Are software engineers with PhD in demand in Academia? I'm about to defend my PhD in Computer Science in a couple of months, and I'm struggling with deciding on a future career path. Over the course of the 8 years I spent in an academic environment, I familiarized myself with advances and challenges of formal software development. I also learned a lot about myself. It might sound a bit depressing but right now I don't think that it's my vocation to be a scientist. I feel that there are lots of talented people who will do the research with a lot more passion and way better than me and that a mediocre researcher is of no use for society.

However I think I would love to work with scientists as a software engineer. I came to this point because I like developing software, I have high respect for science and would happily support the research with tools, and implement the research results in software. Being in a research environment I might become more inspired with science someday and will switch to research.

This being said my question is: are software engineers with a research background & PhD in demand in the academic world? Do they allocate funding for such people in universities/research labs? What should I expect from a career of a research software engineer? Would it be considered strange if I applied to a PostDoc position saying that I want to concentrate primarily on software?

I would appreciate any comment or advice. Thank you.

tl;dr: Yes, some universities do value software engineers with a research background.
University College London (UCL), for example, has a Research Software Development Team (RSDT), which specialises in providing software engineering by programmers with a science-research background.
From the first of those links:

This is a team of professional software developers with particular expertise in designing, constructing and maintaining software for academic research.
Our goal is to enhance UCL’s capacity to produce high quality scientific software, from the simplest scripts to complex simulations running on state of the art high performance computers. We do this by collaborating with researchers who are creating their own software

How is it funded?
The work can be funded in one of several ways. It can be funded through university core funding. The work can be bid for as part of a research funding proposal or consultancy contract. It can be funded as part of a research grant for generic research software development.
What do they do?
The UCL RSDT team work alongside researchers on scientific projects. They co-author papers with them, transfer best practice & skills into the team, and hand over well-crafted, well-documented software (and its version-control history) for research.
The team do have research backgrounds themselves. They help select / develop the algorithms. When starting a new project, they read some of the background literature to the project - particularly that relating to the algorithms - to get enough grounding to enable them to ask meaningful questions of the researchers who they're working with.
And (touching on a comment by dgraziotin), the team host Software Carpentry Boot Camps for research staff and doctoral students. This gives the attendees an introduction to key concepts that they might otherwise not be exposed to, such as unit testing, version control, and working from the command-line.
Do many universities do this?
At the moment, this isn't an initiative at many universities that I'm aware of. However, given the success of UCL RSDT to date (the team is now expanding again), and the growing awareness of the concept of the Research Software Developer ("a new type of hero", as described by Neil P Chue Hong, Director of the Software Sustainability Institute), this is probably an idea whose time has come.
Disclosure
I am a little involved with the research software development effort linked to above.

A PhD carries weight in academic environments in a way it doesn't in any other context. Your colleagues will respect someone with a doctorate more, and it will provide opportunities for job opportunities within academia that are closed to people without a PhD. Depending on quirks of college funding, you may even find yourself joining the faculty in capacity (visting assistant professor, research professor, etc.) rather than simply being staff or an adjunct professor. Staff employment is typically grant-dependent, and semester-to-semester contingency the lot of adjuncts.
Software PhD's are probably more in demand outside of universities. Check the salary differences an decide accordingly.


What a PhD student should do when their supervisor orders them to have a name on their paper just because of grant purposes? We are preparing a new paper and my supervisor tells me that we have to put the name of a person on our paper because he was involved in getting us the grant. He says it is because of future grants and that we want to show that he was involved in the research -- and obviously he was not. I think we are supposed to work with him on the last year of my PhD, but not now. My supervisor already knows that I am against it and tells me that this is an “order” and it is because of some sort of “politics”. I can reject but I am not sure what are the consequences. What a PhD student should do in such a situation?

Have you written a grant proposal? My SO at the time was a prof and geochem research scientist. She has generated millions in grants for her collaborators, students and herself to push their research forward. The latest grant I saw her work took many months gathering data and papers, hashing out schedules and compensation for collaborators, students and contractors. She had to prospectively estimate everything from travel costs for the people gathering samples, to costs for reactor and instrument time.

Would her time have been spent better doing science or assisting her students? Absolutely, but grant writing can be difficult as it requires intimate knowledge of the discipline and particular work being done on the project. This is a difficult role to fill that is usually done by researchers themselves, if they want to stay in the "biz".

If she wasn't already one of the lead authors on this research, I would say she undoubtedly deserved to be named on the project. Just because you are writing a paper does not mean the paper is your final product. The paper is a description of your final product, the process of creating the product, and credits those who assisted.

The person that procured your grant absolutely assisted in your research, consider how your project would have gone without it.

To determine whether somebody is an author to a paper a simple rule is to ask yourself the following: "Would this research have been performed the way it is, was that person not somehow involved?"

If the answer is yes, then that person likely deserves authorship. It's then up to them to give it up.

This is analogous to having somebody "lending" you class time to perform an experiment during their course (e.g. with their students): even if they do not collect the data or run any analysis,, you wouldn't have performed any of that without their collaboration/interest/resources.

edit: I probably should have said "To determine whether somebody may expect to be an author to a paper a simple rule is..", and "If the answer is yes, then that person may claim authorship."

I agree that this is a poisonous setting, but is not up to OP, who is a PhD student, to change it. If he/she is told add an author to the list, in my opinion that's entirely to be expected if it falls within the loose rule above. Is this how it should work? Most likely no. When OP will be a full professor who can set some of the rules of the game, I'll tell him to follow the COPE guidelines that @Roland suggests below.


Before proposing reviewers, should I notify them? Some journals require the author to propose potential reviewers. Should I just propose reviewers and let the editor contact them? Or should I first contact the potential reviewers myself and ask if they agree?

I never asked them and never heard of anybody doing so. It’s the journal who is responsible to organise peer review, not you, and they have to and will humbly ask¹ potential reviewers anyway. By asking potential reviewers yourself, you cause the following problems:

Not every reviewer you suggest will be chosen by the editor. For a reviewer who will not be chosen to review, deciding upon your request will be a waste of time.
Even a reviewer who is eventually chosen will waste a little time by responding to the same request twice.
If a potential reviewer declines your request and you do not suggest them, the editor may still choose them on their own (most editors to whom I have talked make a point of choosing at least one reviewer who was not suggested). In that case, the potential reviewer may think that you ignored their wish.
Asking reviewers directly is a first step to breaching the independence of peer review as it opens up the path for manipulating peer review: “Sure I will review your paper [favourably] – provided that you will do the same thing for my next paper.” Some oppose even the mere option to suggest peer reviewers for this reason.
If you know only a limited list of potential reviewers for your paper, removing those who deny your request may make the list smaller than what is requested by the journal. If those reviewers only refuse when asked by the journal, you still did your duty of suggesting sufficiently many potential reviewers (and this may not even be a problem, if the journal requests a list that is longer than the number of actual reviewers).
You waste some of your time by asking the potential reviewers and waiting for their response may delay the actual submission.
If you show your paper to your potential reviewers privately, they have an advantage in the rare case that they try to steal your ideas or commit other dishonesties. By contrast, peer reviewers are often bound to terms of non-disclosure and similar and also the journal serves as an independent register of who had knowledge of the manuscript. This point does of course not apply, if you trust all potential reviewers or published a preprint of your paper anyway.

¹ Except perhaps for some journals with a questionably demanding demeanor.

You definitely should contact with reviewers, talk to them and then redirect to the editor.


Bad answer to a bad peer-review I submitted a paper together with other people to an important journal. A couple of days ago we received the answer from the editor and the paper was rejected (I was 3rd author) with very bad comments. One of the reviewers wrote that the paper was lacking innovation or originality. Another one sent us more than 20 comments. To be honest the comments weren't really appropriate because we did particles loaded with gold or FITC and one of the comments was "It seems that the FITC and gold are encapsulated inside the nanoparticles, not the other way around." He did not understand a lot but still, he also did a lot of interesting comments.

Anyway, the main author yesterday emailed the editor saying that the reviewers do
not have enough knowledge to correct this paper, that they are unqualified and that people like this should not correct this kind of work. This person sent the email to the editor without speaking to any other authors, therefore we discovered today what happened and some of us still don't know.

Do you think that the journal, following this email, can do something to the authors of the paper? Like, e.g., sue us? or ban us to publish there? or stuff like this?

What should we do now?

What do editors do when authors send them angry emails questioning the competence of the reviewer? When I edited a journal, if the author provided technical arguments against the reviewer's comments, I would forward those to the reviewer(s) and see what they say. If they didn't, I would usually say something generic about our faith in our peer review process and apologize that we cannot accept the paper. Either way the dispute does not usually escalate beyond the three of us (author, editor, reviewer).

Filing a lawsuit would be unprecedented. Banning you from submitting is more conceivable, but still unlikely. After all, it's to their advantage that authors submit potentially-publishable papers there. If it happens my guess would be that the author wrote something that crosses into the realm of personal attacks: for example, "tell your reviewer to take a gun and shoot himself".

