Do I need to search citation sources for a rather generic graphic that I have drawn myself?

If you create an image yourself that is not modeled after/derived from someone else's, you don't have to go out of your way to learn if someone has created a similar image.

For example, if I create a flow diagram of a common process for my paper, it's likely that many other papers have a similar diagram (because the technique of using flow diagrams to illustrate a process is pretty standard). That's perfectly OK as long as I didn't intentionally copy them.

(As always: if the technique of visualization or the data content of the image is not general knowledge, cite it.)


What is expected in a Thesis Abstract, on a math job application?

The few times I was asked for such a thing, I literally copy-pasted the abstract for my thesis into a document and submitted it. mathjobs doesn't want to tell me which jobs asked for it back when I applied so I'm not sure (I got two postdoc offers that round but I'm pretty sure those places didn't ask for a thesis abstract). No one emailed me to tell me that I'd done it wrong though. Usually there is a contact person listed in each mathjobs ad that you could contact to ask for details, but if say the deadline is tonight I would recommend just copy-pasting the thesis abstract, or making up a thesis abstract if your thesis doesn't exist yet.

In principle though, the introduction to your research statement and your thesis abstract can be (but isn't always) quite distinct (my thesis was a subset of my research statement). A research statement should have at least something to say about where you envision your research going, but a thesis abstract is mostly limited to the contents of your thesis.


Is it better to focus on relearning mathematics fundamentals or learn material as needed to understand research papers?

It will not be very easy to learn a broad subject in mathematics by reading research papers.  Books which cover the subject starting from the basics will be more cohesive (for instance, regarding notation and terminology) and will leave you with more approaches to solve problems. If your major requires a lot of mathematics, hopefully you can identify a specific area (like analysis, geometry, probability, etc.) that you need, and find a good text that synthesizes a lot of the research.


Gofer work in exchange for Letter of Recommendation

It’s appropriate to ask for a letter, but completely inappropriate to offer a thing of value in exchange. Professors are already paid to do their job, which includes writing letters of recommendation, and it would be unethical for a professor to accept a favor or other thing of value in exchange for agreeing to do what is already a part of their job.


I would mail the application and contact the institution to explain the situation. If they are willing to make an exception, it's better if they receive your application as soon as possible, and if not they'll just discard it anyway.

Unless, of course, it is explicitly stated somewhere that late applications will not be considered. In that case there's nothing you can do.


Email your supervisor. This is perfectly fine, it's one of the reasons you have a supervisor.

Having to perform a task that you have no background in happens all the time in PhDs - it is a brilliant way to acquire more knowledge. But it is not useful or enjoyable to get stuck in one task for too long. So you want to figure out the quickest way to learn about this analysis.

For some people, learning about something new means immediately reading lots of literature on it. For other people (such as me and, by the sound of it, you), learning about something new means asking other people how they've done that. This could be your supervisor, it could be another student, or you can start by searching examples of that analysis on the internet.

Whenever I have to do a new task, I immediately search for people who already have experience with that. If that exact problem has already been solved, then I'd very much like to know since there is no sense in reinventing the wheel. Usually, however, they can help me a little bit but cannot solve the full problem for me. Finding the rest of the solution is how I show I can work independently.


What does “query to referee” in the tracking system of Physical Review Letters imply?

It can mean that there was something problematic about the referee's report.  This can indicate that there is some kind of inconsistency between what the referee says in different parts of the report.  For example, the referee may have provided a very positive written evaluation, but accidentally clicked the box saying "Reject."  If that happens, the editor will naturally ask the referee to clarify what they actually meant.

One other thing it can mean, particularly in connection with a journal like Physical Review Letters, which has selection criteria that require more than just a correct and interesting paper.  If a paper is deemed to be, in fact, correct and interesting, there may still be some additional back-and-forth communication between the editor and referee(s) to ascertain whether the work is important enough for that particular journal.


Working relationship with master thesis professor

There are three ways to get your work reviewed by people other than your supervisor:

You've probably already done a related work survey. Look for other professors and PhD scholars who are doing or have done work that is very similar to yours. Contact these people by sending them emails and ask them to review your work. Don't send them a 40-page document. No body is going to review that. Send them a summary of your work with emphasis on the main idea. Then if they are interested, provide them with more details. If have done a really good work, someone might offer you a PhD opportunity.
Try to get your work published in some reputable journal, conference, or magazine. During the process of publication, your work will be reviewed. Of course, you need to do that before the deadline of your thesis submission. I do not study physics and so I cannot recommend any publication venue.
Ask your colleagues who are working in the same or similar field to review your work. You said there is one PhD student who reviewed your work. Remember to accept any constructive criticism and use it to your advantage. Try to find other people.

If some people expressed interest in your work, tell your supervisor and try to get him/her engaged in your project. Hopefully you'll get a recommendation letter from him/her at the end.


Start the PhD research before taking my masters?

I actually did what you are proposing, skipped my MS and went straight for a PhD in genetics instead. Also, based on my experience I had a bunch of concerns for you but I can't post much - the program insists I have untoward motives because I don't know your income situation, not that I want to know at all!  Great. Last time I'll post here.

There are positives and negatives to this decision and in the end, you may not think going straight for a PhD is worth it.  First and foremost, will you be paid a stipend while obtaining a Masters?  If so, will it be the same amount as you would make while working on PhD, and are he conditions the same, i.e. will you be a teaching assistant the entire time for both degrees or will the PhD allow you to focus mainly on your research with little other responsibilities for the stipend?

What they did to me was blatant "carrot" manipulation.  I was offered a lot more to enroll in a PhD program and skip the MS.  And hey, they had already accepted me as an MS candidate, they just targeted me as good slave labor :) I think I should have stuck to my guns and gotten the MS first.  The classes in my case would have been identical and wouldn't have been repeated moving onto the PhD if I had stayed at the same institution - find out about that as well - what is the curriculum like between the two degrees?  Will any classes have to be repeated, especially if you change institutions?  If you have a good idea where you want to be as well as what you want to be doing (and you are stating that you do know what you want to study), ask the second institution (or the first one if you plan to stay) about repetitious classes.

As far as continuing on the same or similar track of inquiry, make certain if you plan on staying in one place they are good with that plan.  But honestly, if you are getting two degrees, take advantage of the switch.  Use your Masters to gain extra skills (by classes or experience) that you may not have planned on picking up if going straight for the PhD.  The broader your education, no matter what the field, the better you will see the big picture and its underlying minutiae simultaneously.  A broader knowledge base can only aid you in designing strategies to solve problems and make testable connections between superficially disparate subjects. If you switch institutions, you might find it even easier to stay inline with your original goal.


Impact of a W for grad school if I'm changing majors?

In general, no single thing like this would have much impact. In this case, I'd say even less. People aren't looking for small reasons to reject your application, but for evidence that you will be a success in your chosen field as well as in the program you apply to.

So, if you do well overall and do especially well in Philosophy then you should be fine. Good letters of recommendation will overcome a simple thing like a W.

But be prepared, if asked, to talk about why you wanted to switch. And make the reasons positive, about philosophy, not negative about math or CS.


Does filing a patent application require disclosure in the paper publication process?

The answer to this depends on the state of the filing and the particulars of the publication venue.

If you haven't filed anything yet, you definitely aren't required to disclose, and more than you are required to cite a paper that hasn't been submitted yet.  After all, any number of things might prevent the filing from happening.  Also, if you disclose before filing, it could screw up your patent.
If you have filed, then it depends on whether the venue requires you to disclose a conflict of interest.  For example, PLoS ONE is very picky about conflict disclosure, but most IEEE venues do not care.  A patent filing (preliminary or full), is reasonable to treat as a conflict of interest.

If you're not sure, though, then the people handling your patent will almost certainly be willing to help you figure out the right way to handle it.  In my experience, the IP offices of many institutions are very happy when researchers are actually willing to engage with them and will be very helpful to you.


Postdoc position: should I stay for one year or two years?

Two.

In the United States, at least in computer science, most postdocs are synchronized with the academic calendar.  A typical postdoc starts in August, and faculty application deadlines start in November.  So for purposes of applying for faculty positions, a one-year postdoc is really only three months long.  A two-year postdoc gives you five times as much time to strengthen your faculty application!


What do I do if I cannot give a good reference to my PhD student?

A student who did the minimum during their PhD has very little chance of getting a prestigious fellowship.  In the sciences, you must have publications to get prestigious fellowships; a student who did the minimum will not.  Your role as a mentor is to guide students to attempt things they might succeed in.  Tell the student they will not succeed in this application.  Tell them to compare their record to past successful applicants.
You should not write the letter.  It will not help the student and it can hurt your reputation.  But you should have told the student that they would not get a letter for prestigious fellowships when you discussed their goals for completing their PhD.


Does mathematical modeling expert need to know subject of interdisciplinary field

Yes, absolutely - up to a point.

