Will ISIS attacks hurt my PhD application as a Muslim? I'm a dedicated person, very passionate about physics and pursuing my PhD at a good school is crucial to my life. I've been preparing my application documents for a while now. GPA is almost 4 and Physics GRE is 980. My general GRE is at the 97 percentile. Good recommendation letters. I have other few decent ranks since high school as well. HOWEVER, I'm from the Middle East, and yes, my name is Mohammed. I can feel how the world is infuriated about the Islamic community in general, though the vast majority of Muslims are vulnerable to (and on daily basis thousands are already subjected to) similar attacks from ISIS. The majority of us, including myself, are terrified by ISIS, sorry for and mortified by these attacks by ISIS.

My question: Will these events perhaps hurt my application? If you were to decide on my application on the admission committee, how would my citizenship, religion and name affect your decision?

So grateful for any attempt to help. In fact, I'm sort of developing anxiety due to this issue.

EDIT: For those wondering, I'm applying only for universities in the USA.

Will ISIS attacks hurt my PhD application as a Muslim?

Only indirectly.

Admissions committees have good incentive to get the sharpest, most hard working people into their programs. They will care about your excellent results, as they should.

But administrative procedures may hinder people coming from your part of the world more than other applicants. I am basing this on my experience of being a Serb who wanted to study at Western universities, while Serbia was screwing up royally on the political scene, waging wars and making enemies everywhere. Sanctions made it difficult to travel. A friend of mine was denied a visa even after being admitted into an academic program and obtaining funding. Tuition was more expensive for us (to study in the EU), but far less funding was available. Even though I obtained a scholarship that covered the tuition, it was paid to me in monthly installments while the university insisted that I (as opposed to EU students) pay the entire tuition up front. Nobody could employ me without massive administrative hassle, meaning I couldn't just work at a bar a few hours a week if I needed some extra cash. Phone companies would not let me have a contract with them, limiting me to expensive, pre-paid phone cards. And on and on the list goes.

So yes, I think your chances will be smaller, but not because of admissions committees within any given university. It could happen that academic staff are not sufficiently aware of the additional hurdles you're facing, though. On the other side of the equation, professors from your side of the world might be less experienced at writing recommendation letters, for example. So a number of small obstacles will accumulate, many of them stemming from recent and current world politics.

And my heart goes out to you. It sucks to be vilified by outsiders for things people you don't identify with are doing.

Your religion will almost certainly not have a major impact of your chances at a reputable university.

However, students from some countries that happen to be muslim-majority, such as Iran, may have trouble working in some sciences, such as nuclear physics, within some countries.

ISIS, however, does not change this at all.


Lukewarm grade in proposed area of study? I'm applying for study in a particular area of math.

To keep matters short , I was an undergraduate that took the graduate version of a particular class and ended up with a B+ . I had never taken any class on the topic before this.

The department received several complaints about the professor in the course and other professors in the department even acknowledged that the distribution of the grades was quite terrible , not expected for a graduate course.

Since the grade is in a class that is in my proposed area of study , should I mention it at all in PhD admissions? My supervisor and other professors in the department said they would mention that the class in question was terrible but I'm not sure if I should  talk about it myself.

I feel kind of strange not addressing the fact that my proposed area is the only course which I didn't do great in. For some context every other grade I've ever received are great so there is no pattern of doing bad or anything.

A B+ is not a bad grade for an undergrad in a grad course.  I suspect that it will not raise red flags in an admissions process.  The discussion on "complaints" or "the class was terrible" has no place in your application package, especially coming from you, and it would make the applicant come off as a whiner.  You took a course, you got a grade.  Done.

If admissions slots were limited, and I had to make an otherwise equal choice between  two students, I'd opt for the one that looks more mature, and complaining in your application package about a course does not make one appear mature.

If you could get the distribution of all marks from all students in that class,from the secretary of study, for the semester you took the exam, you could mention that. But a not A is not a reason not to be admitted in a phd course.


When should we repeat a statement of a theorem before proof in a paper? When should we repeat a statement of a theorem before proof?

Suppose we have a theorem in a paper at the introduction or at the beginning of a section. However, a proof is given, say, six pages later after a series of definitions, lemmas and propositions. It would be convenient for the readers to repeat a theorem before we give proofs to recall hypothesis and notations (especially those who read an electronic copy to see in a screen). Then, however, the paper becomes redundant. Should we repeat?

More pragmatic question: Are there any guideline/style of journal papers/books mention when to repeat or not?

Added: Although I asked when to repeat, how to repeat can be found, for example, in section 6.10.1(b) in this style guide.

Unless, you are facing a particular nasty page limit, those few lines spent repeating the theorem should not be a concern to you. Thus, the only concern you should have is what benefits the reader. Here, redundancy is not bad as such, but only if it annoys the reader and wastes their time. Therefore, you have to compromise between the following:

Readers whom the redundant information helps. In most cases, you have to expect that readers have not memorised the entire theorem yet, and this is clearly information that is relevant to reading the proof. Of course, readers can flip back to the theorem, but that’s a major annoyance (even if you can put the pages next to each other).

Even if the theorem equals the title of your paper and is something like:

  Every frasmotic contrafibularity is a compunctuous pericobobulation.

and you spend the entirety of the space between first stating the theorem and proving it with talking about the four terms involved, you cannot expect the reader to remember that, e.g., Theorem 2 was this titular theorem. Even if you refer to it as titular theorem, readers may need more time to understand this than to read the short theorem again.
Readers who are annoyed by the repetition. – In the situation you describe, I would expect that only very few readers do not need the theorem repeated to them. If the formatting is any reasonable, those should notice very quickly that you are restating the theorem so they can skip it.

Therefore, in most cases (including the one you describe), I would conclude that for the average reader the usefulness of restating the theorem outweighs the annoyance.

I don't think it is generally necessary to repeat statements of theorems.

The theorem has already been stated, so repeating it verbatim is unnecessary and not useful. I appreciate that proofs and theorem statements may appear in distinct parts of the paper. E.g., a theorem may appear in the main body and the proof may appear in the appendix. This isn't problematic for the reader, because they can simply switch between the two. (For publisher printed manuscripts, this is a little tricky. But, for other versions (electronic, personally printed, ...), this is easy.) Indeed, I regularly have multiple copies of the same PDF open for this purpose.

Sometimes, you might state a theorem, introduce some lemmas, and then prove the theorem using those lemmas. In this case, I advocate a style similar to that proposed by Andreas Blass, namely, recap some details of the theorem statement and explain how the lemmas.


Do professors get paid for supervising students? Do professors get paid for supervising PhD students / honours student's projects?

If so, typically how much?

In the US, supervising graduate students is generally considered part of the normal workload of a faculty member and there's no extra pay for doing this.

The number of students supervised is typically a factor in tenure, promotion, and pay raise evaluations.  Not supervising enough graduate students can hurt your evaluations and might possibly result in your not getting tenure or promotion or a pay raise.