In any case it is not something to worry too much about - after all it's not you that sent the bad answer - unless the author did write personal attacks, in which case you could send the editor an email distancing yourself from the author's behavior.

If the Idiot Reviewers misunderstand your work, that is prima facie evidence that your work can be misunderstood.  Revise it.


Should I use fancy paper for non-resume application materials? I'm applying to an assistant professor position at a private institution. I bought fancy resume paper on which to print my CV/resume. There are other components of the application package that I need to include:

Official application (contact info, criminal background statements, employment records, etc.)
Teaching statement
Cover letter

Should all of these be printed on fancy paper? My feeling is that all except the official application should be, but at the same time that might make the relatively flimsy paper stand out.

The applications materials are being mailed directly to the chair of the department, and it is a very small department. There are only one or two other faculty.

Above some minimum quality threshold (like, it's actually a piece of paper that is roughly a uniform white), the fanciness of the paper has had no bearing on any hiring decision that I've been a part of.

Yes.

Any advantage or action that you perceive will gain you an advantage is worth doing, as long as it isn't unethical/against the law/etc. It might not impress anyone, or just the secretary who scans it, but it won't hurt either in those cases. A great application that is easy to read and on which somebody has obviously sweated the details is always a plus in my book, it shows that you care and that you pay proper attention to detail.

That said, other details are much more important than which paper you use, such as your prior experience, letters of recommendation, existing work and no spelling mistakes(!). Don't stress it too much.


How should I discuss about a paper with my potential supervisor who is one of the authors of that paper? Last week I met my mentor (and also my potential supervisor) for my PhD. He suggested me to read a paper which is also related to my master's thesis.

I read that paper and some questions popped into my mind and I want to share them with him. Also, I would like to impress him and show him I fully understand the paper. I wonder how I should talk about the paper with my potential supervisor.

Organise a meeting with him, sit down and say "Bob, I have a couple of questions about that paper you suggested I read last week". And then ask the questions.

Don't overthink this. It really is that simple.

Unless your observations contradict a foundation of the paper, mention its positive points.
If your observation derives directly from the paper, show the logical connection, and how it may enhance the paper's points.
If your observation is tangential to the subject matter of the paper, show the tangential relation, and if there is a semantic relation.
If the field of study admits for some formal proof, give some sketch of how you might prove your point.


If I receive written permission to use content from a paper without citing, is it plagiarism? Let's say I find an article online. I contact the writer of this article and, without expecting anything in return, they agree to give me full, unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article, including directly using quotes from the article, without citing it. The agreement even allows me to claim the work as my own, even though it isn't.

Because I have all the rights to do this, would this be considered plagiarism?

It doesn't really matter that the author gave you "unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article" without the need of citing it. We, the readers, want to know that you're using it.

  Because I have all the rights to do this, would this be considered plagiarism?

Yes.

My two cents:  If you have to ask if something is plagiarism, consider it plagiarism.

Always err on the side of caution.  An ethics/honor code violation is not something you want.


I have been asked to change the review I gave to a paper I rejected a paper after careful review and consideration, writing six pages to justify my decision.
In less than 24 h I have received a petition to change my verdict to major changes. The rationale is that the other two reviewers have given major changes and that my review is too harsh and not well enough substantiated.

Is this normal?
Is this ethical?
Any further thoughts?

Thank you

I have written quite a few reviews, with a significant percentage of them recommending rejection. Editors often made the decision to reject; sometimes they deviated and asked for major corrections. This is normal — editors have to take reviews into consideration, but are not bound by them. Not a single time have I received a request to change a review.

Is this normal?

No, this is not normal, in my opinion. There is no good reason for the editor to ask you to change the review. If the editor believes the paper deserves a major correction, they simply have to make their decision, noting your recommendation.

Is this ethical?

No. Under no circumstances should an editor disclose the recommendation of other reviewers to you to ask you to amend your recommendation to join the majority. You were asked to express your own opinion, which you did. The editor is trying to receive an unequivocal agreement, which is not necessary and not fair to you. The editor does not have to follow your recommendation, but they have to respect it.

Any further thoughts?

Please make the name of the journal known. I would refrain from ever using the journal(s) which allow such reviewing process to take place.

Outright rejecting a paper denies authors the opportunity to correct issues raised by reviewers (and to publish at that venue). By comparison, major revisions afford such an opportunity. Authors might not be able to make the sufficient corrections, hence, reviewers may still reject. But, if they do make sufficient corrections, then the community benefits from the value added by reviewers. By comparison, no such value is guaranteed from an outright rejection, because authors may simply resubmit elsewhere without modification.

Perhaps the editor is trying to maximise community value.


How can I convince my supervisor that I have enough data to support my findings? I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in a physics-oriented field. Over the course of my program, I have developed a postulate which leads to some contradictions with some of the tenets of my field, and I have obtained what I would consider a suitable amount of data which both supports my postulate, and conflicts with the (pre-)existing conclusions.
I am in the process of writing a paper on the matter with my supervisor. While initially supportive of my ideas/work, he has unfortunately seemed to change his mind recently, for a number of reasons which I find questionable. Of note, he has repeatedly stated in writing that the work is unsuitable, because I have failed to "either prove that the postulate is correct, or disprove the existing work" (according to further discussions, he believes that having conflicting data is not proof that the existing work is incorrect).
However, in my understanding of the scientific method, it is not possible to prove that my postulate is correct, or that the existing work is strictly incorrect. As I understand it, all I can do is provide data which agrees with what I am trying to say, and which contradicts with what other work has concluded. While I believe that I have done a sufficient amount of work necessary to support my thesis, he is of the opinion that I haven't, and is threatening to withhold granting my degree if I don't meet his expectations.
Perhaps related: he is an engineering professor and as far as I can tell has not published on a postulate before. However, to be fair, neither have I!
My questions are then:

Assuming I obtained the data in the best possible manner, is my supervisor correct in that I have not reached the required threshold for my work to have suitable academic merit necessary to receive a doctoral degree? (Generally speaking - I am aware that practices may vary depending on location).
If not, what must I do in order to reach this threshold?
If so, what can I tell/show him in order to convince his that my work is indeed suitable?

I don't think that anybody can possibly provide an answer without having access to many more details. The precise field matters, how well established the prevailing theories in your field are, how the quality of your data compares to previous work, how the rigor of your arguments compares to other work, etc.
Generally, making these sorts of judgements is what your advisor is for, because he/she has many years of experience in the field.
Now it can happen that your interests and those of your advisor are not perfectly aligned. Your advisor may be too conservative, because he/she does not want to make a mistake. You may be overly aggressive, because you want to get your thesis done.
The question is how to proceed. You could ask your advisor to let you finish a draft, and show it to a third person, an expert in the field (possibly a member of your thesis committee) with no direct interest in the outcome, and who you can trust to keep a confidence.

You are right about the scientific method.
We cannot comment on the evidence you have not provided.  In general, you can demonstrate that evidence is sufficient to disprove a theory with statistical tests.
In physics and related fields, disproving one theory and proposing an alternative is not usually sufficient to obtain a PhD.  For tabletop experiments, you would normally conduct at least three related experiments which test different theories.  A theorist would develop three related theories.  Customs and student achievements vary.
You should have a dissertation committee and you should consult all of them about the quality of your work.


Why do some professors with PhDs leave their professorships to teach high school? I can surmise that some of them mightn't have gotten tenure and needed to find another job, but wouldn't these former professors be bored teaching the same (relatively basal) material yearly?

Let me know of other examples, but I was riffling some fee-paying schools and lighted upon:

Audrey Budding, of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

  B.A., Swarthmore College 1982
  B.A., University of Cambridge (UK) 1984
  M.A., Harvard University 1991
  Ph.D., Harvard University 1998

Eric Casey, former Associate Professor of Classics, Sweet Briar College. Now at Trinity School NYC.
David Gomprecht at Dalton School.

  Gomprecht, PhD, graduated from Wesleyan University, where he majored in mathematics and physics, and then went on to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. After working as a research mathematician for a few years, David returned to his hometown of New York City, where he has now been a math specialist and private tutor for over twenty years.

Mara Naaman at Dalton School.

I have done this so perhaps can answer your question. I was a tenured full professor of physics at a state university but currently teach high school.

There are several reasons I chose to do this.

Most importantly, I love teaching and am great at it, while I dislike the constant drudgery of research and will not be winning any Nobel Prizes. I never have to hit my head against the wall of grant competitions or peer review.
There came a time when I needed to solve the Two-Body Problem and the high school option made me far more mobile.
I get more time for myself. Classes generally require only about 5 minutes of prep time each, if that. The time between periods is sufficient. Grading takes less than 10% of the time it took at college because of the level of study and can often all be done in class while students are taking a quiz or test. When school is out, I go home and forget about work. There is no constant e-mailing from students wanting help and extensions.
My interactions with high school students are closer and more positive than those with most of my college students. I never learned most of my college students' names. In high school, I have a relationship with every student.