You do not need to be the world's greatest expert on the subject matter, but you will need to know enough to participate in the research process and make suggestions. If your role as an applied mathematician is "Subject matter expert gives you equations to solve, you apply numerical method," that is consulting, not modeling or research. Here are some things where more subject matter knowledge improves the life of both applied mathematicians and their collaborators:

With more chemistry knowledge you can know

What approximations could be appropriate? What information do your collaborators really need?
Do the results you have make sense? Being able to determine simple checks and analytic test cases yourself will save a lot of time.
If you can answer this question, what is the likely next question?
If the suggestion your collaborators gave you has a typo - this is obvious with more subject knowledge, but can be missed.
When you report on your work (papers, talks) - you can be specific about why it is important

I have worked in many math/[other science] collaborations, and a very common failure mode is that a math student takes a couple of weeks, and comes back with a single result, with an error that could have been caught. Or that the student mis-interprets a suggestion, and it takes a long time to clear up. Or that the student spends a month optimizing a calculation that is only relevant to an order of magnitude.  All of this happens a lot, and the best solution is more subject knowledge!

I do not know if this is happening with you. But if you are modeling a chemistry process, you will either need to learn a good amount of the chemistry, or you will need a more well-defined problem at the beginning. And as a modeler, you presumably know that defining the problem well is half of the battle!


It's sort of a catch-22 situation here. On one hand, you do need a PhD to teach at the higher education level; on the other hand, the PhD doesn't teach (and doesn't even intend to teach) you how to teach!

But I guess wanting to teach (at university level) is a valid reason to get a PhD, as I've had friends and instructors who took PhDs because they want to teach college. Of course you'll still need to like doing research (and you'll probably still be held to the same admissions standards as those who just want to do research), but wanting to teach at the college+ level seems like a valid reason to take a PhD.

I'm not a faculty member, though, so you may want to talk to some teaching faculty with PhDs at your university to see what they think.


Is it common to do a MS in Germany and then a PhD in USA?

Admission to a "really good" PhD program in the US depends much more on what you do than on where you do it. If you do well and can show aptitude for research, you will have a good chance at many excellent universities.

Admission, however, is very competitive and there will be many people applying to top programs who have nearly perfect academic records. That will be the biggest issue, not the institution at which you study. Make sure that you can get excellent letters of recommendation by the time you wish to move on.

As for "common", however, I don't really know, but suspect it is about as common as applying from good institutions (like Dresden) from any other country.


Writing my speaker's bio when I have very little relevant experience

Don't overthink it. It's true that people will be attracted towards some talks because they are given by a "big name", but it's also true that people will also base their choices on the content, regardless of the speaker. The majority of attendees, if they see a talk on a topic that is of interest to them, will not turn it down just because the speaker has an unimpressive bio. In fact, I suspect many people don't read the bios at all, certainly not all 250 words!

I would recommend a cross between 2 and 3. Give a brief mention of your previous work, because it's a part of your background, and if nothing else, people like to know about the different career paths that others have taken. Then perhaps describe why you moved to your current role/area (avoiding phrases like "filling a mundane role"...), with an emphasis on what you find interesting about it and any ways that it links with your previous experience. That should allow you to talk a bit about the project while still keeping it relevant to you personally. You can keep it fairly brief though - don't feel like you have to use up all 250 words just for the sake of it.


How should I cite a paper from a journal that has changed its name?

Cite the journal name that was used at the time of publication. For example, the British Medical Journal officially changed title to BMJ in 1988. Cite articles from 1987 and earlier as Br Med J, not BMJ.

(Source: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 2nd edition.)


Up until which application level should one keep supplying a bachelors transcript of records together with the actual certificate?

In addition to field making a difference, there are strong differences between countries. For instance, for my jobs in the US, I never needed to show any of my diplomas; however, I had to supply my transcripts for undergraduate and graduate programs. By contrast, in Germany, job applicants are normally expected to show their entire pedigrees—which means at a minimum the diploma certificates at both the university and high school levels! (I was also expected to produce the transcripts, of course.)

So, the best advice I can give is to follow the expectations of the industry in the region where you are applying. If you have any doubts about what is required, ask the contacts for the position or program.


Is it possible to get second master while I already have one?

Your own health is more important than any degree. You should attend to that. If you can do both, perhaps working with a therapist while deemphasizing your degree work for a while, then that might be an option. Stress and depression are very serious.

Your advisor seems to be invested in you, so you may have an option of a pause or a slower rate of progress. But a second masters won't impede your current goals so it doesn't sound (from here - which is far away) as a poor option.

However, if you can find a therapist who can help you with the health issues, he or she would be a better source of advice on your future plans than anything you will get here. In fact you may get advice of a complete different sort that neither you, your advisor, nor the community here could think of.

But for the direct question, I can't think of any downside to having more than one master's degree.


A student keeps using a native language while asking questions in the class when the course is taught in English

If you want a non-confrontation approach, simply repeat the question in English before answering it.

Hearing the translation may help the student in question see how to phrase their questions in English. It also give a polite hint that the question should have been asked in English.


Master's and Bachelor's theses on the same topic?

I don't see any problem studying the same subject. You could consider it an extension of your Bachelor's thesis. As a reviewer I would welcome such a proposal, as long as the one-pager is well written and has clear statements of the problems you want to solve.
I even suggest you think about what you could have done differently in your Bachelor thesis and include it in your proposal.
Remember that you are submitting a project proposal and, during the course of your masters research, you might change your mind and decide to pursue another direction.


Should I pursue a PhD if I am clearly not qualified for it?

Nothing has said that you're not qualified to be a researcher—getting good grades and being a good researcher are not entirely correlated, and having the skills for one is not necessarily a guarantee of success for the other.

What your comments suggest, though, is that you would likely not enjoy the process of getting a PhD. Given how long it takes to get a PhD, that's an awfully long time to spend being miserable.

So ask yourself:

  What is it that I enjoy about research? Is it enough to justify all the drawbacks it would bring?

If you can't justify getting a PhD to yourself, don't make yourself miserable by forcing yourself to do something you don't want.


Doing a second doctorate to get back on a research track?

A second Ph.D. is generally a bad idea, as noted elsewhere in other answers.

Instead, there are several other paths that you can pursue to get back into research, depending on your goals.  The main ones that I would think of are: getting a postdoc, joining a lab as research staff, or joining an industrial lab.  All of these will lead you back into research in some form or other, thought probably not your same line of research that you were working on in your Ph.D.

You've got a gap on your CV, but not an unusually large one, so I don't think that needs to be a major barrier.  More concerning is the fact that you don't seem to have a professional network: the thing that you want from your old advisor is not for them to hire you, but for them to connect you with other different professors or industrial folks who might be interested in hiring you.  Going to conferences in your field is another good opportunity for networking, but it will be more effective if you can get help from your advisor or other professors who you have gotten to know during your doctoral program.


Graduate student salary increase only for new students

Assuming the poster is in the United States:

You can request a salary increase.  Sometimes requests are granted.
You can leave the university to get higher pay elsewhere.
You can organize students in to a union, which will strike if an acceptable salary is not provided by the university.  Most universities in the United States do not have a graduate student union which negotiates an employment contract.  These are different from the student union which offers campus recreation at universities in the United States.

On your own, a PhD student has very little bargaining power.


The US is not a particularly heavy user of formal titles, especially compared to, for example, Germany.  Broadly speaking, education goes like this:

High school diploma (year 12, or about age 18)
Technical school, trade school, associates degree (HS +2 years)
Bachelor of Arts/Science (HS +4 years, a typical undergraduate degree)
Master of Arts/Science (BA/BS +2 years)
Juris Doctorate (BA/BS +3 years, law school)
PhD (BA/BS +4-8 years, depending on field)
MD (BA/BS +4 years, medical school, not including residency)

There are more, but these are some common ones.  However, very few of these translate into an actual title that someone would put before (or after) their name.  Generally just medical school and PhD, I think.  Although for specific use within your field, for example on a business card, you can get into all sorts of initials for niche things, like certifications.

Engineer is a big one that gets confusing, having spent some time in central Europe where "engineer" is a designation for anyone who has studied a technical subject beyond undergrad.  In the US, an engineer is someone who studied engineering, and nothing more.  Americans who don't have contact with foreign institutions and individuals would be quite confused at someone calling themselves a "Specialist" or "Magister", as well, since we have no commonly-used equivalent.

A lot of how you handle this will depend on your audience.  Just because "most" Americans won't be familiar with the myriad of possible titles/levels of education doesn't mean the one you want to communicate with isn't.  But very broadly speaking, anything after your undergraduate studies that isn't a PhD, MD or JD, should probably just be referred to as graduate school or a masters.


Publications and career trajectory in the 'About me' section of a job talk

Since they have asked for it specifically, it won't come across badly unless you make it "over the top".
But talk about how your publications set a base for future studies and, and maybe how you see your work benefiting future students in their own studies. If it is "in person" then a slide listing your publications could save you some time and words. Maybe in an online talk you could do likewise. Let the publications speak for themselves, but say some things about what they imply for the future "trajectory".
OTOH, sometimes "over the top" is a good ice breaker. "Greatest mathematician since Poincaré" would do it.


