Should I become first author of a paper for which I did the statistical analysis? I am a statistician working at a research institute. We work with data from patients with a certain disease. I am getting paid by the institute, but a part of the money comes from a research grant a doctor brought in. The doctor does not work at the registry, but at a hospital and is working closely together with statisticians of the institute (including me) on research questions.

Together we are doing research on a project. I am doing 100% of the statistics, but all the research questions and ideas come from the doctor. She is also the one writing a manuscript for a paper currently.

Now she wants to put me as first author and herself as last author (as supervisor). The idea comes from other researchers who do something similar, but they usually have medical PhD students and not statisticians as first authors. So basically the reason she wants to put me as first author is to put herself as last author.

I feel uncomfortable being first author and would prefer being second author. I am probably the one putting the most hours into the project by preparing all the data, doing the statistics and explaining the results to the doctor. The statistical analysis will be a big part of the paper.  But the research question is not my idea, I have no medical background, the doctor is writing the paper. I am basically getting paid to do the analysis. While I think it is interesting research, I do not identify with it and I do not agree fully with all the conclusions. So far I worked under the assumption to become co-author and the idea of making me first author came up recently.
My opinion is that I should only be first author of my own research, which would be in statistics, not medicine.

I guess it is very odd to reject being a first author =).

My next step will be to talk to her about it, but I was hoping for some perspective or opinions from the community. Is it harsh/unusual to insist on being co-author only?

Who would you suggest should be first author in this case?

In medicine, as in most biological fields that I know of, the first author is the person who did most of the hands-on work, while the last author is the one who had the idea and planned the project.  From what you've said, then, it would be appropriate for you to be first author and the doctor to be last.

That said, if you don't feel comfortable being first author (and especially in light of your comment that I do not agree fully with all the conclusions) it's also appropriate for you to request to not be first author -- some middle position (second author, or whatever) is also perfectly suitable for your contributions, from the sound of it.

As a reader of scientific literature, I will think that either is your work or that she is your advisor/mentor. Now, I agree that If you don't feel comfortable don't do it. However, It would be a waste. Probably this doctor has more publications so he doesn't care about 1st author publications.... but for the sound of it, you are new in this world of publishing.

Also, it is your research "line or agenda". If you don't want to be strongly associated with the output maybe is also a good idea to put you in a second. But, if it is our you considered it "your research" and you plan doing things on this subject in the future maybe is good that you put yourself in the first place.

Good luck with the article!


Professors refusing to write recommendation letter due to change of field I am a chemistry undergraduate student applying for master’s programs in electrical and computer engineering or computer science (ECE/CS). All my programming skills are self-taught so my professors have no idea about my program switch.
I’ve already contacted some professors and they are willing to give me the references. But once I said I am not applying for a chemistry degree but ECE/CS, two of my references said they cannot give me the reference for non-chemistry related programs since they know nothing about my programming skills. Those two references are who know me the most (IMO) and I think I performed well in their courses/projects.
What can I do? I cannot put too much workload on each professor if two of whom quit.

Your professors are in essence, trying to help. They think that their letters would not carry enough weight to help you. They may be thinking about if they'd admit a student from a different field whose letter-writers said nothing about their chemistry experience (and apparently deciding they would not). Professor's time is valuable, and they don't want to spend it writing a letter that they think would be useless.

But once I said I am not applying for a chemistry degree but ECE/CS 2 of my references said they cannot give me the reference for non-chemistry related programs since they know nothing about my programming skills.

I do not know whether you need letters that espouse your programming skills, but the solution is to:

Tell the professors that you have already got a letter-writer addressing your programming skills, and ask them to write about something more specific, like your research experience, or go-getting-ness (etc., etc.). You have a letter that explains why you'd be a good ECE/CS student, right?
Explain why that's not a concern, and then ask them to focus on something more specific.

If they still refuse, unfortunately, there is little you can do.

You need to gain relevant experience so that you can obtain relevant letters of recommendation.  This can be done by working in the software industry or conducting academic research that uses your programming skills.
Alternately, I would expect that some masters programs do not require letters of recommendation.  You can seek those out.


What are acceptable purposes in Statement of Purpose? I understand that honesty is the best policy, but is it a good idea to say "I have no clue" when the SOP explicitly asks me to describe my "intentions relative to graduate study and life beyond the University"?

Basically, I don't have any ten-year plan. The main reason I'm going to apply for the Program at the University is that the Degree can give me great resources and offer me better choices after graduation. (Other reasons include I have friends in that area and I love the weather in California, but I guess those don't count?) I haven't really considered my life beyond the University, though: Life is just too dynamic for me to answer questions like whether to stay in academia or to enter the industry at this point, and I don't want to eliminate any possibility as early as now.

On the other hand, I do have some long-term goals, but I don't have a detailed plan on how to realize them. I just keep them in mind when making decisions. However, these goals are probably too ambitious, bold, and maybe stupid to be used as an intention: I'm going to develop a framework to unify Statistics and Machine Learning, turning all current work into "miscellaneous earlier efforts" like Newton did!

To clarify, I'm applying to both Masters and Ph.D. programs, because I don't really know what I'm after, so I'm just exploring different options and will take the best offered.

"I have no clue" is not going to get you far. The committee will probably interpret that you will not be very motivated, and motivation plays a big role in succeeding in study programs, especially if they include research.

You are also not expected to know exactly what you want to do the following ten years. From your question, you seem to know as much or as little about your future plans as the average applicant to graduate study, maybe even above average.

You are interested in the topic, and want to study further to learn more about it and have a better chance to make valuable contributions, either in academia or in industry. Say that.

You are not sure yet whether you want to continue in industry or academia, but you want to experience research in academia and be able to make a better informed decision afterwards. Say that if it is true.

You can mention your long-term goal, but make sure not to make it sound too ambitious/impossible to do. For example, I am interested in analyzing Machine Learning from a statistical point of view, with the aim to hopefully provide the community with a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is so powerful. Suit this to your own needs.

The fact that you have friends there and like the weather is in my opinion also worth mentioning, but without focusing on it. Mention it last, and only in one short sentence. Although this does not say anything about your ability to do research, it adds to your motivation to go there.

And just in case, do not copy-paste any of my sentences, but use them as a guide to come up with your own. This is about your motivation (not mine), and answers on StackExchange are public and easy to find.

I'm applying to both Masters and Ph.D. programs, because I don't really know what I'm after

Figure out what you want first, then apply for graduate school if necessary.  The question clearly shows you are not ready for graduate school yet.  Do something that pays well while you figure out your goals.

  However, these goals are probably too ambitious, bold, and maybe stupid to be used as an intention: I'm going to develop a framework to unify Statistics and Machine Learning, turning all current work into "miscellaneous earlier efforts" like Newton did!

That's not too bold, just don't say you will do it next week.  You might achieve that over the course of a career.  It could be phrased better.

  What are acceptable purposes in Statement of Purpose?

For a PhD, there is only one purpose:  to conduct research in some specialized topic.


Is it rude to ask your professor to NOT put you as co-author of a paper? I am working as a research engineer for my professor. He told me to write a conference paper from the master’s thesis of one of his graduate students, since I am working in the same field. After reading the thesis and analyzing the student's results, I found that most of the work is of low quality and does not justify a publication. I told my professor that there are several inconsistencies in the results and several misleading claims, but he told me to continue writing the paper to the best I can given that “I have experience with paper writing and that I can present the work in a light that could get the paper through peer review”.

Now that I am almost done with the draft, I don’t want to be an author of this paper given the facts. How can I talk to my professor asking him to not put me as an author without sounding rude?

To elaborate on the comment by Roland.

If you wrote the paper and analyzed the results, you have a strong claim of ownership on the paper (along with the graduate student who got the initial results). Depending on the depth of your analysis you may well be the lead author so it’s your call by right.

If your professor is pushing for the result to be published then your name has to be on it. If you refuse it can’t happen. If they choose to publish without you it’s ethical misconduct and grounds for retracting the paper from wherever it’s submitted to.

The only diplomatic avenue here is that you push to correct the issues and then submit. Otherwise, politely say that you think the paper is not ready and that it is not publishable in its current state.

There are a few separate issues:

A plagiarism issue (professor cannot claim ownership of someone else's work).  Thus, professor must include all coauthors.
Copyright issue: Professor cannot distribute the work without permission from all copyright holders.
Reputational Issue: Student does not want their name associated with bad work.

Assuming the student is willing to provide permission, one solution to this problem is for the paper to be co-authored by "anonymous." This addresses the plagiarism issue (professor is not taking credit for student's work), the copyright issue (student provides permission), and reputational issue (student will not be associated with this work).

Mind you, this approach is highly likely to increase the likelihood of the paper being rejected.


Meeting dishonest ex-supervisors at large international conference -- Should one speak out? I have returned to my country after one negative experience as a postdoc in China.
In short, I was hired based on false salary & funding expectations supported by shady vague contracts written in Chinese. I stayed until the end as to escape a raging crisis at home.