The down sides are minor. The pay kind of stinks compared to what I used to make, but the free time makes up for that. I sometimes have to loop in the Headmistress when making grade decisions that involve teacher's discretion, which grates on my sense of academic freedom. But I think I can deal.

Well, first of all some universities pay poorly. In my neck of the woods it is generally accepted that if you want to work at a UNI you are going to take a pay cut of at least 20 percent compared to what you would earn in the private sector. For some people this is worth it because the work they want to do they can only really do at the universities. For some people the pay cut is not worth it.

Also it is worth noting that some AP classes are in essence first year college modules, so if you find yourself in a High School with such a program you are not doing a curriculum all that different from a 1st year college tutor.

What is also a real bummer is the cutthroat way in which jobs are allocated. The politics and backstabbing nature of UNI's seems to be a real reason why some grow tired of it.

And lastly, some people are just natural-born teachers. Some don't get the amount of teaching kicks at UNI and yearn for more personal teaching environments. You should really not underestimate how hard it is to teach a 4th grader long division or how rewarding it is when you get a class of 4th graders to do it correctly.

It also seems to be a thing that in private high-schools because the parents have to sacrifice so much to get them in to the school they do tend to have better work ethics, not always but some of the time.

Teaching in such an environment where there is a thirst for knowledge, where you can often be better paid and have regular time of to spend with family and don't have much in the of Machiavellian antics, could seem to many a step up.


Email to potential PhD supervisor I am a PhD applicant and I am preparing to send an introductory email to a potential supervisor.

I have two questions:

I am self-funded. Should I mention this in the initial email?
Is the following sentence grammatically correct?

  I would be delighted to undertake a research project under your supervision, kindly let me know if this might be a possibility; I have attached my CV and academic transcript for your consideration.

You could mention self funding or not. However, it is important that you give some indication of why you are interested in this person and what it is in your background that might interest him/her in you. Mentioning past research projects in the same specialty would be helpful. Your statement is fine, but only as an opening.

In particular, you should investigate the background of the potential supervisor, including publications and past students. In mathematics, for example, the Genealogy project can give you information about where the person fits - advisor and students. For famous people, even wikipedia will give you information.

I think a good introductory email should highlight your strengths and your project.

A PhD is your task, a supervisor in my experience will advise, but it is down to you to come up with the research ideas etc.

I would mention that you're self-funded as it can only increase your chances of them looking for funding.

Use the website www.jobs.ac.uk and show some initiative and that Professor may help you get some funding you have already introduced.

Be proactive and best of luck!


Why do people do postdoc(s) when they can already do research as a professor? I think PhD is the first time, mostly, when a person does original new work and in this process they gain the skills to do research. So, I was wondering why do people do postdoc(s) when they already have those research capabilities which they can practice even being a Professor or in Industries. Is there something else left to be learned?

Because the requirements for the majority of professorships are such that very few people can be considered serious applicants right out of their PhD.

Also, the number of PhD holders looking for a professorship far exceeds the number of available positions which creates a "backlog".

The two are obviously correlated since the higher the demand to offer ratio, the pickier the institutions can be.

So even in the case where people developed the necessary skills to conduct professor-level research and teaching during their PhD (which should not be underestimated, that level usually requires more experience than what a typical PhD can give), they usually need to spend some years conducting independent or less closely-mentored research along with students mentoring and teaching as a postdoc until they can secure a position.

Note that the majority of postdoc researchers never get a faculty position.

To understand the question it is important to understand the role of postdoc in an academic career. How I see it:

PhD student

A training to be a researcher. May end up as a researcher outside academia. Even some business manager positions require MBA or PhD.

PostDoc

A full time researcher within academia.

Tenure Track (Associate etc.)

A gradual change from a full time researcher to a full time manager.

Proferssor

The managers of the university.

PostDoc is a way to keep the researchers within academia. They conduct the best research because they are no longer students, but they have none of the managerial responsibilities of a professor. As always, things may vary between every parameter you can name (time, place, field, attitude...).


Citing an accepted manuscript that hasn't yet been published I'm writing a thesis for the master degree.

I'm going to include one of my conference paper in my thesis and I understand that it is common and acceptable for school regulations to include already published papers of my own work in my thesis.

But there is one problem. The defense of my thesis will be held in mid-April and this thesis will be submitted by the end of April.

But a paper I'm going to include in the thesis has been accepted by a conference and will be published sometime in June.

So, how can I cite my conference paper in the process of publication in my thesis?

How can I cite a conference paper that has been accepted but not published?

Cite the paper as if it were published (albeit without page numbers, etc.) and add to appear at the end of the citation.

The way I know it, you'd do:

G. Lee & A. Supervisor (t.a.) "Awesome Conference Paper", to appear in Very Good Conference Proceedings.

(Shamelessly stealing all the words from masher's answer.)


Can you do paid external work under a PhD contract in France? If someone has a PhD contract in France and wants to work during summer for instance, is it fine if that person receives any external support during that time, outside the PhD contract support?

It depends on the work you plan to do (see here, paragraph IX).

You are NOT allowed to do extra activities of the kind that could be part of your PhD contract (teaching, diffusing scientific information, expertise...). If you want to do this kind of work, it needs to be under your PhD contract.
For the other cases, you need to obtain an authorization from your employer. If your employer is the university, they will ask your advisor's opinion and evaluate whether the extra work risks compromizing your PhD before making a decision. I don't know if such authorizations are commonplace.

I am not familiar with the French law, but if you are an employee and don't have an exclusivity contract, it should be fine. If you are funded by grants, they may require the student to not have other sources of income, in which case it will be stated on the conditions. I don't see any reasonable reason for this to be limited, but law works in mysterious ways.

If the person in this situation is already employed, the safest option is to contact the legal services of the university. If they are not easily available, a careful reading of the contract should do the trick.

If the person is thinking about applying for this, the eligibility conditions should state if the successful candidate cannot be working at the time of hiring.


Is it reasonable to submit a paper to a journal that I have uploaded to the Arxiv 4 years ago? I have a paper submitted to the Arxiv 4 years ago (with another co-author). At that time, the only reason that we put the article  online was that someone asked us to do that in order to cite it.
 Since then it has been cited some times, including authors that claim that have found (independently) the same proof as ours.
The paper is the solution of a combinatorics problem.

I have been thinking lately that it would help my career to get this paper published in a Journal, but I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea, since it is certainly not a new result (and it is not super-interesting, just a nice solution for a problem).

What should I do? Has anyone been in the same situation?

Any advice is very welcome!

PS: In case that is a good idea to get it published it would be nice to have some kind of advise of which journal might consider articles of the types I described, as I guess that lots of Journals won't even consider it.

In math, it commonly happens that, for whatever reason, an unpublished work gets cited several times.  (This is rather annoying when it is something useful but not easily accessible, though this is not quite your case.)

I think that whether you can easily publish it depends on how similar the work is now to published work.  A collaborator and I were in a somewhat similar situation (though not the same), but our focus was different and we discussed some different things so it was publishable.  (He didn't think it was interesting enough to publish originally many years ago, but then we did some additional things that made it more interesting, even after someone else had published the main result with the same method independently.)

If you want to publish it, here are two suggestions:  1) try to publish as is in conference proceedings, or 2) incorporate your old paper into a new paper which does some other things (it could be expository, or with additional new research).

As for whether publishing it will help your career, my guess it won't make a huge difference, unless you only have 1 or 2 publications, though it may help some.  (It's not likely to get into a top journal unless you do something else.)  It sounds like people know about your work, so letter writers can talk about it if they think it's important (in which case maybe you should've published it! but one doesn't always know in advance what will be interesting), and on your CV you can always list it as a preprint.

You say that the result is "not new" and "not super interesting", so I'm not sure why it should be published in any event, regardless of whether or not and when it appeared on the arXiv.


What's a proper title when I started a post-doc position but not received my PhD degree yet? I finished my Ph.D. research in computer science a few months ago and started writing my dissertation. Meanwhile, I applied for a postdoc position before my Ph.D. fund could run out. So, I found and started a postdoc position around a month ago in another University in Germany, and I'm going to have my disputation in 3-4 months from now (that's the usual waiting period in CS in Germany).

However, I'm not sure what title I should use regarding my position in the new institute until I do my Ph.D. disputation, especially in email correspondences and when I introduce myself or other similar situations?

Of course, I do not use the "Dr." title until I do the disputation, but should I declare myself still as a "Ph.D. researcher" or a "Post-doctoral researcher" or something else regarding my position here?

BTW, my contract just says a research employee.

I would use research fellow as your title in English and in German use whatever your contract says or research fellow as well. That leaves out the slightly awkward postdoctoral part.

In general, unlike a doctorate, using the title 'postdoc' is not something that people in academia worry a lot about (and outside academia many people will have no idea what it means). So using postdoc to describe your role wouldn't be outrageous even though linguistically it seems wrong because of the implied doctorate.