My experience with co-advising is that it most tends to emerge from some combination of the following circumstances:

The student's project has some sort of interdisciplinary nature, such that the "primary" advisor does not have the ability to entirely supervise the student on their own at a technical level.
The advisors have a very close collaboration already, such that it is natural that a student working for one is de facto working for both.
The "co-advisor" is effectively the primary advisor, but cannot technically be so for various reasons, such as not being a primary investigator or being at a different institution (academic or otherwise).

Any or all of these may pertain at once.  In essentially all cases that I have been familiar with, however, the supervision is of a single project, not of different projects for different advisors.

Funding most typically comes from the primary advisor (who usually would not have taken on the student without having the ability to fund them), but individual circumstances can lead to any number of other arrangements.


Spot a possible improvement when reviewing a paper

Contacting the authors directly is a terrible idea. Don't go there. Contacting the editor with a question or request is fine. If you contact the authors directly and they interpret it as a form of poaching and complain to the editor, you may lose the opportunity to review in the future.
But the "best" option isn't to join the paper. It is to give your best review, pointing out what you think has been missed and asking for major revisions if that is what it would take.
Tell the editor that you would be willing to work with them on the improvement with permission and await what happens. You may not get a co-authorship (I doubt you will) and your advice might even be attributed to the anonymous reviewer, but that is pretty natural.
You will have contributed to the advancement of the art.


With recent PhD admissions success, is becoming a university/liberal arts professor now realistic?

First, you should not expect to get accurate advice about this.  As a new graduate student, you are at least seven years away from being competitive for a faculty position.  Nobody can predict the job market seven years ahead.

Currently, faculty positions in physics are extremely competitive.  There are many massively qualified candidates for very few positions.  Often, new assistant professors have more publications than the retirees they replace.

Owing to falling birth rates, there are too many colleges in many parts of the world.  As a result, some will fail financially before you finish your PhD.  Private liberal arts colleges that do not have endowments will be the first to go.  During the current pandemic, enrollment may fall 20%, which is fatal to many institutions if they are not bailed out by the government.

Community college hiring is also competitive.  It has different practices from research universities, but do not listen to anyone who tells you that if it's not elite you can easily get a job there.

  What other steps should I take to improve my chances to become a professor, especially at liberal arts colleges?

For any institution, publish a lot.  The number of publications you need to get a job keeps going up.  Physics research is really expensive.  If you want to have a choice of employers, you need to learn to do research that is really cheap.  A good research university lab has a budget well into the six figures, but you are likely to get an annual budget in the low three figures when you are an assistant professor.  It might be zero.  For liberal arts colleges, it is essential to include undergraduate students in your research.  Start supervising student projects as early as possible.

  Should I try to TA beyond my second year?

In my opinion, this is irrelevant unless you learn something about teaching by doing it.  If you are TAing for someone who does not know how to teach, you are wasting your time.  If your university has excellent TA training, take it.  Seek to teach a whole course by yourself.


Standard method for showing changes made to a LaTeX manuscript

When submitting to IEEE journals which require to highlight the changes, I simply colour them in red (no one complained so far...).

\usepackage{xcolor}
\newcommand{\rev}[1]{{\color{red} #1}}
%
%...
%
\rev{Hey, I'm a change}

For purpose of reviewing, they just need a compiled PDF. For the final submission, you can simply redefine the \rev command to do nothing.


Many M.Sc degrees in the US are not research oriented (try Canada, they seem to be more common here), and you should be wary of this. If you want to gain experience in research to see "if it is for you" then you need to find a thesis bases Masters, and not a course based one. A good sanity check to see if your potential Masters program will involve real research is to see who is paying who. If you are paying them, then this is not where you want to be. If they are paying you, then it is much more likely that you are in a research based masters.

In general, a Master's degree is a good way to test the waters. It is also a good way to shore up on any knowledge you might lack after being out of university for 7 years, and make sure you have all the necessary foundations (sometimes Information Systems degrees don't teach these). If you change schools between your M.Sc and Ph.D it also offers you a chance to work with more people and if you don't change schools you can often fast-track before graduationg as if you had been in a Ph.D program all along.

However, getting an M.Sc degree does have potential downsides:

it can take longer to finish the whole process (B.Sc + M.Sc + Ph.D tends to be longer than just B.Sc + Ph.D)
Ph.D programs tend to have more stringent requirements for applicants that already have a Masters degree.
Some funding opportunities (such as NSF) might end up unachievable.


My pet peeve as a reviewer is authors that ignore reviewer comments. If you were asked to revise the paper and did not listen, that's a desk-reject in my book. Part of the scientific method is the ability to improve one's work based on peer review. If you cannot do it for whatever reason, then expect a series of rejection.

Is it possible that my paper is considered as a crackpot ? I know that my writing is not up-to the professional level.

Yes, it's possible. Nowadays, proper academic English is the medium of communication in most academic papers (if you had lived 500-600 years ago you'd have needed to write in Latin); you need to conform to this standard before your paper has any chance of being published in a respectable venue.

I am not belonging from a well known place and I am also unknown in research. Does this create any negative impression?

I would like to tell you that only the content of your writing matters, and not your institution/rank etc., but that's unfortunately not true. While this varies between reviewers, I do believe that papers originating from well-known academic institutions are held in better regard. Of course, if you submit your paper to a respectable venue then it would be judged primarily based on its contents. However, the combination of improper English and unknown institution does not help.

I am expecting to apply in graduate math program. Will the admission committee take my paper seriously if I cannot publish it by that time?

That depends. There are plenty of places where you can upload a copy of your work for the public to see (ArXiv is one notable example). You can also try and publish it in a workshop on combinatorial game theory, so that you get a chance to solicit feedback and present your work. This will help get some visibility for your work, and perhaps signal to potential advisors that you are serious. If you send your manuscript to specific advisors you'd like to work with, and are in a position to judge the content of your work, they may look past the stylistic issues and see whether there's any potential to your work.


How should I address a PI at the holiday party tonight?

Address her as "Dr." unless she invites you to call her by her first name.


As a university professor I supervise graduate students including international applicants. I'd say that the situation depends on a particular institution, but unless you want to know the regulations inside out, the best thing to do is to build trust with your future supervisor and ask his/her assistance to clarify the case with university administration.

Say, as a supervisor I don't really care whether a student comes this year, next year or in two years. As a human being, I might be curious about the reason, but in most cases it won't be an issue (a year-long break after enduring undergrad studies is a perfectly legit reason for me).

However, there is also bureaucracy. If you got a scholarship, it might be a serious trouble, as it is often tied to a particular academic year, especially if it you are dealing with an external funding organization. The school could initiate a certain formal process that might be difficult to postpone, but you won't find out the details without your supervisor's support.

Say, at our institution we typically have enough room for potential MSc/PhD applicants, and the real issue is their financial support. If a certain applicant is not funded by us and informes us in advance that we should expect him/her next year, it won't be an issue. However, formally we "reset" the selection process every year (so the results of the last year applicant are considered "stale"), so if there is a real competition among participants, it might become a trouble as well.

Sorry for not being very specific, but there are simply too many factors to evaluate, so an insider is your best bet, really.


How to write a very good curriculum vitae for a summer school application?

There are few tips I can give, I am in no sense an expert on CV preperation. I just recently prepared a few. Most important thing to remember is the reviewer most likely is going to or has already reviewed more than a 100 applications and CVs. You are playing the game of attention grabbing. Reviewers will skim over papers and most likely won't go in detail of each application. Your first aim is to catch their attention and direct this very limited attention to the most important aspects of your application. If you can manage that, your application is much more likely to be read in some detail. Here are few tips.

Keep it tidy and readable. not to many titles, colors or even fonts. It should be designed minimalistically.
Use LaTeX to prepare it. It helps explain your proficeny in LaTeX. It is also is easier to update and maintain.
Make each bit of information concise, highlighting important points but also further information should be accessable easily. I personally like hyperlinks but in most cases date, name of the program and name of the institution would be enough.
Don't let less important stuff to grab attention. Assume someone will only glace over it. You need your best achievements to be "the hook". If their eye catches more important deeds like a summer project then they will read it in detail. My personal preference is to put more relevant bits of information up top, add few lines of details to make a quasi-block of information that is likely to catch attention. I also prefer to "underexplain" some less relevant aspects so that the important bits are seen first. Let me try and illustrate what I mean.

This would be the important bit.

whereas this would be the less important bit.

Don't let the unimportant or less important stuff to take up space. Keep in mind, you always want to highlight your most important achievements. If you spend the same amount of space for your hobies or coding skills the reader might get disfocused or plain bored. If you wish you can put a Github link or name an achievement or two relating to your hobbies but they really should not overtake the readers attention.


How to formulate a reminder regarding letter of financial support?

I would write something along the lines of:

  Hello Professor,

  I am writing to follow up on the letter of financial support we had
  discussed a while back. I was wondering if you had a chance to write
  it, or if you needed more documentation from me. Please let me know if
  I need to do anything on my end.

  Best,  Nikki


Journal got blacklisted recently – how to withdraw the paper from the journal and database?

