some of their other papers, as long it is still of sufficient standard to be published in a reputable journal.  If you go on the research academic job market, you will be compared against hundreds of other applicants at every stage.  In order to get a serious shot, there need to be some people in the department who think your work is very exciting, and having one more paper is not going to make much difference there.  However, these people also need to promote and defend you against the candidates that other people in the department are very excited about.  If it's between Dr. A in subfield B and Dr. C in subfield D, after a point it will be hard to tell an argument in support of
the quality of Dr. A's research from a statement about the relative merits of subfield B versus subfield D.  The department members who are far enough away from these two subfields are likely to take other considerations into account: if one of the two candidates has four very nice papers and nothing else and the other candidate has four very nice papers and two solid ones...well, it's obvious.  So yes, even mediocre publications can work to your advantage.
Early in your career is the best time to pick up an additional publication that is not as good as the others.  Most pre-PhD students in most fields don't publish at all.  Most who publish one paper don't publish two.  And so forth.  Having been involved in multiple projects at this stage provides further clear evidence of your ability to do academic research.  Twenty years later that is not so valuable, but it sure is valuable now.  And the flip side: if one of your early papers is not as good as the others, it shows intellectual growth!  That is an argument for not only resubmitting your work but doing it as soon as possible.


What can one do when emails to the editor go unanswered?

Can you contact an Associate Editor or another member of the editorial board? More than 18 months with no communication does seem excessively long and the lack of response from the editor suggests something is wrong. You might also try the secretary in the editor's department and ask her if she can get in touch with him.

If you don't hear back from them either, I would withdraw the paper and submit it somewhere else. Hopefully, there's a way to do that in the online system -- but if not, contacting them one last time with the notification should be sufficient. They can't publish the paper without you signing some forms.


In Germany, is it possible to get a professorship in the same university where you earned a PhD?

In Germany you cannot get your tenure in the same university where you already working. So to speak, you cannot promote to tenure in a university while working on this university. I explain myself, if you are a post-doc in Uni A you cannot get the professorship in this uni, no matter if you did or didn't your PhD there. You'll have to apply for better positions in other universities and, eventually, get hired in uni B.
What I've seen is someone working in a post-doc position in Uni A, accepting a professorship in uni B, working there for a semester and coming back to Uni A as a professor. He was not promoted to professor in uni A, so it is not illegal.


This is a fairly common situation, but there are lots of ways in which it can be handled.  A lot depends on the specifics of your situation and how well your advisor and your current department are getting along.

One important issue is the source of your funding.  If you're currently funded by your advsior's research grant, and that grant is moving with your advisor to the new institution, then it is may not be possible for you to continue being funded through that grant as a research assistant at your current university but it might be possible to continue with that funding at your advisor's new institution.

On the other hand, if you're currently funded by institutional or departmental sources such as a departmental teaching assistantship, you might be able to keep that funding where you are but it would not be possible to take it to your advisor's new institution.  However, it might be possible for you to obtain some kind of institutional or departmental funding at your advisor's new institution.

There are three common ways in which this handled:

The student continues at the advisor's old institution and the old institution allows the advisor to continue to supervise the student as an adjunct faculty member of the old institution.  The student ultimately completes the degree at the old institution.  This works best if the student is close to completion and has funding that is independent of the advisor's grants.
The student transfers to the advisor's new university and completes the degree at the new university.  This typically works well if the student is supported by the advisor's research grant and if the student is not very far along in the graduate program.  The new university would have to agree to accept the student into their graduate program.  The new university may have different course requirements and the student might have to repeat prelim exams or a candidacy exam.  Foreign students would have to get a new student visa.
The student remains where they are and switches to a new advisor.  This works best for students who have departmental or institutional funding and aren't very far along in the graduate program.

You should talk to your advisor about how he or she wants to handle this, and you should also talk to your department chair or the head of the graduate program to get the department's position. You'll also have to think about what you want- what's best for you may not be what your advisor or department wants.


How faculty might assess a PhD applicant who already has a PhD degree?

Here are the concerns I would have:

Is this person seriously going to spend another N-years getting a second doctoral degree, and then go seek a postdoctoral position before pursuing the job they presumably want to have? If so, what is this going to do to their career, and do I want to be party to that?
How did this person get all the way through a PhD in something other than their "ultimate interest"? Do they know what their "ultimate interest" is now?
Did they try to switch fields mid-PhD, or get some credentializing in the field they wanted to be in. If so, how much? If not, why not?
Do I think this person has strong prospects in this field? They've failed to get a postdoc - was this the result of just a small number of applications, or genuinely a problem. Again, if their postdoc application was weak, do I think it could be salvaged?


Does publishing in multidisciplinary journals undermine perceived work quality or impact?

In Web of Science's Journal Citation Reports, there are 236 categories ranging from "Acoustics" to "Zoology". There is also one category called "Multidisciplinary Sciences". PLOS ONE is in that category (and Heliyon is still in the ESCI, so not assigned to a category yet).
If you sort Web of Science's list of categires by Aggregate Impact Factor, you will see that "Multidisciplinary Sciences" ranks at #10 out of 236 (as of early 2021):

Your question, it seems to me, is too general to answer properly, but perhaps this formal approach might indicate that the answer is: No, publishing in a multidisciplinary journal will not necessarily harm you. As Libor wrote in the comments, journals like Nature and Science belong to that category.
The response might be slightly different if you refer to Open Access megajournals. There are enough skeptics, I fear. But my own guess is that in the mid- to long-term, it will not harm you. The reason is the following:
Many university libraries increasingly set up bibliometric departments that analyze your scholarly outputs when you are a candidate for a research post at that university. And one of the positive indicators they look at is the share of Open Access publications. Publishing in such journals may underline your commitment to Open Science, which is a generally positive aspect. (But again, opinions may vary.)