If I were you, I would just humbly say that I am a young researcher in X field, and spend more time explaining my ideas. In my signature, I would just put something like PhD (ABD) or nothing at all.
By the way, in my humble opinion, I don't think titles matter in academia. Researchers care more about mutual interests and your ability than positions. Putting the obligation of advising students aside, a professor would never refuse collaboration with a college student, if s/he is equally good as a PhD holder.


A paper is published in a book, conference and its proceedings, should I cite it as book, conference or conference proceeding paper? I use Mendeley reference manager and sometimes import articles from browser to my Mendeley Library using browser extension. Import is totally fine but I am having two confusions after importing:

Some conference papers are published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and many other related Lecture Notes series of Springer. When I add it to Mendeley, it categorizes that paper as "Book" although it was originally published in a conference. So should I cite this paper as

an article in a book titled LNCS or
Conference in which it was published or
Conference proceedings in which it was published?

Please refer to following image as an example of this. First screenshot is from Springer site and second is from Mendeley Desktop paper details section.

If I have to cite it as a Conference proceeding, then what should be name of the Conference Proceeding,

the name written as "Proceedings of International Conference on XYZ" or
the actual title of proceeding as "XYZ"?

Taking the above picture as an example: Here, the title of conference is "International Conference on Human Centered Computing" and Proceeding name is "Human Center Computing". Should I refer title as "Proceedings of International Conference on Human Centered Computing" or just "Human Centered Computing"?

If that paper is Workshop paper of that conference, in this case, what would be citation style, workshop title, Conference title or proceedings title?

Please help me understand this. Thanks in anticipation.
PS Pardon me if all three of the above should be posted as separate questions but I think these all all related to one another like an IF/ELSE condition and may help in reaching a conclusion.

If you are writing a journal article, follow the journal's instructions.  If there are no instructions, imitate papers they have recently published.
If you are doing homework or writing a thesis, ask your professor.  Do not be surprised if they do not care.
So long as the paper is easy to find from the citation, any of these approaches is reasonable.


What is a fast way to get the reference in a specific style? For example, if I want to get the reference in APA, what web resources provide this style? I found a way through Refworks, but it requires several steps. Is there a faster way?

Write in LaTeX, and use BibTeX which will automatically format your references in various styles.

I have been working and academia for many years, and recently as a developer of Paperpile I came across this problem several times.

All modern citation/reference managers rely on CSL, the citation style language. For more information on this, see http://citationstyles.org/.

Among these 7,000+ styles, it is, however, difficult to find the citation format you want to have. For this purpose, I would suggest to use the CSL editor search by example (http://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByExample/).

You can type in the inline citation and how the formatted citation should look like, and it will find the citation style that matches most closely. Once, you know the name of the citation style you want to use, you can actually use Paperpile to get the formatted citation (including bold and italic formatting).
You select the reference you want to create the citation for and simply hit Control+C. You will find it in your clipboard and can copy it to Word, Google Docs, and others.


How does PLOS ONE maintain its impact factor? The PLOS ONE journal has an impact factor over 3. The specialist journals in my field top out with impact factors of about 3. As impact factor is in essence a measure of citations per article, it seems surprising that a journal like PLOS ONE that prides itself on not making subjective judgments on things like "importance" can maintain a higher impact factor than journals that prioritize "importance".

I have only cited handful of articles published in PLOS ONE and looking at what has been published in PLOS ONE in my field, the majority of things look "unimportant." It seems like in my specialty that PLOS ONE publishes a higher percentage of "unimportant" work than the specialist journals. This of course could be due to sample size and my own bias.

I am curious about what drives the impact factor of PLOS ONE. Are there specialties for which the PLOS ONE impact factor is low compared to specialist journals? Are editors and reviewers of specialist journals particularly bad at identifying "importance"? Is there something else?

There are, I think, two distinct factors at work that may help explain some of your puzzlement:

Your field's impact factor is not academia's impact factor. For example, society journals in my field have an impact factor of ~ 5, and some of the big names for very splashy studies have impact factors ranging from 20 to 56. Depending on the balance of fields submitting to PLOS ONE, their impact factor may be coming from more cited fields.
Long-tailed citation papers. Impact factors, like many averages, are susceptible to long-tail effects. PLOS ONE is an open-access journal, and a highly visible one. It's possible that the occasional highly accessible generalist paper makes it there, and yields a large number of citations as a result, pulling up the overall impact factor.

Both of these are helped, in my opinion, by the lack of review for "importance" - beyond your suggestion that this does result in less important papers ending up in  PLOS ONE, it's also a benefit to papers that don't quite "fit" in highly specialized journals, but may still be impactful.

One thing that seems to have been left out of this thread is the volume of articles published by PLOS ONE. Approximate 85 per day according to their wikipedia page. It seems that that would argue against a long tail effect.


PhD (at Oxford) vs staying at in the industry (Facebook) for a ML student? I am 26 years old and I got an offer for a PhD in Machine Learning at Oxford. However, currently I am a software engineer at Facebook and I am living a very well-off lifestyle.

I applied for the PhD last year, not knowing if I would get it and I decided to work as a back up. Now that I have a great paying job it is hard for me to want to do the PhD even with the scholarship. However, I know the work I can get after completing a PhD at Oxford is much more interesting to me (my work is currently not very interesting) and I could be making more than I am now.

My question is: will it be worth it do take 3-4 years to do that PhD (and graduate around 30) or should I just stay at Facebook even though the job is not very interesting for me.

You must make this decision - no one else can make it for you. Things to think about:

Uninteresting jobs are bad. If you can't see your job getting more interesting, then say 5-10 years down the line there's a good chance you'll get so bored your performance starts suffering, and then you might get fired.
You know the industry very well since you have a first-hand insider view. What jobs do you enable by getting a PhD? If they're more interesting jobs (do you actually know they're more interesting, or do you just think they're more interesting?) that you will never be able to do without a PhD, that's a powerful reason to get a PhD. On the other hand, it's conceivable that you'll be able to do those jobs without a PhD simply by staying put, acquiring more experience, and doing well. You'll know better than anyone else.
Do you have a significant other or a family to provide for? If so, what do they think? Remember that usually, once people experience a luxury, going back to a less-luxurious lifestyle is typically a big no-no even if it was previously acceptable. Even if you can accept it, your significant other / dependents might not.
What does your current manager or other senior colleague think (if you trust them enough to talk to them)? Just as important, are they willing to rehire you after you graduate?
Is it actually economically better to do a PhD? Run some calculations. If you stay put, you earn $X this year, $X + [increment] next year (if you have one), etc. If you go to Oxford, you earn $Y for 3 years where Y < X, but then after 3 years you earn $Z where Z > X. How many years does it take before the second option exceeds the first, if it exceeds the first at all? The fewer years this takes, the more attractive the PhD becomes.

These things are too intricate to say more, unfortunately. As above, you must make the decision - no one else can make it for you.

Stay at the industry (I'm an IT person and I do have a PHD). At least until you have enough savings to be able to pay for the PHD and all your expenses for 4 years straight up without working.

Your job may not be as interesting now but you can slowly transition, learn or specialize in what interests you, meanwhile a PHD only teaches you how to bull 4 essays in less than 1 week, cite in APA and describe stuff. You could have the cure for all types of cancers but to academia it is useless unless you get into the paper publishing game of writing useless theoretical frames explaining where the word cancer came from and who researched that word before even explaining whats the cure. (Just saying this will hurt a bunch of sensibilities. Expect many downvotes)

Plus a 3-4 years PHD is already out of question for the demands of the modern world. 2 years is the average now. The option of working and doing a PHD simultaneously is hellish for your health (among my PHD generation I ended up with column and sciatica problems, a friend got facial paralysis, there were divorces, loss of jobs, ulcels, a mental crisis...etc. And that IS sadly normal.) Oh! and to get some scholarships normally you are required to be a full-time student, so you cant even work if you want the scholarship.

Besides, you can do a PHD at any age; while getting up on your career and good money becomes difficult with age. Plus you lose on retirement savings.

In sum, unless you wish and plan to enter academia as a full-time professor or researcher I would recommend you to skip on the PHD for now or analyze better your life plans before choosing.  Think why would you really want to do a PHD.


My work was submitted by collaborators without my name, and the university supports them. What are my options? I have collaborated and written several research papers where my co-authors withheld the final draft and submitted the paper without my name as co-author. Two papers have single authors (not me) and a third paper has three authors (one of whom was not even on the research team when I conceptualised the research and analysed the data). The explanation for excluding me as author is that I did not meet the third criterion of the Vancouver protocol (final approval of the version to be published).  The university supported this cheating because it follows the letter of the law.  I have analysed data for a fourth paper which my collaborator has not yet published as her own.  However, she is one of the single authors mentioned above, so my guess is that she will publish this as her work too.  I no longer work at that department. What should I do?

I was never given a chance to review the final drafts of the manuscripts.  They were submitted behind my back.

You might want to consider this discussion of authorship by ICMJE, the statement of interest being that

  The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify
  colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by
  denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3. Therefore,
  all individuals who meet the first criterion should have the
  opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval
  of the manuscript.