A grad student costs X dollars. This pays tuition, stipend benefits. The grad student eventually stops taking classes, the new cost of the student is X-T. (T is cost of tuition). Now if the professor still has X coming in (through grants and other funding sources) and the student only costs X-T, there is T left over that neither school nor student needs.

Source- Prof*** at Univeristy of ***


How to cite a subsection of a book for IEEE For example, we use pp. 4-7 for pages from 4 to 7 and ch. 2 for chapter 2, but how should we cite a subsection of a book when a chapter is divided into multiple subsections, e.g. 2.1, 2.2, ... in a way that's compatible with IEEE writing style?

how should we cite a subsection of a book when a chapter is divided into multiple subsections, e.g. 2.1, 2.2, ...

Rather than citing the entire book, e.g., [1], you can cite a particular subsection, e.g., [§2.1, 1], [§2.2, 1], ..., meaning section 2.1, 2.1, ... of [1]. With Latex, you can use \cite[\S2.1]{X}.

Going by this description of the IEEE citation style, you would just cite the page range, like this:

Chapter in book
[2] L. Stein, “Random patterns,” in Computers and You, J. S. Brake, Ed. New York: Wiley, 1994, pp. 55-70.

It doesn't seem to be necessary to give the exact chapter/section number.


Can I put details of evaluations results in the Appendix? I'm about to send a paper about performance optimization in the field of Cloud computing. My target conference has a limit of 10-pages for the main section with unlimited pages for appendixes/references. My question is whether it's a good idea to move small details of my evaluation results to the Appendixes (to save some pages for other stuff) or it's better to somehow fit them in the main section?
My current plan is to keep key important evaluation results in the main section (maybe only 1 or 2 graphs) and move every other messy stuff to the appendix, including comparison graphs, evaluation parameters, extracted latency/throughput data, and the most importantly, details of scenarios that I considered for the evaluation.
Is this a good idea?
P.S: M̶y̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶e̶r̶v̶i̶s̶o̶r̶ A senior researcher who hasn't read my paper is against this idea. He says: "you should only put things into Appendixes that if a reader misses them, he/she can still exactly understand what you did in your paper (e.g., proofs of theorems). Evaluation results are not in this category, and they need to be put in the main section." ... Of course, I agree with what he says, but my question is specifically about whether small details of evaluation experiments is fitting in this category or not.

I think your advisor gives good advice.
But if you are sole author, you can probably write it as you like and wait for the response of reviewers of the conference papers. But if you are too far off the "standard" you risk a quick reject rather than a suggestion to change it.
If you are only a co-author you need to negotiate it, of cours.e

Between the two of you, I'd go with whoever has more experience.


Can I somehow leverage my willingness to work for a lower salary in job applications? In the future, I will be on the market for a temporary academic position (postdoc or visitor) in the US, in math. Because of my lifestyle and financial situation, I do not need a large salary. Ballpark, let's say I would be willing to work an academic job for about half the typical salary.

Is there any way I can use this to my advantage? I mean: is it possible to use the fact that I am willing to work for cheap to get a job that is better (with respect to some criteria like quantity and caliber of research at the university, strength of students at the university, desirability of teaching duties,...) than I would have been able to get otherwise?

There is some possibility of this, but it would work only in certain restricted ways and in certain limited contexts.  I don't know of any reputable college or university that, when considering applicants for a position that already exists, consider an applicant's willingness to accept less than the standard salary as a point in their favor.  If you think this through, probably you can see why it makes everyone look bad.

You might have some luck getting an academic institution to make a position with an unusual combination of duties and salary that is tailored to you.  Here are some possibilities:

At some institutions, faculty couples "share" positions in some fractional way: e.g. the couple together has 1.5 positions and each does 75% of the work of a full-time faculty member.  If someone had come to me with this as a new idea I would have rejected it as ridiculous, but nevertheless it actually exists in the real world.  I know several examples.
Similarly, you may be able to arrange a single position which is "part time" in some specified way: so maybe it is a visiting teaching position with half the normal teaching load and half the normal salary.  In the very short term, such positions are common.  It is not directly in the spirit of what you are asking about, but the effect could be similar.
Finally, if salary is really no object, it is much easier to get a visiting scholar position which pays no salary whatsoever.  I did this myself once: the summer after getting my PhD (at Harvard), I moved back to my hometown (Philadelphia) and got an apartment in University (of Pennsylvania) City.  I noticed that there was a wonderful library and gym a few blocks away from me, and I presented myself "cold" in the UPenn math department with a copy of my CV and my PhD.  I walked out as a Visiting Scholar.  (Nowadays I think that what I did was a little weird: why not first contact some specific faculty member in the department?  Maybe I didn't know who to contact, or maybe I was curious to see if walking in cold and presenting Ivy League credentials would actually work.  It did!  This "position" still appears on my CV.)

If what you are interested is not covered by the above, then I would say: in general this will be hard to swing, but if you have a more specific arrangement in mind you can ask about that (e.g. here) and maybe it can be worked out.

Let me end by saying something that I suspect you already know: if you aspire to have anything like a conventional academic career in the future, advertising yourself broadly as someone who is willing to work at a discounted rate is a pretty bad idea.  If you do seek to pursue this idea of yours, I would do so with much discretion.

If you want higher caliber work I recommend asking for more, not less money. The reason is they are looking for a high caliber employee, and high caliber employees tend to ask for high caliber pay. If you ask for less they may not think you are a serious candidate.

Also, don't offer an amount unless asked for salary requirements. Sometimes an application will ask for salary requirements, but typically salary and benefits discussions take place after the interview process when the hiring manager knows you are the one they want.


Example of joint submission to PRL, PRA We are thinking about a joint submission to Physical Review Letters, and PRA per these guidelines. I'm however not entirely sure how the two submissions should be exactly related, e.g. how much overlap the works may have.

Does anybody have some insights here? Or just a few example papers that have been jointly published like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if the journal permits it, publishing one work as two papers is viewed as dubiously ethical in the scientific community.  I recommend doing a joint submission only if the scope of the two papers is obviously different.
Also, it's a lot of trouble considering 75% of PRLs get rejected, and you can't take your joint submission to another publisher.


How to find a job without recommendation letters? I am currently almost homeless and without job. Can someone please help me in right direction of finding an academic or non-academic job? Minimum salary will be acceptable.

I hold a PhD in mathematics. I am 43 years old and I am from middle east but citizen of a European country (Germany). I have been away from academia for 4 years (mostly to take care of parents) and I can not get any recommendation letter.

I can teach and have experience in teaching most mathematical topics up to PhD.

I have been applying for many teaching jobs around the world with no luck. With no recommendation letter my applications don't go through.

I also have a few unfinished research projects.

Edit: addendum in response to Buffy's answer.

  If you are just four years past finishing your doctorate it isn't too late to re-connect with your previous professors, and maybe your advisor. If you wait much longer it will be, however.