Now I am back home, among long-date colleagues & collaborators. A large international conference in our field of study starts today. The very same PIs who lured me into their trap are coming, now in my country, actively seeking for new candidates. Surely they expect me to treat them politely, coldly at best. These people owe me a lot of money, plus stolen time and project ideas.

I think they expect me to stay nice and quiet for fear of getting bad recommendations and in the hopes of perhaps getting paid/compensated in the future. The culture here is certainly different from what they expect. In just few hours I will meet them at the conference hall, for the opening.

I am revolted. At least in my country, LoRs are not required for getting jobs, and I do not think they're too influential outside of their institutions.

Should I openly expose them? Or would that just label me as some begrudged nuthead?

There is one special roundtable about work ethics included, and I am thinking of approaching the organisation about this. Any suggestions, ideas on this, would be appreciated.

P.S. This is not in the US.

UPDATE:

Finally the event is coming to an end. I have carefully considered the views of commenters and answers here. Thanks to all for so much attention.

I have avoided the scammers as best as I could. They approached me individually, on different casual occasions, to greet and initiate some chat. I was just plain cold, cutting it short. Fortunately they got the message and have been also avoiding eye contact and interaction.
I have outlined the absurd situation to a large number of peers, yet only when asked. “How was it in China”, “I remember you complaining about some problems, how did that fare” etc. I did not mention names, except when directly asked for confirmation.
A couple of friends are part of fhe organizing comitee. They agree in that it’s best to only bring this up to the chairman in case these scammers are openly advertising positions with false information.
I did contact some local reporters I know who asked for an outline. Yet once they had the story they didn’t reply. I don’t think then this will hit the newspapers unless something new and remarkable happens.

The event ends tomorrow. They might approach me one last time. If they do I’ll comment below. Otherwise I’m leaving this at this. I’ve focused on intensively networking and getting collaborations moving, learning new ideas. Much easier without having to interact with this mess. Hopefully I’ve warned enough people to at least avoid someone else fall in this trap. Hopefully they’ll move to a different field or just stop. Thanks to all here.

There is a lot going on here. If you want to play power politics make sure that you have the power first.

You contemplate making an accusation. Depending on local law and custom this could open you to a charge of slander that you would have to defend. Far in the past a duel on the green would be seen as the appropriate response. Now it is lawyers instead of pistols, of course.

If you can make the claim fairly and can also do so anonymously you protect yourself. If the journalists you intend to speak with can really protect "their sources" (i.e. your identity) it might be possible. But they will need evidence even though they are less susceptible to a charge of slander.

But an emotional response won't help anyone and might reflect badly on yourself.

But I see your dilemma. Others may be at risk here if you don't make some attempt. I think that the conference chairs that I have worked with would listen to your complaint if you can contact them. This won't guarantee anonymity, of course, but in the best case it could put other powerful people in your camp. On the other hand, if the committee is somehow aligned with the PIs in question it would be the worst situation of all.

One rather scary possibility is that you confront them privately and tell them your complaints and that you don't like to see them recruiting others into the same situation you faced. If you know of any others who already faced the same situation and you can confront the PI as a group it would be even better. Some people have no shame at all and some are driven by forces even they can't control, but you might let them think that withdrawal is a better option than continuing. Scary, though.

Ethics don't require, in a case like this, that you put yourself at risk to save others.

I do not know your local laws and I am not a lawyer, but I suggest that the appropriate way to speak out is to use your local courts.  It sounds like you have a legal issue (wage theft) not an academic one.  You can begin litigation against your former supervisor.

Presumably, if your former supervisor appears in your local court, they can win any litigation on the basis of jurisdiction.  But you are interested in speaking out and stopping your former supervisor from seeking new victims.  Unsuccessful litigation could achieve those goals.  I would expect your former supervisor to respond to litigation by avoiding your country.


Citing paywalled articles accessed via illegal web sharing There are a few sites which offer paid articles for free. It’s something unethical, especially for those who upload to that site, but for me, it’s good for expanding knowledge.

As a readers, can we cite those documents, and can the editorial board know that I’m using those articles?

Nobody will know how you have gained access to the article. Feel free to cite articles found via whatever sources.
It might not even be illegal to download content from the website; check your local laws and Berne convention (if your country is signed up) to be sure. In any case, this is unlikely to affect your reputation in any way.
Remember to cite the source appropriately; a journal or a book, not a pirate website or any other medium. The pirate website is usually not the publisher. You do not cite the university that has bought access to research (probably funded by public sources and peer reviewed by academicians funded by public sources), or the colleguage who shows you an article, or the library that contained a copy of the article; these all have the same role as pirate website.
You might not want to be vocal about using such a website. Some people still see it as ethically questionable. That said, using various pirate websites is increasingly common, and the status of many academic publishers among academians seems to have taken some hits, so many researchers will not care about how you get your articles.
You also have the ethics tag on the question. The ethics of pirating digital material are a polarized subject. You might want to do your own research here, or ask a new question for what the main arguments for both sides are, if it has not been asked already. Some people say that pirating material is analogous to physical theft, while others say that intellectual monopoly laws are bad and breaking them creates more good than ill. (I happen to think the laws are far too strong and harm humanity, and should be weakened substantially or entirely removed.) I strongly suggest reading on the matter until you have found strong statements of both points of view to come to an informed decision.

Isn't this the same thing as breaking into a house and stealing everything, then asking if it's ethical to watch Netflix using the victim's account?

You are asking the wrong question.

The unethicalness occurred long before the question of attribution arose.  The publishers of the papers placed a value on them.. and you, for whatever reason, chose to obtain the document from a thief rather than the publisher.  Just because "everyone else" is doing it and it's "wink wink" accepted practice in no way makes the act of theft ethical.  Everything that follows from that act is then tainted by the original act of thievery.

So to recap...

Pirate steals from publisher.
You obtain copy of document from pirate, making you at best an accomplice and at worst a thief yourself.
Question of ethics regarding attribution of stolen documents in your own paper is really not a valid question at this point.


How can I deal with being pressured by my department to pass students who failed? Due to COVID-19, I have found myself teaching a course online. I worked with the university teaching center to transition the course online, prepared an online classroom, and updated the requirements of the course to deal with asynchronous leaning. The course went along reasonably well, and at the end I felt good about the learning demonstrated by a majority of the students.
However, some students did end up failing the course, largely due to a poor performance on the final assessments. Here is the situation:

The students failed to turn in early homework. I reached out to them to see if there was any technical difficulties. There were technical difficulties, and I provided a solution that the students confirmed as solving the technical issue.
The students continued to turn in homework late, wherein I often had to reach out to them to get submissions. Trying to be empathetic to the COVID-19 situation, I waved the late penalties (although the late submissions are recorded by the online system).
The final exam was available for two weeks as a take-home. The student turned in very little, earning less than 10%.
Upon seeing their grades, they reached out stating the same technical issue as before (which they had previously said was resolved) and that they needed to pass the course to graduate.

I feel as though I am being pressured by the students and department to pass the students with a minimum grade (the department thinks we should be lenient due to the pandemic). The students never showed up for online lectures (NB: all course materials were available for fully asynchronous learning), their course interaction scores were very low, and I felt I did everything I could to succeed in the course. Yet I feel completely at fault and guilty.

Your department defers to you as the final authority on the student’s grade, and for a good reason: because you are the only person who sees the full picture of the student’s performance and the context in which it was assessed.
The department can give you high-level guidance and advice, but that is never a substitute for an instructor’s reasoned judgment taking into account the details of the situation.
The student, like all students everywhere, wants to pass, and like many (but not all) students will offer any excuse they can think of, no matter how feeble, for why they deserve lenient treatment. If the excuse rings hollow, ignore it.
Whatever your conscience dictates doing is the best course of action here. Making that final call is precisely what the department pays you to do and expects of you.

Fail them, but don't make it count against their GPA.
My university had the following policy for the classes that were affected by the Covid-19 lockdown: all classes were online, and students who failed were recorded as having failed, and would need to repeat the courses they failed. However, these failed courses wouldn't be counted on their transcripts, and wouldn't be counted for the calculation of their GPAs.
After all, if the student hasn't passed the unit, it isn't fair for everyone who put in the effort to pass the class legitimately. Additionally, if they haven't gained or demonstrated the knowledge that the class aimed to teach, then they should be given another option to gain or demonstrate that knowledge by redoing the class at a later date.
This would, of course, delay their graduation and result in them paying additional tuition fees, but that's what happens when someone fails their classes.


E-mailing a paper under review to a prospective PhD advisor; a co-author wants all co-authors to be CC-ed. Is this OK? So I am stuck in a very weird situation. I am a prospective PhD student, and I emailed a supervisor that works in a field of research very close to mine, and is very successful.
He replied stating that he is interested to have me in his team, and requested my papers. One of my papers is under review.
I asked my co-author which is my advisor for a permission, and she said it is okay to send the papers as long as I cc all co-authors in the email.
I feel like this is not a nice way of emailing a distinguished professor, especially that I do not understand the point of ccing the co-authors. I might offend the professor, which I do not want to happen.
I appreciate the advice.