So if you made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work, then you should have been given the opportunity to meet the third criterion. If indeed your colleagues just hijacked the work, there is a clear argument to be made that this is a violation of an ethical principle (depending on whether there are other material details that we don't know of).

It is not clear from your question whether you were denied the chance to review and potentially approve the manuscript for submission, or you did review the manuscript but did not approve of the decision to submit the paper. If it is the second case, then there is, in my understanding, very little chance for you to make a case for your authorship, since you voluntarily gave up your authorship right. Depending on the particulars of your case, it may be argued that the collaborator should have delayed publication until a consensus has been reached after additional revision. But again, it is unclear from your question whether this option has been explored appropriately. However, if it is the first case, the reason given by your collaborator sounds dubious - if you do not have a chance to review the manuscript, how can you possibly approve the manuscript? In this case you should consult the previous questions and answers suggested by @ff524.


Presentation: Is using cartoon slides un-professional or fun? I am close to graduating and am going to an assessment center for a very large tech company. One thing we need to do is hold a presentation about one of their products.

I want to stand out a bit from the crowd and show that I spent a lot of time on this presentation. So I had the idea of drawing my own characters and using them in slides to help explain my reasoning etc. (A lot like in the youtube-videos you see nowadays where stuff gets drawn while a person talks).

I find this type of presentation fun to listen to, but is it unprofessional? It is my first time at a global giant like this and I'm sure they are fine with more than others since it's in tech, but is this too much? Should I use the normal "boring" slides with one idea/slide etc. ?

In general, the person talking to your slides should be you, not a cartoon character.

Now, I've seen things like this work for people who are very good presenters and stage performers as well. For example, one of my grad school compatriots was also a serious performing storyteller, and he understood the performance aspect well enough to do all sorts of fun, risky, and showy things in his talks.

If something like this isn't already you, however, then I would advise not trying it for the first time in a potentially high stakes presentation like this. Conservative may be relatively boring, but it's also safer, and it won't be boring, if your material is good.

In my experience, it all depends on the seniority of the people in your audience. The more senior they are, the more they'll appreciate a low-level presentation.

Have a look at the sort of presentation McKinseys give to techy middle managers, and the thing they present to the Board. The former might be quite technical. The latter often looks like something out of a frikkin' children's book.

They can do that, because their authority is established (by the eye-watering fees) before they say the first word; you may not have that luxury. And pitching it right, and not being seen to talk down to them, is a very subtle art.  So if you don't have someone alongside you, preparing and giving the presentation with you, who knows exactly what they are doing and is an expert in that subtle art, then DO NOT DO THIS.

Instead, play it very very safe and very very straight. So design your cartoon characters, get it out of your system, and then remove EVERY SINGLE ONE from your presentation. Do not yield to the temptation to leave even a single one in. "Murder your darlings". (But do save them as a set of fragments for possible future use.)

And whatever level your audience is, try to ensure that by the end of the presentation, they feel that they are smart, and that you are an authority.


How did researchers find articles before the Internet and the computer era? I find it hard to write a literature review, even though I have Google, the Internet, and all free, very easy to search for information tools.
I have to search for days to find a piece of information that is related to my research.
I really would not be able to do that without the help of the  internet and the technology.

This really makes me wonder how people in the past did that:

Did they have to read the entire book to find a piece of information?
I know they might have used the index, but still this wouldn’t have given them the details of what they were looking for.
Does that mean people in the past (before the Internet) worked harder to achieve their degrees?
Does that mean that research before relied less on references?

We depended on libraries and librarians. Grad students would spend hours in, say, the math section of a good academic library, going from book to book and taking copious notes (on paper, of course).

But, often enough, the next paper we needed to look at wasn't in that library at all, so you would go to the librarian and ask for a loan of the resource from another library.

But it was also an important technique to use the librarian as a 'knowledge expert' who could, and would, suggest things for you to look at and places to look. I don't know if librarians still get the training to do that.

And, of course, you could ask your colleagues for hints about which rocks to uncover to find the gems.

Amusing quote from Dirac on this subject:

'I worked on it [quantum theoretical interpretation of kinematic quantities] intensively from September 1925.  During a long walk on a Sunday it occurred to me that the commutator might be the analogue of the Poisson bracket, but I did not know very well what a Poisson bracket was.  I had just read a bit about it, and forgotten most of what I had read.  I wanted to check up on this idea, but I could not do so because I did not have any book at home which gave Poisson brackets, and all the libraries were closed.  So I had to wait impatiently until Monday morning when the libraries were open and check on what a Poisson bracket really was.  Then I found that they would fit, but I had one impatient night of waiting'.


Is it considered normal to publish job offers inviting candidates to apply based on their gender and/or race in academia? I was browsing PhD position offers in Europe on different websites and I was quite surprised to find that several offers contained sentences such as

  University of X value equality and diversity. We strongly encourage women and BAME applicants for this position.

where BAME stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicities; or

  The research group aims to increase the number of women in scientific positions. Female candidates are therefore encouraged to apply.

Is it considered normal in the academic environment to discriminate between  candidates according to their race and/or gender for "egalitarian" reasons?

How is the choice of a candidate based on their gender and/or race considered "egalitarian"?

These statements, in many variations are quite common. But they are not discriminatory, as you suggest (universities do not "discriminate against white males"). All the statement is saying -- and that is true in actual practice in the discussions of hiring committees -- is that women and other minorities are specifically encouraged to apply. This does not imply that they get special treatment or preference. It is simply a reaction to the fact (statistically proven by research) that women rarely apply for jobs that they do not perceive as a "perfect fit" whereas men do. So if a committee has a bunch of applicants where none is a perfect fit, more often than not a man is hired because there simply are not enough women in the pool.

See: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified.

I do want to also comment on one of your comments while we're here. You state

  I think job offers should only focus on the candidate's skills regardless of his background and gender.

That is true, but how do you define "skills"? Let's use "qualification" instead. If you're, say, a typical math department where 50% of undergraduates are women, 35% of graduate students are women, but only 20% of tenure-track faculty are women, wouldn't part of the qualifications you are looking for in an applicant be that that person is a good mentor to many of the students in your department? Does it not diminish the quality of the department in its ability to teach and mentor if every single faculty was a white male? It is important to recognize that the role of the faculty extends beyond just writing papers in obscure journals; "qualification" is a term that ought to be understood much more broadly than you may think.

(I think it's important to say that the role of women in math departments is not to be there as mentors. All I want to say is that I want diversity to be part of the many considerations when deciding who is "best qualified" for a job.)

The practice of particularly encouraging candidates from under-represented groups to apply is common in physics. I have also seen jobs advertised that are  available to only female applicants, see e.g., this opening in Australia. This practice, however, isn't that common internationally (and may require special exemptions/measures), and I haven't seen it applied to other minority groups.


Surname change during PhD I am in my second year of my PhD and am about to get married. I plan to take on my husband's name with my name and not keep my maiden name. But I have two publications already. What can I do so that I can associate my publications even after my surname change. Also, if I keep on publishing with my maiden name and use my husband's surname socially, and also change my surname in passport, won't there be a conflict when I apply for visa to attend conferences due to the two different surnames?

You should also consider registering for an identifier, such as ORCID or Researcherid. This way you can have an additional layer that relates your profile with your work. It is used in many submission websites and it is becoming quite common for funding agencies to require such a profile when submitting applications as well.

you can use both your maiden name and your husband's surname in parallel.For example if your name before marriage was X Y, and your husband's name is A B, then after marriage you can use X Y(B) as your name. This can be solution of your problem.And during VISA you have to show your marriage certificate and the supportive documents in the context of your maiden name.


Is it normal for PhD students to do much "non research" work? Background: At my current institution I haven't even officially started my PhD yet, meaning I am not even enlisted as a PhD student. I have my bachelor’s and master’s already, and this is in Germany so “thesis only”. I also have worked here for a while now during my master’s so I know the institute well and they also know me well, which may be part of the problem as I am not “just a PhD student”.

The problem is that I get buried in all kinds of work like,

writing parts of grant proposals (many, not one or two like other questions mention)
giving popular science talks about our work on any given chance
presenting our work during lab tours for all kinds of guests (which happens often)
writing news articles and marketing material
supervising students and assistants
...

It’s not that I don’t like doing that stuff as much of it helps me to improve my writing, presentation and people skills.

My problem is that there is nearly no time left to actually do research. I just present old stuff or the work of colleagues that is to some degree build upon my old stuff. I feel like I do the work of a postdoc or professor and not the work of someone that hasn’t even started their PhD yet.

So to what degree/amount are the mentioned tasks normal for a student in my stage?

These all sound to me like usual activities for a PhD student (the "news articles and marketing material" bit sounds a bit odd to me, but that might be more field-dependent).

PhD programs are not typically designed only to allow you to do research, they are designed to teach you to do research, and furthermore to train you to be an independent researcher. That can include learning about all the other baggage that comes with research, such as finding funding, disseminating the research to the academic and sometimes lay community, mentoring junior researchers, etc.