How to write teaching philosophy and research statement?

Many successful teaching and research statements do the same basic three things:

Describe broad themes or approaches that tie together your research or teaching.
Narrate specific relevant examples of your achievements related to these themes or approaches that illustrate your experience and qualifications.
Describe your aspirations and future directions in terms of your research or teaching.

It might help to think of the research and teaching statements in terms of other items in your packet. For example, your writing samples will provide concrete examples of your work as a scholar so don't need to prove this in a research statement. Similarly, your CV will show your publication and teaching record so you don't need to reiterate this either. Instead, provide a high-level overview of your approaches to research or teaching while referring to examples from your experience that help make the case for your excellence in each area.

Statements also provide a space for you to explain what you hope to do in the future. I used my teaching statement to describe examples of graduate and undergraduate classes I could teach that were on the books at the department I was applying to and that I would design from scratch. I used my research statement to explain the areas of research I was hoping to move into in the future.

Your goals with the statement may also be to address potential weaknesses in your application. For example, if you have little teaching experience, your teaching statement is an opportunity to show that you have thought deeply about teaching and that you have gained relevant skills through experience like mentorship that might not show up on your CV.

Specific expectations, in terms of of teaching and research statements, may vary from field to field and even within fields, but you can generally assume that authors have quite a bit of latitude. Look for examples online and, perhaps, more usefully, contact successful recent job market candidates you know to ask their materials.


Is it possible to be paid by a company for research and also use this research towards a Ph.D.?

Yes, you can do this, but use caution. There are situations in which you can do research at a company but be prohibited from writing about it or using it outside the company. Contracts rule in this area.

There are other situations in which you can do such research and have the university involved so that you can use the research to obtain a degree, but your dissertation disappears into the void and you can't publish anything, again for contractual reasons.

If the work you do can be patented, there may be additional restrictions on who owns the patents (likely not you) and who can benefit from it (possibly you, but not necessarily).

Other places there are no issues.

So, before you contemplate doing this, just be aware of any restrictions on your results and what you can do with them after your relationships to both company and university end.

And, if you have a contractual obligation, be sure to honor it as companies can be ruthless if you expose proprietary work or trade secrets.


Thinking about switching to a Masters from a PhD, advisor wants a decision now

That is a tough decision, but do you think it's mainly the project or just the whole concept of PhD that isn't appealing? Would it help to switch projects or advisors? It sounds as though you have a good fit with your internship, so perhaps it would be a good to gain that work experience and, if you want later, return to school with a clearer idea of what you want to work with (as you mentioned).

With regards to the type of job you want in the future, have you spoken to other professionals to gauge whether or not a PhD is really necessary? That might help in your decision as well. Good luck!


Data publication basics - where, why, how, and when should I publish my unpublished data?

There are a few things that I would consider when choosing a data repository:

Does it let you release your data under a license you're happy with?

Applying too restrictive a license can prevent anyone from doing anything useful with the data, so think about what you're prepared to allow. In particular, remember that most of the research done in academia could be considered "commercial" from a legal perspective. On the other hand, you may wish to choose a license that ensures you get credit for your work. You may or may not agree with them, but reading the Panton Principles will give you some idea of the issues here. Also take a look at this list of licenses written with data in mind

How easy will your data be to find?

People will only use your data if they can find it. I recommend Googling (other search engines are available) for some datasets you know of in your field and see if they come up — those repositories which are indexed by the major search engines will put you at a big advantage when it comes to attracting citations.

What repositories are well known in your field?

Your institution may have a repository which you can easily deposit in, but it won't be the first place colleagues in your field will think of to look. If there are well-established repositories I would prefer those, or make sure your data is indexed by a well-established aggregator (I know ANDS runs a national aggregator in Australia).

What does your institution allow?

In many cases, your institution will own (or otherwise have a claim to) the data you generate as part of your research, so check what your local policies are and if need be ask your supervisor, head of department, legal team, etc. This will particularly affect your choice of license.

The other parts of your question can probably be answered better by others here (or maybe it should be split into several?)


This sounds like a classic case of burn-out. You've been working hard, maybe too hard, and it isn't fun anymore. I think a lot of academics do that at some point and you need to find a way past it to be successful.

Some of the solutions can be fairly simple and others not. Getting advice from a counsellor or therapist may be needed. Probably useful in any case.

Some people can just find a non-academic activity to spend time and effort on. I usually recommend something physical, but that will also engage your brain in a different way. My own go-to activity is Tai Chi, a mind-body fusion. In the past, I also used bicycling and skiing to get away from the academy.

Such things can even be beneficial in solving academic problems, such as mathematics. When you get stuck on a problem, often letting it go for a bit will let your subconscious mind work on the problem and get you past the block. This too is a common experience.

On a larger scale, a year away, doing things that aren't so academic or that use your mind in a different way can be helpful. Students who had the means, often spent a year "bumming around Europe" after graduation. A museum tour of the great cities.

But if you just keep pressing and increasing the pressure, you probably won't improve.

You might also want to look at some other answers here that discuss Imposter Syndrome (search for the phrase here to get some idea of what it is and how to deal with it.) I'm not reading clear signs in your question that you are "suffering" from that, but take a look.


