How can a TA help a student who is certain she sucks at programming? I am a TA for an undergraduate Signals and Systems class (Electrical Engineering). As part of this, I lead a lab session, where we teach students how to code up various signal transforming operations in MATLAB, and visualize the transformed signals (for example, time-scaling, time-shifting, etc). So far it has been just basic stuff (it's only week 3), but the complexity will scale up quite a bit.

One of my students has some kind of "code-fright". She understands the theory (because there's a pre-lab in which you write down the theory of what you will be coding in the lab, and she does well here), but when it comes to coding, she just can't get started; her editor is blank till the very end, and she doesn't ask for help when I go to her; eventually, she's on the verge of tears, and is clearly very, very upset.

When I try to talk to her about what the code should look like, asking questions, and trying to get her to answer, she just remains stuck on the line, "I'm not good at programming". I repeatedly tell her that she has the theory down, and she simply needs to write it up in MATLAB, and reassure her gently that she can do this. But it doesn't help at all.

How do I help her out? The lab has 20 students, so as much as I wish, I can't spend more time with her. But I don't want her to forever think that "she sucks at programming".

EDIT - I forgot to add, this lab has teams. But she refuses to work with her partner (presumably because she wants to be able to do it on her own?). The partner does manage to get her code to work on her own.

When you tell her that she doesn't suck at programming, all she hears is that you don't understand how bad she sucks.  The psychology is the important thing here, not pedagogy.  If I were in your situation, I would say something like, "Yes, you do suck at programming.  In fact, most of us suck at programming. (Heck, have you ever noticed that Windows doesn't work???) But by doing some of these exercises, we get a bit better at programming.  Likely, you'll never be World's Greatest Programmer, or even a programmer, but by struggling, even unsuccessfully, with some of these exercises, you'll make yourself a stronger thinker.  And therefore a better person."

I've gotten a lot more mileage out of "We all suck, so let's do what we can" than pretending that everyone's a genius.

Your student will probably not be able to pass the course this time - she is already far behind, and will be unlikely to catch up. So she may prepare for passing next time.

The problem isn't anything intellectually, it is plain and simple fear. She absolutely knows she can't program, so she needs to start without programming, or without thinking she does programming. In the end, "programming" means you type a program, the computer does what the program says, and if you type the right things, the computer does what you actually wanted.

So to try her to do this in the simplest possible way, ask her to go to https://www.w3schools.com which teaches html. It starts really easy. They show a program, you change it a bit, you click on a button and it shows the result of your changes. It doesn't look like programming ("real" programmers will say it isn't programming, but it's close enough), so the hope is that she can do this without being overcome by fear, see little successes, and improve from there.

And at some point, MatLab will not induce fear in her anymore. I hope it is possible for her to get the course materials, so she should be able to get started on her own, and then do the course next year.


Should I suggest to use version control for writing a paper with new collaborators? I will soon write a new article with new collaborators (my first paper with other people, I'm in math). For some context, I know one of them well, but I've never met the others in person.

I use Git to manage all my papers. I'm wondering if I should suggest the use of Git to them? If so, how much should I press the issue, what should I say when suggesting it?

I can use it alone and apply their changes manually, but it would be infinitely easier if everyone just used a VCS -- and not just for my own personal comfort, because Git (or any VCS) does make writing the paper easier, IMO.

The main issue is Git's learning curve. I can offer to make everything as simple as possible (set up the repository myself, help out with technical issues they might have, direct them to tutorials), but academics are busy people, and they might not want to learn a whole new system for just one paper (even though I believe that were I they, I would then use Git for everything...).

I've gotten a lot of answers that don't apply at all to my situations, so to clarify: I'm in (pure) mathematics, where all manuscripts are written in LaTeX. So

version control using, e.g., Git, is appropriate, since LaTeX is a plain text format (and not some WYSIWYG thing), and
it requires a little bit of technical know-how already, so it's IMO safe to assume that other collaborators are not completely tech-illiterate.

I recently was on the other side of this - I learned git to work with a collaborator on a paper (written in LaTeX). While git is fun, and it's good I learned it, I am not convinced the net time savings were that large, and I found the first steps very frustrating. I would not generally recommend you ask collaborators to learn git - but only ask if they already know it. For papers, maybe things like overleaf/etc might be better?

Giant time losses:

 Trying to figure out how to properly discard changes I made but didn't want to merge, when stash didn't seem to work right...
 Accidentally doing bad commits, etc, and trying to figure out how to move backwards.

This would obviously get easier the more you worked with it, but I found that in the first few months, there was some problem like that, and I ended up deleting everything and re-downloading - this xkcd sounds about right: https://xkcd.com/1597/

Upside:

 Fewer ugly email chains
 Made integrating small edits late in the process a lot easier - I was more willing to make tiny wording changes when it didn't require someone else to integrate it into the final draft, and that I could do it on my time.

You should tell your collaborators to use SourceTrees, and git will become a piece of cake. No need to learn anything.

It is also good for Mercurial.

Good luck with your paper :)


Do I have an "anti-research" personality? I am a second year Ph.D. student in a North American university who is mostly working on applied mathematics with a supervisor/advisor/PI. I have been troubled by a pattern of my own behaviour that seems to go against the seemingly correct way to succeed in research and I wonder if I have some sort of an "anti-research" personality.

Here are the problems:

I study whatever is interesting and cool (within a reasonable range of my discipline) and this causes me to lack a solid focus. It seems to me that people who wind up obtaining a PhD learn to abandon so-called academic freedom early on and drill into a tiny research area. For example, while other people's research could be about different types of seahorses, my research would be about seahorses, pipe fish, shrimps...you get the picture.
Since I work in applied math, therefore I often demand more proof of applicability, where my supervisor is totally happy with toy models. He thinks it is completely sufficient for publishing a paper while I think it is fake applied research. This seems to generate some conflict between us and usually I am the one who gives in at the end and do some simulation on these toy models to make him happy - I never care about these problems. Most other people in my field only simulate toy models as well, not really "real-world" applicable in any sense, but hey, it is sure pumping out a lot of papers.
I never collaborate or ask for help from my peers no matter how stuck I become. I often see my colleagues collaborate with each other in the office. A part of me is jealous that they are taking advantage of each other's knowledge, another part of me almost thinks that this is like cheating. I feel that my thesis and my ideas wouldn't be mine if it was interfered or influenced this way. It wouldn't feel authentic
I move on to a completely new topic immediately after I finish my old one. Usually the way I see how other people work is that they try to do something tangentially similar to what they have done before, i.e., blue-tailed seahorses, then yellow-tailed seahorses. I jump to studying pipe fish immediately after I warp up my research on seahorses. I think my advisor must dislike me immensely for starting from scratch after every project.
If a problem seems to have an easy or existing approach that solves it, I find the problem less attractive to the point that I get physically sick from reading about other people's approach. However, a lot of times in research I find that other people would simply adapt other people's method for their own problem and then publish a paper that way. I try to solve it in my own way every time and most of the times it gets to a point where my supervisor intervenes and tell me to do whatever other people are doing. Again, I give in at the end.
I don't even try to follow my advisor's vision of my project. My advisor seems to have his own vision and ulterior goals that are not completely aligned with mine. I think a good PhD student should just listen to him like a father-figure and do whatever I am told. But I don't agree or sometimes don't even care about his specific vision. For example, why should I do a research on the dorsal fin of a seahorse (for your "dorsal fin grant") when I can study pipe fish instead? I understand that he is the one who is funding me, but I also care deeply about my own academic freedom.

Given these habits, am I doomed to fail my PhD? Do I have an anti-research personality?

Having a broad set of interests and knowledge is fine, and can lead to some 'outside of the box' solutions. Yes, you will find periods where anything else is more interesting than your PhD work, irrespective of how interesting your PhD work actually is. You'll find that as you come closer to the end of your PhD, your concentration on the problem at hand will sharpen, and while a PhD deadline isn't quite as good at sharpening a mind as an impending duel, you probably will find your ability to concentrate improve as the ending comes into sight.

Furthermore, don't assume what you're researching your PhD on is what you'll be doing for the rest of your life. Having a wide set of skills and a shallow knowledge of many things will often help you out when you (most likely) realise you don't have the desire to become an academic, and need to search for a different job (which, let's face it, given your background means probably going in to Data Science)
I don't know too much about the culture of applied math to make an informed comment on this, but in general, finding a good real-world application of a concept, and carrying it out, is difficult. It can involve a lot of time mucking around with real world datasets, which are often messy. You have an obligation to show that your results and methods are useful, but to what degree is up to taste, and I don't think is an issue with any kind of 'anti-research' personality.
This sort of thinking is by far your most serious problem. If asking fellow students for help and collaborating is cheating, then so is using Stackexchange or reading from a textbook. Modern civilisation rests on the ability to record our thoughts so every human doesn't have to derive all the rules from scratch. There is nothing dishonourable about asking for help. If someone gives you helpful ideas, thank them in your thesis. Even if they do clever novel work on your problem, you still have to at the very least understand it and synthesize it into your own work.