In fact I got my phd before I was 30. So it was, relatively, a long time ago. Contact with my previous professors isn't a possibility.

  Another thing, not very palatable, is to get some low-level position in a decent university where you can do more than is required by the job.

I have tried applying to many "low-level" positions but recommendation letter is a real obstruction.

  Further down the list of suitable options is to look at good secondary institutions, rather than universities. There are many of them that find people with doctorates to be very desirable. The job is mostly teaching, and mostly introductory subjects, but it can pay the bills.

Secondary institution as a high school? I am trying to find a position in a high school too but a "license or teaching certificate" is needed in most cases and in my situation it takes time and money to get that.

  get connected to a research group so as to get some papers into publication. Initially they might be joint papers, of course.

I have a few publications which I guess are relatively good. I try to publish preprints too. But it is getting hard because I will be out of money very soon.

What surprises me is that when I look at my cv it doesn't look extremely bad but still I have got not even one interview or any offer. And asking people in the subject to write recommendation letter has not been successful.

I was hoping maybe someone with similar situation who managed to solve his/her problem can help me by sharing a bit of his/her experience.

The situation is difficult so the solution may also be difficult. I can offer only a few suggestions.

If you are just four years past finishing your doctorate it isn't too late to re-connect with your previous professors, and maybe your advisor. If you wait much longer it will be, however. The best way is to visit your old institution in person and spend a couple of days talking to people and reminding them of who you are. You can also talk to them about research ideas - theirs and yours. But you can also let them know why you have been away and that you'd like to get back into academia. If you were once well regarded then you still are, but they need a reminder. Such a visit might be the best "vacation" you've ever had.

Another thing, not very palatable, is to get some low-level position in a decent university where you can do more than is required by the job. If you can let the tenured faculty know of your skills and interest, maybe you can be given interesting tasks that will lead, after a while, to good letters of recommendation. It may not be possible to work up from a low level position to a better one at that university, but you may be able to leverage it for a position somewhere else.

Further down the list of suitable options is to look at good secondary institutions, rather than universities. There are many of them that find people with doctorates to be very desirable. The job is mostly teaching, and mostly introductory subjects, but it can pay the bills. If the place is also located close to a good university, you can make yourself known there and try to get connected to a research group so as to get some papers into publication. Initially they might be joint papers, of course.

But don't let your age be a deterrent. You will get older no matter what you do. Many people don't start their career until your age, in fact. But take a long view into following whatever opportunities present themselves, always with a view to a higher level position.

A recommendation letter is not always a pre-requisite to get a job. A company looks for dedication in an employee. Rather than applying online, show up with a hard copy of your CV. Maybe do some voluntary work (if applicable) for them and try to get their attention with that.


Verbatim self-plagiarism in introductory sections I'm reviewing an article where the authors are kind of experts of a particular subject and published several similar studies in the field, some even in the same journal.

This apparently leads them to reuse part of their own content between articles, sometimes self-citing sometimes not.

E.g. there are a couple of paragraphs in the Introduction that are a copied almost verbatim from a study from the same authors (which they don't cite). They maybe changed some comma or a word here and there.

What's the best practice in peer-review about this scenario? Is this ethical? Can this be considered a reason for rejection?

It's mostly in introduction and material and methods sections and the study overall is novel enough, so I'd be inclined to suggest a self-citation. But I'm curious if there is a consensus about how to handle such cases.

There seems to be no risk of getting credit twice for the same work here, as the papers are fundamentally different. It is possible that more modifications to these paragraphs would make them better suited for their role in the new paper, in which case suggesting that the authors do so is appropriate for the referee. However, rewriting the paragraphs just for the sake of it seems like a pointless endeavour. As a referee, you should not suggest that the authors waste their time on this.

This sounds like a clear case of self-plagiarism, and self-plagiarism is a violation of academic integrity.

Definitely a sufficient reason to reject a paper without considering any merits of the paper.

Possibly a sufficient reason to contact the institute of the authors and inform them about questionable research ethics of their employees.


First postdoc as "the big filter": myth or fact? I am currently halfway through my first postdoc (a two-year position). I have a Ph.D. in physics, published 3 papers during it, and since this postdoc is in a slightly different field, I still haven't published anything.
I am moderately comfortable in my original field, meaning that if I work for some months on something, it will most likely render some sort of publication (usually in Journal of Physics A/B or Physical Review A). However, my current situation at work is very stressful. I have less freedom than I thought I'd have to work on my own ideas, and the research environment is very dull. I find myself working on problems that might be simply too hard, and perhaps I can't solve them.
I started to wonder what will happen if I turn out not publishing anything during these two years. When I was struggling in my Ph.D., thinking about dropping everything and becoming a monk, I heard from many experienced researchers that it was OK if my Ph.D. was crappy. That the Ph.D. is not the "big filter" in the life of a researcher... And that this is the function of the first postdoc. They told me this is a decisive moment because people will not hire you afterward if you do poorly. In your Ph.D., the fact that you're still more of a student than a researcher usually saves you some explanations, but for the first postdoc, the lack of publications looks really bad when applying to a follow-up position. This is naturally very simplistic (a postdoc might not publish anything simply because his/her research group is non-existent, the boss is crazy, family problems, etc). However, if I were myself on the board analyzing applications, I cannot promise I wouldn't consider the lack of publications as a red flag.
If this filter is true, it makes the situation of someone who just happened to be unlucky in his/her first postdoc quite depressing. Maybe they will have to give up academia and go to industry, even if they don't want to, just because no one accepts them. As I really don't want to move away from academic research, I'm starting to get very anxious about this topic...
Well then... Is my stress justified? Will I be able to find another postdoc after this one even if I don't publish?

Like many other things in academia, this depends.
Having an unproductive postdoc is a point that will definitely come up with any future hiring committee. I’ve sat on a few myself (CS departments) and productivity is considered at every period of your academic life. Of course, if a candidate had a stellar PhD it will make up for it to an extent, but it’s entirely possible that such a candidate will be passed over in favor of a candidate with a less impressive PhD but a more consistent performance overall.
Such “performance gaps” always raise questions - does this indicate an issue with working independently? Working in a group?
Another point to consider is reference letters. Your postdoc host is not likely to write you a glowing letter if you are unproductive, which will hurt your chances of landing a position later on.
That being said, research does not always result in publications. If you made progress on an important problem and have at least a preprint/workshop publication, this may be enough. Hence, your focus should be on productivity rather than on the end product.
A postdoc is also an excellent time to show your commitment to the research community. Organizing workshops, taking on higher-ranking roles in program committees, setting up tutorials, writing a useful blog... All excellent ways of putting yourself out there and making yourself more marketable. Of course - research should absolutely come first, as it is the main evaluation criterion.
Remember - you successfully completed your PhD, you can (at least according to empirical evidence) succeed in this as well! Good luck!

That the PhD is not the "big filter" in the life of a researcher... And that this is the function of the first postdoc. They told me this is a decisive moment because people will not hire you afterwards if you do poorly.