I don't think you can or should "drop" the paper.  To paraphrase the jewelry slogan, a publication is forever.  You can't take it back just because you don't like the direction the journal has gone, or how people's  opinions of the journal have shifted.  Also, from a legal perspective, it's likely you signed a contract giving the journal the perpetual (and possibly exclusive) right to distribute your paper, and you might also have transferred copyright; so you can't legally prevent them from keeping your paper.

And indexing services are telling the truth when they list your paper as published there; you can't prevent them from sharing that fact.

One could argue a moral exception for a "predatory" journal which actively misled you about its standards and practices, in which case one could say your consent to publish was fraudulently obtained.  Even in that case, though, I don't see what you can practically do, since the journal is unlikely to agree to drop your paper.

How it will affect your career is unknowable - it depends on how important this paper is to your career, the opinions of the people evaluating you, why the journal was blacklisted, etc.

I think all you can do is resolve to be more careful when choosing publication venues in the future.


Discriminated by senior researcher because of my ethnicity

In the comments you mentioned that getting an ombudsperson involved was not an option for you. However, your advisor does not necessarily need to know that you talked to the ombudsperson. Ombudspersons are often required to keep discussions confidential unless you explicitly tell them otherwise. You of course need to check that before with your ombudsperson before you go that route. Just discussing your options face to face with another person who has to treat that discussion confidentially is probably of enough value in and of itself. And maybe (s)he can do even more.


Is it acceptable for a student to connect with a professor on LinkedIn?

It sounds to me that this is just the reaction of that particular professor, and so there's not much you can do about it. Perhaps the professor only likes to use LinkedIn to connect with other researchers and professors, but personally I don't believe that it's unprofessional or inappropriate for university students to connect with professors. You are both adults and the site is intended for networking in the professional context. I myself added many of my lecturers on LinkedIn while I was an undergraduate, with no problems.

If you'd added him on Facebook, that might have been a different matter, as many people want to keep their work and personal lives separate and would regard such a friend request as overstepping that boundary. However, all you can do now is move on. In the future, perhaps only add professors that you have got to know quite well, as then they will recognise you if you request to connect, which in turn will hopefully mean they are less likely to refuse.


What does one call a group of similar courses where only one can be taken for credit?

A couple of universities that I've worked and/or studied that described the courses as having equivalent content.  So, the prerequisites for an upper-level course might be listed as "MATH 344 or equivalent content."

The reverse descriptor also came up sometimes.  For example, the degree requirements for a given major might include:  "Four additional courses at the 500 level, of essentially different content."  Another school used inequivalent content for the same thing.


Is it okay to email the general/conference chairs if I feel the reviews are biased and unprofessional?

This situation happens many times in conferences. At least, I have experienced once.

  I firmly believe that these reviews are biased and the reviewer is either the author of the paper, which he/she is asking me to compare or was planning to put a similar paper.

This is a straight-forward assumption. And, I think you are misinterpreting in this aspect. Though it could be true, you are thinking too much about the rejection.

  Is it okay to email the chairs to look into my paper and reviews?

Since this is rebuttal phase, this might not sound okay to email at this point. Just write the rebuttal and/or do the revision.

I feel you are too much emotionally attached to the paper and that is how you are assessing the situation. Take a break from this paper. Look at the review after few days, and think positive.

"Rejections are good times of research, in which we learn to accept the truth."


Does more knowledge enhance your chance of doing better and 'original' research (in mathematics)?

Intuitively, of course the answer should be yes.  Surprisingly, however, in reality the answer is sometimes no.

A common saying, which to the best of my knowledge has no known attribution, goes something along the lines of: "The fools didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!"

To achieve a significant original scientific contribution, you need to know enough to have a sound basis to build upon.  You also need to avoid immersing yourself too deeply in conventional wisdom and groupthink, or else you are likely to have your originality bleed away from you.

Moreover, every hour spent reading the works of another is an hour not spent producing works of your own.  But of course, you can waste a huge amount of time if you end up reinventing another's idea or miss an important clue in somebody else's work.  So across a scientific life, you will end up wobbling back and forth on a balance between spending more time acquiring knowledge and spending more time generating it yourself.  Early in your career, you will spend most of your time acquiring knowledge, because you need to get to a point where you can understand what is unknown well enough to begin grappling with it meaningfully.  Later you may spend more time working on creating new knowledge, but must also keep up with your reading to keep from going stale.

Even in old and well established fields, however, it's surprisingly easy to get out to the edge of human knowledge and find yourself tangling with some of the interesting things we do not know.  Like, how do cats drink water? We only learned that a couple of years ago.  Heck, we're still figuring out how bicycles work!

If you don't have enough knowledge, you may not notice that there's a problem worth solving there, and you certainly won't have the tools to solve it.  If you're too saturated in the knowledge of others, you might not notice the problem either, because you might end up accepting their explanations instead.

In sum: you must know your fundamentals, know your field, and know how to go looking for specific pieces of additional knowledge.  But knowledge is not originality, and although knowledge often supports originality, it can also interfere with it.


Should I restate acronyms in each section?

My approach to the issue of acronyms is to restate them only after a significant gap in their use.  How long I consider to be "significant" depends on how salient the acronym is in its usage.  Some extremes of how I would tend to approach it:

If the paper is about EP, and you're talking about EP and using the acronym quite frequently, then even if you have a page or two where it happens to not appear, I would not bother to redefine.
If EP only appears a couple of times as a side point, then even after only a few paragraphs break I might redefine the acronym.

One exception: when I define an acronym in the abstract, I also define it in the introduction, no matter how close it is, since the abstract somewhat stands apart from the remainder of the paper.


Are endorsed undergraduates eligible to submit papers (and eventually get it accepted) to arXiv?

Yes, of course.  The arXiv staff doesn't sit around evaluating the credentials of everyone who submits.  They reserve the right to reject even endorsed submissions, but this is unusual.

The main obstacle to publishing on the arXiv as an undergraduate is writing a suitable paper and getting it endorsed.


You could ask, although it's likely the publisher will be reluctant to make changes, for the reasons you mentioned: it creates a discrepancy between the different versions of the paper.

I'd honestly not worry too much about it. Yes the typo in such a visible place is embarrassing, but hardly unique. It doesn't threaten the veracity of the paper's results, and readers learn to ignore typos (lots of papers have typos!). If there ever is a "second edition" of the paper then yeah, correct it, but otherwise it's just not worth the effort.


Too much review time and the related actions

If you haven't heard anything for seven months it is certainly time to send the editor an email and ask for a status update. There might be valid reasons for a long delay, but it has been a long time.

Don't threaten to withdraw, as it will probably have no positive effect, but you can certainly say that the delay is affecting your prospects of completion.

But only withdraw if you have a better option. Starting over in the process with another journal may be good or bad and I can't guess which.


For publications, what do I do when my first name is abbreviated?

This shouldn't really be a problem these days in most places, because the entry fields on most web-based entry forms are smart enough to recognize and accept spaces. Thus, even when the site asks for a first name only, you can put in "Md. [Middle Name]" as your first name.

As Dave suggests in the comment, unless you have a really uncommon last name—one that doesn't show up in ISI or arXiv.org searches at all right now, you're better off having parts of three names show up. It's also helpful to keep your professional name fixed throughout your career. (In other words, if you want to go by Md. [Middle] [Last], use that same form whenever possible.)


Can we write a case study by referring our previous work instead of re-writing?

Yes you can publish a case study as a (conference) paper and your proposed structure looks reasonable, albeit I have a few comments.

  I don't want to re-phrase the introduction, related work, the algorithms and our proposed methods etc.

You'll clearly need a new introduction. You'll possibly also need a new related work section too (which is missing from your proposed flow). The algorithms and proposed methods can be copy-and-pasted, as long as they are attributed to your previous work, but you might need to revise some of the introductory material to those algorithms and methods.

Since you're in computer science, you have another option: Publish the complete work as a journal paper, rather than a conference paper.


Is it possible to refer to a specific section of the supplemental material?

It's generally best to avoid making readers figure out anything.  I'd write "See supplemental material, part 1" or "See Part 1 of the supplemental material".  I can't think of any reason not to, unless perhaps you are extremely close to a page limit.


Recently, I've been considering a PRL-PRB joint submission, and was looking for recent examples. It appears there is no external marker for them, so they can indeed be hard to find. My initial web searches led me to this question, and to a Twitter thread by a PRL editor actually providing some examples.
One way I came up with, that finds at least some examples, is to search Google for
"companion paper Phys. Rev. A" site:journals.aps.org/prl

replace "A" as needed. (This search matches how the reference tends to be formatted.)
For reference, some examples of joint submissions are:

PRLs with companion PRAs: 1, 2, 3
PRLs with companion PRBs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PRCs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PRDs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PREs: 1, 2

These examples demonstrate that the overlap between letter and full-length article is somewhat variable, reflecting the nature of the results and how well they "split up". Nevertheless, a fairly representative case that I think handled the splitting well in a PRL-PRA joint submission wrote:

LETTER: We present a self-contained discussion of our methods and results below. The full technical details and additional developments are deferred to the companion paper [52], where we consider the problem of quantifying infinite-dimensional resources from a broader perspective of general probabilistic theories, extending the concepts discussed herein.