I asked my co-author which is my advisor for a permission

Here a better move would have been that of asking all your coauthors for permission.
I'd now:

Inform all your coauthors, cc'ing your advisor, asking if they are OK with that.
Inform your advisor that you would not feel comfortable in cc'ing the coauthors in the discussion with the prospective supervisor.
Write to the prospective supervisor without further copying your coauthors. At most, if your current advisor insists with that, use a blind cc.

Yes, it's fine to CC your coauthors when sharing a draft of your paper.  It just informs your coauthors that someone was interested in your work.


Why do some journal proofs insert dozens of typesetting mistakes? Why do some journals change the final software and do not provide a template for the final draft(e.g. contains the same font as in the gallery proof)?
I often hear that some of my colleagues get unacceptable proofs (often even from Elsevier journals).
I am checking an Elsevier paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141029619305024) which was in the state of Galley proof (after acceptance)

letters in math equations look different: (converted all math equations to vectorgraphics)

letters have inconsistent size even in the continuous text

made a screenshot of the rendering of jpeg-graphics if the jpeg-image contained two images (a) and (b)

where they converted all simple *.eps-graphics (nothing complex) to *.jpeg with 110dpi (text is almost unreadable) also declare a min of 500dpi in the author guidelines

changed the font from the font declared in the template("Times") to "Charis SIL", now the continuous text is in Charis SIL, but the equations, the variables in the text and the figures are in Times
The font color is generally dark gray, but in math equations it is black

the variables in micro-environment are not aligned with the surrounding text (sometimes smaller letters are even higher then capital letters)

several manual line-breaks are awful (some lines contain more space than letters) also a short word is following

some lines start with "," or "."

converted a table (conatining text and two eps-graphics) to jpeg with obvious compression artifacts

added space between "mm" and "²"

removed spaces

some citations are outside the page border

According to the pdf metadata, it was created with Prince 10 rev 7, which only supports SVG as a vector format.
Why don't they convert all eps/pdf-files with inkscape to svg (can be done fully automatic as a batch-process e.g. pdftocairo.exe -svg "Input.pdf" "Output.svg")?
In my field, if I use a space instead of a small space, it is unacceptable or at least unprofessional. (As a reader, such mistakes are evident and disruptive.) And it is so super-important to add it as vector, but then the proofs ruin everything! Why do they have guidelines for authors if the journal introduces illegal (according to the guidelines) mistakes on their own?
Why do some journals change the final software and do not provide a template for the final draft?

Because they are incompetent.

That's about it, really. But don't lump all publishers/journals as one - the typesetters for one journal might not be the same as that for another journal, even one published by the same publisher, and of course there are good and bad employees everywhere.

It's all about how the education system treats this topic. Most people are happy with a fast-written Word document as long as what they want to discuss in the paper is there. They neglect the fact that proper presentation is essential.

Sadly proper typesetting isn't something that is actively thought at universities, which is a rather interesting situation given that universities in general aim to promote science and everything that comes with it including paper publication. So if you don't get into it on your own the chances are you will end up with a Masters or PhD degree without ever having done a proper paper in terms of typesetting.

I remember at my university that there was a workshop for typesetting using LaTeX specifically for writing proper publications, seminar papers etc. It became mandatory years later (kudos to the teachers for noticing the poor level of typesetting in assignments the students were turning in) but before that most people didn't even know it existed hence a gap in typesetting skills was present

I know plenty of people, who think decent typesetting is rocket-science. It's not. But the fact is that this air of mystery that surrounds it makes many people quiver. Quite often this results in using Word or similar word processing tools, which are easier to use for simple things but fall flat once you start getting into proper typesetting. Most teachers at the university will not have a problem with you using Word and some even require it (mind-boggling, right?).

I started learning about typesetting, LaTeX etc. quite early on during my studies even though no one required it from me. I just had it with papers with poor typesetting. Sometimes it's so bad that your whole concentration goes into analyzing the typesetting issues instead of the actual topic in the paper, which is sad since the author(s) has(have) put work into doing the research.

In addition we have to consider outsourcing. Due to lack of experience, time etc. many people outsource the writing (in terms of typesetting) to others, who may or may not have the expertise to do it.

Finally proof-reading is something that is often neglected. People concentrate on what's discussed in the paper but forget that the presentation is also very important. Just like when buying a car - will you go for the slick looking one or will you pick one, that looks as if it just got dragged out of a scrapyard because it was too much of a junk for it. If my professor saw the examples you have given, he would have told me to buzz off and redo it all.


Tool to generate feedback based on test results My mom is a tutor and she was hoping for some software to help her speed up her grading process. Currently, she has her students take a test and she needs to generate something for the student with what they need to work on.

For instance, the student takes a test and they get questions 3 and 4 wrong. Question 3 is on long division and question 4 is on exponents. Ideally, she would be able to put in what questions the student got wrong and get something in a presentable format she can email to the student and their parents:

  Areas to work on:

  Multiplying exponents
  Long division with numbers greater than 3 digits

Is there any software out there that can do something like this?

Thanks,

Eric

A possibility is to use a vlookup() in an Excel sheet.

Have a list with the q numbers and areas - every q number entered will return the area to a pre-set reporting area.

Put this together just for fun - you can edit and play as you wish:

Just enter the question numbers in cells E3:E12, leave un-needed ones blank and it sorts it out.


Can I demand re-submission of a manuscript that has an odd document layout? I am assigned to review a paper that has an extremely strange page layout (the pages are squares, single column with about 150 characters per line), making it very impractical to print or read. It is for a journal and was submitted via Manuscript Central.
I could of course read it on my screen (which I don’t like at all), or print it with either rotating or stretching the pages (which I tried but it’s very awkward to read and therefore extremely distracting).

Is it okay to write to the ADM and ask them to demand a re-submission in a proper document layout, i.e., A4 or US Letter? Or am I being fussy?

No. It is not your job as a reviewer to demand things. You can inform the editor that given the format of the manuscript that you will not review it. The editor will then likely look at the manuscript and either decide that you are being a pain and find a new reviewer or that the manuscript format is ridiculous. In that case, they will apologize to you and tell you that they are requesting a reformatted version.

Unless the format is really awful (like less than 10 lines a page or greater than 100 characters per line), the editor will probably conclude you are a pain.

The one column is not ugly for a submission.  It is very normal for the journal to handle that reformatting and for authors not to worry about it.

The square thing IS ugly and a little strange (surprised it won't just print normally in Word?)  But maybe it is a pdf.

I would lean to printing it and reviewing it.  It's a minor imposition.  (Reading poor English is much worse and if you have to handle a paper that needs a translator because of the flawed grammar, than just stop the review on those).  But  let the journal deal with the format peculiarity.


How to avoid self-plagiarism when adapting dissertation into a paper? I have recently completed a dissertation and have been encouraged to publish the work.

My dilemma is that I find it quite difficult (and painfully tedious) to rewrite the same thing couched in new language. Whereas I don't plan to copy and paste the whole thing verbatim, it would be nice to take chunks of the original text here and there, and proceed to break-apart, edit, and reassemble the bits and pieces to create a newly condensed version of the dissertation.

How does one go about this whilst avoiding self-plagiarising?

It would seem sensible to make generous reference to the fact that the paper is derived from the dissertation. However, does one really have to effectively rewrite everything and reference every last page and figure from the original text?

Thanks.

The dissertation is not a published work in the same sense as a journal or conference paper.  It is normal for a recent graduate to take large chunks of their thesis, with minimal or no modification, and use the excerpts in more formal publications.  You do not need to worry about self plagiarism in this context.

The copying often goes the other way as well.  If you already have published papers when it's time to write your dissertation, you may take large chunks of the published papers and reuse them in the dissertation.  In some fields (mathematics or theoretical physics, for example), this is quite commonplace.  People talk about "stapling your papers together" to make a thesis.  In reality, there is more to it than that.  Introductory and concluding material are needed, but many theses have chapters that are based on published manuscripts, with relatively little editing.

Plagiarism (n): the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

By definition, you cannot plagarise your own content. Make one reference to your dissertation and don't worry about it.


Reporting a student who may be psychologically disturbed Yesterday, a colleague from my school's history department brought me a student's final project from her history class. The assigned project was to produce a "creative" project dealing with a historical figure/event covered in the time period of the class (20th century United States). One student wrote a short play about the Great Depression. Another student designed a simple computer game that he ran on a Macintosh Classic II from the 1990s.
However, the student in question here (whose project I was shown) wrote a diary for a famous American serial killer.  The diary graphically details the killings this man performed, including hand sketches of female genitalia, clippings from some porn magazines, and (as far as we can tell) splatters of real blood. It is a horrifically disturbing piece of work.
The student did technically fulfill the parameters of the assignment. He produced a (seemingly) historically accurate project on a historical figure from the 20th century in the United States. (Neither my colleague nor I really wanted to fact check every detail of a 200 page diary written in scrawled handwriting and splattered with blood and sketches of vivisected women). The writing is decent, albeit rather repetitive and somewhat simple. My colleague is likely going to give the student a fairly high grade on the project.
However, the graphic and disturbing subject matter, alongside the frighteningly realistic psychopathy, have brought my colleague to wonder if she should show the project to department or university administration. We were not sure if this student just had a distinct (and disturbing) gift for creative writing or if he was actually writing from personal experience (or something?). Is it a cry for help? Is the student a serial killer (unlikely)? Does he enjoy fantasizing about vicious crimes?
We are not psychologists, so we are not going to try to psychoanalyze this student from a professional standpoint. We also want to tread lightly around punishing and censoring a student for "thought crimes." However we also do not want to become part of history ourselves by being "that one professor" who saw potential signs of a violent criminal and opted to just give the kid an A- and be done with it.
Should my colleague show this project to university administrators?