This is a myth.

Will I be able to find another postdoc after this one even if I don't publish?

Not publishing during your 2 year postdoc will not be a decisive factor.
So what is the big filter?  Your overall publication record.  To get academic research jobs, your publication record must be larger, better quality, and more relevant than the competition.  Only the hiring committee knows what the competition has done.


What to remember when supervising female PhD students? I have been supervising a female PhD student for a couple of months. She is the first female PhD student I am supervising and got the position on merit.

My view is that her gender does not/should not change anything in how I supervise her or what I expect from her, the rationale being that doing so might ultimately hurt her in her post-PhD career. For this reason, I have not brought up her gender in any of our discussions. I briefly contemplated telling her that I will treat her the same way as her male peers, but did not do so because it seemed wrong (as in "of course, why is he telling me this?").

Lately I have been wondering, however, whether there are things I should do that I might not even be thinking of. Perhaps my own experience and the male-dominated environment blind me so that I do not perceive my own sexist/reverse-sexist attitudes and ultimately do not do things that I should be doing (and vice versa)? So I am interested in reading advice/views on supervising female PhD students (in male-dominated academic environments).

A few notes to address anticipated follow-up questions: Yes, I am male. I did not specify where my institution is located because I am interested in a range of opinions/comments. The agency that finances her project offers a special stipend to attend workshops/meetings for female students; I have encouraged her to attend.

My view is that her gender does not/should not change anything in how I supervise her or what I expect from her, the rationale being that doing so might ultimately hurt her in her post-PhD career. For this reason, I have not brought up her gender in any of our discussions. I briefly contemplated telling her that I will treat her the same way as her male peers, but did not do so because it seemed wrong (as in "of course, why is he telling me this?").

That is exactly the advice I would give in this situation, so congrats, you've already figured it out.

  The agency that finances her project offers a special stipend to attend workshops/meetings for female students; I have encouraged her to attend.

Try not to overdo the encouragement. I get so much spam inviting me to assorted "women in engineering" events.

On a related note, you might want to watch out for the possibility that you (or your department) might have a tendency to overuse the students who are "visible" minorities (race, gender) in publicity materials and outreach events.  Some people don't mind (some even appreciate this), but some dislike being used as "poster children" to show how diverse the department is. (There's a joke in this TV episode, where the African-American doctor calls out his college for overusing him in their brochure by photoshopping him into the same picture twice.)

I'm sure people must have published studies about how female PhD students are statistically more likely to have families and be concerned about work-life balance issues, and how you have to be more supportive, etc.  But all that really just comes down to being communicative and supportive of your students, whatever their individual needs might be. For large numbers I'm sure there's a gender dimension there, but at the individual level it's just about being a good supervisor to an individual student.

I understand I might have lost people wit the following answer. In short: the dream supervisor has many skills, a specific role, yet one goal: elevate the  skills of a PhD student to the level where she/he can fly away by herself/himself, despite three types of stereotypes: his/hers, yours, those from your (her/his+you) environment.

Warning: the following answer contains strong allegorical content. One can replace the two bird species by other animals, male/female, as well as other broad categories like majority/minority. This was partly inspired by:

a Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon (see below),
the French anime Wattoo Waatto super bird, whose music has been in m head during the whole vacations, and which depicts two fictional bird species (one being goose-like) to describe/critize human traits.

It helped me to   step aside the question, as done in some science-fiction or utopian texts.

First, to limit the standard gender biases and stereotypes, try to view the situation from  an other perspective: you are a duck, the field is 95% duckish, and you are supervising your  first  seagull student. Both are quite similar: they are birds, they fly and  dive, they are webbed-toed. But one common trait, though less visible at first glance, is more important to scholars: they can  travel thousands of miles (out of merit). The allegory  is about focusing on the most important traits in academia, not the obvious ones that matter most in society.

Yet, in this allegory,  some birds are more familiar than others in everyday life. And the others  are more prone to songs or poems.

So I am a duck, supervising a seagull student. The work place is 99% duckish. Ducks shake wings to other ducks, but they like to cheek kiss seagulls. There are other such "habits", that distinguish seagulls and ducks in workplaces.

So I told my seagull student: "I do not really like to shake wings with birds, cause wings get dirty (and you can get bird flu), but this is a habit. So I now ask people if they want to shake wings or else. With those who dislike that, we can agree on a different sign. What do you prefer?".

My intent is to show that seagulls can make their own rules in a duck world, slowly but firmly.

When I have changed some of my unconscious duck manners, I can observe other ducks behavior: do they behaved duckish? do I feel this may affect the seagull's feelings?

Then, observing  a specific behavior (daily comments in public about the seagull's feathers), I can tell the seagull (face to face, afterward): "I have seen this behavior, it seems duckish and misplaced to me. If you feel like this too as a bird (or a seagull in first place), may I suggest you to talk to the duck face to face, and tell it what happened, how you feel, and what you would like in the future (tools from emotional intelligence). If you do not want that here, or  cannot handle it right now, here is some help you can use: myself, or another trusty person (if possible, a senior seagull you know in HR department. Just tell it. You should also know that even 'talking about how duckish ducks can be' can  help".

On my own, I did tell a follow duck how duckish it was with the seagull, from my point of view, not involving the seagull, and told the duck  to think about it. I even had to make public comments about its feathers on a regular basis to ring the bell. It worked.

Finally, I confess a little  tern bias when I present scholar birds to the seagull (at meeting, conferences). Showing how other senior  seagulls perform in the field can be important for identification and future positions. But warning: you can learn that maybe your seagull student self-identifies as an eagle. You should adapt.

That is your duty as a bird advisor: help the bird students find their way. And for yourself: do the same with any other bird students, even ducks.


How to know whether a Faculty member has done good work or not I have completed my Masters in Pure Mathetics in India and I want to join a Ph.D. program in Algebra and Number Theory.

For that reason, I am checking the profiles of the faculty members of the different institutes where I can join.

But the problem is I don't understand how to judge the profiles of the faculty members and what are the parameters.

Should I look into the following:

From where the faculty member has done his Ph.D., is it from India or from abroad.
Under whom has he done his PhD
What are his publications? Where has he published them?

Though I can check 1 and 2 but how do I know about his publications?
How do I know that he has done good work in Algebra and  Number Theory or not?
It's not possible for me to know about all journals in Algebra and Number Theory as I have not done any publication before?

I really need some help as I don't want to join an institute where no good faculty members are available?

How to judge? Please help.

The institution and the advisor give you very limited information. Of course, a very bad person would not be admitted at a very good institution, but even god institutions and great advisors have mediocre students. The same goes for journal names. All but the top 10 journals sometimes publish mediocre papers, and some great papers appeared in middle ranked journals.