PAPER Intro: This work also serves as the companion to the paper [39] which deals with resource quantification in continuous-variable quantum mechanics. Here we provide a derivation and extended discussion of the results stated in [39], along with several additional developments specific to quantum theory. The general framework in GPTs can be thought of as a generalization of the concepts introduced in [39].

PAPER Sec. VI:
This section complements the dedicated paper [39] in which we focus on the case of continuous-variable quantum resources. In particular, the discussion below constitutes a
technical companion to Ref. [39], providing a detailed derivation and several extensions of the results mentioned there. Since all of our results for general GTPs immediately apply to quantum mechanics as a special case, the results of previous sections already serve as proofs of some of the results of [39]. Specifically, Theorem 1 in [39] is Theorem 10 here; Theorem 2 in [39] is Theorem 9 here; Theorem 3 in [39] is a consequence of our characterization in Sec. III and in particular the duality result in Prop. 2. The other results will be established below.


Do students and faculty comprise any State University in the US?

No, there's nothing like Oxford's or Cambridge's legal structure in the United States, where students and faculty are members of the University.

For historical interest, the first university -- University of Bologna - 1088 -- was a universitas scholarium, i.e. a "university of scholars (students)".  It was a collective that had bargaining rights with the city and hired and paid their professors -- paying them after each lecture. (!)


Is it crazy for a PhD student to pay open access fees out of pocket?

I don't think you're crazy at all. From a purely economic point of view, although $500 sounds like a lot of money, it is quite insignificant (in a US context) compared both to your future earnings once you graduate, and to the present potential earnings you are foregoing by attending graduate school in the first place instead of working at a "real job". Thus, if you truly think that paying the fee will help you get on with your other research projects and graduate faster and/or with a more impressive publication record, then, assuming you can afford to pay the fee without sacrificing other important or crucial things at least, it seems to me that paying the fee is a reasonable decision.

With that said, I think a note of caution is also in order. My main concern is that a good proportion of the journals that charge open access publication fees are predatory journals, and given that you are a graduate student and new to publishing, there is a risk that the journal you are considering publishing in could be one of those. I would therefore suggest not paying any fee until you have made absolutely certain, by consulting your advisor or other experienced researchers, that the journal in question is a reputable one and that publishing in it will actually further your career and goals. Good luck!


How to learn the format of a scientific paper, to emulate it?

Different fields tend to have their own standards regarding format of papers. So a good start is to Google something like "standard format of a [field name] paper". For example, for "standard format of a chemistry paper" I found:

Southwestern University: Guide for Writing in Chemistry
Oregon State University: Writing Guide for Chemistry
American Chemical Society: Preparing a Research Report

You can also read some research papers in your field - even if you don't understand the contents, you can pay attention to the format: what sections are included, what's in each section, etc.

Finally, you can look up some journals in your field and look for their "Instructions for authors". There, they describe the formatting rules specific to that journal, that authors follow when submitting a manuscript. They are likely to have paper templates you can use, either in MS Word or LaTeX format depending on the field and the journal. See e.g. the instructions for authors of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and their template.


Don't worry, it's a very minor issue. In the worst case it will be part of some minor corrections you'll have to do after the viva.

It's important that you don't contact the examiners yourself, as this might be against the rules. Instead talk to your supervisor, they will know what can be done in compliance with the institution rules; and even if they don't they will know who to ask at least.

As far as I know it's usually fine for the supervisor to contact the examiners, but rules may differ by institution, and since the PhD viva is an official examination it's crucial to do things by the book.


Keep asking the dumb questions! It is better to look like a fool, than to be one.

You worry that many speakers are annoyed at the `elementary' questions. Some speakers do it because they are stressed about public talking, and any question upsets them. For some, communication of mathematics is not the aim of the talk; they give it because it is a condition of travelling to the venue, or simply because everyone else gives the talks. Instead of feeling joy at an opportunity to clear the confusion, they might get annoyed at having to do the extra work of explaining some of the background. The annoyance has no long-term effect --- nobody holds grudges for asking dumb questions. To give up actually understanding math for such a petty reason is just not worth it.

There is only one situation in which you should refrain from asking a question. That is when you are representative neither of the actual audience nor of the intended audience. So, if you are graduate student at your department's colloquium, it is OK to ask anything. If you are a graduate student at a seminar in your field, it is OK to ask anything. If you are at a seminar in another field, and there are several other students in your field in the room, again it is OK to ask anything. Only if you a lone outsider at a seminar or a conference that is not in your field, there is a reason not to ask questions.


Will the origin of anecdote in paper violate double-blind policy?

Double-blind reviewing is about trying to make you non-identifiable.  The only way I can see this violating a double-blind policy is if you are well known by your scientific community as the only one who would both write on your topic and know Japanese.  That seems like a stretch.


How much teaching is expected on a CV for a graduating PhD student (mathematics)?

It is what it is.  Some schools give you less opportunity for teaching than others (e.g., schools in the UK).

If you are looking for a research postdoc, then having a lot of teaching experience is not too important.  For instance, at my institution, we want to make sure you're competent and not going to cause problems, but you don't need to have won five teaching awards.  This is evidenced primarily by your teaching letter.  If you think you can get a decent teaching letter now, then I wouldn't worry about it.  (Note: if you're TAing now and probably won't be again before you apply, consider having someone who will write you a letter observe your class.)

If you're looking for a "teaching postdoc," e.g. a temporary position at a liberal arts school, they typically want more evidence that you're a good teacher, so you might try to actively look for more teaching opportunities.

Note: presumably many other students at your institution have the same issue.  Try finding out how much TAing recent graduates did and what kind of jobs they got after graduating.


How to report an author who doesn't share the last name but had similar first name as mine, is adding my articles in his profile on google scholar?

Don't assume malice. It appears to be unlikely that this person is doing this actively. The more likely scenario is that Google's algorithms add these publications to their profile automatically and they are not maintaining the profile at all. Since they don't care about Google Scholar and are probably the typical busy professor, your attempts at contacting them about it are just filtered out as noise with hundreds of other emails.

If you really care about this, you'll probably need to address this issue to Google (but according to other posts on the internet they seem to be known to not care and to not fix).


Online recommendation for an applicant who is not the recommender's student

He told me that in the online recommendation form they asked him some questions like "Which courses has he/she taken with you?" or "How do you rank the applicant among all your students?" and he does not know what to say.

Well, he should say "kasramsh has never been my student". What else could he truthfully say?

  Should he leave them blank and just write the recommendation letter?

He shouldn't leave them blank but answer them truthfully. "I know kasramsh from [...]. He has never been my student.". Somewhere in the letter, the relationship betweem recommender and student should be explained anyway.

  Would this not be perceived negatively?

Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, it is the way it is, and there is no way how you can spin it that the target institution would not figure out that you are not your recommender's student.


You should note that you can use all of the ideas of the other paper, so long as you give proper attribution and citation so that you don't claim the original as your own. You can't, however, use "too many" of their actual words and must quote and cite the ones you do. The first issue is plagiarism and the second is copyright. Be sure to avoid both.

But if you write a proof that has the same structure as the other, using the same lemmas and referencing the same earlier work, it shouldn't be a problem, especially as you say you will explicitly state that the overall structure is the same.

You don't need to work to make it seem different where it isn't. For some sorts of things, especially in math, there may be, in essence, only one way to properly state something. This is recognized both in law and in practice.

However, it is possible that reviewers will suggest to you that your work isn't especially novel and may want to reject it on that basis. But if your conclusion is sufficiently interesting, and you support that idea by making it explicit, you may avoid that pitfall also.


Well... there are lot of important variables not mentioned, but this is how I will generally draft it:

Dear Madam Give-me-a-job,
It was great talking to you after your talk on Jan 17th, 2014 at
My-Little-Institute. I found your experience and nature of your job
fascinating. In our conversation about pursuing a career in
Whatever-you-are-working-in, you were so kind to offer giving comments
to my CV. And if you don't mind, I would love to take up your
generous offer.
Attached please find my CV. I would love to follow up with you in two
weeks and set up a phone conversation to discuss how I can strengthen
my profile so that I can be a more competitive candidate in this job
market. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to your invaluable critiques and suggestions.
Sincerely yours,
Penguin Knight

My approach:

Don't treat it like a lead to a job. She might just say that to be nice. If I come off too pushy, I may not even get a chance listening to her comments. For that reason, I will not attach a cover letter that details my experience, research interest, and why I am suitable for the position. There isn't even a job, a catch-all cover letter is difficult to write and hard to be made impressive.
Ask for follow up and act on it. A lot of the "send me your CV" didn't get follow up because the candidate really just "sent the CV" and that's the end of it. I specifically tweaked it as wanting advices from her, making it easier for both parties to engage in another conversation.
No need to worry about "what if she really just gives me comments?" She probably knows and remembers. If my CV is really good, she will mention the availability of openings. If there isn't or I am not good enough, then I can use this chance to flush out weaknesses and improve them.


Web of Science allows you to extract (and even bulk-download) bibliographic metadata of scholarly works. (Select the papers, click on "Export...", choose "Other File Formats" and use "BibTeX" as File Format).