There is a certain kind of person who is reluctant to ask questions. I would count myself as one. If you feel uncomfortable doing do, I recommend working on that skill until you do feel more comfortable. Stackexchange is the perfect place for that -  even if it isn't a question about anything to do with your research.
This behaviour is fine. One can get a certain fatigue when working on certain projects for a while.
& 6.  It does really seem like you have a need to derive and understand everything from its foundations. In real life, this is rarely necessary.

I did a PhD in organic chemistry. After that, I decided I didn't like chemistry anymore and went on to be a Data Scientist. At first, I would spend a lot of time trying to mathematically understand the techniques I was using, and I wouldn't feel comfortable using them if I didn't understand the underlying linear algebra. Then I slowly got more comfortable using techniques whose underlying mechanics I don't understand. We by and large don't understand the inner workings of a car or computer. We do know, roughly, its outputs when given certain inputs. The inner workings are a problem already solved by someone else.

As you grow older and read more, you'll be continuously struck by the sheer quantity of stuff out there that people have figured out. The sheer amount of knowledge that goes into, say, building an aeroplane or a computer game or a treatment plan for a specific disease or a skyscraper or a hadron collider. Letting go of the need of having to understand all aspects of a certain thing is an important skill. Practice triage with the information you receive and the problems you encounter. Trust in the expertise of others who have come before you. Know when to expend your brainpower, and know when to conserve it.

So in summary, apart from issue 3, I don't think you have any significant "anti-research' personality issues.

I didn't read through everything, but I'm presumptuous:

I would bet you care about being first, best or unique. That you don't like others controlling you, or restricting your freedom, or how to think. I would guess you have more thoughts than you know what to do with. I would bet you only complete things that support the first/best/unique identity, and most other shit falls to boredom because you've already seen it, or thought it. Them also means you probably like playing the hero, and completing a shit ton of complex work quickly to find that concept true to yourself.

Generally then, I'd guess you could be leading the field, but don't have effective tools for determining how to act given your tendencies.  I'd probably start with getting a coach to walk you through the 7 why's.

I'm sure you can interact with people just fine, and are fully aware of how to be optimal in your setting, but that is exactly what is pissing you off. It isn't really about that is it?


Co-authors not willing to publish after rejection. May I drop them? We wrote a case report (1 + 2 co authors). The case report was not accepted. I tried to convince the other co-authors to re-write and submit.
I waited for 3 years and 6 months. The co-authors showed no interest after repeated calls. I wrote the case report completely fresh with review of literature.

Can I send for publication without the co-authors as they did not take part in preparing this revised manuscript?

It depends what the co-authors did. If they were involved in the work they should normally be authors of the paper. I think the important questions you need to answer are:

What exactly do you mean by "showed no interest after repeated calls"? I have never heard of someone who does not want a "free" paper published, unless they disagree with the methods or conclusions in the paper. What is the reason they are not interested?
Did you ask them if they agree to not have their name on it? If they agree: problem solved. If not, that means they do agree to be co-authors: problem solved.

I think the question is deep rooted. Always happens between the seniors and juniors. In my opinion the co-authors should be removed as second time around they did not participate in the writing up. It appears the co-authors gave up thinking it is not publishable. Moreover >3 years is a long time to wait to get an answer.
My vote go ahead and publish without their name.

Consultant


Moral dilemma in unwittingly being paid to complete a student's work I am a computer science freelancer who takes on medium-sized projects I can complete in a month or less. I was approached by someone who wanted a set of 12 tutorials at least 500 words each about certain programming topics with code examples and workouts. We talked payment and I accepted this project and got to work. I have been using GitHub to write the pieces and publish them privately on my account.

Here's where things get tricky. After I had completed the tutorials, but before I sent them to him, he disclosed to me his full name and the institution that he attends. It turns out that this was his honors project for an undergraduate major in Computer Science. He has already paid me.

My dilemma is this: I would like to return his money and not send him the tutorials and have him fail his school project. However, I have worked on this for 3 weeks, and I obviously need the money.

In our original conversation, he made no such mentions of secrecy, so at the very least I could make the GitHub repository public and still accept his payment.

My question is this: What is my best course of action? I don't want him to submit that work as his own. However, I still would like to get paid as he did not confine to me he was planning on plagiarism until the very end.

I think you should take the money, try to retain as much of my copyrights as possible (the law may help you do this implicitly rather than explicitly, which may be helpful), and refrain from doing anything else until after the student misuses your work.
Why? Consider that:

Plagiarism is not a crime.
Copyright violation is a crime.
Neither has occurred yet.
You have done the work in good faith.
You are not responsible for preventing others from plagiarizing your work.

Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to you because you have already done the work. You have every right to keep the money for the work you have done.
Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to him too, since he has every right to obtain the work from you that he has paid you for and waited for. Even if you refund his money, you can't refund the time that he has spent waiting for you to do the work, so you would arguably be liable for damages too.
If your work is actually plagiarized, then you will have a basis for complaining academically and/or legally, and it will be more difficult for your client to view you as a "snitch", etc. if he violates your copyright.
If you let his institution know before the deed occurs, then I'd argue you're doing something morally wrong: you're getting him into trouble for an act that he has not even committed yet. (This might be fine for dangerous actions, but this isn't one.)

Clarification:
I should clarify that my answer is only intended for a "generic" freelancer, not someone who has something else at stake too.  For example, if you yourself were e.g. a professor/graduate student/public figure/etc., then you could earn yourself a bad reputation among your colleagues by giving him the work even if most other people would consider what you do to be entirely ethical/moral/righteous. In that case, the wisest career move for you may not be the same thing as what a typical freelancer might or should do, so keep in mind I'm not addressing such situations.

Α supplier contracts with a customer to produce some goods. The agreement is to get paid before delivery, and this happens. Then the police appears and tells the supplier that the specific customer is prohibited by law to get these goods (they' re bad for the customer's health). Something that the customer has not disclosed to the supplier.
Then rightfully, ethically and educationally, the supplier keeps the money and the goods, and the buyer hopefully learns a lesson. Or not. The customer got himself into this predicament, purposefully withholding vital information, and since he is not a child or mentally incapacitated, he should bear any concequences, intended or not, of his course of action.

The fact that in your case the customer himself acted as the police, does not change anything.


Is it rude not to take a course with your adviser? This semester I need to take a course that is offered in two sections, one of which will be taught by my M.Sc. thesis advisor.

The problem is that I personally prefer to take the course with the other professor instead of my advisor because:

The teaching quality of my advisor is not as good as the other professor.
If I take the course with my current advisor, the TAs would be my labmates, and it makes me a little nervous that my grades and activities be exposed to them (and also to the professor).

I want to know generally: is it OK to not take a course with your advisor, especially if that course is the main focus of your lab and your work.

Expanding my comments from earlier...

Most importantly, talk to your advisor. Either you should be able to convince him/her that the other course will benefit you more or he/she should be able to convince you that his/her course will benefit you more.

I disagree with RoboKaren's answer. Working with your advisor is far more important than taking a class with him/her for a letter of rec. You may have other opportunities to take a course with him/her anyway.

While it may be permitted, it's not advisable to graduate without ever having taken a class with your advisor. Remember that one of the things that you will want to do is ask your advisor for a letter of recommendation (either for a job or for graduate school).  So if you have never taken a class with your advisor, do so.

The reason is that when writing the letter, they will want to say that they had you in class and that you were brilliant. If they've never had you in class, it's hard for them to make that type of evaluative statement. A much shorter and weaker letter may result.

The most important thing, though, is to talk to your advisor. I have actively advised my students to take a class that isn't mine (and that meets at the same time as mine) because it is better for their scholarly development.  At the same time, I had supervised their work closely and felt that I knew them fairly well.

Note: While this is not part of the question, if you are somehow giving the impression that you think lowly of the professor and of your lab mates, then you may have bigger problems than a course or two.


How to become an Editorial board member? How to become an Editorial board member?Is it appropriate to contact journal's Editor in Chief to show interest for joining editorial board?

That's generally not a job you can apply for, but a job you're asked to take on. At least in reputable journals, the members of the editorial board are largely scientists well known in their field. They have that role because the editor-in-chief trusts their opinions and perspectives on submitted papers, and also because they have the stature in the field to write to potential reviewers and ask them to review a paper. Well established researchers also have fewer potential conflicts of interest: They no longer have promotions coming up, and so feel less conflicted about rejecting papers by people who might otherwise be asked to write letters of evaluation about their promotion.

I don't know what your career status is, but suspect that because you are asking the question that you are still young. As an editor-in-chief, I usually try to avoid using younger researchers as members of the editorial board. That's not necessarily because I don't trust their judgment, but because they have conflicts of interest and because they will have a harder time receiving the necessary reviews within a reasonable time frame.

To become an editorial board member, contact the journal and ask. You can contact the editor-in-chief directly, or the publisher (who will probably discuss with the editor-in-chief in any case).

You'll likely be asked for your CV and area of expertise, and might also be asked about what you can do that the editorial board can't (e.g. if you have expertise in [topic] that nobody in the editorial board knows well).

It's potentially possible they ask you to publish/review a paper for them, or even organize a special issue, to show commitment to the journal.