Addendum
There have been a few questions about the structure and reasoning behind this class.  This is a class that emphasizes history through the lens of "creativity." The thesis of the class is essentially that historical figures were highly creative and that we can learn a fair amount about history by examining "creativity." The class is usually taken by STEM majors as a general ed requirement. I took the class (years ago) and it actually was very interesting and I learned a lot about history.
There have been questions about the grading on the assignment. I do not know the specific metrics for grading the project. I said that my colleague may give an A- on the project as just a hypothetical filler grade. I do not know what she will grade the student on specifically. I guess it comes down to how creative we think writing the F-word 200+ times in a pornographic notebook splattered with a bloody substance is. Let's not act as if all violent porn is to be elevated to the pedestal of artistic acclaim just for the sake of radical liberality. I'm not the grader of the assignment and I ultimately cannot answer how it will be graded.

The "administration" is probably the wrong place to look. Instead, see if you your institution has some mental health staff, whether just associated contacts, or counselors, or even a dedicated behavior concerns advice function, to get proper advice. If the university is well-organized enough to have one of the latter, chances are they've also established policies requiring you to pursue this. And such an advice line would be well suited to tell you how to go about it. If your university doesn't, figure out where to report it.

Note that, unless your institution is highly dysfunctional, reporting concerning behavior and having a professional talk to the student in question shouldn't be considered a punishment, but a safety net.

As Buffy points out in a comment, the law may further require you to do some things, and avoid doing other things. While one would hope that the mental health support staff are well-informed, contacting the legal staff (University Counsel) may be useful. That said, as a non-lawyer person, I imagine most legal pitfalls concern naming the student when you shouldn't. Your initial inquiries need not include the name of the student, until you're convinced that you should.

You're the doctor.  Ultimately, medicine has been a complete disaster with dealing with psychological issues.  Firstly, note that it disturbs YOU.  Until you acknowledge that or discuss the issue with the student, you can't tell if YOU or the student are disturbed (or undisturbed) in a healthy way.

Secondly, the ONLY healthy way to address the issue is to tell them your feelings about it, not as an equal, but from the point of view of being the superior.  This way you'll perhaps learn something, rather than get more confused through attempting to understand each other.  Something like:  "This is not really appropriate result for the assignment.  While detailing the account of a serial killer was aligned with the objective, you went into a depth that concerns me."  That opens up the arena for addressing whatever issue may be present.

This allows YOU to understand student psychology better, rather than hand it off to some unknown authority that isn't directly connected to the issue (as you are:  you know what the assignment was and the context in which you asked it).

Every interaction with a student on difficult issues related to your mission is another chance to further your mastery of pedagogy and your curriculum.  The more difficult it is, the more you have to gain -- whether you are right or wrong.  You never want to give up those opportunities.

[Edit:  after some comments, I see I made some assumptions about the gender relationship between student and professor.  If they were the same gender, I'd have MORE reason to suspect a psychological issue -- but still well within the means of a doctor of philosophy to deal with.]


Removing an author from a future publication I published a conference abstract with a undergraduate student of mine as a co-author. The work was presented as a poster and the conference doesn't publish proceedings/papers. I am now planning on publishing an extended version and want to drop her as a co-author. Can I do this?

Prior to the student starting the project we discussed authorship and agreed that it was unlikely that she would contribute enough to warrant authorship on anything that came out of the study since the experiment was conceived and implemented by me and I designed the statistical analysis. At the time of the conference, the student had collected approximately 1/4 of the data on the poster and did a fair amount of the statistical analysis, but her contribution was essentially just turning the crank. Given the effort she put in, I did not think it was out of place to have her as a co-author on the poster, but nor did I think it was required. I wrote the abstract and poster and asked her if she wanted to be an author and if so for any input on the abstract and poster.

Since then, I have collected a second independent data set and come up with a completely new analysis. I now feel her contribution (1/8 of the total data set and helping with a partial preliminary analysis) does not warrant authorship and I think it would be better to acknowledge her work in the acknowledgements then to add her as an author. I would discuss this with her, but she is out of the field and I cannot contact her easily. Can I drop her for the list of authors?

Most authorship questions are a gray area: she did contribute to the paper, but was it a significant intellectual contribution (which is one usual criterion), with emphasis of both significant and intellectual (or scientific)? That's for you and her to decide, taking into account the customs of your field.

From her point of view, I can see two reasons why she might be consider a rightful co-author of the paper:

If the data collection was itself part of the scientific research, i.e. if it could not have been done by an unskilled worker following instructions. If so, then her data collection was significant (and it doesn't really ).
If the conclusions drawn from the preliminary analysis were useful in tuning your final analysis, i.e. if her work helped design a better analysis method.

Though by your description it seems like she may not pass the threshold, it is true that having her as a co-author on an earlier publication (conference abstract) gives her a stronger case than otherwise. If her contribution was deemed important enough for authorship at first, and you now publish work that includes this contribution, why shouldn't she be an author? I don't think that authorship “dilutes” because other larger contributions were added…

In conclusion: you maybe have good reasons not to make her a co-author, but if she feels like fighting it, she does have valid enough arguments that it could get messy. I'd advise discussing it openly with her, but being ready to have her as co-author if she feels strongly about it.

The Hardy-Littlewood rules of collaboration, while formulated for a mathematical collaboration between peers, are a useful guide to a harmonious collaboration here. Specifically, the fourth axiom:

  ...it was quite indifferent if one of them had not contributed the
  least bit to the contents of a paper under their common name . . .


Use a survey from a study under review? I developed a survey and my study using the survey is still under review for a publication.  However, my friend wants to use the survey and data for her study. I collected the data only in my school; she wants to collect additional data from a different school.

My concerns are:

If her study is published before mine, my study could be meaningless.
Also, the two studies could be very similar.

Is it okay to allow her to use my survey as well as my data?

I assume that your supervisor already know that you already submitted your work:
If your targeted publication venue allows you to publish pre-print than you may submit your work at arxiv or any other similar public library and give reference to you work in extended work conducted by your supervisor.Otherwise, you can give reference to your work in extended version with status "Under Review".

If your friend uses your work, academic ethics compels her to cite you, even if it is only as personal communication or similar. Currently, the typical type of citation would be unpublished or under review and this should be updated to your paper once it is published (the details may depend on field, citation style, and journal). Thus, it should be clear to everybody that your friend’s work fundamentally builds upon yours, and it would be absurd to consider your publication irrelevant due to your friend’s one. Of course, some reviewers and editors out there make absurd decisions, but that’s nothing I would consider likely and take into account.

You have to decide yourself how much you trust your friend to adhere to academic ethics (and cite you). At worst, you can contractually stipulate that any publication based on your work must cite you (or make you a co-author in the event that you do not publish). Either way, it is usually a good idea to have a discussion with everybody involved to clarify this and arrive at a common collaboration and publication strategy.


Should I explain that I cannot finish my current master due to religious discrimination when applying for another graduate program? I am currently enrolled in a master’s program in the Middle East, which does not seem to be possible to finish / worth finishing for various reasons. The main problem is the lack of research facilities that would allow me to generate data for my thesis. The facilities that do exist seem to prioritise students from the religious majority. As a Christian, you do not get that many opportunities in the Middle East, and there is no protection against discrimination.

So I applied to a master’s programme in Europe. Shortly afterwards, I received a personal message from one of the professors asking for my motivation to restart the master's and not run for a PhD.

My question is: How open I should be about the reasons why I will not finish the master’s I’m enrolled in already? I am not sure if I should mention the religious reasons – I do not want to look whiney, but this is the reality of being a Christian in a predominantly Islamic country. Can mentioning religious discrimination negatively (and significantly) affect the professor’s decision in accepting me, despite how real it is?

My advice is to state facts not conclusions.

For example, you should not say:

  It's impossible to finish my degree here because they discriminate against Christians.

Instead, you could say:

  I finished all my coursework, but I have been unable to get a spot in a lab -- there are only 10 lab spots for 40 students. Further, two different professors told me they would give priority to Muslim students (I am not Muslim). Given this, my best option seems to be to restart at a different university.

By the way, I also wanted to comment on this line:

  asking for my motivation to restart the Master's and not run for a PhD

In some fields and some countries, it is common to go straight from undergraduate to the PhD without getting a master's. This professor may be asking specifically why you want to try again to get a master's, as opposed to enrolling directly in a PhD program.