A better way to judge people is by looking at the reviews of their papers in MathSciNet or Zentralblatt. Citation numbers are easy to manipulate, so having many citations does not necessarily mean that you are good, but few citations are a bad sign. A good indicator is by how many different authors someone was cited. If you have many citations by few people, something seems fishy. You can also look at their most cited papers. If many of them are surveys, books, or pose many open problems, the citation number is exaggerated. Worse, if there are many self citations. Next, you should read the reviews themselves. Since you want to know what the faculty members are doing, you should do so anyway. The personality of the reviewer plays a role, but I would expect that every decent advisor has some papers that are praised by the reviewer. If all reviews are short summaries of the main results, the reviewer was either lazy or didn't find anything important in the article. Articles without a review are usually worse.

A big red flag is the use of predatory journals. Some people might be too innocent to see through this scam, but every half way decent research can be published in a real journal. Not necessarily a good one, but one which has actual peer review going on. On the other hand, publishing in a little known journal, or conference proceedings is not a bad sign, unless it is always the same journal/conference, or more than a quarter of all publications are of this type.

Other answers have commented on how to evaluate the quality of research output. In my opinion it is at least as important to evaluate if a supervisor is a good match for you. Research excellence does not necessarily correlate with excellent mentorship of students. Sometimes (maybe even often) famous professors have little time to devote to their students due to other commitments.

A good way to find out is:

Contact current/former group members and ask about supervision style/lab culture, does this match with how you work?
Find out where former group members have gone afterwards. Have they moved to prestigious institutions/got faculty/industry jobs, does this match with your career goals?
If you want to travel/visit other institutions, see if the potential supervisor has an international network of collaborators (for example look who the co-authors are on their papers).
If possible arrange a face-to-face meeting, or a phone call, to get a sense of if this is someone you could spend the next few years working closely with.


How to politely decline the university medal? I have studied in an Australian university and throughout my university studies, I declined all prizes awarded to me. It is not that I have had something against my university but it is due to my own ethical values. I believe that a true scholar should have no interest in fame and prizes and that is exactly the reason I declined all the prizes given to me so far (I want to remain a true scholar).

It's not that I see myself superior to others in any way; indeed, I always claimed to be the dumbest student in my university. If it takes someone 10 minutes to understand a math theorem, it would take me at least 3 hours to understand it properly.  Some people unfortunately misinterpret my statement:

  I believe that a true scholar should have no interest in fame and
  prizes and that is exactly the reason I declined all the prizes given
  to me so far (I want to remain a true scholar).

I did not mean in any way, that someone who accepts prizes is not a true scholar and if that is the message conveyed by my statement, then I apologize from the bottom of my heart. This statement only applies to me; if I accept prizes, then I think that I am better than others and because of this I decline prizes because I want to remain a true scholar. I do not want to feel superior to others. This will make me not work hard. Some people said that I am following Perelman's footsteps. I honestly do not even consider myself a successful student; how could I dare to compare myself to Perelman. I am only an ordinary dumb student.

I just received an email from the university that this July (my graduation ceremony), they will award the university medal to me. I am going to decline the university medal but I am not sure what is the best way to do this politely so that the academics at my university will not be offended.

Update: After discussing this with the dean of my faculty, I agreed to accept the university medal. It will be annotated in my academic transcript, record, and testamur. This helps my Phd admission chances in the top 10 universities (something I was told by academics at my university).

The problem is as @WetlabWalter says: the medal is not just for you - it is for everybody that supported you and, in fact, indirectly for your class, and lecturers.

You have a good reason (for yourself) to decline it, which is commendable.

But you might offend those who recommended you, those who taught you (who would be indirectly honoured) and possibly your classmates.

If on weighing your principles against this you still stand by your decision to decline the prize, send a letter as long beforehand as you can, explaining your position and emphasise your history of declining prizes (to indicate that they are not the only one on the receiving end of the rejection).

Don't decline on the event itself, this will be a major embarrassment.

Finally, if you develop a reputation for declining prizes, grant managers may decide that they'd rather not put glamourous, funded programs your way, so be prepared for limitations of funding in the future. For anybody as brilliant as a Grothendieck or Perelman, that should not be a problem, but if that's not the case, take that into account.

PostScriptum: The balance of prize distribution is very fine. A prize is supposed to honour the recipient. But if the recipient is absolutely outstanding, the recipient would add as much glamour to the prize as the other way around. Therefore, a rejection penalises also the prize-giver.

Why are prizes at all relevant? You have a point in that a true scholar should not be motivated by prizes and honours. However, in today's very crowded fields, a prize is like a flag that demonstrates "this is how things should be done". It sets a signal of example for others. By rejecting the prize you send the message that you do not care to be an example; which is entirely your right - but you must be aware of that.

Interestingly, Sartre was one of the few people declining the Nobel prize (literature). It was claimed that, some years later, he decided that he'd rather be in need of the prize money and asked whether he could get it retrospectively (after this story, he couldn't). Whether this anecdote is true or false, it makes clear you have to think hard whether there could be a constellation whether you could regret your decision - it doesn't have to be for the money, of course.

Just a few minor points in light of the useful answers already given:

If a True Scholar should not have interest in fame and prizes, that does not necessarily mean s/he would decline them, it means s/he would not mind them when studying/researching. So your conclusion does not seem to follow from your ethical stance (which I am not judging). At least, it does not necessarily follow. Going to a lot of trouble to refuse an award seems to indicate some level of interest.
If you had not already decided how to act, I would have encouraged you to give a moment's thought to the following question: Do you believe another person should get the award, or no person should get the award? Assuming it's the latter, I think that a refusal to accept the award phrased not as personal humility but as a principled objection to the system of awards would be less offensive. However, as @faisceaux suggests, in Australia things are more complicated.
When I was a Teaching Assistant I would often argue against grading students. I mean, obviously you want to mark errors in homework and make comments about the content, and a pass/fail is reasonable (usually) - but I didn't approve of putting people on a scale of who's best, for multiple reasons which I won't go into. Of course I was never made the TA-in-charge of any course I was in.


Why attend predatory colleges in the US? I just read this article about predatory colleges in the US:

  S. Cagle, These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.

I am not from the US and didn't ask in the comments of that site because I wouldn't want to insult anyone concerned.

I just wondered: before you enroll for any degree, would you compare what the college's officials say with reality? Like, looking on the internet to find people with a degree from that school who got jobs, asking a local employment worker, asking at a local employer if they would consider giving a job to someone with a degree from that school, etc.

How is it this article says the students were so young they could not possibly have known they were being tricked? If you are old enough to go into debt with thousands of dollars for a college education, how can you not be old enough to check for the quality of that education first?

Why would people attend predatory colleges?

A few possibilities:

These people genuinely don't know any better. They think a degree is a degree. I would guess that they come from parents that did not attend college. A friend of mine started at a for-profit school because she really didn't know that there was a difference between my 4 year bachelor degree and her 12 month online degree.
People want to take shortcuts and these schools know that.
These schools spend a lot of money on commercials and marketing to try to convince people to attend. It isn't surprising that people would fall victim if you see a commercial for a school 3 times a day.
These schools also promote their currents/past students to help recruit their friends. I have certainly seen this on my own social media feeds.
I once had a manager at a large company that was working on a degree from a diploma mill because the company was imposing a new policy that all managers had to have a degree, but it didn't matter from where.