Another option is JabRef, a reference manager which uses BibTeX and whose official browser extension "automatically identifies and extracts bibliographic information on websites and sends them to JabRef with one click."

I also find ZoteroBib useful. It worked well for me, and it is quick to use in browser.

Fur further options see Are there any tools to automatically search and download literature in a given .bib file?.


What typesetters do with the submitted paper?

Typically, once a manuscript has been typeset, the editor asks the author(s) to check for errors that might have been introduced by the typesetting process. The checking process does not take too long, but I suggest you to check carefully the equations (if there are any), for their meaning is unknown to the typesetter and he or she might involuntarily introduce errors in case of reformatting.


What can I do if I have a massive personal problem with a future student?

the nature of the problem is that the student violently assaulted my girlfriend [...] Charges were filed and I stand by the seriousness of the accusation.

The fact that there is a criminal case involved makes this situation much more serious than just disliking someone. It doesn't matter whether you think you could behave impartially or not, the appearance of a conflict of interest is what is important, and that is most certainly present here. If the student is doing poorly, the student could accuse you of unfair treatment regardless of your behavior, and there would most likely be an investigation. It's better to avoid that possibility entirely.

You need to talk to your professor immediately. Depending on the status of the case, tell your professor that your girlfriend and the student are on opposite sides of a criminal case. This should convey the seriousness of the conflict without disclosing too many personal details. Keep in mind that there are privacy issues with saying too much about your student's personal life, in particular when it comes to criminal charges.

Work with your professor to figure out what the best solution is, whether that means switching sections with another TA, switching the student to another section, or putting in place defined procedures to prevent bias on your part (such as anonymous grading). It may be a good idea for your professor to involve an ethics adviser from the university, since the conflict of interest is so clear. Regardless of the outcome, by officially reporting this potential issue ahead of time, this will reflect positively on you in the event that the student does make any complaints.


Since you have not provided enough details in your question I will go with a generalised answer to this end. The answer to this question, however, is country- and organisation-specific. Further, it does also depends on the PhD advisor herself.
I am in academics for a few years now and I have seen some post-grads (not PhD) who do/did have bad grades during their corresponding undergraduate studies.
First, let's quantify what does a bad grade mean: On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest), bad grade would be, according to me somewhere within 4. "Ok" grades would be the ones falling in the range: 5-7, and above 7 is just great. As I said, this can be argued; but lets for the moment accept these as axioms.
So, if your grades in the "bad" category, then you should have something additional to show to the PhD selection committee or the advisor you are applying under. This term "extra" would mean something like a voluntary project that you did, maybe a collaborative work you participated in, or an article that you wrote with some others. Again, this extra stuff that you show may not be well-accepted but would definitely provide a soft edge towards the decision-making process. Also, note that PhD application might require a few recommendation letters if those letters could mention these extras to compensate for your bad grades, then you are okay I think.
If you have nothing to show as an extra component, then this might not be a good sign to have "bad" grades in the CV. A PhD position would expect someone to be serious in studies and highly motivated to pursue research.


Is it "inappropriate" to write in a manuscript "this problem is unsolved, though arguably progress has been made" and then reference your own work?

I don't think I'd call it inappropriate, exactly, but I don't think it is the best way to word it.

Your use of the word "arguably" signals that the phrase "progress has been made" is subjective - and in particular, it's a subjective opinion coming from a source that is clearly not impartial (you).  Also, "progress has been made" is vague and not very helpful to the reader by itself - you're forcing them to go and look up your other paper if they want to know what kind of progress you mean.

So why not solve both problems, and replace this unhelpful subjective statement by a helpful objective one, that briefly describes what you actually did:

  This problem is unsolved.  However, in previous work [14], we showed that in the special case where the graph is symmetric, the conjectured statement is true to within a factor of 20.

Of course, if there is relevant work by other researchers, you should cite their work here as well, with a similar brief discussion.


Is there a way to report to google scholar some systematic mistakes?

(Edit: I am no longer at Google Scholar, so I cannot fix issues for anyone anymore.)

I am an engineer on the Google Scholar team.

Errors in citation data provided by Google Scholar can occur either because of an error at the source or a case that is not handled correctly by our algorithms. We have automated monitoring systems in place to detect errors that occur widely and bring them to the attention of humans, but it is not possible to catch and fix every possible case at the scale at which we operate.

You can use our contact form to contact us but we do not provide any guarantees of responding or fixing the problem within X business days.

Regarding the paper "Heat generation in plasmonic nanostructures: Influence of                  morphology", we have provided the citation data as it appears at the source.

<meta name="citation_firstpage" content="153109" />

I believe for some physics journals it is standard to cite the first page only instead of a page range.

Regarding the paper "Super-resolution in high-contrast media", it is our mistake that we have classified the venue as a conference instead of a journal. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.


What's the difference in responsibilities between a committee member, a co-advisor and an advisor in an PhD committee?

The advisor is the person who is formally recognized as the person most responsible for supervising the student's thesis research. A co-advisor is a person who also works with the doctoral candidate, but often in a secondary role (perhaps providing scientific but not financial support, for instance).

In my own case, for instance, I had two advisors who were fully equal in both supervising the research and supporting it financially. However, formally one of them had to be in charge of the thesis research—I believe they decided it by a coin flip.

The thesis committee is a body that convenes only sporadically (although sometimes on a regular schedule) to ensure that a doctoral candidate is progressing according to expectations. The committee—which usually includes the advisor and several other faculty members (or other advisors)—is also usually responsible for deciding when a candidate is ready to schedule a defense of the thesis and graduate.

As you can see, this is a very different role than a co-advisor, who takes on a much more active role in supervising and guiding the doctoral candidate's work. While a thesis committee member rarely is a co-author on a paper with the candidate, a co-advisor often will be. Consequently, it's much more useful for a faculty member to be a co-advisor than simply a committee member. (The latter role will not carry anywhere near as much "credit" toward a tenure case as being an advisor or a co-advisor.)


If I use results from a source I don't have access to, should I include it in references?

Be honest. You do not gain anything by pretending knowledge you have not, nor it helps the reader.

Write "According to A, in B it is shown that" or some variation on it. If you have made a good-faith effort to obtain a copy of B (that includes interlibrary loan), but had undue difficulty in doing so, you might want to mention it --- "We were unable to find a copy of B".


recommendation letters at different stages of interviews

What to do to avoid requesting letters too often, annoying letter writers?

You don't request letters “too often”.  You request letters once, at the beginning of your job hunt: “Would you be willing to write a strong recommendation letter to support my applications for [kind of job]?  I'm planning to send out about [number] applications.”  If they say yes, take them at their word.

At least in North America, academic/research employers request letters directly from your references, not from applicants.  Applicants only provides names and contact information for their references; they never see the actual letters.  Most universities send letter requests by email; a few ask references to submit their letters when the applicant submits their other materials, without waiting to be being asked directly.

Keep your references up to date on which [kind of job]s you've actually applied for, and how they should expect to receive the letter request.  I strongly recommend maintaining a single Google spreadsheet (or your favorite equivalent) with a row for each target institution, and columns for each of your references to indicate who has asked them for letters, and which letters they've actually sent.  (Then your references can see which of your other references have already submitted letters, making it less likely that they'll fall behind.  Peer pressure works.)


When you no longer want a professor on your dissertation committee

You do not need to tell them from the first place. They will implicitly understand that you changed your mind. It is fine. But if you send them the official forms and dissertation, I think you need to follow a certain procedure. In this case, it is not polite and not recommended to change a committee member unless there are strong reasons.

Contacting committee members should be done by the supervisor not by the student in most of the places. I highly recommend you to consult your supervisor as this is part of the supervisor's job.


Asking for letters of recommendation for HS teaching positions

If the TA supervisor knows that you are leaving the program to find a (high school) teaching job, and can speak to your ability or potential as a teacher then their letter will be a plus.
As for feeling you cheated the program - better to leave now than after taking their support for a few more years and leaving then. Some fraction of students leave without a degree - it's expected and not shameful.
Finally, I suspect high school physics teachers are in demand.


Given that most universities have different titles for different functionally similar positions, I wouldn't sweat it too much. The only places where things are different in my experience with NSF are for faculty and post docs. I know NSF has a rule about the total amount of time that a person can be funded (without explicit exception from the Program Officer) on an award (2 months), but these rules are generally only applied to faculty since they are expected to get 9 months of support from their institution. NSF also requires a Postdoctoral Researcher Mentoring Plan for any proposal that will fund post docs. This is there to ensure that post docs have their careers promoted appropriately and that they learn appropriate collaboration methods.

That being said, you don't even have to work at a university to be paid under an NSF award. There are frequent subcontracting relationships created to send funding to other institutions including private companies and contractors.