Edit: inspired by @arp's answer, I'll expand my script to address the possible confusion about master's vs. PhD

  I applied for a master's degree because I will be leaving [current univ] without a master's. I finished all my coursework, but I have been unable to get a spot in a lab -- there are only 10 lab spots for 40 students. Further, two different professors told me they would give priority to Muslim students (I am not Muslim). Given this, my best option seems to be to restart at a different university. I would certainly be open to pursuing a PhD at [new univ] if that is an option, but my understanding is that I will need to complete my master's first.

The professor asked why you want to re-start your Masters instead of pursuing a PhD.  You should consider the possibility that they will allow you to pursue a PhD track directly and without completing a Masters first.  Perhaps you should see if this is possible and take that option, provided that they accept the premise of why your Masters is not completed.
On a note related to disclosing perceived discrimination, I don't see any issue with disclosing it, as long as your tone does not conflate discrimination that is fact and discrimination that is assumed.  I live in a country where Christians frequently make frivolous and obviously false claims about being persecuted, when they are the dominant demographic and are not persecuted.  But if you live in the Middle East, then a professor in Europe would probably readily believe your story.
I assume that you chose a valid thesis topic, attempted to pursue it, and were rejected.  If pressed, you may want to demonstrate that your thesis topic was valid, and that it would have been approved at the institution that you're applying to.  I say this only because there may be people who failed to complete a thesis specifically because they were determined to pursue a subject that is dishonest or without academic merit.


Are there any tools to automatically search and download literature in a given .bib file? I'd like to download automatically tons of papers listed on .bib file so I'm trying to find a way to facilitate the process by, e.g. I import or input to a tool a certain .bib file which contains a list of literature, the output is the literature's .pdf file. Any idea to do so?

In contrast to the freemium/proprietary tool suggested in the answer by andreas, I propose a FOSS solution that works reliably for this specific task.

Assuming you are connected to a network that provides permissions to legally download the required content, the cross-platform reference manager,JabRef has integrated fetchers to download full-texts for the entries in your library. Import your bib file into Jabref (maybe just start a new library for this task to keep things clean) and select the desired number of entries for which full-text PDFs are needed. Then, from the Quality pull-down menu, select Lookup Fulltext documents.

However, you still have to manually confirm all downloads. From the user's perspective, this requires just a bunch of clicking the OK button in the same on-screen co-ordinate (for pop-ups that appears sequentially for each citation entry). Jabref does all the heavy-lifting and correctly downloads the desired PDFs of the full-text and link each of them appropriately by matching to their relevant citation entry in the library.

The latest master build of Jabref is recommended, since there were some recent fixes to its IEEE fetcher (i.e. if IEEE matters to the OP).

Zotero can import many formats, including *.bib.


Is it possible to submit a paper to a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal without PhD and get it accepted? Is it possible to submit a paper to a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal without PhD? More specifically, what would be the bare minimum qualifications that would grant one the possibility of the paper being published in a peer-reviewed academic medium?

Submitting an academic paper for publication (and potentially getting it accepted) does not require any qualifications whatsoever.  You don't need a PhD; you don't even need to have gone to college.  There are no educational, employment, or membership requirements at all.

That's not to say it's easy to get a paper accepted with no formal training in the field.  Learning how to write a compelling paper is much easier if you have a mentor to offer guidance.  However, if you can figure out how to do it without a PhD, then your lack of a PhD will not be held against you.

Of course publications want to be read. There is no doubt that anyone who can submit work that is clear, concise, innovative and readable will be considered. But no matter what an individual's personal experience has been, or even the official policy, it comes down to the work, how it is expressed, and the integrity and professionalism of the scientist author. Somehow, nitpicking others' comments seems to be related more to the desire an individual may harbor to be published- even if it's in an online forum!


Is it normal for master's students to be sidelined, compared to PhD students? I'm a MS student who just finished his second semester. The lab that I'm in is fairly large (around 30 people) and there are a variety of students working on different topics.
Here in my country (Korea), people usually enroll as MS/PhD integrated students (i.e., enlist with a bachelor's and exit with a PhD, with an option to exit after getting a master's). I had signed up for this integrated program, but recently decided to exit once I get my master's.
The problem is that since I've decided to leave after  getting my master's, I find myself being ignored. One senior lab member questioned whether I "wanted to be part of the group" (I thought I already was). Further, no one even approaches me about research anymore unless they need help with something (e.g., English writing - I'm the only English native speaker there).
I feel like this is a toxic environment. I mean, I enrolled as a graduate student to study more and learn how to be a researcher, and I still want to do that. But maybe I'm being naive. So, is this kind of behavior
normal? Is it a known issue in my country? What's the best way to proceed?

No idea about anything specific to Korea, and haven't personally experienced this, but yeah, it seems pretty normal to me. In my field in the US it is similarly most common for people to be admitted only to PhD programs, with a masters degree as an option for people who fail to/decide not to continue.
From the perspective of your coworkers, you've decided to quit the lab. You don't mention why, and it definitely might be the right decision for you, but for people around you it might look like you don't value the kind of work the lab is doing, you're just going through the motions to get the master's degree and move on. You also might be perceived as a bit of a burden: you're opting to skip the years in which you would be likely to be most productive and most helpful to others as a senior graduate student in the lab, and only staying for your first steps into research. Ordinarily, if your goal is to "study more and learn how to be a researcher", the best way to do that would be to complete a PhD program, not to quit with a master's.
I think it's unlikely you'll change this attitude much, so I think you probably have to just embrace your decision, put your head down and get through it. I don't think that's really fair, by any means, and is especially unfair if you're working just as hard as everyone else while you are there, but I can also understand why your coworkers might not feel like you're a full contributor.

When I was in the US, it was as you say: MS students were not valued. Also, I think most schools do not fund MS students.


If a professor says he will not fund my internship as it will be my first visit, how can I convince him politely? I contacted a professor in a foreign university for a possible research internship in his lab. He is willing to accept me as an intern, but has stated that since he barely knows me and it is the first time I will be working under him, he will not provide any financial support.

I have read his publications, his areas of interest match with mine, and I believe that his papers were among the most exciting ones I have read so far. Being an undergraduate, I have limited funding of my own and I don't want to miss this opportunity because of lack of resources.

Since he mentioned 'will not fund' instead of 'cannot fund', I feel that there is some scope to convince him. Can someone advise me regarding what I should say to do so, without being rude? I would appreciate any help.

It may help to look at this from the professor's point of view:

You are not a student at his university (or even a citizen of his university's country), so internal research grants are not an option (indeed, he may face some backlash for hiring a non-student if research slots are limited).
You are an undergraduate, so your ability to be useful to him is very limited, especially at first as you are ramping up. (Undergraduates generally have limited time and skills compared to grad students and post-docs).

Given this, his position is quite reasonable: if you want to work "for free", fine; otherwise, this won't work out.

To change his mind, you need to reverse one of these assumptions:

You can find a pot of money (e.g., a scholarship) and ask for his support in applying for it
You can prove that you are really useful for the lab, and that paying you a meager salary is more cost-effective than other options. But, for most undergraduate students, this will be an impossible sale, and the professor will quickly tire of saying "sorry, no."

In short: I really don't think you'll be able to convince him. Your best bet is to look for scholarships or other funding. If that doesn't work out, you should tell him honestly that while you appreciate his offer, and would certainly accept it even with a modest stipend, you simply cannot afford to travel to and live in the foreign country with no income.

Never work for free, unless its for a charity or a noble cause.

  "... but has stated that since he barely knows me and it is the first
  time I will be working under him, he will not provide any financial
  support"

This is clearly a red flag. Look for some other internship or better not do anything than accepting this offer.

Had he stated that he did not have money to fund, then it would be a different scenario, but still I would say not work for free, but you could ask him to support you with a recommendation letter for a possible external funding source that you had identified. Anyway this is not the case, so my advice is , do not accept this offer.


When should a professor recommend a student drop out of college? I am a college professor, and sometimes I learn of a student's career goals.  I think some should drop out despite having good grades.  If they do not learn much (because they are advanced or because they do better on their own), or if a degree will not help them with their specific career goals, I think that they should drop out.  College is not cheap, and I can tell some students do not enjoy going to class or doing homework.  I am afraid if I suggest a student leaves the school without a degree, I will be fired.   When should a teacher recommend a student leave the university without a degree?
I am in the U.S.

The career goals of an undergraduate change on a regular basis. How many of us are doing exactly what we thought we would do at that point in time?
If the student is doing well, grade-wise, and is on track to graduate, in most scenarios it is much better for them to finish an undergraduate degree. It opens up more doors both initially as well as for some time afterwards. If the work is too easy, suggest harder classes.
If a professor were to suggest to one of my children that they drop out of college even though they are doing well, I would have an in person visit with them to discuss their complete abuse of power. My daughter had a professor suggest she was not suited for her major - that was inappropriate enough (and totally wrong as time has told). For better or worse, your attitude towards those students is condescending at best.