However, like most things, balance is important. It's hard to specify some number of hours per week or something like that for you to contribute to these "other" activities, but the most important thing is that you are able to make progress in your research.

Since your advisor will be the person judging your satisfactory progress as well as being the person assigning you all these tasks, you should have regular conversations with them as a student regarding this balance. Have these conversations early and as often as necessary. It would be appropriate to approach this question directly as you have asked it here, too: tell your advisor "I am worried too much of my time is being spent on X/Y/Z and it will be difficult for me to make progress towards my thesis."

You need to concentrate on your research.  Hide out if needed or do your work at odd hours.  Often people won't tell you the dirty truth but I would urge you to at least consider a more stark and cynical view of grad school.

A fair amount of single-mindedness, even selfishness is needed.  It is possible to take this too far (not pulling your weight in the group, leaving lab dirty, breaking things) but you are the opposite.  Doing too much.  At the end of the day, the "score" will be based on how many papers you write and how good they are.  NOT on the other crap.

Buckle down and get some science done and papers written.  You can be more outgoing and do outreach, etc. after you are a tenured faculty.


Implications of being accepted without funding to a computer science PhD in the United States? I was accepted into Ohio State University CS PhD without funding.

I have heard that people who can show their capability may get funding after getting into the program. Is this understanding correct?

Is being accepted without funding a dangerous sign? Does this means that the faculty doesn't care about you?

My answer applies exclusively to CS in the United States, or other scenarios in which the standard PhD offer comes with guaranteed funding.
Implication #1: How the department feels about you
First, I will quote from an answer by JeffE (who is a member of the admissions committee at a top CS department in the US) to another question (also about CS PhD offers in the US):

A typical PhD offer from a strong department includes guaranteed funding in some form.

That may come in the form of guaranteed RA/TA work, or something else, but whatever it is will be promised at acceptance. Therefore, the main implication of a PhD offer without funding is that (as you have intuited), the department does not consider you a top candidate for their program. As JeffE remarks in the same answer:

Do not accept a PhD admission offer without funding. If they really want you, they'll pay for you.

You asked: "I have heard that people who can show their capability may get funding after getting into the program. Is this understanding correct?"
It's not impossible to get funding after beginning the program (e.g., if you really hit it off with a potential PhD advisor who has grant money to spare).
But this depends very much on luck and circumstance, not just on merit; so unless you like living dangerously, it's not an advisable strategy.
Implication #2: How it will affect your future prospects
Having said that, if you somehow manage to support yourself while doing a PhD, it probably won't matter to anyone that you were self-funded. Per Suresh's answer to another question:

There's nothing on your CV that needs to indicate exactly how you were supported during your Ph.D.

It means you may want to look around for jobs on campus, like TA positions to pay for living expenses and tuition. Not having funding upon acceptance is not a mark against you, it just means exactly that. In biology funding is more common because the scientist will need to pay for materials and reagents. I'm assuming there aren't many inherent costs in CS research aside from a computer.


Does a lecturer have the right to prevent students from making their notes public? A lecturer does not make slides or lecture notes available (e.g. on the course website) in an effort to force students to show up at lectures.

However, many students learn the material just fine without attending each and every lecture. It also seems unethical to force us all to show up, even though the attendance is not a requirement because we may just choose to do something else and there is no rule against it.

As a response, some of us have decided to write extensive notes together and put them up on a filesharing website, and we've notified other students of this using the course websites' discussion forum. The lecturer has now messaged one of us (the one who made the post on the forum) and told him to stop doing this.

What should our response be? Does the lecturer have any say in this? Are we in the wrong?

You don't say where in the world all this is taking place.  As usual, both the country and (in some cases) the specific university matter, as the laws vary and (probably more significantly) the academic culture varies.

  A lecturer does not make slides or lecture notes available (e.g. on the course website) in an effort to force students to show up at lectures.

An instructor does not have to make slides or lecture notes available full stop.  Academic culture seems to be changing in the direction of lecturers giving slide presentations, and since you are showing your slides exactly as they are, not making them available to students seems a bit more conspicuous than not giving out your lecture notes.  But many instructors still do not use any special materials and feel that it is up to the student to get the content from the lectures.

It is a common sentiment among instructors to do business in a way that does not make it too easy or appealing for a student to skip class.

  Some of us students feel this is a terrible policy: many students learn the material just fine without attending each and every lecture, so it is not a necessary policy, and it also seems unethical to force us all to show up, because what if we just happened to have something more important to deal with on some given day?

Unethical is very strong.  Again, your location probably strongly informs the academic culture, but e.g. I don't know of any American university where the instructor who claims that students should, in general, come to class would not be supported by the administration.  At my big state university, there is a blanket attendance policy, to the extent that there is a statement from the administration that students are expected to attend class.  This gives support for individual instructors to create their own specific attendance policies.  In my undergraduate classes I have often had mandatory attendance policies, to the point of factoring attendance into course grades and also to the point of (rarely, but it has happened) withdrawing students from my course for very poor attendance.  On the other hand, I was a postdoc in Montreal, and at Concordia University in particular it was expected that instructors would give students the option of a "100% final": that is, the entire course grade would be the final exam.  When I taught a course there, two students exercised this option: one got an A, the other an F.  If you don't know, ask the question "Can the instructor require attendance?" to an administrator or academic advisor.  You should get a clear answer.  If it's yes, then you have no leg to stand on about this policy.  (Yes, that does not stop it from being unethical, but if you really feel that way: don't attend that academic institution.)

  As a response, some of us have decided to write extensive notes together and put them up on a filesharing website, and we've notified other students of this using the course websites' discussion forum. The lecturer has now messaged one of us (the one who made the post on the forum) and told him to stop doing this.

If the instructor wants or requires you to come to class, then look at from his perspective: he is not going to be pleased if he sees students brazenly making arrangements to avoid coming to class.  You are rubbing your lack of respect for his wishes in his face.  This is a bad idea.

  What should our response be? Does the lecturer have any say in this? Are we in the wrong?

Well, first I want to say that you haven't actually given a good reason for not wanting to come to class.  You say "what if we just happened to have something more important to deal with on some given day" but...do you?  If most students attend, say, 90% of the lectures, I'm not sure why you need a filesharing program: you can just copy your friend's notes for the few lectures that you missed.  On the contrary, a filesharing program looks like a systematic plan for the students to avoid the lectures: again, you may have the right to do so, and you may have good reasons for doing so, but...do you actually or are you just being difficult about it?  I have taught at the university level for almost 20 years, and in my experience: there is a high correlation between coming to class and student success.  Even if you win a battle not to attend class, the victory seems rather pyrrhic to me.

However, if you feel strongly that it is in your best interest not to attend most or all of the lectures and your right to do so is supported on the institutional level, then: check to see whether there is any institutional policy against students sharing lecture notes.  I would highly expect there not to be such a policy.  Assuming that's the case: yes, you can share lecture notes.  I advise that you contrive to do it more quietly.  Giving your instructor even plausible deniability that you are not sharing your lecture notes should go a long way towards defusing the situation.

I would stick to this link, although it is a bit old but the explanation is quite logical: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091005/0207136420.shtml

So no, I see no legal right at all for a lecturer to claim a copyright on lecture content.

In my opinion there is also no moral right to claim copyright on lecture content and the behaviour of the lecturer is against academic spirit.
They are paid by the University (and some get paid a fortune) for presenting knowledge of a field, not making coin by any other means, which is often an intention. At my university there are some not offering any material for the lecture at all but adevrtising heavily their book which is then relevant for the exam - which means you have to buy it if you want to stand a chance. Of course if the book is shared in a public drive, the professors see some income loss.


Improving conditions of a tenure-track job offer I have recently been offered a tenure-track position in a very prestigious northern European university. I am currently a lecturer in a smaller UK university but I have six years of experience between my post-docs and appointment as a lecturer.

The level of appointment would be as a an Assistant Professor. Here, I am a "tenured" Senior Lecturer (which should be a bit higher), however being a non-intensive research university, there were an easier set of requirements. I feel more like a glorified post-doc with more teaching responsibilities than a full lecturer (but don't tell them that!). Indeed the level of research support is non-comparable. In the two years I have been here I have not had the possibility of supervising PhD students as there are no resources, beyond a few temporary post-docs I have been able to fund. Which is my main motivation for leaving (and Brexit).

Still, I feel the experience I have accrued should be recognised a bit more. Since the assistant professorship is also something they could be offering to a very good newly minted PhD or an early post-doc.

They say that "almost-always" a five-year tenure-track position results in a promotion to a tenured Associate Position. However my negotiating experience is really low, and coming from a Southern European background, all wages seem astronomical compared to what I was earning as a PhD back home.

My question is: how should I argue my case? Should I be asking for an earlier tenure time? It could be also counter-productive, for example if all my grant applications are rejected. If you have been in a similar situation, what did you ask for?