“Ibid” is short for the Latin “ibidem” meaning “in the same place.” It is used when referencing the same work as the immediately preceding reference and appears in the same place the reference usually would. For instance (assuming the below are a list of footnotes on the same page):

Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, p. 67. <— this should usually be a full reference, unless the full reference was already made in a previous footnote (which need not be in the same page)
ibid. <— same work, same page
ibid., p. 98 <— still refers to Principia
Gottfried Leibniz, Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire, p. 4
ibid., p. 8 <— Now refers to the Leibniz text
Newton, op. cit., p. 83 <— another short hand; “op. cit.” is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase “opus citatum” meaning “the work cited” and like “ibid.” refers to the most recently referenced work, with the difference being it refers to the most recently mentioned work of the named author.

How this works with non-dead-tree media is highly dependent on the citation style you are using and probably not that well codified since “ibid” is fairly rare these days. But a decent approximation would be to replace the page number in the above examples with whatever you would use to locate the specific reference normally. For web pages, there might very well be nothing following the “ibid”. For video, you would generally include the time frame in the video referenced, e.g.:

Fight Club, 1:15:07-1:18:54
ibid. <— same film, same scene
ibid., 0:33:56-0:38:21 <— same film, different scene


How to successfully train myself in multiple "meta" areas of my discipline?

Since you learn best by doing, I would suggest a few basic techniques that will allow you to learn these materials and retain the knowledge over the long-term.  The important thing is not to overload yourself with too much disparate information at one time, and to also make sure you are doing enough to solidify each important piece of knowledge before you move on to something else.  Look at this as a long-term goal --- aim to gradually build knowledge gradually and in a "deep" manner, where you solidify new knowledge as you go.

Start with what you know, and let yourself wander outward: I would counsel against attempting to learn a large number of meta topics at once.  The difficulty with doing this is that those topics might not have obvious connections for you, and that will make knowledge retention difficult.  Instead, it is often useful to start with a topic that is of immediate interest to you, which gives rise to broad meta-questions to which you do not already know the answer.  It is commonly the case that aspects of your discipline border on to other disciplines, including broader issues of philosophy of science, and so there are often a lot of obvious questions at the border of your own knowledge.  By answering these, and connecting it to your existing knowledge and work, you can move outward and solidify your knowledge at each step.  Pick a topic on the border of your existing knowledge, and focus on that, but allow yourself to wander into its connections with other topics as you get to the margins.

Since you have not mentioned your area of speciality (or even the broad field you are in) it is not possible for me to give examples that are applicable to you.  So in substitution of that, I will give you an example of my own previous learning.  I am a statistician, and when I was learning probability and statistics in detail as a grad-student, I learned a lot about the mathematics of "random variables", which are a certain kind of mathematical object.  There are some natural philosophical questions arising from this.  Is there actually such a thing as randomness in nature?  If not, does that invalidate the foundations of probability theory?  If not, why not --- i.e., why would it make sense to have mathematical "random variables" if there is no randomness.  If there is no randomness in nature, then what is "probability"?  Those inquiries led me to the literature on philosophy and probability (plus determinism, indeterminism, compatibalism, etc.), which led me to other broader methodological issues in epistemology, and to learning the approaches of a number of broad schools of thought.  One question naturally led to another, until eventually I had a good meta-knowledge that I could connect all the way back to practical issues in my subject matter.

Learn the history by learning about individuals, and remember interesting titbits about them: Just as it is useful to learn broad subject areas by starting with individual questions and working outward, when learning the history of your science, it is similarly useful to start with one person who developed something you find particularly interesting, and then gradually expand outward to learn about more and more people and groups.  Also, avoid just learning about the contribution of each person to your field --- try to augment this by learning some interesting things about each individual that will help you remember them.

For example, I have learned a lot about the statistical contributions of Ronald Fisher, but I also try to remember him better by familiarising myself with his contributions in genetics and eugenics.  No matter how much I might forget about Fisher, it is very easy to remember that he formulated the "sexy son hypothesis" in genetics.  That is not something that is super important to understanding his contribution to statistics, but it is an interesting thing about Fisher that makes it easy to remember him.  Similarly, I remember William Gosset by the fact that he worked at a Guinness brewery for almost all of his career.  When I teach introductory statistics to students, I often mention this little titbit, and whenever I have occasion to drink a Guinness, I will usually bore my drinking partner half to death by bringing up Gosset's work on the Student-T distribution.

Write about the things you learn, even if it is not an academic paper: In some instances, there may be opportunities for you to incorporate what you learn into your publishable scholarly papers.  Unfortunately, the large amount of effort involved in scholarly research means that this is not usually a feasible method of broad learning on a wide range of topics.  For that reason, it is worth establishing some other avenue for you to write about what you have learned and present it to others.  This could be writing articles or posts on a website or blog, answering questions on one of the StackExchange websites, giving presentations to colleagues, or incorporating what you learn into your lecture materials and teaching it to students.

Some researchers keep expository notes on things they are learning, and personally, I find that the easiest and most effective was to do this is to start writing up "partial papers" in the form of a scholarly paper whenever you get any new idea while learning a new subject.  These can be expository papers that might or might not become substantial enough to warrant an academic publication, but in the meantime, they function as useful expository notes collecting and organising your thoughts on a topic you have studied.  I have written hundreds of these partial papers, and most will probably never get turned into full published papers, but they are there on my hard-drive to allow me to look at my own exposition of an idea or area of analysis that was interesting to me.  By framing the exposition as something that might one-day be an academic paper, I also put it in an organised manner, and save myself some work if I want to develop it for publication later.

Incorporate what you learn into your teaching: When you have learned a new thing that sheds light on your subject, try incorporating this into your lecture notes and adding it to your lessons to your students.  Teaching is often a very effective method of learning, and it can be useful to solidify your knowledge.


Should a student use the email account provided by the university to communicate with professors?

In the cases I'm familiar with (U.S. universities), using your own e-mail account should be completely fine, subject to some obvious caveats.  One is that it's best to have an e-mail address that doesn't look foolish or offensive.  People sometimes choose very strange usernames, and you don't want that to reflect poorly on you; furthermore, you should make sure your e-mails include the name your professor knows you under.  Another issue is that if you are asking for sensitive information such as grades, your professor will likely be unwilling to send this information to an outside account without some verification that it belongs to you.  Finally, you should make things simple for anyone you correspond with.  For example, if you use several accounts, you should check them frequently or forward one to the other, so that there are no delays if someone sends something to an account you didn't expect.

One common solution is to set up your university account to forward to your private account, and to set up that account so you can send e-mail listing your university account as the sender/return address when necessary.


Language certificates when applying to positions in the USA

Normally TOEFL is required for admissions in USA. However, you must check the requirements that are required by the University first to secure admission that may or may not include TOEFL beside other tests such as GRE, GRE subject, GAT etc.

Second is the visa requirements, make sure if the TOEFL is required or not for the visa, as in that case, you may get admission but denied visa or vice versa. so get eligibility criteria from different universities, compare them and find out what are the common requirements for all the universities, and then check the visa requirements.

Time of showing language certificate depend on the university, they can ask in advance or later.


Should I do another Master's in CS to take courses covering recent developments in my field relevant to my work?

You finally want to convince a potential employer that you know enough about hot topic ABC (in your current case "deep learning") to get the job. Best thing is personal hands-on industryt experience with the topic. If I were this potential employer, I'd as well consider someone who made significant contributions in a relevant open-source project.
As the hot topics in software change quite frequently over time (I've been in the industry for 30+ years and seen an awful lot of different hypes), you can't continue to add more and more Master's degrees - or do you want to still attend university MS programs when being 50+ years old, and finally retire with a collection of maybe ten different computer science MS degrees?
My recommendation:

You got an MS in computer science already, and that shows your basic competence. No need to repeat that with a slightly different specialization.
Acquire the necessary knowledge on the interesting hot topic ABC, maybe by attending a course, or by reading online materials or whatever you prefer. (And continue to do so with topics of interest all over your career.)
Depending on the country / culture where you seek a job, get a certificate documenting your knowledge.
Find a project where you can apply that knowledge, either in your current job, or volunteering in an open-source project.
Be quick. Don't waste years of time studying before you apply for a job. By the time you're ready, there will be a different hot topic, and topic-ABC specialists aren't relevant any more. As long as the topic is really hot, there won't be enough experienced specialists available, so the industry will also accept a lot of training-on-the-job candidates.


What is the difference between Article File and Related Manuscript File in Nature?

The text in Nature states

  Submission to Nature [...] is taken to imply that there is no significant overlap between the submitted manuscript and any other papers from the same authors under consideration or in press elsewhere. (Abstracts or unrefereed web preprints do not compromise novelty). The authors must include copies of all related manuscripts with any overlap in authorship that are under consideration or in press elsewhere. If a related manuscript is submitted elsewhere while the manuscript is under consideration at Nature Communications, a copy of the related manuscript must be sent to the editor.

In other words, related manuscript files means any other manuscript that overlaps with the one submitted to Nature and hence runs the risk of duplicating the Nature paper in some sense. Nature assesses such papers to see where and how the overlap occurs and, probably, rejects the submitted manuscript is the overlap is deemed significant to that it may be considered duplication. This is likely to safeguard the uniqueness of the Nature paper when (and if) it becomes published.


Can a professor make your final pass or fail?

Why wouldn't it be allowed?