Paid publication fee and now no contact from journal: what should I do?

Based on the time of year, if the journal is based in the US or Europe, it might be that the editor and staff are on vacation. You have confirmed with your bank that they have received funds, so I wouldn't worry too much. Give them a week or two, and then follow up more strenuously.


Asking same professor for rec letters for 2 different grad programs?

Not at all.  We realize that students typically apply to more than one program.  I encourage my undergraduate advisees to apply to five or six graduate programs.

Given that reality, I don't mind writing a letter of recommendation and submitting it (with few changes) to a half dozen graduate programs.


producing quality research in non ideal laboratories

You target enough problems in your lab that it is probably worth your effort now to look for other opportunities rather than just accept the one that has fallen to you. It may be that you are well-enough placed to move to another university/lab and also obtain funding.

In some fields, students work more or less alone, independent of their advisors, but it doesn't sound like you are in such a situation.

But you can probably contact a few people in your field, not to seek a co-advisor but a new position entirely. You can do this discretely at first until you get a sense of what is possible.

I'm guessing that staying in your current situation won't be terrible. But you might be able to do at least a bit better. But you won't know until you look.

I'll also suggest that a co-advisor from another university might not be able to give you the attention you need. The nature of the relationship and the distance will work against that, as well as raising possible conflicts with your advisor. So tread carefully in that direction if you decide to go there.

I should add that before you condemn your current lab too severely, you should also look to see what has happened to other students who have graduated out of it. Are they developing the careers they hope for? Do they have good positions? If that is so, then the lab is a success, not a failure.


How is a paper with multiple authors usually written?

I think that this article from the Research Whisperer covers aspects of how multiple authors can collaborate to get a paper done. It is an interesting and quite brief read that I would recommend.

TL;DR version:

One leads the project and the initial drafting with others
contributing to an almost complete draft.
The team splits the work into broad sections for each collaborator, which then draft, combine and revise.
Decide on all the details and each writes its own section with minor final corrections.

From my experience, the first one would be the most common with an almost final version making it to the very senior people in the article.


An institutional email address is not a requisite nor it does make your inquiry looks less serious.
I personally was suggesting a receipt request, but apparently most people dislike the option no matter the purpose. I personally can see the difference between a peer of mine pushing for some action and a student in trepidation. However, as the chance that I would be the recipient is ridiculously low, don't ask for a receipt.
Be cautios and clear filling the subject field. I do suggest something like "PhD openings inquiry, name surname" or so.
I also suggest that the body part shows that you didn't choose the particular recipient at random. This can be very short, at this stage.


Changing ordering of authorship in a proceeding

Here is a quite frequently occurring extreme case which may help you evaluate your own situation:

As @JonCuster also mentioned in their comment, there is always plenty of time between the abstract submission and the presentation itself, and the work typically evolves a lot during that period. Imagine it evolved such that new collaborators were added. Adding new names in there may change the list of authorship a lot. Imagine also that you actually submitted the manuscript by the time you present it, of course with the co-authors on it. In the conference, strictly adhering to the list of authors submitted in the abstract would mean removing your new co-authors, which should be out of question as it is best practice to give them credit as co-authors of your work. Thus, the list of authors can definitely change during the actual presentation as one is usually entitled to also present improvements to one's work. Whether it is common in your field, I don't know, but my guess would be that it is not too rare.


What order should authors be on arXiv.org for equal contribution authorships?

If everyone made an equal contribution, you can put that information in the footnote.
In a very famous (in the AI-related research) paper ADAM: a method for stochastic optimisation you can encounter the following line:

  ∗Equal contribution. Author ordering determined by coin flip over a Google Hangout.

I'd say randomisation is a fair way to go.
If you want to be more specific, here you can check examples for contribution statements.
There's a whole taxonomy for that: CRediT author contribution statements.
You can place these contributions e.g. just before the references section in the paper.

As Jukka already mentioned in the comment, arXiv does not matter in this case.
I think the order should always reflect the real contribution (if possible).
All in all, it's good that you care about such things - good luck with your research.


Finding a suitable research topic from outside academia

"I'd like to find a suitable research topic (specifically, in mathematics) to work on, where 'suitable' means that it's publishable and amenable to being completed in, say, 6-12 months."

Sorry to disappoint you, but that is not how mathematics works. If you are a professional, the possibility to produce a steady flow of results comes not from your ability to estimate the time needed for each particular project but from the general approach which is a combination of some pieces of folk wisdom like "cut the tree that matches your strength" and "don't put all your eggs into one basket". If you are an amateur, it comes from the sheer enthusiasm and the fresh point of view on things (also available to and important for a professional, BTW, but playing secondary role to a methodical approach there).

In both cases, the first question you asked is just meaningless (for that simple reason that no random person on the web can even approximately estimate your strength or tell which topics will carry you away and which won't, if you do not want to invoke higher level considerations). Either learn to live in the ever-shifting treacherous alternative reality based on the crazy concoction of high and low speeds, short euphoric moments and long depressive periods, persistent pressure and all-out spurts, rational calculations and pure luck, or consider another career path taking some "safe" job where the result is directly proportional to the product of the time and the effort spent.

As to your second question: "How to find a topic to research?", you don't find the topic; rather it finds you. Just go around and read papers you can understand and talk to mathematicians you know about what they are doing. Everybody is stuck with some "little thing" that does not require too much time to explain and if you can help someone to get unstuck in their project, you may easily get three things at once: a reputation, a joint paper, and a friend.


Is it OK to cite? Yes.