Your question, "how should I argue my case?" is unanswerable without a statement of what your "case" is. With any job offer, you state what you want, and the other party agrees or disagrees. A vague feeling that you should be "recognised a bit more" doesn't matter. What is it that would make you more likely to take the position, or make it more likely that, given the position, you'd be successful at it? Also: Congratulations!

You didn't say what the job market is like Europe in your field. Typically, there is a lot of competition for tenure-track jobs at very prestigious universities. In light of that, my advice is to accept the job graciously (not grudgingly, and not giddily), and work at the university for at least a year before asking for anything better than what you were offered. That's because you might find that colleagues who are better qualified and more accomplished than you received offers with the same terms you've been offered, or perhaps worse terms, in which case you would seem to be unappreciative or worse, unrealistic. Of course, you might find that everybody haggled for better terms, and feel like a sucker, but it's better to err on the side of humility than in the direction of arrogance when starting a new job in academia.


Responding to low-key insult from lecturer A lecturer for a course I am attending was late for a class, and as they had sent an e-mail a few days before mentioning a different classroom, the class was confused about whether we should go to this classroom or not. I decided to send the lecturer an e-mail to clarify whether the class location had changed.

In the end, the lecturer appeared about ten minutes late. That could've been the end of the story, but the lecturer sent an e-mail today (to me only) stating that I "was the only one confused [about the matter]!". I find this rude and inappropriate - they could have just let it slide, or at least apologised for being late.

I realise that I caused some minor noise in their inbox through my e-mail - but it is not enough, in my opinion, to respond rudely.

My University is running a campaign on respect among students and teachers. I would like to respond in a way that clarifies that I think they were rude, while keeping in mind that I will have the class for the rest of the semester with this lecturer.

Should I respond - in that case, how? - , or should I simply ignore it?

Sincerely? Let it go. The tone is also not "low-key insulting" (that means a personal disparaging attack on you), it is dismissive/snotty/irritated (do not bother me with this stuff).

The thing is that you are reading a lot (IMHO too much) into this. I'm not saying that you are wrong, but it sounds that you are in danger of spending precious lifetime for collecting perceived slights. You have already used approx. 1 hour of your lifetime to ask this question, and probably several hours of suppressed anger pondering his answer.

Really, the easiest way is to think "Perhaps he has eaten something bad today/has relationship problems", or whatever. Remember: once is chance, twice is coincidence, thrice is a pattern. If it happens three times, then it is time to act.

I would not bother with arguing with lecturer since it can probably hurt you more than you can him. And if he is so unprofessional to send you mail like that chances of him apologizing are slim.
What I would do is when this professor is mentioned in peer group tell everybody how "great" he is so my friends know who they should avoid(it is a weak signal but if this lecturer is as nice to everybody as he is to you it will accumulate into enough useful information for your friends).

That being said beware of a sampling error, you should not claim this lecturer is the worst person ever, you can only testify for this brief interaction.


Is it common to include author without any contribution in a paper? I have recently finished a paper and send it to my supervisor for review. He corrected it and before submission, he added some authors (some labmates, collaborators) who have no idea about my project. Also, he did not even ask me before adding though I worked so hard for that project. How ethical it is? Because he is my supervisor, I could not raise my voice. But I think this is not right. Is it so common phenomenon in academia?

No, it is not ethical.
Yes, it is common.
Particularly for countries that have requirements on absolute number of papers to be published by grad students prior to graduation, this is a relatively common practice. Many journals now ask for the authors to explicitly list what was each author's contribution to the article, but of course this is also quite easily padded.
A question to consider, however, is whether or not these other authors had any contribution to your project you're not aware of. For example, if you are doing experimental work, perhaps they built the system you use to acquire your data - even if they have no idea about your data or experiments. In these cases some argument could be made for their inclusion. Whether that's true or not in your case is up to you.
As to what to do about it, if you have a good relationship with your advisor, ask him why they are being added using the most neutral language you can find. They may have some very good reason for adding them. If you don't agree, you can voice your disagreement and go from there. If you have a poor relationship with your advisor, you probably will just have to accept it and move on. I don't recommend secretly or "accidentally" going against your advisor's wishes since this will likely backfire, and they will in any case simply correct it at the proof stage.

This is known as padding and is not ethical.
Will you take a stand?
Well, will that affect your supervisor / student relationship? Your degree completion?
That is probably why this practice happens and will continue to happen. You have to decide if you will talk to your supervisor, if that fails then the department head,  then the head of research or even contact the editor.
The consequences could be huge for you...
If it has not been submitted yet and you do the submission, then you could make a "mistake" and remove those names... "Sorry I sent the wrong version"...


What can I do about nasty comments in student evaluations that could cause me to get fired? I recently received the results of student evaluations. After my colleague (who is qualified to make such determinations) observed one of my lectures and said it went very well, a small group of students took it upon themselves to make some very personal, hurtful, and untruthful comments about me and my teaching.

Unfortunately, it is quite a small class and only one other student did the evaluation this year so it looks really bad with all the negative comments and ratings. The place where I work has decided to take no notice of the comments from the lecture observation, nor to the fact that most of the students' comments are easily refutable based on videos that are made of each lecture. They are planning to fire me, despite my having ok (though not perfect) student evaluations in the past.

I personally think it is ridiculous to give student comments such a high importance and ignore anything else, because students often give ratings based on how much homework they get and how easy they think the exam is going to be. One student in the past commented that he had learned a lot in my course, and then proceeded to give me the lowest numerical ratings possible.

Do I have any recourse here? If nobody at my institution will look at the videos to see that the statements made by the students are false, can I make a claim for wrongful dismissal? Can the students be held responsible for their lies? The questonnaires are anonymous but they were done online so it would be possible for the institution to find out the identities of the students.

Thanks.

Update:

Thank you very much for your replies.

This has gone all the way to the point where I have a meeting soon where I'm going to be told whether the head of the department intends to terminate my employment.

At my request, an investigation was done into my allegation that a colleague had influenced my students' opinions against me, but the evidence I presented (emails from that person from before the questionnaires were distributed matching very closely some of the students' comments, the notes from the lecture observation, and videos of my lectures, not to mention my own written and verbal testimony) were not only ignored, but it was claimed that I had provided "no evidence" for my allegation.

I have just found a video of a lecture given by my colleague in which he is seen and heard to completely trash me and make fun of me in a conversation with my students before his lecture begins. I look forward to presenting this at the upcoming meeting.

Does anyone have any predictions for the outcome of this? Will this new video be considered or will they just ignore it as well and fire me anyway?

Thanks again.

To answer this question: "Can the students be held responsible for their lies? The questonnaires are anonymous but they were done online so it would be possible for the institution to find out the identities of the students."

Probably not.  If the university promised the students their comments were anonymous, then it probably cannot reveal their identities, which would rule out holding them responsible.  Most likely the university did not retain records of who wrote which comments, so as to protect itself against accidental disclosure or subpoenas seeking to deanonymize the comments.

Assuming you are right and undeserved the hateful comments, I would say it depends largely on the size of the institution and the nature of  your position. I have attended/taught both a tiny liberal arts college and a big state university. Most instructors in small liberal art colleges are there to just teach classes, while big university professors usually have research duties which takes priority.

What I am saying is that if your college is small and your only job is to teach classes, then there is probably nothing you can do about how serious the department take students' comments.


What does "Awaiting Reviewer Scores" mean within the context of a ScholarOne submission system? I submitted a paper to a Taylor and Francis journal that uses the ScholarOne submission system. The manuscript status has changed from "Under Review" to "Awaiting Reviewer Scores".

What does this change mean?
What is the flow chart of the different statuses for a manuscript?

With a typical ScholarOne configuration, "Awaiting Reviewer Scores" means that it is actually out with (at least some) reviewers, while "Under Review" would instead mean the previous stage, where it is being considered by the handling editor(s) and might still be rejected without review.

After the review scores come back, a manuscript then returns to the handling editor for a recommendation, and thence up to the chief editor(s) for a decision.

Awaiting reviewers scores simply mean the article is with the reviewers and the journal office is waiting for the comments.

Under review also can mean that the article is being considered by the science editor for technical and English language check or it is with the subject editor and he is evaluating it for external review, or the article is with the reviewer for evaluation.

So, the former (Awaiting reviewers scores) is a direct statement that the article is with the reviewers.


Should I use my official legal name or the one I'm known by on my Master's dissertation? My official, legal name is A, but I'm know by most people as B. B relates to A as Bob to Robert, however this connection is only obvious in my country of origin where I am no longer based. I am known primarily as B, among my friends and colleagues. In order to build a consistent professional profile over the past several years I've been making a conscious effort to not use A at all, as I've noticed it causes some confusion. My undergraduate degree certificates have my legal name on them but I feel like in a Masters I am currently writing up I would like to proceed with "migrating" over to being a "full-time B". I am not sure though if that in itself won't generate damaging inconsistencies in my professional profile / online presence etc, with various certificates awarded under different names.

Should I use my official legal name or the one I'm known by on my Master's dissertation? What kind of problems can I expect from going either way?