Edit: It seems many people don't believe that non-shady journals can consider self-nominations. Real life example.

In this article, a group of Polish researchers create a fake academic profile "Anna O. Szust" with woefully inadequate qualifications, and send applications to a variety of journals. A substantial amount of journals listed on Beall's list accepted the fake editor, which is not surprising. However I will point out two things:

Some DOAJ journals (technically a whitelist) also accepted her.
Even among JCR journals, almost half the journals sent a formal rejection. Because the fake academic has woefully inadequate qualifications, it's not surprising that they will reject. This indicates, nonetheless, that if you have the necessary qualifications, they will consider self-nominations.

Of course, if you have the necessary qualifications, it's likely that the journal either knows you or knows about you, and might approach you without you having to approach them. However it's one thing to approach someone who might not be interested, and another to be approached by someone who's already interested.

This doesn't even consider those journals that are having trouble filling their issues, for whom if the new editorial board member can attract submissions ... why not. It's not ideal, but the alternative is to let the journal struggle.

tl; dr: You can contact the journal and ask. Your chances of success are slim especially if you contact a top journal; however, they are also not zero.


How to take notes while reading textbook? I am very interested in Physics and I want to read as much as I can. Most people, including my teachers, advise me to take notes as I read. But I find this very difficult. I can concentrate only on one thing at a time -- whether that's reading or making notes. When I concentrate on reading then usually the notes that I make are of very bad quality and eventually I lose interest in reading. When I focus on reading then usually I read particular content from various resources and I find this very fascinating. On the other hand, if I focus on taking notes then usually I lose interest in reading.

How can I get rid of this habit of mine? How can I take notes effectively?

I tend to have problems documenting-while-reading as well. What tends to work for me is either:

Read all of the resources on your topic that you find, and then write a summary of what you've learned immediately afterward. Try to have enough detail that someone following behind you can make sense of what you write. (In a few days, you will be that someone!)
If I have a specific need (say, to defend a point I'm trying to make), then I'll quickly jot down bullet points while I research, but no more than that. Then when I'm finished with my research, write the summary described above.

If you read a paper book and use a paper notebook for notes, try to switch to digital. Might be you find this variant more convinient, just because you could copy and paste some quotes from book to note-taking app and you will feel, that you could easily change you notes (edit or make some structure from
Just want to share my post on Medium in case you want to take a look at different digital note taking methods and my thoughts about thinking spaces in digital
https://alexmind.medium.com/thinking-spaces-and-note-taking-methods-275bd80d0df6


How much patience is needed in a PhD? I am a PhD student who works in theory. I have been patient but nowadays I am losing my temper, patience, etc. Many publications have been rejected as well as my proposals for grants. I have submitted one research paper which was also recently rejected.

I am working very hard but also feeling disheartened about the way academia works. As a student it is very hard to be patient. I worry each time my proposals get rejected or even if I have a failure in my research. I am trying my best to be patient but I don't know how to keep it.

Question:  How much patience is needed while working on a PhD? (in terms of number of years for a publication) Is there any way to not worry about the failures we have in academia?

The PhD is a test of your stubbornness, patience and grit more than it is a test of any sort of intelligence or ability.

The key is "Staying-Alive".  Good research, getting published, getting degree, getting noticed.... all those things are great, but these things (at least for most of us) comes after failures, rejections, frustrations  and all the bad things we don't want.  However, you need to satay live for it to come.  It will come, so stay alive until then.  Don't loose it.

It is like going through a long tunnel with so many doors - working hard to reach a door thinking this is it, but it only opens to another distance with another door at the end.  But, if you stay alive, you will reach the door with the sign "PhD" on it.

So, breath in and breath out, and stay alive.

But, I may warn you - you will have scars all over you.  Until now, if I have a bad dream, it is about those days in research.  It wakes me up in the middle of night with cold sweat all over me.


Should I be an author on another PhD student's paper if I went to their meetings and gave advice? My PhD supervisor (in the field of artificial intelligence) invited me to several meetings with another PhD student. Since I have more knowledge than my supervisor in some topics, I made many suggestions about how this student could improve his methodology. In total, I went to 5 meetings of 3–4 hours each. I could have used this time to do my own research.

When the other student started to write his manuscript, I asked to be an author, since I had contributed directly to the research, but he felt I only deserved to appear in the acknowledgments. So I asked my supervisor to be on the paper and even volunteered to help writing it. My supervisor said “Don't worry about his paper, you have your own things to do, and he is not going to submit this work anytime soon”.

One week later, they submitted the paper to a major conference without my name on it. I felt really insulted that they used my time and skills with no credit to me.

I didn't actively do the research or help write the paper, but I felt I was supervising the student since I have the most experience on this topic. Many academics in my field get their names on papers by just giving suggestions.

What should I do? I am planning on taking it to the head of department.

Actually, I think you should relax and take your advisor's advice. Collaboration is a good thing, and it is a two-way street. You give a bit and you get a bit. I assume you got an acknowledgement in the paper for your help. I don't think it would be appropriate if you weren't. But authorship is a different thing.

You contributed ideas. Research seminars are often organized to give ideas to researchers but the members don't become co-authors in the normal case.

Congratulate your colleague and, as your advisor suggests, spend your effort on your own work, not raising an objection to someone else's.

But, it is good that you contributed ideas. Do that a lot and you will have a lot of people willing and happy to work with you. Occasionally you may need that help.

Pay it forward.

I have a bi-weekly meeting with my MSc and Ph.D. students that some time is 6 hours long. We discuss ideas and brainstorming solutions; they work on different subjects.  When I was doing my Ph.D, I designed an algorithm from A-Z gave it to an MSc student to implement, he published a paper I did not co-author it and did not ask to be a co-author. Why that? because I was a fully-funded Ph.D. student, this is my work I was hired to do that and this was part of my training.

Now, I am a supervisor, and I am on every paper of my MSc and Ph.D. students work. I secure funds for all of them to work on their research.

Are you a fully-funded Ph.D. student? If yes then do not complain, as you are a professional researcher, not an undergraduate student working on a group assignment.

If you are not a fully-funded Ph.D. student, then I do not understand why you are doing a PhD. Because, if you are that strong and more knowledgeable than your supervisor and at the same time not funded, then I would strongly suggest that you switch your supervisor.

In the future, please tell your supervisor you are busy with your research point and do not go to these meetings.


Tutoring as a undergrad student My school provides undergrad students with the opportunity to tutor the classes where they received an A as an extra-curricular program. I have received an A+ in some classes and think that if I have a chance to be a tutor of that class, it will help enhance  my understanding and teaching skills.  However, tutoring is so time-consuming that if I do it, I might give up one of the lectures next semester.

So, my question is: Is it worthwhile to be a tutor if I want to go to grad school?

Tutoring is definitely a great way to gain more confidence and knowledge in a certain area as well as help you to decide if you enjoy the subject/teaching it and want to go to grad school. However, it sounds like you know the class really well as you received an A+ and it isn't worth dropping a lecture just to tutor. Grad schools do not put nearly as much weight on tutoring to warrant sacrificing other things that would benefit you.


Exam requires self-imposing a time limit: what should I do when others are likely to use more time? I am enrolled in an upper level STEM class.
My teacher has recently announced that we have a "downloadable" midterm. The midterm is not officially timed, and we have a week to submit it, and there is no way the teacher can track how much time we have used. Now, in class and in a clarification request, it was stated that we have a total time to "work on it" for 3 hours tops, even though we can "look at it" for longer.
I have no clue how to deal with this. A good number of my (normally obsessive/honor code) friends have already told me that they will use more time than what is officially allowed to work on the exam. Based on the sample I've conducted with the people in my year in the class, I would say its highly likely at least 50% are planning on using more time than allowed.
Ngl [not going to lie], I've had to deal with "other people using more than they should be" for at least two of my classes (all of which are online) this semester and I don't want to deal with it in a third. I'm frustrated.
Is there anything I can do?

Solutions I consider:

Students protesting — I don't think anyone is being obsessive about
this mess apart from me.

Confronting the teacher myself — for one thing, I'm not sure if I
am liked by this person (LOL) but I'm guessing if I say "yo there
are students planning on cheating", this person will simply send out
an email stating "don't cheat" to the class.

Notes:

The people in the class of my year already know about all this mess of a situation because I discussed the strange rules in our group chat, so I suspect if the professor sends out an email I can be immediately linked as "the person who prompted the kerfuffle".  also I'll be known as the rat. I don't care too much about my reputation, but nonetheless this isn't super pleasant. I probably shouldn't have done this, I see now that it is kind of coming back to bite.

Certain details have been changed or obfuscated to avoid identification.

I'm estimating likelihood of cheating based on an informal "poll" I gave in a high-effort group chat; to get a picture of this group, its a bunch of overachieving underclassmen who I don't think would ever cheat in normal circumstances. I have evidence of intention to cheat, I am not willing to submit it to my teacher.

What I would hope from my teacher would be that the "time cap" of 3 hours would be removed; this obviously is going to get violated anyway.

I specifically asked the professor whether we "must not" spend more than 3 hours on the test; he confirmed that 3 hours is a hard limit.