But... While I recognize that some valuable information can only be obtained from the dark side, it is unfair to air a source’s opinion when the source’s identity and motives are shielded from scrutiny.

So, describe the anonymous sources as clearly as you can. I totally agree with you: "stating their poor trustworthiness immediately after the citation". And note that not everybody knows that *.onion URLs only work in the Tor browser.

About the URL format, cite as any URL, as Anonymous Physicist recommends. I would also suggest you to create permanent records of the web page. Services like perma.cc might help you, it cannot resolve .onion domains, but you can upload your own archive. Another way can be find here.


The cumulative GPA can't in general be known from just the GPAs of the individual semesters.  The cumulative GPA is your total grade points divided by your total possible grade points, over all semesters completed so far.  If you took the same number of classes each semester, and all had equal numbers of units, and all were included in GPA (i.e., no pass/fail or the like), then it would be (1st+2nd+3rd)/3.

The reason it can't be known just from the GPA of the individual semesters is that it depends on how many units you took each semester.  If you took more classes/units in one semester than in another, then that semester will have greater weight in the cumulative GPA.

This applies to averages in general.  If I tell you I have one bag of stones with an average weight of 1kg, and another bag of stones with an average weight of 2kg, you don't know what the average weight would be if you combined all the stones into one group.  To know that, you have to know how many stones are in each bag.


Adding to the other answers to reply to the comment: sure, a postdoc would have the skills to learn the subject on their own. But do they have the time? It's (usually) faster to learn when you get a world expert to teach you, than trying to do it on your own in your office. You can ask questions to the expert, and depending on the format of the course and your questions, the expert can even adapt the course to the audience (a book can't do that). You also have a few other motivated people learning the same thing beside you, and you can ask questions to them. It also provides motivation: if you have an appointment every Monday at 10 to learn something, it's harder to blow off than "I'll read this book some day during the week... maybe...".

Finally, well, learning is fun. Maybe the course isn't strictly necessary for what the postdoc is working on right now. But it's always nice to take a couple of hours every week to learn about something new, open up new perspectives. And it's quite refreshing when you know you are doing this for yourself and not for some exam at the end of the semester. (Almost?) nobody has learned all there is to learn during their PhD. And who knows, maybe you will have a revolutionary idea by attending the course and thinking "wait a minute, I've seen this sort of phenomenon before...!"

Of course, as the others said, I don't think any postdoc would "take" the course to get credits or something like that. Postdocs aren't students.


CS Associate's degree in Brazil: go straight to master's or get a bachelor's first?

You will almost certainly need to obtain a bachelor’s degree before enrolling in a master’s program. Virtually all master’s programs in STEM fields have the requirement of a bachelor’s degree in either the same or a related field as part of the admissions process. It will also give you the opportunity to make up for deficiencies in your previous experience before beginning the more difficult master’s program (relative to the bachelor’s).


Difference between Poster Session and Oral Session

In an oral session, speakers present their work one-by-one in a series of short lectures (usually no more than 30 minutes, and potentially as little as 10 minutes). Each speaker presents, takes questions for a few minutes, and is followed by the next one. These presentations are usually in a room with a seated audience, in a lecture-style format.

In a poster session, a number of presenters each prepare a poster (in a standard size) and mount them on boards in a large room. For a fixed period of time during the conference, all participants are invited to wander round the posters, reading and asking questions as they deem fit. Poster presenters typically stand by the posters and answer questions as people come by.

For more information, see:

Talks vs. poster presentations: Which is better for advertising your research and building research networks?
How important are poster sessions in conferences?
What are some general good principles for creating a poster for a poster session?


Is preparing for a lawsuit a valid reason to defer an exam?

Your original title seemed to imply you are talking about an ordered court appearance, which could be scheduled in conflict with an exam, in which case you should reschedule one or the other. If the court would refuse to reschedule, you would have fairly good reason to request the exam be delayed (I cannot answer the legal question of whether a school would be required to do so for that reason).

However, the body of your question makes it clear that you are just stressed out over a long time period. People are stressed out about all sorts of things. Other people in your program may have sick children or other family members, may deal with chronic illness themselves, may have to balance an additional job with their schoolwork, may have relationship problems, etc. Sometimes these issues are disruptive enough that a school may agree to give some lenience, and in some cases of disability or illness they may be required to, but for the most part you are expected to simply deal with them as part of life.

I can't know your specific situation, but being owed wages does not sound like it rises to the level of interruption that would require deferring an exam. You could consider asking, but this would probably be a favor rather than something you have a right to, so ask carefully if you must.


How to find a reputable open access journal?

Use a journal that is indexed in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).

The DOAJ has a certain quality check regarding the journals' trustworthiness, and it thoroughly reviews journals marked as 'questionable' by users (see, for instance, their FAQ).


Are results that are derived simply by using more computational power publishable?

(I switched the order of a couple of your questions to give the answer a more logical flow.)

  On the other hand, the results are definitely new, and interesting (for whatever reason N = 20 is the point where interesting effects are predicted).

If the results are new, and interesting, then they are by definition publishable. The key point is they add something meaningful to the sum total of human knowledge. That’s certainly a sufficient criterion for publishability (in an idealized sense it should be necessary as well, but I fear it isn’t - plenty of things get published that don’t really meet this condition).

  Are Bob's results publishable? He didn't actually do anything special, he just had more computational power.