For students who have borrowed money to study, correlation suggests that completing the degree is better for their finances.
The probability of defaulting on student loans is inversely related to the amount of money borrowed.  Students who enrol briefly and drop out are not able to repay their loans.  Students who persist longer and borrow more money are more able to repay their loans.  While correlation is not necessarily causation, it does suggest that completing a degree is better for personal finance.
Of course money is not the only reason to get a degree.


How to "work on the essay" as a non-native speaker We received a report on our paper (it's the 2nd version already). The referee writes:

  The proofs are correct. However, I'm not completely satisfied with the style in which the paper is written and the authors have to work more on the essay.

I'm not sure what we can do with that. We are not native speakers and we did our best to use as good English as we can. I'm not sure how we should respond to that, since currently it seems to be the only thing that prevents us from finishing the referee process. We implemented the minor corrections suggested by this referee and as well the remarks by the language editor.

Any ideas how to proceed in such a case, please?

The referee is obviously satisfied with the "scientific" part of the publication but points out the narrative itself. I don't think that your English language skills are the deciding in the factor in that matter. You could write the same paper in your native language, let it someone translate it as it is and still get the same comment. As the referee puts it, it's the style that has issues. You should try to formulate your paper in a way which not only lists the discovered facts one after the another, but attempts to guide the reader's thought process towards your idea and results. Make it more interesting and engaging. Your language should be eloquent, your narrative consistent, your thought flow constant; the paper itself serves as a way to reflect the scientist's mind and as such it does not consist only of definitions, lemmas, theorems, proofs, citations, figures, etc., because a significant part is the skill (or art) to mold them into an article that readers will enjoy reading.

If the problem is really only the lack of English skills, try to write it up in your native language and consult some professional to translate it.

If that is not the case, don't be discouraged, good writing is a skill and can be learned and trained. Unfortunately, I've encountered many students (and some experienced scientists) who struggle with this. I personally blame it on the lack of reading of non-scientific material, like novels, articles, philosophical works, etc. Of course, this doesn't mean that you should style your paper like an adventure novel, but, as I mentioned before, writing is a skill, and it is best honed by being in contact with other well written materials. This way, you'll broaden your vocabulary, improve the ability to express your thoughts through text and, if you focus on English materials, become more proficient in English.

If I may add one more thought to the discussion here. I think "the authors have to work more on the essay" proves that this referee is not able to put his thoughts in a usable, clear, scientific way. Style problem!? If he or she does not want to invest the effort in explaining himself properly, I doubt that he is a good referee. It is his/her duty to do a proper job. Ask for specific examples of what he is - vaguely - complaining about. I am certainly questioning his/her style. I do referee papers from time to time.


To what extent is the students' perspective on the lecturer credible? I am giving a master course with another colleague, but since I am more experienced in the subject, I took the most difficult lectures.
My lectures contain a lot of mathematical equations and require deep knowledge in algebra. I tried to make them as easy as possible and even made extra videos to explain parts which I felt were difficult. I checked all available lectures to make sure I explain well. Therefore, I find my lectures among the most intuitive and informative ones.
It seems that my students (or most of them) are not that good in mathematics and found the lectures very difficult. They are rating my lectures with very bad scores although I made a lot of effort in these lectures (I have been teaching this subject for several years) this year as they are online. I see my colleagues just recording their old lectures.
As a lecturer, I try to transfer knowledge, so satisfying my students is my priority. However, I feel that my efforts were not acknowledged and I have lost motivation to prepare good lectures. I am planning to simply record lectures and read the slides as most of the lecturers at my university are doing.
Did anyone go through this? Also, how informative is this evaluation to me? In other words, how credible is it to validate if there is really an issue with my lectures or if it is just a biased opinion?
EDIT
It seems that the students are comparing my lectures and the lectures of my colleague with whom I am sharing the course. I assume they think the difficulty of the lectures is related to the lecturer and not the topic.

Student feedback can sometime be a difficult thing for a teacher, and it is sometimes  inappropriate that teaching quality is measured in terms of student feedback.
Let me explain this by means of anecdotes. Imagine a colleague who is a good performer, much as a stand-up comedy act. They give good jokes, tell stories, show interesting films. How would many students rate them? Quite a few students might give them a good rating on the basis that they had a good time. However ask them in five or ten years time what they got  out of that class, and they might remember one of the jokes or stories.
Now imagine a colleague who works their class. Makes them do test and examples. Makes them go places that makes them think, makes their brains ache from the thinking they had to do. It is possible that quite a few students might really give some negative feedback that this was a class they did  not enjoy and might have liked to be changed. However, ask some of these students in five or ten years what they got out of that class and it might surprise you. It might be that they remember what they were taught and use it in their profession.
Good teaching can be preparation for the future and sometimes students can only discover that when they reach their own futures. I started to find this out when I would get unexpected emails saying "remember me". "I didn't believe you when you taught me that thing, and now I see that lesson playing out in front of my eyes every day. Thank You."
We have to balance those two aspects of teaching. We have to give them something for their now and something for their future. In fact something for our future and our grand-children's future, because that is what we build by good teaching.
As has been said by others: if you care, you will find ways to improve. You are doing the right things. Keep going. Best of luck.

I would say that your experience is one of the most basic reasons why professors used to have tenures. Tenure was an acknowledgement that a professor is expert in its field and able to teach. With tenures becoming rarer and rarer, more lecturers are falling in the trap you found in. With universities caving in to student opinion, this may go horribly wrong in the future.
Myself, I do care about student opinion, because university makes me to think about it basically every day. I am successful and apparently highly respected by students, but still unsure whether I should be harder on them and care less about what they think of me.
This is not much of help in your current situation, I understand. My best advice would be to avoid such situations where students can directly compare you to other lecturers, as these comparisons can be highly unfair. There is also another point you may think about: how does self-selection bias influence student opinion about you? I have recent experience where there was a questionnaire sent out to the students about the quality of online lectures in time of COVID. The feedback was pretty bad, but there was only one student who submitted any kind of feedback! I have the option to do such survey myself, anonymously for students, and when half of them responded, the feedback was actually pretty good - they were satistfied with the lectures and did not even to bother to provide any kind of feedback to the University, when asked before.
So, think of this too - who is complaining, and whether they are representative sample of your student body.
EDIT: I am not sure why this is getting negative grades, so I will clarify that: It is university's job to employ good lecturers, and student's opinion should not have too much weight precisely because the dilemma described by the OP. Placing too much weight on student opinion is University's way of acknowledging that their committees who select professors are not doing their job and really puts University's administration in a bad light.


Is it appropriate to ask a professor to bump up a grade when I suspect it may be at the cutoff? Background: My course has three exams: I did really bad on the first, great on the second (97%), and I think well on the third. I regularly attended the professor's office hours and never missed class.

Question: I now estimate that my final grade could be at the cutoff. Is it appropriate for me ask if he can round up grades (or bump up..) now before the grade is out? Or after the grade is out..?

Details:

This professor didn't send out scores online for the previous two exams. He only allowed us to pick up the exam on the class. However, since everyone will be leaving, I don't know whether he is going to distribute the exam grade online or he is just going straight to put the final letter grade in the system. So, another option would be to e-mail him now and ask how he plans to distribute the exam grades.

Consider asking for an appointment to review the final exam.

Preemptively saying "I might be below the cut-off and would appreciate free points" is obnoxious. It's likely the professor has already taken your improvement and other factors into account. Further, asking for additional points for any reason other than a grading mistake is really inappropriate, though it's so common that most professors accept it.

On the other hand, waiting until the final grades might be too long. Once the professor has made a decision about what grade you deserve, they are much less likely to reverse that decision.

So, a good middle ground is to ask for an appointment to review the exam. This is a good thing to do in any case; further, the professor will take extra care when assigning your grade, as he will anticipate having to justify it to you. This also does not put you in an awkward position if you actually earned the grade you wanted -- you can just review the exam and thank him for a good course. Note, if you do this, you should make a good-faith review of the exam and an honest assessment of what you deserve; this is not "one weird trick" to get free points.

It may depend on what you mean by "bump up"?

An increase of a couple of points to get you from 58 to 60 out of 100 (or eqivalent scale) may be one thing that may be considered prior to or at the grades or exam board..

But bumping your grade from 25 to 60 is completly different and not likely to happen whether you ask before or after...


Is it possible to be admitted to CS PhD programs (in the US) with scholarship at age 18? I have a son (currently 16) who is a junior in computer science at a well-known university. We are Canadian. He is very passionate about AI research and has published several first-authored papers in highly ranked journals and conferences (top 1-5% in Scopus).

Given the competition in graduate applications in AI, does he stand a chance to be funded in CS Ph.D. programs at 18 (I cannot afford his graduate study)? Will his age be a problem to be admitted to top programs? Should he apply for Master programs first? He has a perfect GPA and GRE.

[For context: I am a professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia.  I've served on my department's Graduate Committee, which does graduate admissions, for about eight years.  From 2016-2019 I was the Graduate Coordinator, hence the faculty member most directly involved in the graduate admissions process.]

Regarding your son, you told us:

1) He is a junior studying CS at well-known university.  He has perfect grades and GRE scores, and he has multiple first authored papers in highly ranked journals and conferences.