The class is graded on a curve.

What I'm probably gonna do:
I don't think I should contact the professor directly, mostly because I think this person doesn't like me that much. I think my solution is just going to be to email this person anonymously and express that I have concretely seen evidence of people intending to cheat, though I'm not ratting out any fellow students, and I'll request that the time limit is lifted.

You’re in an unenviable position and I don’t have clear suggestions how to proceed. But at the very least, it’s worth calling attention to the fact that

your instructor is neglecting their duty to maintain an acceptable level of academic integrity, and

this may rise to the level of being more than just a “feeling” but an actual violation of university policy.

For example, at my university, our guidelines about faculty responsibilities in connection with academic honesty state (emphasis mine):

Academic honesty is an integral part of the University's educational mission. According to the UC Davis Code of Academic Conduct, all members of the academic community are responsible for the academic integrity of the UC Davis campus.
[...]
Faculty are encouraged to promote an atmosphere of honesty in the classroom. For example.
[...]

Use exam and assignment formats that discourage academic misconduct.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that this is grounds for an official complaint or to ask for the instructor to be punished or anything like that. But the point is, if and when you choose to complain either to the instructor or to other campus authorities (department chair, office of academic integrity etc), citing relevant university guidelines or policies can be a good way of strengthening your case and reminding people that academic honesty is a two-way street in which both students and teachers have responsibilities. When the teachers are neglecting their own responsibiltiies by creating such obvious opportunities for a “thought crime” form of cheating that cannot possibly be detected, they can’t very well expect students to fulfill their side of the bargain.
Good luck! Sorry you have to deal with this nonsense.

I would presume the teacher took this course of action because they know the exam will take less than three hours.  Probably the there is no benefit to spending more than three hours on it.  In my experience, students who take the longest to complete an exam are not doing anything to improve their grades during the later part of the exam.
What should you do?  You should follow your honor code (we do not know what it says), just as with any other exam.  If you are required to report other people telling you they will cheat, report it.  Otherwise, spend your time studying.


How to obtain citation counts per year or exportable data from Google Scholar? To me, it seems that "Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4038v2) has quite a bit of impact. However, I would like to support this feeling with data.

On Google Scholar, I can see that the paper was cited by 116 publications. However, I would like to plot a curve showing when it was cited. So I would like to export this data to a CSV with a "date" column and a "title" column. (Other columns like authors, how often the other paper was cited, journal, ... would be nice, too).

Are there other ways to quickly analyze the impact of a paper?

Are you referring to this type of plot, which can be found through an author page containing that paper (in this case Evan Shelhamer), by clicking on the title:

At the Google scholar page of that paper you can also hover over the bars to see e.g. that the paper has 109 citations from 2015. I don't know about a way to directly export data from Google scholar. You could probably html scrape the data though, or by manually using "custom range" here to get citation counts for each year.

Another option is to use the Publish or Perish software (which functions as a front-end to Google scholar), which allows you to use the "Lookup citations" feature to get an exportable list of all the citing papers found through Google Scholar. This list will contain year, title, authors, citation count etc for all the citing papers.

An excerpt of the data for this particular paper is included below. In this particular case (since most of the citations are coming from arXiv) you can actually get a better temporal resolution of the citations after some post-processing of the exported data, since it includes the arXiv identifier which contains the month of publication (posting to Arxiv). That plot looks like this, for the 77 arXiv papers citing "Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation":

Data excerpt:

427,"K Simonyan, A Zisserman","Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1556","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15993525775437884507&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",1,2015-11-18,""
51,"LC Chen, G Papandreou, I Kokkinos, K Murphy…","Semantic image segmentation with deep convolutional nets and fully connected crfs",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7062","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12556287530133233148&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",2,2015-11-18,""
31,"B Hariharan, P Arbeláez, R Girshick, J Malik","Hypercolumns for object segmentation and fine-grained localization",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5752","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=338188405356970854&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",3,2015-11-18,""
24,"S Zheng, S Jayasumana, B Romera-Paredes…","Conditional random fields as recurrent neural networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03240","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4680896688857314530&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",12,2015-11-18,""
20,"J Dai, K He, J Sun","Convolutional feature masking for joint object and stuff segmentation",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.1283","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1283","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3867986733742388443&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",4,2015-11-18,""
18,"G Papandreou, LC Chen, K Murphy…","Weakly-and semi-supervised learning of a DCNN for semantic image segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02734","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12298732919189295864&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",6,2015-11-18,""
14,"J Dai, K He, J Sun","Boxsup: Exploiting bounding boxes to supervise convolutional networks for semantic segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.01640","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01640","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=10583411756105923851&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",9,2015-11-18,""
13,"AG Schwing, R Urtasun","Fully connected deep structured networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.02351","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02351","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9137941562147447673&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",10,2015-11-18,""
13,"G Lin, C Shen, I Reid","Efficient piecewise training of deep structured models for semantic segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.01013","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01013","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1420854562551446027&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",25,2015-11-18,""
12,"S Ren, K He, R Girshick, J Sun","Faster r-cnn: Towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.01497","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01497","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16436232259506318906&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",5,2015-11-18,""
10,"G Bertasius, J Shi, L Torresani","DeepEdge: A Multi-Scale Bifurcated Deep Network for Top-Down Contour Detection",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.1123","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1123","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2089551699301366907&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",8,2015-11-18,""
9,"D Pathak, E Shelhamer, J Long, T Darrell","Fully convolutional multi-class multiple instance learning",2014,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7144","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7144","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6242051221514792488&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",11,2015-11-18,""
7,"H Noh, S Hong, B Han","Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.04366","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04366","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4896002303003783815&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",80,2015-11-18,""
5,"M Jaderberg, K Simonyan, A Zisserman…","Spatial transformer networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02025","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1662293494062093494&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",7,2015-11-18,""
5,"R Girshick, J Donahue, T Darrell, J Malik","Region-based Convolutional Networks for Accurate Object Detection and Segmentation",0,"ieeexplore.ieee.org","","http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7112511","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2674763949973029385&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",42,2015-11-18,""
4,"S Ren, K He, R Girshick, X Zhang, J Sun","Object Detection Networks on Convolutional Feature Maps",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06066","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06066","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8299550676813721451&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",21,2015-11-18,""
4,"S Xie, Z Tu","Holistically-Nested Edge Detection",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06375","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06375","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18154299256265143241&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",112,2015-11-18,""
3,"W Liu, A Rabinovich, AC Berg","Parsenet: Looking wider to see better",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04579","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04579","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11105541992267753132&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",13,2015-11-18,""
3,"A Dosovitskiy, T Brox","Inverting convolutional networks with convolutional networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.02753","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02753","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3843085858101673825&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",14,2015-11-18,""
2,"S Hong, H Noh, B Han","Decoupled Deep Neural Network for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04924","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04924","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15385340253531275638&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",15,2015-11-18,""
2,"O Russakovsky, AL Bearman, V Ferrari…","What's the point: Semantic segmentation with point supervision",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02106","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14456480836534501375&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",16,2015-11-18,""
2,"Z Xie, K Xu, W Shan, L Liu, Y Xiong…","Projective Feature Learning for 3D Shapes with Multi-View Depth Images",2015,"Computer Graphics …","Wiley Online Library","http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cgf.12740/full","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16653555319690091022&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",17,2015-11-18,""
2,"P Wang, X Shen, Z Lin, S Cohen, B Price…","Joint Object and Part Segmentation using Deep Learned Potentials",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00276","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4342156029683513177&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",48,2015-11-18,""
2,"B Yang, J Yan, Z Lei, SZ Li","Convolutional Channel Features For Pedestrian, Face and Edge Detection",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.07339","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.07339","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6994455475312011326&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",59,2015-11-18,""
2,"S Gidaris, N Komodakis","Object detection via a multi-region & semantic segmentation-aware CNN model",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.01749","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01749","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17076919334968493616&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",65,2015-11-18,""
2,"G Papandreou, I Kokkinos…","Modeling Local and Global Deformations in Deep Learning: Epitomic Convolution, Multiple Instance Learning, and Sliding Window Detection",2015,"Proceedings of the IEEE …","cv-foundation.org","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=372687354279680428&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",84,2015-11-18,"PDF"
2,"X Zhang, J Zou, K He, J Sun","Accelerating Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Classification and Detection",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.06798","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.06798","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11183077033015235296&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",89,2015-11-18,""
1,"A Khosla, AS Raju, A Torralba, A Oliva","Understanding and predicting image memorability at a large scale",2015,"","people.csail.mit.edu","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4151583339195604249&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",18,2015-11-18,"PDF"
1,"B Shuai, Z Zuo, W Gang","Quaddirectional 2D-Recurrent Neural Networks For Image Labeling",2015,"","ieeexplore.ieee.org","http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7118156","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=13720065868238901658&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",19,2015-11-18,""
1,"Z Liang, S Ding, L Lin","Unconstrained Facial Landmark Localization with Backbone-Branches Fully-Convolutional Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03409","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03409","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12791133750001877582&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",20,2015-11-18,""
1,"D Pathak, P Krähenbühl, T Darrell","Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.03648","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03648","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18113115400192563138&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",22,2015-11-18,""
1,"C Ionescu, O Vantzos, C Sminchisescu","Matrix Backpropagation for Deep Networks with Structured Layers",2015,"","maths.lth.se","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17387807402435828231&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",23,2015-11-18,"PDF"
1,"V Badrinarayanan, A Kendall, R Cipolla","SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.00561","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00561","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18037094217443794526&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",24,2015-11-18,""
1,"K Lee, A Zlateski, A Vishwanathan…","Recursive Training of 2D-3D Convolutional Networks for Neuronal Boundary Detection",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.04843","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17230449095463437923&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",26,2015-11-18,""
1,"B Pepik, R Benenson, T Ritschel, B Schiele","What Is Holding Back Convnets for Detection?",2015,"Pattern Recognition","Springer","http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-24947-6_43","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1468500825478747183&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",27,2015-11-18,""
1,"C Ionescu, O Vantzos, C Sminchisescu","Training Deep Networks with Structured Layers by Matrix Backpropagation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.07838","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07838","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8704018611282114837&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",28,2015-11-18,""
1,"Z Liu, X Li, P Luo, CC Loy, X Tang","Semantic Image Segmentation via Deep Parsing Network",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.02634","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02634","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18281955767933637624&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",29,2015-11-18,""
1,"X Gibert, VM Patel, R Chellappa","Deep Multi-task Learning for Railway Track Inspection",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05267","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05267","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16444267879523298138&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",30,2015-11-18,""
1,"X Gibert, VM Patel, R Chellappa","Material classification and semantic segmentation of railway track images with deep convolutional neural networks,”",2015,"IEEE International Conference …","researchgate.net","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=13942078593779597868&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",31,2015-11-18,"PDF"
1,"H Xu, S Venugopalan, V Ramanishka…","A Multi-scale Multiple Instance Video Description Network",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05914","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1990066366497434516&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",33,2015-11-18,""
1,"F Liu, C Shen, G Lin, I Reid","Learning Depth from Single Monocular Images Using Deep Convolutional Neural Fields",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07411","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.07411","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2562418167496300062&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",52,2015-11-18,""
1,"PD Vo, A Ginsca, H Le Borgne, A Popescu","Effective Training of Convolutional Networks using Noisy Web Images",0,"comupedia.org","","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12447971813084759439&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",70,2015-11-18,"PDF"
1,"Z Zhang, AG Schwing, S Fidler, R Urtasun","Monocular Object Instance Segmentation and Depth Ordering with CNNs",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03159","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7431213548054053779&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",78,2015-11-18,""
1,"S Tsogkas, I Kokkinos, G Papandreou…","Semantic Part Segmentation with Deep Learning",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.02438","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16300824466121812385&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",79,2015-11-18,""
1,"G Bertasius, J Shi, L Torresani","High-for-Low and Low-for-High: Efficient Boundary Detection from Deep Object Features and its Applications to High-Level Vision",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06201","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06201","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6429592123688911770&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",86,2015-11-18,""
1,"M Havaei, A Davy, D Warde-Farley, A Biard…","Brain Tumor Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03540","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4159936825454045654&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",91,2015-11-18,""
1,"P Fischer, A Dosovitskiy, E Ilg, P Häusser…","FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06852","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4399198863370102461&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en&num=20",111,2015-11-18,""
0,"CA Brust, S Sickert, M Simon, E Rodner, J Denzler","Efficient Convolutional Patch Networks for Scene Understanding",0,"hera.inf-cv.uni-jena.de","","","http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:G0POBdhSJIsJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&num=20&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5",32,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"J Vašícek, M Hradiš, F Radenovic, O Chum","Camera Elevation Estimation from a Single Mountain Landscape Photograph",0,"cmp.felk.cvut.cz","","","",34,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"A Dubrovina, P Kisilev, B Ginsburg, S Hashoul…","Computational Mammography using Deep Neural Networks",0,"cs.technion.ac.il","","","",35,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"DL Richmond, D Kainmueller, MY Yang…","Relating Cascaded Random Forests to Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07583","",36,2015-11-18,""
0,"X Liang, Y Wei, X Shen, J Yang, L Lin, S Yan","Proposal-free Network for Instance-level Object Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02636","",37,2015-11-18,""
0,"M Xie, N Jean, M Burke, D Lobell, S Ermon","Transfer Learning from Deep Features for Remote Sensing and Poverty Mapping",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00098","",38,2015-11-18,""
0,"S Gupta, J Hoffman, J Malik","Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00448","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00448","",39,2015-11-18,""
0,"H Chu, H Mei, M Bansal, MR Walter","Accurate Vision-based Vehicle Localization using Satellite Imagery",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.09171","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.09171","",40,2015-11-18,""
0,"D Dai, Y Wang, Y Chen, L Van Gool","How Useful Is Image Super-resolution to Other Vision Tasks?",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.07009","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07009","",41,2015-11-18,""
0,"A Raj, D Maturana, S Scherer","Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture for Semantic Segmentation",2015,"","ri.cmu.edu","","",43,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"F Xia, J Zhu, P Wang, A Yuille","Pose-Guided Human Parsing with Deep Learned Features",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.03881","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03881","",44,2015-11-18,""
0,"J Xie, M Kiefel, MT Sun, A Geiger","Semantic Instance Annotation of Street Scenes by 3D to 2D Label Transfer",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.03240","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03240","",45,2015-11-18,""
0,"J Kim, V Pavlovic","Discovering Characteristic Landmarks on Ancient Coins using Convolutional Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.09174","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.09174","",46,2015-11-18,""
0,"C Sun, M Paluri, R Collobert, R Nevatia…","ProNet: Learning to Propose Object-specific Boxes for Cascaded Neural Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03776","",47,2015-11-18,""
0,"LC Chen, JT Barron, G Papandreou, K Murphy…","Semantic Image Segmentation with Task-Specific Edge Detection Using CNNs and a Discriminatively Trained Domain Transform",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03328","",49,2015-11-18,""
0,"N van Noord, E Postma","Exploring the influence of scale on artist attribution",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.05929","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05929","",50,2015-11-18,""
0,"A Kendall, V Badrinarayanan, R Cipolla","Bayesian SegNet: Model Uncertainty in Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architectures for Scene Understanding",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.02680","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02680","",51,2015-11-18,""
0,"C Wang, X Yan, M Smith, K Kochhar…","A unified framework for automatic wound segmentation and analysis with deep convolutional neural networks",2015,"… in Medicine and …","ieeexplore.ieee.org","http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7318881","",53,2015-11-18,""
0,"PH Liu","Novel Convolutional Neural Networks for Deep Learning and Its Applications to General Image Classification",2015,"","pc01.lib.ntust.edu.tw","http://pc01.lib.ntust.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0708115-214445","",54,2015-11-18,""
0,"S Bittel, V Kaiser, M Teichmann, M Thoma","Pixel-wise Segmentation of Street with Neural Networks",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00513","",55,2015-11-18,""
0,"D Ravìa, M Bober, GM Farinella, M Guarnera…","Semantic Segmentation of Images Exploiting DCT Based Features and Random Forest",2015,"Pattern Recognition","Elsevier","","",56,2015-11-18,"HTML"
0,"H Nam, B Han","Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.07945","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07945","",57,2015-11-18,""
0,"LC Chen, Y Yang, J Wang, W Xu, AL Yuille","Attention to Scale: Scale-aware Semantic Image Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03339","",58,2015-11-18,""
0,"A Seff, L Lu, A Barbu, H Roth, HC Shin…","Leveraging Mid-Level Semantic Boundary Cues for Automated Lymph Node Detection",2015,"… Image Computing and …","Springer","http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-24571-3_7","",60,2015-11-18,""
0,"AL Jones","Segmenting Microarrays with Deep Neural Networks",2015,"bioRxiv","biorxiv.org","http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/03/020404.abstract","",61,2015-11-18,""
0,"Y Wang, J Liu, Y Li, H Lu","Semi-and Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks",2015,"Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM …","dl.acm.org","http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2806322","",62,2015-11-18,""
0,"BS Riggan, C Reale, NM Nasrabadi","Coupled Auto-Associative Neural Networks for Heterogeneous Face Recognition",2015,"Access, IEEE","ieeexplore.ieee.org","http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7270978","",63,2015-11-18,""
0,"A Carlier, A Salvador, F Cabezas, X Giro-i-Nieto…","Assessment of crowdsourcing and gamification loss in user-assisted object segmentation",2015,"Multimedia Tools and …","Springer","http://scholar.google.comhttps://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11042-015-2897-6.pdf","",64,2015-11-18,""
0,"P Hu, D Ramanan","Bottom-up and top-down reasoning with convolutional latent-variable models",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.05699","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05699","",66,2015-11-18,""
0,"SS Mukherjee, N Robertson","Deep Head Pose: gaze-direction estimation in multimodal video",2013,"","ieeexplore.ieee.org","http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7279167","",67,2015-11-18,""
0,"MM Cheng, VA Prisacariu, S Zheng…","DenseCut: Densely Connected CRFs for Realtime GrabCut",2015,"Computer Graphics …","Wiley Online Library","http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cgf.12758/full","",68,2015-11-18,""
0,"J Pan","Visual Saliency Prediction using Deep learning Techniques",2015,"","imatge.upc.edu","","",69,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"A Dosovitskiy, P Fischer, J Springenberg…","Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks",2015,"IEEE Transactions on …","computer.org","http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/tp/preprint/07312476-abs.html","",71,2015-11-18,""
0,"X Wu","An Iterative Convolutional Neural Network Algorithm Improves Electron Microscopy Image Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.05849","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05849","",72,2015-11-18,""
0,"LC Chen, G Papandreou, I Kokkinos, K Murphy…","SEMANTIC IMAGE SEGMENTATION WITH DEEP CON-VOLUTIONAL NETS AND FULLY CONNECTED CRFS",0,"stat.ucla.edu","","","",73,2015-11-18,"PDF"
0,"C Frogner, C Zhang, H Mobahi, M Araya-Polo…","Learning with a Wasserstein Loss",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05439","",74,2015-11-18,""
0,"G Bertasius, J Shi, L Torresani","Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Neural Fields",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.02674","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02674","",75,2015-11-18,""
0,"Y Wei, X Liang, Y Chen, X Shen, MM Cheng…","STC: A Simple to Complex Framework for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv: …","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03150","",76,2015-11-18,""
0,"H Lai, S Xiao, Z Cui, Y Pan, C Xu, S Yan","Deep Cascaded Regression for Face Alignment",2015,"arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.09083","arxiv.org","http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.09083","",77,2015-11-18,""