So to directly answer your questions: No, a lot of people probably don't look into the details of past student success. The type of people that would do this, aren't the ones being targeted by these schools. And even if they do, you're bound to find some successes (confirmation bias) which the school will proudly advertise.

Unfortunately, these types of schools prey on uneducated people, so while it seems like common sense to us, those people may really be getting tricked and yet the government continues to have surprisingly loose regulation.

There are lots of rubbish colleges in my country that offer "degrees". There is even a place called MIT which is the Manakau Institute of Technology, not to be confused with the top league place in the USA.

The pass rates are high in the rubbish colleges. In the US they would be probably called "diploma mills". The property developer "BOB JONES" wrote a book about it called "Degrees For Everyone". This book was intended as a bit of a joke, but in the future it will become a cornerstone for academic reform.

The real success rate of a college is the employment outcome ratio. The employment outcomes are terrible at the easy colleges and very good at the good colleges. In my country the labour market is relatively deregulated so if someone with a degree can't get a job in his or her field the pay is a disaster. In other words if you end up with a macjob in the service industry you may never pay off the loan and never own a house. People must think very carefully about whether it is worth it to take out a student loan. Unfortunately most young people don't think that way.


What can I do if I don’t completely understand a paper? Our team finished a paper 3 months ago. However, we use a result from another paper in a very top journal (one of the best). There are quite a lot misprints and somewhat mistakes. We can fix most of them but one inequality which they didn't have explanation why this inequality is true. We have spent 3 months to ask people (some extremely top mathematicians, they published many papers in the top 5 journals) and no one understand...We also asked the authors, but it seems that they don't want to explain that to us...We are really lost and don't know what to do...Shall we submit our paper? We really can not make sure that the inequality is true...

PS. This result is crucial in our proof...

Now, we have clarified the 'gap', there are some problems in the proof, the assertions are not accurate/correct. However, luckily, the final result is correct. After discussing with one of the authors, we confirmed that it is a gap and it took us quite some time to fix it.

Well, some people told me that the 'big guys' do not care about the details. I am not sure whether these incorrect details would lead to wrong theorem. As a young scholar,   I have to say that I am a little bit disappointed at math research (well, maybe my field).

Ask on mathoverflow!

It's a site like this, but for math at research level. There is incredible expertise in all fields of math (I know of) over there. Before you ask, look at "How to ask"  and also take a look around at the site to get a feel for how the folks roll.

If the paper clearly states the inequality is true and it was peer-reviewed and published in a reputable journal, you can assume it is true. The rule of thumb here is that you need to be able to fully understand the results of the paper you use, but not necessarily be able to reproduce ever result you cite.
For example: when in any field you use statistics (e.g. an inequality), you need to understand the final equations you are using. However it would be silly to require almost every scientist to be able to independently prove each and every equation from scratch.
The same is true for various measuring machines. As a scientist you need to know how to use your equipment and what it can and can't do. However beyond that, it is perfectly acceptable to cite that it works and treat it as a black box.


Should peer review invitations be accepted if one is unemployed? My colleague lost his job in academia due to COVID-19. He has zero income at the moment and there is little to no funding or employment opportunity in his field (invertebrate taxonomy) in his region (a developing country). He is now looking for other non-academic jobs.
But being one of the few experts in his field, he is still frequently invited to review manuscripts. Each of these reviews takes a long time (especially large taxonomic monographs) and takes away his time to develop skills and look for jobs. And hours spent on peer-reviewing are not remunerated by anyone. Should he just outright reject such invitations? Should he give reasons for rejecting such invitations too?

Peer review is not a tax: if it doesn't make sense for somebody to peer review, they shouldn't do it.
Instead, I view peer review as:

an opportunity to contribute to a community that I care about, and
beneficial to me in helping me "keep my tools sharp" on critical thinking, writing skills (even as a reader!), and exposure to authors and ideas I might not otherwise read.

Because responsible peer review takes a significant investment of time, however, I set a budget for myself on how much time is sensible for to contribute over the course of a year, and I refuse assignments that would take me over that budget.
I would thus advise your colleague to consider a sensible budget, given their current situation and how much those motivations make sense to them. Yes, peer review may take time away from job development. On the other hand, peer review may still feel meaningful as a contribution, an intellectual connection, a motivation, etc.
Maybe the budget should be zero.  Certainly the budget shouldn't be 10+ hours per week.  But it may be entirely reasonable to put in a couple of hours of peer review per week if they still enjoy and benefit from it.
Bottom line: the amount to continue peer reviewing is an assessment that your colleague needs to make for themselves based on their personal situation and to periodically reassess as that situation evolves over time.

Is this a colleague or a friend? If a colleague, I think it is presumptuous to tell him what he should or shouldn't be doing with his time. I'm sure he is aware that he is under no obligation to review papers. (If not, then it would perhaps be helpful to point this out.) Whether he "should" review papers or not is like whether he "should" spend time gardening, reading textbooks in new fields, learning a new language, etc. -- none of a colleague's business. (Perhaps he enjoys the stimulation of reviewing papers; I often do.)
Of course, if you're a friend, this is different, but what your friendship is like is for you to assess.


How to find OA free to publish journals with a JCR ranking? I would like to find journals that:

are ranked with JCR (no matter how low) and
have open access (anyone can access the papers for free) and
are free to publish (authors are not required to pay)

Maybe I am asking for a unicorn, but I think this should be feasible.
If I'm not mistaken, arxiv.org only fails in the first point. If someone could provide (a link to) a list of such a kind of journals that would be awesome. If such a list does not exist, how would I go about creating a list.

Please feel free to edit anything.

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning

Journal of Machine Learning Research

General

Journal of Universal Computer Science

Mathematics

Combinatorics

The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics

Statistics

Journal of Statistical Software

Sherpa Romeo, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/, might be helpful to you, as well.  I think you'd still have to do your cross-check against the JCR, though.


I'm afraid of chemicals. How do I handle my required uni biology class? I have a freshman requirement as a science student for at least 3 core science classes, and I picked physics as often as I could. However, I must choose either chem or bio as my third. I chose bio.

The thing is, I'm deathly afraid of chemicals. I don't know when it started, but I can hardly touch household cleaning products without obsessively washing my hands afterward. I broke down crying a few times in high school bio, to my embarrassment. Oh yeah, and I'm also pretty much a hypochondriac. It's not something I can control.

I'm afraid that my grades will be hurt because of my phobia. There are several hands-on labs in the course, though I am not sure if we are working with very hazardous chemicals. The exact course name is cell and molecular biology. How should I approach the course, and does anyone have any advice for avoiding chemicals in the lab? I wish I could opt out of a class due to fear, but alas.