The concept of “doing something special” is both mostly meaningless and (to the small extent that it has any meaning) completely irrelevant to the question of publishability. Plenty of authors of excellent papers “didn’t do anything special” - they just had more patience and were willing to work a bit harder, or in many cases just got a little bit luckier, than their peers, and ended up discovering something significant. Publication is not a prize that’s given for “doing something special”, it’s simply the scientific community putting a stamp of approval on a discovery that it is correct, new, and worth paying attention to.

By the way, one can even say that a researcher Bob who works harder than his peer Alice is pretty much the exact scenario you are describing of someone “having more computational power”. In this case the computational power is of the human sort, but I don’t see why that should change the calculation.

Edit: another thought is that Bob actually did “do something special”. It’s not just that he had more computational power, but he had the foresight and intuition to realize that it would be worthwhile to apply that computational power to Alice’s particular problem rather than spend his time and resources doing any number of other things. So although it’s not really that important as I said above, even by your own criterion I think there is more merit to the achievement than your description makes it sound.

  If they are publishable, what would Bob actually write in such a paper? Everything sans the result could effectively be communicated in one sentence ("Read Alice's paper").

Bob would simply write what he did and what the results were, and what makes them interesting. If it can really be described in one sentence I’d argue that it likely wasn’t such an interesting result after all. But on the off-chance that it was indeed interesting, then it would make for a great one-sentence paper. There isn’t any rule that papers have to be longer than one sentence.


Can I submit the same article, which is written in two different languages, to two different journals simultaneously?

Yes, this is a problem. You should not submit the same work to more than one journal at a time. This applies regardless of language - merely being in a different language does not make the actual work unique.

Further, consider some practical considerations - a simultaneous submission means that you'll have to go through peer-review for both papers and (assuming you don't get caught and summarily rejected) presumably have to make some changes. What if the changes don't align? Now you don't have two translations of the same paper, but two subtly different papers in two languages.

If you're genuinely interested in making your paper more accessible, either post a translation online, or wait until one paper is accepted and then approach a journal in the other language about posting a translation.


How to address reviewer's suggestion for new experiments, the results of which have been communicated elsewhere?

I think you should ask the editor. They may  decide to go ahead and publish your paper, or want to wait for the results of the new experiments to appear. In either case you should revise the paper to discuss the new experiments.


Self-plagiarism and citation when working on 2 papers simultaneously

Yes, I would cite paper A in paper B, and I would cite paper B in paper A. Initially the citation would be something like “in submission” with a URL for the referees. As both papers work through the pipeline, that citation would evolve into either a refereed publication venue if possible, or a preprint server if not, to ensure that future readers can follow the link.

On the other hand, I would also write both papers from scratch, without sharing text between them, because (in my experience) that leads to better-written papers. So self-plagiarism isn’t an issue.


How to apply to do a masters thesis in the US or Canada when departments don't post specific positions?

Master's have a different meaning in North-America than in Germany. While the Master's thesis typically closes the university studies in Germany, it is considered 'graduate studies' in North America (the Bachelor is considered the 'university degree' and the majority of students join the workforce with it). Masters are either specializations or given to graduate students who wish or have to stop graduate school before completing a PhD. That is the reason why you didn't find any offers for 'Master's theses' on institution websites there.

You approach of asking a local faculty for contacts is probably your best shot, don't give up. Narrow down to a few options and write them an email, explaining your skills, interests and field of study. Ask if they can think of a possible project for you. In your inquiries explain the requirements for a foreign Master thesis host at your university. Stress out the fact that you are merely asking for the right to use the local facilities and a co-supervision of your work. In my case, a professor told me about a project he had in mind, and I expanded it in a short proposal that was accepted by the local faculty and my program.

North-American professors have to worry about funding for their local Master students. You have to make clear that you want to be a visiting student and thus you will most likely be able to waive tuition fees (with some exceptions, like MIT). Along that line, explain that like Masters students in Germany, you will pay for your ramen noodles yourself and don't necessarily need a stipend if it can't be provided (on that note, Canada and the USA require that you prove you have sufficient means to support yourself while on their territory, so start a piggy bank).

With this in mind, there are few reasons for a group leader abroad not to consider your project, since you might contribute to their research while not costing anything. These few reasons include: too much supervision burden already.


Does a glossary make sense in a computer science masters' thesis

I'd encourage you to include a glossary.
I expect your work to use a mixed vocabulary from different fields of science, e.g. computer science, signal processing, or even linguistics. Your paper might be read by people who are not as familiar with all these fields as you are. And some of the terms might not have a common, generally-accepted definition. Or they might gain a different meaning over time (e.g. "AI" now has a rather different meaning today than it had in its early years).
So, defining and explaining the vocabulary that you use seems quite necessary to me, to make your paper accessible to an audience from slightly different fields of research, and understandable for a longer period in time.
As a (maybe old-fashioned?) reader, I'd prefer to have these definitions in one place, not forcing the reader to search through all occurrences of the word just to find its meaning.


How do I compare my thesis research work to commercial products that I can't obtain?

It's my experience that software companies attempt to secure intellectual property rights for their codes in the form of patents. This is especially true in the United States. You could attempt to find information about the subject matter that you are interested in using the publicly available US Patent and Trademark Office portal, PAIR.

A search on a company name - as applicant, or keywords in the title or abstract might get you somewhere. If you are successful, you will not - necessarily - find code. What you might get is an outline of how the patent's subject matter fits into the existing state-of-the-art. In this way, you can map out what these commercial vendors' software does and if your work will extend the subject.


Can I add a GitHub repository as an entry in Google Scholar?