You can do it with scholar package. Follow the steps

1) Find the article in scholar.google.de
2) Click on one the authors registered in google scholar, this will show the page with all articles of that author
3) Click on the title of the article you want, this will show the profile for the article. Copy the complete address (url) showed behind that page

4) From the url get the id for author to get the publication list, and the the pub_id for the article

id="ltRSM0AAAAJ"   #user
arta=get_publications(id, cstart = 0, pagesize = 100, flush = FALSE)
article=as.character(arta$pubid)[2] #W7OEmFMy1HYC

5) Get the data for the article and plot the data

art2=get_article_cite_history(id, article)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data=art2, aes(x=year, y=cites)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill="steelblue")+
  geom_text(aes(label=cites), vjust=-0.3, size=3.5)+
  theme_minimal()


Paper excluded from conference proceedings Last year I submitted a paper to a IEEE conference that was going to be held in the US. I got funding from my university and registered to attend the conference. Unfortunately, my visa was rejected, which was unexpected for me because I had been in the US before for another conference.
Since conference presentation was mandatory for publication of my paper in the proceedings, I contacted the organizers to let them know about this issue and if there was something I could do like sending a video presentation. I didn't get any response and assumed that they were going to publish it anyways. However, a couple of months later I found that they didn't do so.
I tried to contact the organizers again to see if I could get a refund, but was ignored again.
Is this common? Is there something I could do to get the money back?

Is this common?

Not getting a visa to enter the country where a conference is held, is quite common. It is not common for someone to ask for their money back months after a conference though: while people do occasionally get delayed in asking for their money back, usually this is done immediately after finding out that you won't be able to attend the conference. Not months after the conference is over.
I've highlighted two words in what you wrote:

Since conference presentation was mandatory for publication of my paper in the proceedings, I contacted the organizers to let them know about this issue and if there was something I could do like sending a video presentation. I didn't get any response and assumed that they were going to publish it anyways.

If doing X is "mandatory" to get Y, I would recommend not to "assume" you will get Y without doing X. If this happens again in the future, I would perhaps send a polite reminder about my inquiry for presenting the work through video conference (not just one email and then "assume" that the paper will be published even though they never replied to your email), and perhaps make it clear that you would like your money back if there is no way to get the paper published. You might also consider getting a colleague or friend to present the work for you, if you know anyone else going to the conference who you trust with that type of thing (I have had people present my work for me at conferences before, and I've even seen invited speakers gets their post-docs to present their talk for them if they are too busy to attend).

Is there something I could do to get the money back?

You can ask again politely and include a summary of the timeline of events, perhaps with copies underneath of your old email inquiries which were ignored, but I do not recommend to have very high expectations here.
A friend of mine has this motto: "Low expectations, High hopes"

All you an do is ask. It may be possible or not. But the more important thing to resolve is your copyright on the paper. If you signed it over and they didn't publish it, I'd see a problem that should be resolved.
If IEEE sponsored the conference, you may want to discuss all issues with them.


How detrimental is involvement in politics to a scientific career? I am an undergraduate student in the hard sciences, and am thinking of pursuing a research career after graduation. I am also quite politically involved on the left, and have political articles published online. I am critical of many governments (including my own) and corporations, and of many of the applications of technology in fields I am interested in.

My politics are very important to me, and I could not give them up. That said, I often worry about how they could be detrimental to my career, especially before I'm already established. I worry, for instance, that grad school admissions would Google my name and find my views and affiliations, and that this would negatively impact my chances to get in. How realistic is this fear?

I will direct my answer at an American academic career in the sciences.

You certainly have a right to make your political opinions known.  Unfortunately the internet makes it possible (indeed, trivial) to search through every public remark someone has ever made, and this means that everyone can be held to a higher level of scrutiny in this regard than in the past.  As others have said, there are situations in which remarks people have made have had a negative impact on their academic career.  Most academics believe that "academic freedom" should ensure immunity from retribution for a range of such political remarks...but certainly not all of them.

In fact, it is not entirely clear what constitutes a political remark as opposed to something else.  For instance, one of Steven Salaita's tweets was

  Israel: transforming 'antisemitism' from something horrible to something honorable since 1948.

This is taken from this article in which he explains the context.  The additional context he provides convinced me to view it is as a truly political remark that should come under the protections of "free speech" and "academic freedom".  However, without that context....in that it contains the claim that antisemitism is honorable, it looks pretty bad.  If my colleague had posted this and asked me to defend his right to keep it there, I would on the contrary ask him to take it down.

Here are some thoughts on how to be politically active in a way which is not to the detriment of one's academic career:

Don't post on twitter.

Really, "don't post on twitter" seems close to being universally good advice.  [Added: David Z disagrees.  I can see that if you want to post academic/scientific content only then the twitter effect would be at least non-negative.  I cannot agree that twitter has had a significant effect in disseminating work in my field, especially in comparison to so many other electronic media.  But maybe it is different for others.]  But the combination of telling the whole world and strict character limits make it anathema to academic discourse or even, I would advise, to discourse by academics.  In general, young people need to use social media carefully: political articles are different, but one's off-hand political, social and religious comments are best not shown to the entire world.

Make sure that your political remarks can only be construed as political.

This is the moral from the above example.  Political remarks advocate policy, support or criticize governments, or support or criticize political figures on political matters.  Salaita's tweet (intentionally, and even rather cleverly) plays on the distinction between criticizing the Iraeli government and criticizing Jewish people.  But don't play with that.  Don't criticize or denigrate any ethnic group.  When you want to criticize a group of people aligned around a certain practice, make sure you are criticizing the practice, not the people as people.  For instance, if you are pro-life, don't (publicly) paint women who get abortions as immoral or unclean: that's not a political statement.  Don't (publicly) criticize conservative politicians who are against gay rights by saying that they must either have terrible sex lives, be latently gay or both.

Try to have a clear separation between your political activities and your academic ones.

The OP says that he has political articles published online.  Sounds fine to me.  I would think at least three times about incorporating these articles into your science classes.  As a general rule, I feel free to discuss politics and religion in my (mathematics) courses because I feel these should not be taboo topics among human beings, but I always characterize them as digressions from the class, I never push a position, and in fact I try not to enunciate my own stance or position in a classroom environment.  If someone wants to hear how I really feel about Islam or the midterm elections, they can talk to me after class.

This "clear separation" should work just as well in the sciences as it does in math.  Academics in certain other fields might have more trouble with this: e.g. women's studies.

Hiring committees doing significant digging into candidates' extra-academic life is the exception rather than the rule.

The OP specifically mentions graduate admissions and googling.  I have done lots of graduate admissions and I cannot specifically remember ever having googled an applicant (and I often google their letter writers or their home institution).  For faculty and such: sure, sometimes I get curious, but I don't feel like such googling is part of the faculty search process.  If I found some political activity about a faculty candidate through the job search, it would have to be extremely significant or specifically problematic in some way for me to bring it up to my colleagues at all.  To give two examples of googling academics: I have learned for instance that someone had been a union organizer and someone else was a leader of a campus pro-life organization and had run for political office.  If these people applied for jobs I would keep this information to myself.

On average, it is a little safer to be on the left than on the right.

The majority of American academics that I know are not very politically active but are considerably left of the center of American politics.  This applies to me.  If I learned that a potential job candidate was very active in Tea Party politics, I would take a moment to steel myself not to let this affect my decision.  If I learned that a potential job candidate had been active in Obama's campaign, I would think "Well, that will make for a fun story sometime."  I have colleagues whose political views are very different from my own, including one whom I respect the most, because of his great personal integrity and selflessness.  But I still have to think and act a little more carefully around this colleague because of this; often I cut off a "humorous remark" just before it leaves my mouth because I remember that he will not be amused, and I don't want to make him uncomfortable.