Legally? You didn't say what country you are in, but I'm not aware of any country that regulates courses at this level.
Your university's rules? You didn't say what university you are in, so it's impossible to say for sure. In general, though, the "instructor of record" has the authority to make decisions about how a course will be graded.

Broadly speaking, this does not seem like a bizarre policy that some wacko professor implemented; I've actually seen this in other math departments. I guess the philosophy is that most entry-level math courses are about skills: they do not want to pass you onto more advanced courses unless you know these foundational skills well enough to do them in a measurable way. (I realize that you may not personally plan to take more advanced courses, but the principle is the same).

Anyway: yes, unless your university has a policy that forbids it (e.g., a policy saying that all professors of a given course have to grade the same way), this policy is almost certainly allowed.


How to learn to make a meaningful study without having an academical background?

Given the comments of yourself and others here, let me make an orthogonal suggestion. Instead of exploring this on your own, you might try to contact someone in either medicine or psychology at a university or research center and speak to them about your ideas. You might provide a useful resource to someone who might be interested in following up your ideas, perhaps by guiding a student already under their guidance.

But alternatively, your conversation might reveal to you that what you propose has already be well researched. Such a professional contact could, perhaps, point you to the answers you seek.

This would result in minimal impact on your career, and might provide an interesting research problem to someone.

Personal contact via an office visit is probably the best and most efficient way to get such a conversation started. An email might be ignored. Your therapist might be able to point you to a researcher.


Tips on organising the survey of a large body of literature

If my opinion, a good survey is not a snapshot of what is out there in the literature, but rather is a presentation of the current state of knowledge on a subject (which will necessarily involve some snapshots of what is out there).  This model of knowledge is the novel contribution of the survey.  Your goal, then, is to develop enough expertise in the "lay of the land" to be able to see a pattern that may have never been explicitly enunciated in the literature before.

As such, I recommend the following iterative approach, which has been useful for me in preparing surveys:

Begin with a hypothesis of the structure of knowledge on your topic.
With keyword searching, find lots of articles related to the topic.
Do not read the articles: read just enough to make sure they are actually relevant, and download and organize them into categories based on your hypothesis.
When you've got a big enough pile, skim them to see how your hypothesis is holding up, and adjust it to fit the reality of what you've found.
Repeat from 2, with your adjusted hypothesis, gathering more references, until you find your hypothesis is beginning to stabilize.  Once you've got a stable hypothesis, you are ready to write, and your final organization will reflect the discovery enunciated in your final hypothesis.

A good survey is probably going to be in the 50 - 200 reference range.  If you are finding that you are gathering many more than that, consider whether your subject is too broad and you need to narrow its focus.  It may also be that you have an appropriate focus, but that you are thinking about too many details, and you need to go into less depth in your investigation.


Should I cite every study that supports my point?

It depends on the purpose of the paper.

If it is a review article on the effects of different flavor of ice cream, it may well be appropriate to cite far more papers than it would be if you are merely establishing the point in a paper containing your original research on the subject. In the latter case you may even be able to cite someone else's review.

Generally speaking, new papers in a field only get published if there is an element of novelty to them. Thus it is unlikely to find 50 different papers saying exactly the same thing. If you need the citation to support your own project, you should be able to find a small subset of those that are most relevant to the question at hand (e.g. if I am using mouse models, I should probably cite prior work in mice over prior work in rabbit models). If you are reviewing a topic, you should be able to find the most important papers out of the group (e.g. the ones that were transformative to our understanding of ice cream health effects).

Additionally some papers will vary in quality or scope. Citing an initial, limited scope paper might be appropriate if you are discussing the history of a topic, but if you are just trying to establish a basis for a claim you may want to go with a later, more definitive study.

Many publications will give you a citation limit when writing for them. So you often won't have a chance to cite an entire library of previous work. You need to be able to pin down the papers that are best suited for your specific need.


Letter of recommendation from Head of Department vs Assistant professor?

Good question. Here are my thoughts.

If you can have both, then you should. If you can only have one or the other, then I would weight it up like this. If both are going to say good things about you, then pick the one higher in status. If one is going to say much better things about you than the other, then pick that person.

If you think that can get a somewhat better recommendation from the assistant professor than from the head of the department, then that is a bit of a quandary. As status of a student's referee and their level of supportiveness both affect acceptance decisions to uncertain degrees, you will probably just have to make a call based on your own intuition.


As adjunct faculty at four-year university, with no PhD, what should I have my students call me?

To a fairly large extent this can be student driven, actually. The students get into habits of speech. Some places it results in fairly formal address, in which case "Professor" would be fine in the US. Other places it is common to use first names. Your colleagues should be able to tell you the local custom.

In the US, "Professor" has both a generic and a technical sense. Students normally use it as a generic term. Undergraduates, at least. There are some places in which you are Doctor if you have a doctorate and Professor otherwise. Not especially consistent, but as the kids say, "whatever".

There are a few places that impose formal rules, but you'd have been informed of that if it were the case. But, no matter your wishes, the students will likely do what they do.

I once tried to impose "first names only" rules on a set of doctoral students. Some went along ok, but others couldn't make the jump. I was, forever, Professor Buffy to them.

If, on the first day of class, you write your name on the board as "Professor MathStudent1324", most will go along. And if you write "Maria MathStudent1324" you will probably wind up as Maria. But like I said, they will do what feels comfortable to them.


First, it isn't plagiarism if you cite it. Plagiarism means using someone else's work as if it were your own. What you have done is paraphrase something from the paper. This is allowed as long as it is accurate. Your statement seems a bit too definite, however. The paper makes claims and provides some evidence, I suspect, but it is a bit strong to state it as you did - as if the papers claims are correct in every respect.

Maybe:

"According to [1], Knee flexion was ..."


Is an American University Professor allowed to share grades with the class?

This is a clear violation of FERPA. Bring this up to your department head or a dean of your college.

To prevent this from happening, any identifying information should have been removed. Your name (and if were there, a student ID number) should have been redacted.

As this has already happened, I would promptly report it to the appropriate campus administration.


Is it financially worth it to teach a MOOC (e.g. Coursera)?

Coursera works on a different model from Udemy. Basically, Udemy pays its instructors while Coursera does not. Coursera may split profits (or revenue) with the university, but as far as I can tell it does not pay the teaching team directly. Based on your constraints this means teaching for Coursera is not worth it. It is possible to make money teaching for Udemy. For example, in 2012 the top ten earners made 1.65 million [1] and a quarter made at least $10,000 [2].


How to react to unfair reviewer comments?

Take a very deep breath. The only way to react to a review that you believe to be in bad faith is to act as the bigger person. You can definitely mention that the reviewer disagrees with the other reviewers, but don't say anything about motives to the editor - there is no way that it can benefit you. The editor will have noted a difference in tone themselves and decided what they think about it. If you complain, and the editor has decided the review is valid, you just look defensive and bitter. If they have already decided that the third review is unfair, then you'll make no difference.

If its possible implement the reviewers suggestions, do so unless you think it seriously harms the paper. Whether you think they are fair or not, as long as they don't hurt the paper, do it. This goes double for citing papers if they relevant; 90% of citations in a paper will be read after the work it done.

"How should I behave for a positive outcome?" Open a bottle of champagne, celebrate your paper, be thankful you got through it despite the reviewer and forget about it. There is nothing you can do about this sort of thing. If you really want to do something support movements for open peer review and next time submit to a journal that practices it.


What does it mean "English proficiency" for a J-1 visa?

Candidates must be proficient enough in English to participate successfully in their exchange program and to function on a day-to-day basis. J-1 Exchange Visitors must have sufficient, verifiable English language skills.
The CEFR Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is a European certificate. Notice that it's CEFR level, not CERF.
In the US, they expect a TOEFL certificate or equivalent (like SAT or Pearson tests). An acceptable grade for some programs in the internet based TOEFL would be 79 points, which is the equivalent to a B2 level in the CEFR.
There are sample tests online that might help you get an idea of your present level. For example, this one. However, judging by your post, I assume you are at a more than acceptable level, probably at the C1 or even C2 level.
PS: I have the impression that you believe it's the US gov who is setting the English proficiency standards. Actually, it's the university who sets the standards and how to prove proficiency. If the university accepts you I don't see how the government can reject the J2 application for lack of proficiency in English.
Consider taking some Zoom 1-to-1 conversations lessons, but more for brushing up your knowledge and for peace of mind than for need. As said above, your English seems fine.


No students show up to class -- what should an instructor do?

At my former institution the rule of thumb was a lecturer waited 15 minutes and if no one turned up then the he/she was free to leave (this was common when the period was devoted to a problems class). However, even if one student out of the class turned up then we were expected to present the lecture.

The only case where I didn't follow this was one time out of a class of approximately 30 students one solitary student turned up. This was rather extreme so I checked and found that the students were on a field trip that day (I hadn't been informed which was rather bad) and the student who had turned up often missed lectures and had, apparently, missed the lecture when the field trip was discussed.

Because of this, the majority of students had good reason to be away I decided not to take the class since, effectively, the students on the field trip would have been at a disadvantaged through no fault of their own.