The way with dealing with github repositories in a citable way is to draw a DOI from Zenodo. Zenodo allows you to create a tag or release in the github repository and make that citable.
I don't know specifically whether google scholar indexes that, but at least it is something you can put into a list of references.


Are non-first authors less likely to be invited for peer review?

Certainly someone with no first-author papers (or indeed no papers at all) can be asked to act as a reviewer. However, I think it is relatively unlikely, if only because it can be hard for the editor to be confident what expertise that person actually has (perhaps they're the statistics guru and don't know anything much about reaction pathways in biochemistry...). In contrast, it is a reasonable first assumption that the first author of a paper is broadly capable of reviewing similar papers.
Of course there are exceptions: the editor may know the individual personally; the individual may be recommended/suggested by someone else; they may have a strong reputation in their own right without ever authoring papers (e.g. if they are a specialist lab technician).


collaboration in phd project from an undergrad student

That's probably a question best asked of your PhD adviser -- if you want your friend to become a co-author, your adviser will have to know about that friend's contributions anyway.

In any case, if your friend contributes significantly to the work, it's not a question of "being nice" when you think about making him a co-author: he contributed intellectually to the work, so he needs to be a co-author.

Whether that is "fair" is a different question and depends on what your friend hopes to get out of it. If he's interested in getting publications, then he may consider it fair. If he is only interested in graduating and then getting a job in industry, he may not be interested in publications and might consider money to be a better way to compensate him for the work.


Can research project scholarship offers ever get retracted?

Well, probably yes, if they find out you have a "rap" sheet for dealing in x,y and z etc etc.

But I think they have just been busy so have not replied, and are still looking forward to welcoming you on that date.

You may find that you receive an email with lots of info as you are on some other mailing list to get initial information... The wheels sometimes grind slowly...

Best of luck!


You seem to mix two different aspects: Your (understandable) disappointment about the response and the long time it took to get the response.

You cannot really complain about the response itself because it generally seems to be rational and the reason for the rejection is not the long time it took. Right now you can only try to use the helpful aspects in the response to improve your manuscript.

On the other hand, you should complain about the time it took. Two years is indeed inacceptable. If you will get no reply, there is very little you can do, I'm afraid. It is probably best to look for an alternative journal.

My advice for the future: Do not submit to the journal again, but count it as an important experience: next time, you could ask in regular intervals (not too short or long, let's say every three months), and also give the process a maximum timeframe.


Do some or most universities allow retiring faculty to retain their faculty email accounts?

In my experience, most institutions do allow retired faculty to keep their email accounts.

The American Association of University Professors has issued a Statement of Principles on Academic Retirement and Insurance Plans which includes:

  Each institution should help retired faculty members and administrators remain a part of the academic community, and facilitate timely retirement, by providing, where possible, such amenities as a mail address, library privileges, office space, faculty club membership, the institution’s publications, secretarial help, administration of grants, research facilities, faculty dining and parking privileges, and participation in convocations and academic processions.

Although "email account" isn't specifically mentioned on that list, it would seem to clearly be in the same spirit.

Of course, your institution has the power to make whatever policies they see fit.

As to your correspondence, I'd suggest asking whether it can be restored from a backup.  They might be able to give you the data even if they won't mantain the account.  Your department chair might be able to support you in this, particularly if your correspondence included other department business that may be relevant to current faculty.

Another request you could make is whether your institution could set up a forwarding address, so that when your correspondents send mail to jbales@yourschool.edu, it gets forwarded on to your own personal email account.  That saves the institution the trouble of having to maintain your account and store your mail, but you still get the benefit of being reachable through that address.


Recommended course weight for online quizzes outside of class

My favorite way of incorporating out-of-class online quizzes is rather unconventional.

Rather than worrying about cheating, we encouraged students to work together and even to keep redoing the quiz until they got everything right. Then we incorporated their scores into their overall class grade as a multiplier.

In other words, the grade for the class was: grade = weighted_tests * f(online_quizzes)

We played some fancy curving games with that f function to mean that students wouldn't get hurt by being a little off, but that they'd suffer badly if they didn't take the online quizzes seriously.  The net effect was to use the online quizzes as self-grading practice work, with a grading "stick" to enforce that the students were actually expected to do them.


Can one blow the whistle on a professor who excludes students on the basis of their personal life?

Along with several commenters, I think that first we have to understand and agree on at least one unambiguously unethical or illegal practice is being committed before we can discuss whistle-blowing.  I find myself having to stretch rather far to see such a practice here.

We are asked to consider a professor "who only takes students who are willing to commit to spending all their waking time studying." I think this could be an exaggeration, because

  This professor is in the United States. He is very good in his field and manages to get students who fit his requirements;

Devoting all your waking time to studying is highly unwise and unhealthy.  Even in the short term it does not lead to increases in productivity, and it will lead to burnout in the (not so terribly) long-term.  Such an advisor would likely burn through his students faster than he can get them, and if too many students burn out, the professor's work will be affected and also other students will notice and not want to sign on with him.

However, let us assume for the sake of argument that a professor is only willing to take students who devote, say, 100 hours a week to work for him (not so far from "all their waking time").  Although thoroughly unadvisable, I don't know what rule would be broken by setting this ridiculously high bar for student workload.  A student and an advisor must both choose to work together in order for this to take place.  (For students who have not already been admitted to the program, the department and university has some role to play, at least in vetting the process.)  In this choice there are competitive aspects on both sides: given that throughout the academic world the vast majority of advisors would (sanely) require much less of their students, it is not clear why a student would choose to work with an advisor under these conditions unless they foresee an amazing long-term benefit to their career.