I put this point last because it is purely contingent on "local phenomena", but I think it would be naive to expect exactly the same academic reception for political activism on the two sides of the spectrum.  On the other hand, at some state universities the local politics can be very different from the politics of the university and the faculty.  This is really beyond the scope of my answer, so I'll just say: surely it is best if state employees who run the university system know as little about a faculty member's political activity as possible, at least until tenure.

Likely, very detrimental.

Ask yourself this. Suppose you become a scientist, and you are considering citing a paper authored by someone you know stridently espouses ultra-conservative views, entirely antithetical to your own. If you could cite another paper instead of hers, all things being equal, would you? Would it cause you to hesitate citing her paper? Would you think to yourself, 'Ugh, I hate this guy, I wish someone else had published similar research?'

In my opinion, this is common sense. However, there's also a bevy of evidence that publishing research contra, for example, feminist theory, will harm the publisher's career. Consider the following quotations from the Florida State Law Journal.

  Perhaps the most physically and personally intimidating behavior was
  directed at Suzanne Steinmetz, who had first brought the issue to the
  public’s attention.43 Steinmetz appeared on such shows as the Today
  Show and Phil Donahue. 44 Her work was reported in various newspapers
  and magazines, including a full-page story in Time magazine.45 Yet,
  while Steinmetz’s work received some support, the public attack, the
  public attack against Steinmetz and her family evidenced the public's
  overwhelming rejection of her work. Verbal threats were launched
  against her and her children - at home and in public. Threatening
  phone calls were made to Steinmetz and the sponsors of her speaking
  engagements in order to prevent Steinmetz from further publicizing her
  work. On one occasion, a bomb threat was called into an ACLU meeting
  at which Steinmetz was scheduled to speak. Professionally, Steinmetz
  was also threatened. In an attempt to prevent her from receiving
  tenure, every female faculty member at the University of Delaware was
  lobbied by individuals calling on behalf of the women's rights
  movement... Other social scientists committed to the study of husband
  abuse and family violence were similarly mistreated.Such tactics seem
  to have proven effective. Both researchers who were involved in the
  early projects and even those who might have become involved admit
  that they now choose to give the topic of battered men "wide berth".

Further consider the following list of feminist methods of suppressing research, as published in the Journal of Criminal Policy

  Method 1. Suppress Evidence
  Method 2. Avoid Obtaining Data Inconsistent with the Patriarchal Dominance Theory
  Method 3. Cite Only Studies That Show Male Perpetration
  Method 4. Conclude That Results Support Feminist Beliefs When They Do Not
  Method 5. Create "Evidence" by Citation
  Method 6. Obstruct Publication of Articles and Obstruct Funding of Research That Might Contradict the Idea that Male Dominance Is the
  Cause of PV
  Method 7. Harass, Threaten, and Penalize Researchers Who Produce Evidence That Contradicts Feminist Beliefs.

Moreover, just the other day I learned that a pharmaceutical corporation decided funding an endowed chair at the U of T was no longer a "priority" when the U of T decided to award the chair to David Healey, author of the book Pharmagedon.

Of course politics will affect your academic career.


How to deal with incompetent PhD student as an undergrad I am an undergrad who was recruited to join a lab by this PhD student and help her with her thesis, but since working with her I have come to the conclusion that she is incompetent and probably not going to finish her PhD. I often question her judgment especially related to safety and her research. This is my first research job, so sometimes I am unsure if this is normal, but at the same time I don't want to pick up bad habits. Some of the highlights include:

Lack of safety awareness. No gloves/splash goggles when working with (hot) concentrated acids and bases. Some of these experiments are run outside the fume hood, and sometimes on the floor when there is no space on the lab bench. Lab bench is a mess and when I mention cleaning up she says it'll take too much time.
When I ask her about her research proposal, she seems confused and is unable to answer basic questions about previous results. Previous experiments all seem inconclusive, need to be rerun, or she can't remember. One of the major part of her proposal is to investigate a particular mechanism, but when I ask what tests she plans on running, she has no idea.
I will talk to her about papers that I found, sometimes exactly matching the experiments we want to run, and she seems surprised. I will mention things from papers we've both read or thesis of previous students and she has no clue so most conversations about research is unproductive or she offers very superficial, obvious observations. Conversations with other group members are much more productive.
She (and I) have very little to share during group meetings because experiments are sometimes poorly designed and she does not plan them out. She will have a rough idea of what she wants to do, but no procedures or plan so lab time is spent planning the experiments out. She seems to have a very bizarre attention to some details but not others. For example, when running some high purity experiments she doesn't want us to wash the beakers with soap due to fear of contamination, but then she'll proceed to run these experiments on the dirty lab floor.
She has poor organization and samples are sometimes lost or results are not written down.
She has very rudimentary technical skills. I have watched her use the computer multiple times and instructions on how to use simple programs need to be written down step-by-step with very specific instructions on which button to press... etc. Sometimes she wants me to write a program from a paper, but she is so inept that she is unable to offer any assistance/advice, and after I'm finished writing the program she will have no clue how it works.

At times, it seems like I'm doing all the literature search, running the experiments, writing the programs, and coming up with new ideas while she grades homework. She says she is going to graduate this year.
Our PI is a very hands off person. I spend a lot of time reading literature and have ideas of other experiments we can run related to this research area in general. I would like to run these experiments myself. Since we're working in the same research area, however, sometimes when I discuss these ideas the grad student will mention wanting to include it in her thesis (even though it wasn't in her proposal). And because of how unproductive she is, I would prefer not to work with her anyways. I'm also concerned that the PI will think that these are good ideas and that I should work with this student to test them, particularly because I am an undergrad.
How can I politely distance myself with her and start doing some independent research?

No gloves/splash goggles when working with (hot) concentrated acids and bases. Some of these experiments are run outside the fume hood, and sometimes on the floor when there is no space on the lab bench.

Do not work in this lab.  Do not even go in.  It could kill you.  Obvious safety problems are often accompanied by even worse, hidden problems.
Consult your university's safety policy to determine if you can/should/must report this situation.
The other problems are insignificant by comparison.  Find a new PI.

I am sorry, but I find it very hard to believe the above.
Getting payed as a PhD candidate involves grants, and thus great effort by PIs or postdocs to get funding etc. If your candidates do not graduate, you can not get grants easily, your reputation as professor is a bit damaged, so it is not something to be taken lightly.
I find it hard to believe someone so incompetent is hired, let alone continue 3 years without anyone noticing or doing something about it, and all of a sudden an undergrad reveals this.
If that was the case, statistically some accident/ other catastrophe would have happened.
Does she have any results under her belt already or something?
PIs have great experience on this (literally decades), you can address to them for this.
Well if the situation and chaos is that bad all across this lab, you made a poor choice.
Either continue for a bit together with the shenanigans and graduate and never look back, or get the big decision and restart all over.
However, again, rethink on the whole situation a bit. It reminds me of when I see a footballer on tv and comment that I would do better.


Associate Editor is our faculty member, so he/she will not handle our paper, right? We submitted to peer-review journal that has several Associate Editors. One of them is a lecturer in our department. Thus, the editor will not assign our paper review to him/her. Do we understand correctly?

Yes. An editor from the same institution as the authors has a clear conflict of interest, which is to be avoided.

I focus the following primarily on the review aspect, not on the editorial aspect.

I think the correct answer to this is that it is very unlikely, but not impossible. But background is needed. The main issue is conflict of interest. There are three parties and their interests partly align and partly not.

The journal, and the senior editor acting in its name, has an interest in publishing good papers (leaving out predatory journals here). The associate editor, under the senior editor, has the same interest.

The author has an interest in publishing papers, preferably good papers, but, for some, any paper will do. This is where the alignment of interest isn't perfect.

The reviewer has an interest in improving any paper and in providing good advice to the journal (editor).

However, in a case such as that presented by the OP, there is, possibly an additional interest of the reviewer, but we don't know what that is, since we don't know the nature of the relationship between the reviewer and author other than that they have the same employer. The relationship might be friendly/supportive, or it might be poisonous. Or, it might be anything in between.

But if we consider the situation of the senior editor and the associate, it is possible to know something of the nature of the relationship before any assignment is made, since, we hope, they work together and have a trust relationship.

Note, however, that reputations are involved, and, in fact, a reviewer's reputation (with the journal, at least) is harmed by giving improper reviews for any reason, including just laziness. So a reviewer has an additional interest in being fair and accurate. But this may not be their strongest motivation, of course. The editor's reputation, however, is much more affected by the outcome. I don't think an editor would last long by publishing bad papers or by making enemies of authors. An editor's academic reputation, in the current case, would certainly be harmed by improper actions if/when brought to light.

The editor, knowing all of this (we hope), but most likely not knowing anything of the relationship between reviewer and author, will be (should be) cautious. Hence, the unlikelihood that this reviewer will be assigned even in the face of the known alignment of interest otherwise. But the situation between senior and associate editors, involves more knowledge, at least in theory.