What should I do? Thanks in advance.

To further echo one of the comments:

Seek professional help. This may be a trained psychologist, or even just a general medical practitioner, who may be able to direct you to another institution if necessary. You may have access to mental healthcare through your institution if you do not otherwise have access. Specific phobias are treatable. Formally addressing this will do two things for you:

It may or may not help you overcome your fear. This may not be necessary just because of a single bio class alone, but it sounds like your condition is limiting your life in other ways, and this just may be a good trigger for you to seek a treatment that may improve your life in general going forward.
However, even if the treatment is not successful, or takes too long to help you much with your class (treating phobias can be a long-term project, from my limited  understanding), your condition is now on record, which allows you to approach whatever office in your university is responsible for handling special needs students. They should be able to convince the teacher to find alternative ways for you to do the class without handling chemicals, but they will almost certainly not act unless you have documentation from a qualified medical professional.

As other already say, go to see a doctor for help.

Meanwhile you can try eleventh commandment of work in laboratories: Thou shalt not work without proper protection.

Wear protective gear - lab coat, goggles, mask and nonpowdered nitril gloves. If you aren't sure you can stack them. We do use this trick to be sure our hands won't be contaminated when working with nasty stuff.

If you are not given such, you can buy gloves in drug store and all the gear can be bough in dedicated stores. If don't know how to find it, you can ask any M.D.


How to explain a recent bad semester to graduate school admissions? I am an international student with a 3.7 US equivalated GPA. I applied to a grad school program in the US fresh out of undergrad and was accepted.

I was a part-time student at that grad school. During the next semester, I took up some courses at a local community college instead of the grad courses (physics 1, chem 2, o-chem 2, o-chem lab). I ended up having situational depression and got help really late in the semester. I was only able to withdraw from one course early in the semester, and failed two courses, and got a B in one.

I am currently re-thinking the grad program I applied to at first and want to apply to another one. However, this program is more prestigious. While my undergrad GPA  and experience are good enough for the school, I am worried about how my recent bad semester at the local cc will be interpreted to the admissions office.

BTW: These courses that I bombed are not pre-requisites for the program I am applying to.

Should I discuss this bad semester in my personal statement? Are my chances of acceptance really low because they are recent grades?

If you explain as eloquently as you have here what happened, I cannot imagine a semester hurting you.

What impresses admission officers is when they see people who have a passion about themselves, and express
intellectual curiosity, but at the same time, are willing to be vulnerable.

If you explain what happened on your statement of purpose, just as you have here, that will go along way with admissions.

My answer is that one semester of subpar grades will not hurt you.


Physics masters with undergraduate in computer science I am currently entering my third year of undergraduate. When I entered college I was torn between physics and computer science and ultimately chose computer science. I like cs, but I'd like to apply it towards physics applications. I've spent the past two summers working at software companies as an intern, so I have no research experience as of now. I need to start applying for research positions soon if I am to get into graduate school I've heard.

I am wondering if it is possible to get into a masters program for physics with my undergraduate in cs?  My school offers a minor program for physics which covers mechanics, E & M, light/waves/heat, and quantum which I am currently working towards as well. For the research, is it even worth applying to physics labs if my major is computer science or should I stick to applying to cs labs? In a physics lab maybe I could aid in preparing apparatus that involve programming or electronics?

I would say you would absolutely be able to get in to a physics masters program as long as you have taken the pre-requisites for the specific program.  Most programs have a list of courses that must be taken to be considered for admission.

I got my undergraduate degree in Geology and Geophysics, but I became more interested in engineering towards the later part of my undergraduate.  So I was sure to take all of the requisite engineering courses that I needed to get into an engineering masters program.  Now I'm actually working on a PhD in Civil Engineering.

Moral of the story... It is absolutely possible, but be sure to check out the program requirements for the physics programs you are interested in applying.

I am wondering if it is possible to get into a masters program for physics with my undergraduate in cs?

Absolutely! Especially if it's for quantum computing, computational physics, or physics of information.

My school offers a minor program for physics which covers mechanics, E & M, light/waves/heat, and quantum which I am currently working towards as well.

Good idea. This will not hurt!

For the research, is it even worth applying to physics labs if my major is computer science or should I stick to applying to cs labs?

Yes it is absolutely worth it! You may wish to contact some professors in the physics department where you're applying (especially ones who you might wish to work with as a research student), to get a feel for the situation, because while I say it's in general absolutely worth it to apply, specific universities/departments can have their own unique quirks.

In a physics lab maybe I could aid in preparing apparatus that involve programming or electronics?

That is completely true, especially if you're going into computational physics, theoretical physics, or mathematical physics (which tend to involve a lot of programming), or experimental physics involving a lot of electronics (assuming you took some electronics or hardware courses in your CS degree).


Create journal database: is there any easy way to auto download all the citations of a volume or all the volumes of a journal? I am trying to create my own research database, the first step I do is to identify the journals that I need to read and refer to. The way I create the searching database is copying all the articles titles and authors one by one, or downloading the endnote citation format and input it into the endnote database. I found this process very time-consuming and wonder if there are ways to download all the citations of a volume/journal at one time or a few times?

Thank you!

Most journals deposit metadata at CrossRef, and CrossRef offers an API for accessing these data.

To access journal-level data, you need the journal's ISSN. You can find it on the journal's  website.

For instance, to access the metadata of the journal International Organization (ISSN 1531-5088), you can look at:
https://api.crossref.org/journals/1531-5088 (You should use a JSON-Beautifier to format the text).

Look at CrossRef's API Documentation to find out how to fetch the journal-level data you wish to get.

Just as an example, if you modify the URL to this one: https://api.crossref.org/journals/1531-5088/works?sort=issued&order=desc&filter=from-online-pub-date:2020-01&select=author,DOI,title,references-count - - then you will see all articles from the journal International Organization issued since January 2020, and for each article you will only see those metadata that you selected in the URL, i.e. the author name, the DOI, the title of the paper, and the number of references the paper contains.

Good luck.


Untrue negative comments on RateMyProfessor website I pay close attention to how my rating scores/comments are like on the RateMyProfessor website. Very rarely I reported inappropriate comments (which violated site guidelines) for removals, and the average score has been decent (4.8).

Since last week, after I reported a comment (with improper language which violates the site guidelines), very suspiciously the same student (who is angry about their bad grade) has been trying to (even until now) leave 10+ intentionally untrue, deceiving comments with low scores.

My average has now been brought down to below 4.0. I've been frustrated because this severely compromised all true comments left by previous students. I reported this to the site and am still waiting for a response. Any suggestions?

As the comments suggest, just ignore it. You will always have disgruntled students even if you do a great job. Some will blame you for their own shortcomings.

But the best "defense" against such negative comments is the positive comments from those who think you served them well. If those appear also, then a reader can easily judge it for what it is.

If you want to "sabotage" such things, just point other students to the site, without comment. You don't need to "defend" yourself when your other students naturally do so themselves.