You could write your name as Robert "Bob" KubaFYI, if your university policy allows for it. At least in the US, that's a standard stylization to indicate a nickname or unofficial name one goes by regularly. Classmates of mine who were international students from Eastern Asia and had traditional legal names but went by English names commonly did this.

If this is in the US, unless you have changed your name legally, it might be considered fraudulent by the authorities to use B instead of A.

My wife has a similar issue. Until she changed her name legally when we became citizens, she had to use her legal name instead of the one she is known by.


Etiquette for email asking graduate administrator to contact my reference regarding a deadline extension I've applied to the University of ....... for fall 2016 graduate admission. The deadline for my references to submit the recommendation letters is December 01.

One of my references is currently extremely busy and has asked me to request the graduate administrator to contact him regarding the reference letter deadline.

I'm trying to think of some way to communicate this to the graduate administrator. Is the following e-mail alright?

Dear .......,
I am a Physics graduate applicant to the University of ....... for fall 2016
entry. My Application Number is ...........

One of my referees, Professor .......... from the University of ..........,
is currently under extenuating circumstances and will not be able to
complete my reference letter in time. He's asked me to contact you regarding
this urgent matter.

I would be grateful if you could contact him at his e-mail address
......@.......... , and also to kindly confirm if you have received this
e-mail.

Yours sincerely,
........

Does the e-mail look proper and ready to be sent?

The letter looks fine. However, it seems strange that the professor would involve you to intercede on his behalf in asking for an extension. Surely he can't be that busy! (I disagree with phys_chem_prof on the amount of time needed to write a reference letter. I would estimate writing a convincing letter to take the better part of an afternoon.) Unless this letter is crucial and the grace period asked for is not more than a few days, you may be better off approaching some one else, even at this late date.

One of my references is currently extremely busy and has asked me to request the graduate administrator to contact him regarding the reference letter deadline.

Do not email the department you're applying to -- that would be a waste of time, and would not put you in a good light.

Speak to your advisor (or write to him), saying that you need his advice about something.

Intimate that you contacted the department and were told that the deadline is hard and unyielding, and that the letter has to be submitted by him to the department -- they will not contact him to request the letter.  Say that it's important to you to submit a complete application to this university, and that a recommendation from him would be the most meaningful letter that could be submitted, because he knows your work better than anyone else.  Ask his advice.  Should you write a rough draft for him, to enable him to submit the letter by the deadline?  Would it be better to approach someone else, given that any letter that is received late will not be taken into account?

In other words, politely put the thumbscrews on the guy.


What should I recommend for a foreign student with problems on the country language? Later this week one of my undergrad classes have their first written test and one of the students is not from my country, and he said he's been having some problems both understanding my lectures and the recommended book

And now he desperatedly sent me an email asking for advice on what to do.

The thing is: I don't know what to recommend either... I never have this case before...
What could I indicate/advice him that would help?

He needs to improve his language skills fast...

When I studied in France (and this was engineering, which means a different vocabulary), we watched tv, worked with our French colleagues (ie other students), we helped them with English and they helped us with French... Total Immersion was what we practiced - limiting our use of our mother tongue to increase the French as fast as possible.

We also did evenings where we provided food & beer / wine to increase opportunities for conversation as well as getting our work checked.

Also, watching France V England at rugby was good for a laugh... :)

Are there any courses in the institution he could enrol in? but these courses need to be accelerated...

I'm not sure you can tell the guy this, but if I were freely talking to the guy would advise him to get a your language speaking girlfriend (unless he is hitched).  Drives your learning fast.  Plus there are the added benefits.

In any case, the more he socializes with locals and gets himself out of the immigrant clique the better.  Consider how kids dumped into a foreign land for the summer (sans parents, sans bilingual education) get up to speed just from playing with the other kids.

Of course the timeframe for this will not likely help with your class.  Probably if all he cares about is your class, the most efficient thing would be just to get a textbook in his own language and use that as an accompaniement.  If he reads it (and works problems) AHEAD of your lectures, he will have a much easier time since the content will be more familiar.  [This is true even without a language difference...prereading makes lectures easier.]


How is Study Abroad regarded by PhD admissions committees? Does study abroad help enhance a PhD candidate's profile or does it not carry much weight at all?  Let's say I took "regular" coursework while on study abroad for a semester, like a core course and not something research-focused.

Would my having lived in Prague or Florence or Shanghai be something that PhD admissions committees consider favorably?

The field is applied mathematics, statistics, or operations research.

I think this is too broad a question to have a really good answer, but I think the most generic one is: not really.  If your study abroad experience could provide some unique opportunity to deepen your knowledge of the field, then that might get some real consideration.  Otherwise, it probably won't be seen that differently from other classes, and in some cases viewed more skeptically if they were at a program whose reputation is less established.  EDIT: In particular, to address the last sentence, living abroad will count for extremely little.

As one counterexample, I will mention that when I applied for grad school, one graduate director explicitly mentioned my study abroad experience.  However, I think this is the sort of exception that proves the rule: I went to a very well established program specific to my field; I was going to a small liberal arts institution, so the study abroad program actually had a stronger reputation, probably; and I took a very ambitious schedule and he mentioned the specific classes I had taken, not the generic fact that I had gone.

My point is, study abroad can mean many things.  Use your good sense (or talk to mentors) about how different ones can affect your graduate school applications.

It really depends on the university one is opting or taking admission to and also the country in which the university is present. Sometimes, it gets difficult to get admission into top institutions in one's own country but he/she gets easy admission to foreign university. One such example is India. Mainly in Engineering, you would not get admission to research positions in Top tier institutes in India, rather foreign universities shall give you offers of admissions. However, not all Indians who come back with degree from outside India will get a job or reputation until and unless they have degrees from top institutes of the world.


Is it ethical to award points for hilariously bad answers? Q: Why are the outer planets of the Solar System so much more massive than the inner planets?
A: By the central limit theorem, everything eventually appears to look like a Bell curve. Therefore planet masses increase with distance to the Sun before decreasing, and the planets at the end of the distribution (Mercury & Pluto) have small masses while the planets in the middle (Jupiter) have large masses.

One doesn't need to know anything about astronomy or planetary formation to know this answer is nonsense.  Furthermore, the student should have known that Pluto isn't a planet (Mars is also less massive than both the Earth and Jupiter, and Neptune is more massive than Uranus as well, breaking the trend).
On the other hand, it's funny nonsense. Funny nonsense has gotten immortalized as internet jokes, and if the joke is to be believed, even led to an 'A' for the student. There's even a journal for funny research.
Is it ethical to award a few points for this answer?

Is it ethical to award a few points for this answer?

No.
It does not demonstrate understanding. If I wrote a good-intentioned, but poor answer and got the same amount of points, I'd be peeved.

If the awarding of points to such a student doesn't disadvantage other students in any way, then sure, it is fine to do it. The only problems occur if another person suffers in some way because of it.
And, assuming that this is a real case and not made up, it is possible that the person awarding the points has some information that the student knows a better answer (I certainly don't) and is just having a bit of fun.
Ideally, grading is of individuals, not groups. The grade of an individual student is based entirely on what that student does, not in any way on what the class as a whole (or worse, classes in the past) do. There is no predefined distribution that grades are forced to adhere to. I'm happy if every student gets full marks. If they all get zeros I'm not happy, but I know what must be done, at least. If you keep that principle at the front then lots of such questions become moot.
Of course, another issue is whether awarding those points helps that student or hurts them. Giving good grades because of, for example, hair color, would be wrong because it doesn't contribute to the learning process of the student. But I see no such harm here. It is a discrete event.

Hmmm. Is it because the gas giants sweep out a larger circumference and hence picked up more material from the primordial gas cloud? Just guessing.
And the status of Pluto is just a judgement call.


As an instructor, how to use the first day of class? I found some relevant advice on the first day of teaching online (e.g. here, here, here, and here). Common themes include setting expectations, motivating the course content, and having two-way interactions with students.

Besides for reviewing the syllabus (and relevant university-wide policies referenced but not located in the syllabus), how can an instructor most effectively use the first class session? Are there any especially effective ways to do these things on the first day of a class?

Students basically want to know if they should take your class.  To that end I would include

A short (10-15 minute) sales pitch explaining what exactly your class is about and why your topic is interesting.
Administrative details of the class (I would cover this after the sales pitch, so students who are late don't miss anything).
A presentation on the first topic in your syllabus.  This is important because hearing your first lecture will give them a good idea of the difficulty of the class, which prerequisites are required, and the style/quality of your lecturing. Also, if your entire first lecture is a sales pitch, students will feel like they wasted time coming to your class, or that your class is "easy"/not serious.

At my top 10 US university, some of the math professors do not care about grades, or administration, etc. They would rather teach. So within one minute of starting the class, they begin the main material. Any administration information is placed on the website or sent through emails, if necessary.

But the (undergraduate and graduate) students are at a sufficiently high level that grades are not an issue either. Virtually all my friends are hovering around the 4.0 range. So this may not apply to other situations with lesser students.