The only legal angle I see is that if an advisor terminates a student for failing to do more than 40 hours per week of work in a lab or other environment where specific duties are being done and can be timed: that would probably be actionable.  But it seems to me that an employer can ask an employee to complete tasks that would take that employee (or most, or all employees) more than 40 hours a week and can terminate the employee if they fail to complete those tasks.

The idea that advisors specifically require students to have no "personal life" just sounds a little silly to me: an advisor has no right to know a student's marital or relationship status, and in academic environments I'm familiar with there is no natural path for an advisor to find out this information if the student does not want to reveal it.  Hinting that a student should not or will not have time for dating, family life, other hobbies or whatever is much as above: obviously highly unadvisable on the professor's part but probably not really actionable.  If a professor saw a student's wedding ring on Monday, made a point of asking about it, responded disapprovingly and then terminated the student on Tuesday for no compelling reason, then whistle-blowing would be in order.  In the absence of such egregious behavior it's hard to see what can be done.

Graduate students often feel that "they don't have a choice" and must put up with poor behavior or poor deals on the part of their advisor.  I think the best thing that we can tell students is that they do have a choice.  Healthy academic programs should engineer and foster mechanisms for students to stand up for themselves and switch out of bad situations.  Students should not assume in advance that they are enrolling in a healthy academic program.  They should be very hesitant to work with an advisor whose current and/or former students are unsatisfied.


Carrying incomplete research work from postdoc to assistant professor position

You should (indeed, I'd say you must) acknowledge any funding that supported any of the research reported in the paper.  If you (like me) are in mathematics, then you should list as co-author(s) whoever made a substantial intellectual contribution to the research.  If you're in some other field then you should follow that field's conventions for co-authorship.


Should I change “colour” to “color” when incorporating a Canadian article into an American book?

Changing the spelling of a single word, in multiple places, from British to American English seems odd. Enforcing a particular writing style (e.g., American English) on all authors is fairly common. Ideally, you will have a professional copy editor edit the book. The copy editor will need to be given stylistic guidelines including spelling, word usage, abbreviation, citing, referencing, numbering and many other aspects. Once the chapter has been copy edited, it should be returned to the author for her final approval.


Is there is a real possibility that it will be rejected because of its length?

No: Length is irrelevant, quality counts. A two page paper could be better than a twenty-two page paper.


Style guide for academic conference talks

Edward Tufte is classic and well-recognized authority on scientific communication.  His book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a wonderful guide for thinking about your visual communication (including slides). He also has a fierce critique of PowerPoint which serves as a good negative guide of pitfalls to avoid.


Should I include that someone cited my dissertation as part of their master's?

No, individual citations are not typically included in a CV.  Some people might include aggregate statistics such as an h-index.


Getting an academic position right after an industrial based PhD program

Actually, this is a question for your university, you are enrolled to. If they offer "industrial" PhD program, they should explain the criteria for "good" PhD thesis. It is entirely possible that 5 SCI papers are plenty, given the orientation of the program.

If, on the other hand, you are worried about your future career after PhD, yes, there is reason for concern. You enrolled in a program that fits people who want to get employment in the industry, not in the academia. In my opinion it is not the question of what your CV or PhD thesis says, the question is whether you learned enough of the basic research stuff you will need as an academic scientist (as opposed to the industrial developer).

If I would be faced with a candidate like you, I would be very interested in the content of those 5 SCI papers and would like to know which parts of the research were exactly your responsibility. If you implemented a solution, but someone other did rigorous experimental evaluation on all papers, then I would consider you less qualified than someone who did the experimental evaluation part as well (which is usually the case with first authors on journal papers, written in academia).

The unrelated subjects on the other hand would not be a disadvantage.


If my PI received research grants from a company to be able to pay my postdoc salary, did I have a potential conflict interest too?

Yes, this is a potential conflict of interest. You specifically refer to working on industry-sponsored projects in addition to your salary being paid by an industry sponsor (even if indirectly): both can be perceived as conflicts.

Since your position is contingent on the industry funds, it would be possible for you to lose your position if the sponsor was unhappy with the results you produced.

That doesn't mean your work is by rule dishonest or tainted, but it means that for people to properly interpret the meaning of your work they should be aware of how you were funded: that's the purpose of conflict of interest disclosure.  You aren't saying that the work was unethically influenced, but you are allowing others to make that determination on their own.

As @BrianBorchers pointed out in a comment, the importance of this particular conflict depends on the rules for reporting conflicts of interest in whatever context you are talking about. In general, though, it's better to err on the side of disclosure.

To clarify further, if you are asking whether you are legally required to declare a conflict (for example, to abide by US federal law) then your question is probably off-topic for this site and you should instead be consulting with staff and training materials at your university that determine what is a reportable conflict of interest. My answer should be interpreted according to the question you asked, which is whether you had a potential conflict of interest.

In response to your edit, and your comment that indicated you weren't aware of exactly where your funding was coming at the time: I think you can relax a bit and not worry too much about this potential conflict, as long as when you present your research either in talks or in published work that you make sure it is clear that the work itself was funded by an industry sponsor, even if no improper behavior actually occurred. I would definitely put it in a disclosure slide if you are talking about work related to the company that funded you and the work. If you are talking about anything unrelated to that project then I see no need to disclose: you have no continuing ongoing financial interest and there is no conflict of interests on an unrelated project.