2) He is 16.

To my mind, the first point is highly relevant.  In mathematics a student with that profile would probably get into some of the top PhD programs in the country.  I am confident that the same holds in CS. Moreover, in both of these fields, admission to a top program comes with full funding the vast majority (over 95%) of the time.

I am also assuming that since your son is 16 now and in his junior year, he will be 18 -- i.e., an adult -- when he starts graduate school.  Given this, the second point does not seem relevant to me.  Some people will find your son's achievements (even) more impressive given his age.  Others will have some concerns about the maturity and readiness of such a young student for a PhD program.  But when it comes to admissions and hiring, times have changed: in the last few years faculty have received much more training and specific instructions (including on legal obligations) regarding admissions and hiring than in years past.  Deciding not to admit a qualified student because of his age sounds like a discriminatory practice to be avoided.  Conversely, giving more weight to a student because of his age sounds like a discriminatory practice against the other applicants...also to be avoided.  A small number of committees may still be influenced by such thinking, but overall it should be the case that your son will be considered only on point 1) and I think that it will be the case.

In summary: your son has an excellent profile that will most likely lead to multiple fully funded offers at prestigious CS programs in the US.  (By the way: yes, he should apply directly to a PhD program.)  You do not need to, nor do I think you should, do anything out of the ordinary because of his age.

First may I say what a legend your son is. For context, I'm a funded PhD student in the UK and I'm currently VP Lead Cloud Engineer for the central banking and regulatory arm of Barclays Bank (a division known as RFT). I also advise the UK government on national security strategy and countermeasures to cyberwarfare affecting critical infrastructure. At the heart of it, I'm just a guy who loves my craft. I jumped from a junior engineer to a VP in less than a year (something I occasionally have regrets about). When I finished my MSc I was admitted to the faculty at my university because they wanted to perpetuate our relationship, I began teaching on the apprenticeship, MComp and MSc Cybersecurity courses.

Your question reminds me a lot of Akrit Jaswal, otherwise known as the 7 year old surgeon. He applied for a PhD at Imperial College London as a young child. He was refused admission, but that doesn't detract from the fact that he was performing surgeries at that age. The reason he was refused admission is because he was deemed to have insufficient life experience to make a real contribution. They also thought that he needed to be allowed to have a childhood.

Granted your son is a bit older, this does remind me a lot of Akrit Jaswal. Whilst at the core of it, theoretical computer science is heavily mathematics and totally impersonal, many of the problems that research contributions need to address have a temporal dimension to them. Many of the innovations we see are not as a result of a genius finding the solution to a difficult mathematical problem, but lie in the humanity of what we do.

Before I entered software development and cloud engineering as a full time commitment, I had programmed since I was 8 years old and started to sell my skills at 14. Ironically, when I left school I trained to be a nurse and then became a lawyer (I'm far from a perfect man) - totally different professions. Unfortunately I didn't take the path of CS until much later in my life. The experience life has given me though allows me to be a good researcher. That isn't to say that to be a good researcher you need have lots of life experiences, but it helps significantly. My research area is trustless security, an area which is a hot topic right now given the increasing use of computers as weapons. The problem I'm working with goes much more beyond mathematics and founds itself in human nature, something that is very complicated indeed.

What I would say is that you should consider what you want the endpoint for your son to be. Does he want to be a researcher and only that? Or does he want to take his time to enjoy his youth and figure things out as he goes?

In the UK your son would be turned down for a PhD not because he isn't absolutely fantastic (which from what you say he clearly is), but because his contributions would be limited by his age. Many PhD students worldwide are considered successful if they publish just a single research paper, many PhDs can be submitted with just two good journal publications in solid journals. One of the final tests however is a viva which taps much deeper into the context of your research. A good admissions tutor would be able to detect the likelihood such a young man would be prejudiced through a lack of life experience and wider context. Another measure of a successful researcher is a wider understanding of the implications of their research and an ability to network and promote their research - I think this is where your son would fall down at his age. I don't say this in a negative way, but purely to give you a realistic view of what is required.

I began publishing as soon as I started my MSc, but this is not a measure of success. The reason I have been the leading author in the publications I have been involved in to-date is because I have networked with a large group and collaborated in a way that would not have been possible had that collaboration not existed.

I hope this provides a better view of where your son would sit in relation to a PhD. Ask yourself this, what are you trying to achieve? Is your son trying to obtain a qualification or make a wider contribution? If the latter, is he in a position to do that right now?

This is the fundamental difference between a PhD and any other type of qualification. It's not a benchmark, its an award for contributing to the state of the art, going much more beyond core academia but to the connection between the output of the PhD and the benefit of that output to the rest of the world and the impact it is able to have.


Do academics look down on well-designed academic websites? Rationally, I should not be concerned about building a well-designed academic website for myself. But academic websites are consistently so visually spare and poorly designed that I would feel like a peacock designing the site in any way. I don't mean anything crazy, maybe a web font or a non-#0000ff link.

I realize this is broad, but I'd be curious if others feel this stigma of trying too hard in this area—same probably applies to clothing—and how they approach it.

As has been stated several times, there is no such thing as a site being "too well designed."  Of course the design should take into account the audience that will be viewing the site—i.e. if you are designing a website gallery for minimalist paintings, it would be very odd indeed to use as many buttons and links as Amazon.com, whereas for an online store that isn't a bad design at all.

However, in my view, the keynote is really not so much design as implementation.

There are two crucial factors: file size (also known as website obesity), and overuse of scripts (which is closely related).

The website you linked in the comments doesn't load at all in my browser, because I have scripts disabled by default.  I enable them for sites that I expect to run scripts, such as gmail or youtube.

I grant that I may be in a minority of the general web browsing population...but I expect a disproportionate number of academics are aware of such things, and are more likely to be irritated by websites which require plug-ins, scripts and high bandwidth simply to display a bunch of text.

Do your design as well as you please, but try to keep it as minimal as possible on bandwidth, plug-ins and scripts.

(Note: My own personal settings aren't the main topic of this answer, but as several people have made noises of shock at my default blockage of scripts, I'll clarify: I don't block first party scripts that are served by the actual website I'm visiting.)

You mentioned two specific aspects of website design: the choice of font in which to render a page, and the choice of colour in which to display links.  I would say that, in the underlying philosophy of HTML, both of those choices legitimately belong to the reader, not to the content creator or the server administrator.  Hence, I think I am mildly inclined to look down on content creators and server administrators who try to impose their will in these matters on readers.


Is a Masters Degree required to pursue a PhD? I recently heard someone saying that you don't need a Masters to pursue a PhD. Since I have never heard of people who got PhDs without Masters, I wanted to know whether this is true and how common is it for people to get a PhD without Masters?

I would also like to know if this is true for Engineering related fields specifically.
In other words, can someone who has just finished their undergrad apply for a PhD?

A master's degree is not required for admission to a Ph.D. program, but Ph.D. admissions are extremely selective, and most students aren't competitive for a Ph.D. straight out of undergrad. In addition to a high GPA (I'd say around 3.8 or higher) and GRE SCORES (around top 10%, though this may depend on the program), you would need several publications/conference presentations, extensive research experience, and STELLAR letters of recommendation attesting to your readiness for a Ph.D. program.

Most undergraduates, even with excellent GPAs and test scores, lack the research experience required for Ph.D. admissions. Also, undergrad (and to a lesser degree a master's program) is a time to explore your research interests. By the time you're applying to a PH.D. program, however, you're committing 4-9 years to researching a specific question/topic. Thus, you need to know exactly what you want to write your dissertation on and have to find a professor that will agree to take you on as a student. Again, most undergrads are still at the stage of exploring their interests, so they don't gain enough research experience in a specific topic. (I'm speaking generally in all programs.)

This is why most people end up completing their master's first, but it's by no means a requirement, and if you do feel you're competitive for a PH.D. program and know what you want to research, then certainly apply to Ph.D programs.

Disclaimer- I'm neither a professor nor a grad. student, nor is engineering my intended field. Again, my comments are meant more generally and apply to the U.S.

Good luck!


Reviewer recommending citation of certain papers of specific group of authors may be himself Recently I had a challenge in responding to a reviewer (#2) for revising our work. The reviewer asked us to refer 16 papers in multiple parts of the paper. I decided to refer some of these references about 8 papers due to the not relevancy of the mentioned references from the reviewer to the question raised by the reviewer #2.

Now the reviewers commented on the revised version and three of them are accepted without any further comments and modification. But the reviewer #2 rejected the paper and said that the authors didn't consider my concerns and comments thoroughly and only partially answered to them.

I think that this reviewer objects to our work because of we didn't refer to all of 16 mentioned paper in his comments.

The editor asked from us to answer why we didn't answer the reviewer #2 comments and revise our work to answer them.

I have two scenarios in my mind:

State clearly the unprofessional work of the reviewer #2 to forcing us to mention many papers from a group of specific people with a similar author in all of them and weak relevance of the mentioned works to that comment.
Reanswer the comments of reviewer #2 and mention some of the wanted references

what should I do now?