As an aside, the reason we have reviewers is that authors are often poor judges of their own recent work. If that were not true, review would be less necessary, though improvement is always good.

However, I can see situations in which an editor has a long term relationship with a reviewer and trusts the reviewer to do the right thing regardless of other circumstances. I've known of such situations in which an editor leans heavily on a certain trusted reviewer. This is, I think, unlikely in the case at hand, but cannot be ruled out entirely. Hence, I conclude that this reviewer might be assigned. Of course s/he might validly refuse. And, exactly the same situation applies between a senior editor and an associate.

Note that in a double blind review, none of the complications arise if only the senior editor knows the identity of all parties.


Citing published papers while using their pre-print versions Is it unethical if we cite a paper with mentioning the publication venue (e.g,. author, "paper title," journal name, year) when quoting or mentioning some idea from it, while we have not even seen the paper in its final published form and what we have read is indeed previous versions of it (e.g., because we got it from the author's homepage, arXiv, etc., which are not copy-editted and may have some differences with the final version)?

If yes, what is the solution? (Having many references without any publication venues and e.g., by mentioning the url of the file we have, makes our paper ugly)

I'm going to answer from a (theoretical) computer science perspective.

For historical reasons, in computer science, the "published version" of the paper is likely to be much lower quality than the arxiv preprint. Conference proceedings typically have terrible page limits. Usually 8-12 pages are allowed, but I have heard of 4-page limits. Formally, the published version is not a full paper, it is an "extended abstract".

The standard practice in has become to cite the conference paper but to read the full version on arxiv. It's the only thing that makes sense given our publication system. I rarely bother to find the published version of papers I cite, even if they are readily available.

If it's standard practice in computer science, I struggle to believe that it is unethical in other fields. The arxiv version should be good enough and, if it isn't, it's the authors' responsibility to update it (or withdraw it).

Yeah.  Just cite the authors and as much detail about the paper as possible.  If you know the eventual journal, say "submitted" or "in press" or whatever describes the status.  (These words make it obvious that you did not have the final version.  Also it covers you if the thing never makes it through.)


How can a demoralized research student restore the passion for research? To the point, I do love conducting research, however, I have put myself in a very difficult point of research that made me switch to another Ph.D. program for the sake of more technical support. However, I found the other group doesn't have the required set-up devices as they have mentioned earlier before arrival, moreover, they don't have any idea how to solve this complicated point which they are interested in already. Finally, I felt I am in the same blank loop.

To be honest, I began to lose motivation and passion and sometimes I feel lost. I don't know what to do, I see crappy research published and seems everything to me to be fake, I am asking myself: Why this happens to me?.

My dream is to be like Carl Segan, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and present interesting science TV show one day, but I don't know how to reach this goal and present what I am really interested in.

Honestly, I don't know how should be the exact question, but I feel miserable, I don't know whether I have to look for another different point of research and easy to be solved. This would obligate me to look for another different research lab.

Maybe I am not smart enough, but, I began to feel academic field is so dull and boring. I would like to hear what I should do in that complex situation as I cannot dare to speak with anyone in my current research lab about my situation.

If you lack motivation in your research because you feel like you lack the resources/knowledge to tackle the problem, then you should probably discuss this with your advisor. It is important that the advisor offers you projects that can be 'broken down' into small, manageable pieces, rather than some monolithic task.

A PhD is often an isolating and depressing experience. You should find a support system of some sort to help you through the process. This can be family, friends, or fellow students. You can consider taking up a hobby (preferably something social, like sports) to give you an outlet that's not research.

I can't comment on what exactly makes some people great thinkers, but I can say that in successful research takes a lot of hard work, vision, and a hearty willingness to fail 90% of the time.

Finally, and I am sorry to say this, but you need to be mentally prepared for the fact that academia is not the right place for you. If it truly depresses you to the point where you don't feel like it's worth it, you should seriously reevaluate your prospects.

Doing a PhD can be very stressful and socially isolating. We all can have a run of bad luck (I speak from experience and thankfully I got through it).

I suggest you look at the difficulties others have had and, more importantly how they overcame them. Sheer determination and the right strategy can overcome many obstacles.

Here are quotes from the lives of just two famous people.

  In 1968, Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard. He later indicated the
  decision was very much unexpected.[26] The tenure denial has been
  blamed on several factors, including that he focused his interests too
  broadly across a number of areas (while the norm in academia is to
  become a renowned expert in a narrow specialty), and perhaps because
  of his well-publicized scientific advocacy, which some scientists
  perceived as borrowing the ideas of others for little more than
  self-promotion.[22] An advisor from his years as an undergraduate
  student, Harold Urey, wrote a letter to the tenure committee
  recommending strongly against tenure for Sagan
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

  Steven Spielberg is arguably the most famous director in the world... he was rejected from the University
  of Southern California School of Theater, Film, and Television three
  times. It didn't prevent him from achieving world-wide acclaim,
  though.
  http://uk.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-didnt-do-well-at-school-2017-5/#steven-spielberg-was-rejected-from-film-school-13


Can I cite an old book in my research proposal without having read it? Here's a small dilemma. I have a few ideas that I am putting into the form of a research proposal. It borrows heavily from the insights of David Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage. Now, the notion of comparative advantage is pretty much common knowledge in economics. However, my proposal is for research in Complex Networks.

Should I cite David Ricardo's original book from 1817 in which he published the idea, without having read it? (I doubt I'll be able to follow the argument easily in Enlightenment-period English) Or should I cite a secondary paper by someone more modern that talks about and analyzes comparative advantage? I would prefer the latter route as I would actually be able to read the material that I'm citing, but then I will not be going to the source of the original idea.

You need to read the material you cite.  That does not mean you need to read an entire book if the relevant portion is in one or a few chapters, but just plopping in a citation without ever cracking the cover is reference padding and is academic misconduct.

You've been given good advice by J. Fabian Meier about also citing newer material, but you can't cite something you haven't read.

(from the question above)

  ...  a research proposal. It borrows heavily from ...

Always read the original work, unless perhaps you'd have to learn a whole new language. Shakespeare's English is easy enough to understand once you've gotten into it, a text half as old shoudn't be a large problem.


Is studying past exams I found online cheating? I had an exam this morning. Last week the teacher had warned us that her exams are tough; this scared me. I wanted to see what her exams were like, so to study I searched through the exam repository at my school for an old midterm. Unfortunately, the exam repository only has final exams (including this course). Then I googled "(course code) (school name) midterm", and a couple of links came up. One was an online repository (not associated with my school) where people can upload old exams. I found a lot of old midterms for this course. These midterms were all in the same format but the exact questions were different in most cases. These midterms also had the answer key. I studied them to get an idea of how much the professor expected of us and to help resolve my confusion about some concepts. The practice midterms REALLY helped clarify things for me.

Last night, a student in the class posted a past midterm in a student-run Facebook group for the class. This exam did not have the official answers on it, but it did have the ones given by the student who took the test that year. After taking the test today, I noticed that some of the questions on this midterm were identical to the ones I studied online. It dawned on me that I may have committed an academic offense.

I am wondering, is studying past exams given in the course cheating? What if those exams are found in an non-school-sponsored repository online?

This is from the Texas A&M Honor System:

20.1.2.3.6 Complicity:
Intentionally or knowingly helping, or attempting to help, another to commit an act of academic dishonesty. Examples: ...
b. Distributing test questions or substantive information about the test without the instructor’s permission.

If you were here at Texas A&M, then this is considered an act of academic dishonesty (in my interpretation), as this was uploaded to the repository, perhaps without the knowledge of the instructor (as is usually the case). If, on the other hand, the instructor had provided old exams or released sample tests, then this is okay. I personally follow this, as I only trust information from the instructor.
However, I would say this was a lucky search on your end. Unless your campus has a clause on academic conduct and the distribution of past tests, you're okay.
This answer was based on a misinterpretation of the question and is therefore not a valid one. The original text is still available.


Referencing Android, using the word 'Android' in a paper I want/need to use the word 'Android' referring to the Android-System/Software in a paper/thesis. I found these guidelines. Do I have to use both, the TM-symbol AND a footnote? Like AndroidTM - It looks strange...

Your thesis or paper is in this respect similar to a newspaper article about the product ("Independent coverage"). Do newspapers use the "TM" symbol if they write about products? No. (At least no newspapers or magazine I know does.)

It is used by people who have an agreement, are cooperating with the proprietor of the brand name in question, to show exactly that.

These "guidelines" (same as e.g. Microsofts EULAs etc.) are not even a binding contract in many legislations, because they try to force them on you after you have already paid for the product.

I would advise you to be as conservative as possible and err on the side of adhering to the wishes of the trademark's owner. It won't do you any harm, whereas breaking a rule/convention might wind up giving you grief.

The rights of owners should be respected, especially when the cost is essentially zero. You will want them to respect your IP in future as well.

It is easy to Do the Right Thing when it costs you nothing.

I would guess, however, that mentioning the trademark and its owner once in the paper is sufficient.

And note that you do this, not because of a legal threat but because you respect the people that built the system. This is especially true if their prior work has enabled your own.