Submitting to a journal as an undergrad but lying about academic status on bio

It's maybe too easy to offer advice on such matters when one doesn't have to live with the consequences, but for what it's worth: for your own peace of mind, and to minimize the risk of long term consequences (while possibly increasing the short term risk, though not by much I hope), I think you should send a contrite email to the editor explaining what happened and apologizing. Although there is no telling for sure what the editor would do, considering that your bio status is immaterial to the acceptance decision, I doubt that this will cause them to unaccept the paper. In any case, it's the right thing to do. And if you decide to stay silent and keep your deception a secret, you will have to spend the next few years worrying that it will be discovered, with potentially worse consequences for your career. Nip it in the bud is what I suggest. Good luck!


Idealistically, a paper should aspire to contain all the information required for reproducing its empirical results and verifying its deductive results with reasonable effort. Just writing the suggested sentence, however, does not allow for this, as someone would have to redo your work on finding those equations from scratch.

This may drastically reduce the usefulness of your paper, as it unnecessarliy increases the amount of work other people have to put in using your results and decreases their perceived soundness (see Fermat’s Last Theorem for an extreme example). This may also be harmful from an egoistical point of view as it does not improve your popularity amongst others in your field and you may receive less citations.

Depending on how exactly your equations were derived and look like, the following ways to include or not include them may be appropriate:

  From [equations derived in the paper] we can obtain closed solutions for [variables] using [standard technique or computer algebra system], which we use in the following.

  From [equations derived in the paper], we obtain closed solutions for [variables] (see Appendix X).

If the target journal does not allow for appendices and has a content limit (in which case it will usually be a letter journal), the following may be acceptable:

  From [equations derived in the paper] we derived analytical results for [variables]. For brevity’s sake, these results are not given here and will be published elsewhere.

Something similar may also be appropriate if you are publishing in a journal of another discipline, e.g., you are publishing in a medical journal as your equations are relevant for an imaging technique.

Either way, it should go without saying that publishing the results elsewhere should be a realistic endeavour and actually be intended. Also, if you are not giving too much away, it would be better in terms of soundness and acceptance to actually publish your analytical work first.

As always, you will likely get a better answer from someone familiar with your work and field, such as your supervisor.


What are the benefits of working as a teaching assistant?

Being a TA has helped throughout my Ph.D. I would highly recommend becoming a TA for the following reasons.

You get paid.
You learn teaching skills
You strengthen your knowledge.
It's good for the C.V.

First and foremost you need to fund your life and studies. Although being a TA might not offer the greatest of pay and may take a lot of time. It does seem to pay reasonably well for the amount of effort you have to put in.

Secondly but possibly one of the most underrated things about being a TA. You learn to communicate, and you learn to communicate and learn how to teach.

By communicate, I don't mean just how to improve your English, but how to engage with students. Teaching skills are great, and if you want to go into academia or wish to go in a role where you have to explain concepts to others this will come in handy.

OK, you're teaching at undergrad level. So you may think you know everything. You may actually be surprised that some undergrads may ask some really advanced level questions. Also you may find yourself recapping on some content which you just swept over in your own undergraduate degree. Recovering content, you could find you have a better understanding of it.

Since being a TA. I have had several offers to teach in academic and commercial organisations, and have become a visiting lecturer at another institution based on some of my TA activities.

In terms of cons:

Time

Teaching, marking etc takes time. You may only be teaching for an hour of time, but actually its 4 hours worth of work. From preparing slides, teaching, marking coursework, meetings about students progress with academic staff etc.

I would suggest you give it a go, its only 10 hours after all. If you find it's too much you can always say that it's too much and you will be unable to continue being a TA as you feel your studies are suffering.

Best of luck and I hope this has been of some help.


Cite only "good papers" or "all expected papers"?

In my discipline the typical structure of an article is introduction, theory, previous research, data/methods, results, conclusion. In the section "previous research" you describe the state of the art in your field regarding the research question from your article. As I understand the OP's question, there is a group the OP disagrees with, but who are considered in your field to be important. In that case you need to refer to them (not every single publication, but one or two main publications), even if you think their way of doing things is substandard. That does not mean you have to agree with them; you can tell your audience how your approach differs form theirs and how your approach is (in your opinion) better. But ignoring an important part of your field is bad. Addressing substandard practices is how your field can move forward.

Pragmatically, not citing them in the previous results section signals to the readers, editors, and reviewers that you are not aware of important parts of your discipline or that you don't want to take part in a particular debate. Both can easily lead to your article being considered less relevant, which could get your article rejected or ignored.


How to find an (Undergrad) research assistant position in europe?

The Dutch term you are looking for is Studentassistent.

My experience in the Netherlands (some time ago and in the social sciences) is that these positions are fairly rare. Moreover they were rarely advertised. If someone had funding for such a position, a student was directly asked. At my current institution in Germany we have so much funding earmarked for "HiWis" we have trouble filling all the positions.

So I don't think it is a European thing; there are huge differences between countries and disciplines.


How would a collective recommendation letter from co-workers be perceived for admissions to MFA requiring work experience?

I had a "co-written" letter of recommendation when I was applying to graduate schools. I thought it was fine, and it was also somewhat unique, as did the people reviewing the application. The interviewer for one of the programs to which I was applying said that in two decades, he had never gotten such a letter before. So your letter will definitely stand out. However, there was also the comment that the letter was a bit strange and came across a bit "gimmicky."

I might recommend instead that you have one of your colleagues "officially" write the letter, and have the letter state that his co-workers (and name them!) also contributed to the content of the letter.