Neither, you should just write an answer (not change the article) in which you mention for each paper why you did not cite it. Keep it objective, calm, and short. If the reviewer is unprofessional then that will become clear enough, and your professionalism will be all the more obvious.

Your situation is a very common case in current scientific publishing. At the moment, pressure on scientists is much higher than it was in the past. Citations are one of the many measures of scientific excellence ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153730 ). Hence, everyone wants to obtain citations for their work.

In the past 5 years, I have encountered very similar situations as you did. Reviewers requested me to cite their papers (2-3 papers max), etc. Usually, some citations were not totally relevant. Nevertheless, I have never complained to an Editor or Reviewer but just cited Papers, and that's all.

However, defining your situation is much more complex than is seen at first sight. It would be good if you could specify if these 16 papers were authored by the same researcher or not. In line with this, it would be good to know if the references belong to the same journal or even journal families.

Anyway, we can outline some possible scenarios why someone would like to see 16 more references (relevant or irrelevant) in your paper.

Personal benefits: Each Reviewer sees reviewing a paper as a chance to put some citations in that paper. In this case, the Reviewer obtains some valuable citations easily (let us propose that 95% of authors cite recommended references in order to avoid any complications and quick
acceptance). Additionally, it is also intended to promote his/her work.
Raising the Impact Factor of the journal: Some years ago, The Scientific World Journal (TSWJ) lost its Impact Factor, since this journal was used as a resource for boosting citations to other journals. If I remember correctly, there were some Editors that were also Editors in other journals and they requested to cite references of other journals in TSWJ papers.
Citation cartels: The last point is citation cartels. Roots of cartels can be found in points 1 and 2, but are more sophisticated and organized. In simple words, a citation cartel is actually a group of "friends” or group of “researchers" that work together for mutual benefit. This benefit is manifested in personal benefits (to raise citations to each other) or to raise Impact Factors of journals. There are many scenarios of cartels: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049

What to do in your situation?

Go with the flow: Just cite these irrelevant references and the paper will probably soon be accepted.
Talk to the Editor: You can write a message to the Editor and try to present your situation. A good Editor will understand your situation fully. On the other hand, be aware that the Reviewer and Editor may be also friends (Cartel members) and your email will not the save your situation.
Withdraw your manuscript and try in another venue: If you think that these irrelevant references will decrease the quality of your manuscript, then simply withdraw it. However, you will lose a lot of time and the paper will undergo once again the first round of reviews.


How to enter graduate school in a social science discipline from a computer science background? I am a senior computer science major at a state school in the US. I have done internships at "Big 4" companies in my field as well as CS research with NSF grants.

I am interested in getting a Master's degree in a social science (history, English, or something related) but am not sure how I could get a school to look at my application. They are looking for students who have extensive experience and internships in related fields, which I don't have.

For what it's worth, I write very well and read copiously in my free time. My standardized test scores bear this out; when I took the SAT in high school, I got perfect scores on the reading and writing sections. Professors have also been very impressed with my analyses in humanities classes, though I haven't taken very many of them.

I understand that it probably wouldn't be so hard to get into a state school, but it would be nice to be accepted to a top 10 or so university. Is there a good way to get these schools to consider my application?

I am not totally familiar with how social science graduate programs work. But, in general, in order to have success with grad school applications after your undergraduate: (1) you should show you have the theoretical knowledge needed to succeed in your research and graduate studies (2) AND you should show some hands-on experience, at least tangentially, related to the area of research and study you want to pursue.
If you want to get into some interdisciplinary areas like computational social science, e.g. social network data analysis, your computer science background is a definite asset that definitely helps you both get into the program and get ahead in your studies. If a program of choice is interdisciplinary enough, they may not care about your lack of coursework in humanity or suggest you take prerequisites as part of their program.
However, if you don't want to "beat around the bush", so to speak, and get into more theoretical and pure social science fields, I think you need to take the essential coursework similar to what students with those majors take. Having research in social science beforehand also would work if you can allocate some time for that. It may require you to take an extra year to take all the extra credits but I argue that it also benefits you and increases your success in grad school, even considering the fact that you are a self-studied and well-versed person in social science. Grad school is not often a good place to catch up with fundamentals. I think it is important to take your time and build the foundations before starting your grad school studies.

In the US, the undergraduate education is sufficiently broad that moving to a graduate program in a field other than your major is certainly possible and reasonable.

Of course the competition for entry into top schools is fierce, so any given individual has only a small chance.

But the only way to be certain is to apply. But best to apply to several places with somewhat different characteristics.


Citing a paper published multiple times This question is a special case of this one, which has no satisfying answer in my opinion.

I often encounter papers that have been published twice (or more), without any modification. An example is this one. First presented at the DLS'12 conference, and published in the proceedings. Then, the proceedings have been published in an issue of the ACM SIGPLAN. Notice that the paper is the same, same DOI, etc. However, there are two bibtex entries (one @inproceedings, one @article) which are similar, but not identical.

My question : in such cases, how should the paper be cited ? Using the @inproceedings entry or the @article ?

(Side question : Why is it the case that a single paper is published twice ?)

This may be a special feature of CS or not. We depend a lot on conferences for publishing work. The conferences usually publish proceedings. The first version is distributed at the conference to attendees and may have a limited run. It typically has the conference name on the cover. In the case cited, SIGPLAN, as is typical, will put a separate cover on the proceedings, turn it into a (regular) issue of the Notices and distribute that to all members whether they attend or not. It is really a service to the community, since not everyone can attend an important conference. It is possible that corrections are made between the two versions, but I don't think that is common.

If they are identical, you can cite either one with confidence that readers needing to follow the citation will find the paper.

Manuscripts should (generally) never be published twice. (Exceptions exist, e.g., a famous academic's works might be compiled into a single volume.) A manuscript may be published at a conference (@inproceedings) and then subsequently be published in a journal (@article). However, journal versions are required to extend conference versions. In such cases, you have several options:

Cite both
Cite the version where the relevant result first appeared
Cite the conference version and mention the journal version in the reference


How to deal with arrogant e-mail of a student I have sent the solutions of some assignments to the students of my class.

One of my students sent me a message that reads as follows (not greeting or anything, no closing, just the following):

  The proposed solution of Exercise X is obviously wrong because of reason blah blah. An appropriate solution to your exercise would be such and such.

Now, the student in essence is actually correct: there is a slight error (but it does not alter the essence of the solution). It is just a small wording issue that might raise some confusion (but the calculations are clear).

What troubles me is the attitude, which I found kind of offensive (but I might be wrong).

Is it appropriate a student to behave like that? What would be the right approach to deal with this student?

I answered as politely as I could that the student is right, thanked the student for spotting it, and updated the solution manual. But I feel that the student would create similar issues and make similar comments if some typos are found in subsequent notes.

Note: The actual problem might be that the student might start bad-mouthing me to other students/professors and this might negatively influence other students in believing that I am doing a bad job and consequently this could be reflected on my teaching evaluations (given also that I try to get tenured). Maybe I am paranoid (hope so!), but in relatively small classes where everyone knows each other, the power of bad-mouthing can be great. I want a way to (a) avoid confrontation and (b) make it clear that these issues are completely minor (they are) and not worthy of such aggressive (which they might not be, but I do not want to take chances) messages.

How to deal with this?

Dear [student],

Thank you for pointing this out.

[1 or 2 more sentences of explanation]

Sincerely, [your name].

  What troubles me is the attitude, which I found it kind of offensive (but I might be wrong).

Maybe the email is offensive, or maybe the student just wrote an email from their phone. Maybe they are actively trying to be a jerk, or maybe they just don't know how to behave properly. Maybe they are just trying to be a troll. In all those cases, I have found the best way is just to not engage and write a neutral response that does not comment on the perceived rudeness.

If it's just a regular student writing an email from the phone, this does not create a conflict out of thin air.
If it's a jerk or troll, this does little to satisfy their hunger for drama.
If it's a student without manners, well, you are not their parent - don't make it your job to educate them on proper email etiquette.

What I certainly would not recommend is "inviting" them into your office for some sort of explanation, just for writing a factually correct but unfriendly email. You are, again, at worst creating a conflict where there is none, and at best spending significant energy trying to educate a fellow adult on basics of etiquette.

  But I feel that the student would create same issues in case some typo is found in the subsequent notes and make similar comments.

So what? If they have a real concern, address them. If they make things up to feel important, either ignore the email or tell them that you do not see the issue.

It could be that the student has an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) such as Aspergers, in which case it is likely that ther is no arrogance or rudeness intended, just direct factual language.  It is worth academics having a reasonable understanding of the communication issues arising from ASD as it is not uncommon in maths, science and engineering.  It is important that we don't discriminate against them because we over-interpret their overly-direct communication and read a subtext into it that is not there.  The reply sounds fine.
Try not to worry too much about errors in teaching materials.  We are all only human and no matter how hard you try, there will always be imperfections.  In my experience, students are quite forgiving of mistakes, provided you "own" them (rather than minimising their importance) and are eager to fix them when they are detected.