A slightly different perspective, even if the end result is the same of other answers.

Is that site well-designed?

You reported the untrue and duplicated comments.

If the site admins act on it, it means that the site works: the problem is solved.
If the untrue reviews stay there, it means that the site is completely bogus: it's not to be trusted at all with anything.

So you should not care either way. Not "because Internet", but because if this problem isn't solved, the site itself becomes irrelevant.


Publisher has changed many terms in section/subsection titles to acronyms I have an accepted paper which is now in the proof stage. Throughout the paper we define various acronyms, since we use these terms lots of times. For example:
These two acronyms are introduced in the first section:

A Bayesian network (BN) is a well known machine learning technique for (...) The conditional probability distribution (CPT) requires the specification (...)

Afterwards we generally used these acronyms, but not always. For example, at the start of a new section. We felt it is better to start the section with

Bayesian networks were introduced by (...)

than with

BNs were introduced by (...)

I think it is much easier to read the first way. Afterwards we do use the previously defined acronyms.
They have even changed these in the section titles. For example, a section is called

Estimating the Conditional Probability Tables of a Bayesian Network.

They have changed this to

Estimating the CPTs of a BN.

To me this does not look right. The reader who just wants to quickly grasp the contents of the paper will likely be confused.
Is there any convention about this? Do you think I am right to suggest the complete titles?

You should not assume that all changes introduced by the typesetters are the result of enforcing some house style. You should also not assume that these people are particularly competent. If they modify your text in some nonsensical way, you have two choices:

Page 7, line 15: Replace "Estimating the CPTs of a BN" by "Estimating the Conditional Probability Tables of a Bayesian Network".

Page 7, line 15: Please replace "Estimating the CPTs of a BN" by "Estimating the Conditional Probability Tables of a Bayesian Network".

Personally, I'd choose the first variant. This is not a request, this is an order. If they don't comply, escalate to their supervisor.

It could be that they find your titles overly long and verbose (and they may have a point - they do this work for a living). But your point about giving people a fresh start in a new major section is valid too.
An in-between option would be identifying the major/minor terms in your titles and using acronyms only for the minor terms. For example:

Estimating the CPTs of a Bayesian Network

If you're already thinking about Bayesian Networks (and know what they are) then "CPTs" is easily recognized. More easily than

Estimating the CPTs of a BN

But it's less ponderous than

Estimating the Conditional Probability Tables of a Bayesian Network

It's a matter of style, and since it's your text in their journal, you should both have a say in it. Aesthetics and clarity should be balanced against each other as well. Treat this as a negotiating position, and consider the question from both viewpoints.


Publicly available extended summary of PhD thesis and manuscript submission In my country, if a PhD thesis is written in national language, the candidate must also submit an extended summary of the thesis in English, which will be deposited in a national repository and will be uploaded to the appropriate section of the university's website. This English-language document is approximately between eight and ten thousand words long, its structure is pretty similar to that of a scholarly article and can be downloaded by third parties without cost or restrictions.

I have the following two questions:

Can a candidate submit an English-language manuscript based on the extended summary to an international scholarly journal? Should the extended summary fall in a different category with regard to prior publication than theses "published" in ProQuest ?
A few journals publish extended abstracts and extended summaries of PhD theses as they are - these items are not peer-reviewed and the published version is essentially the same as the item submitted by the PhD candidate to the Doctoral School. This is only for increasing visibility of the original thesis and serves purely research dissemination purposes. If the candidate's extended summary is published in a journal, would it be considered a prior publication?

If you submit the summary (or a substantially similar paper), you should ask the relevant people at the journal beforehand. We can't give an authoritative answer for any particular journal, let alone all of them.

To your first query, the candidate can submit the extended summary of his thesis to a scholarly journal. And more likely of it is not to be rejected, basis the fact that it is a summary of thesis, leaving other selection criteria aside. I belong to a finance background and got the extended summary of my PhD Thesis, post submission of my thesis in an international journal of finance. Secondly, it will, in my opinion, fall in the different category with regards to the published thesis.
For your second query, I am quite unsure of whether it will be considered a prior publication. I will check with my supervisor and will get back to you with his suggestion.


Are there any undergraduate research programs available online? Is there something like an undergraduate research programme (given by a good institution) in mathematics/theoretical physics which provides a research opportunity in which I can collaborate online and leads to a publication?

I think you should check The Open University's site.

Under the Studying for a Research Degree section in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology site I found this:

  Part-time research students pursue their projects at a distance, under individual guidance from expert supervisors.

So maybe it is a possibility if you actually would like to earn a degree from that university, but since this institute is famous for the excellent quality online and distance education I think you should write them a message and ask for information. I guess they would have good suggestions about your question.

PS. I've taken an online course from this University on the FutureLearn site, and the material's quality was very good.


Is it acceptable to ask for a first review midway through the review process? I have written a paper on COVID-19 with data that goes up to the 31st of July. I would say that the interest in this paper will reduce significantly as time goes on. I submitted the paper to a fast-track process of a relatively high-profile journal on August 5. This is the second time I have submitted to the fast-track process of that journal. Last time, both reviewers were assigned in a single day, and the first round of reviewing was complete in two weeks.
This time things were much slower. Reviewer 1 took over a week to assign. According to status updates, Reviewer 1's review is in as of August 20. A second reviewer still has not been found. I asked the journal whether there was any way I could assist, and they asked if I had reviewer suggestions. I thought a bit and provided a suggestion. That was before the weekend and I have not heard back.
Here’s my conundrum: If Reviewer 1 has recommended rejection, then the paper will not be accepted, so I think waiting any longer is a waste of time. I would like to see Reviewer 1’s review and feedback, implement it, and submit to a different journal ASAP, preferably still in August (so the data is less than one month old). I feel this is an unusual thing to ask: “Based on Reviewer 1's report, is the paper likely to be rejected? If so I'll just withdraw, make the changes, and submit to a different journal now.” If we wait till a second reviewer is found, that review takes time, and then the paper is rejected based on Reviewer 1's report, then I will be quite frustrated. I will have waited for little purpose and the paper will now be out of date and less likely to be accepted by another journal.
There's always a certain amount of chance with submissions. Do the reviewers like your paper – that's often quite subjective. If they don't, I'll roll the dice again, and would like to ASAP.

I'm interpreting your question as whether it's acceptable to ask for a decision based on the single reviewer report received so far. You could certainly ask but the editor's reaction is probably unpredictable. Some will be OK sharing the report (this gets more likely if the report isn't controversial), others will not be hurried.
The problem with sharing the report is that the decision might not agree with the report. There are all sorts of reasons why the first report might be rejected, e.g. (and this is an intentionally egregious example) if the reviewer says "this should cite A, B, C, D, E papers, aside from that it's acceptable". In that case the report effectively says nothing except ask for some citations. The second reviewer report will likely be the decisive report, and showing the authors the first report is rather pointless (other than to show how bad our journal's reviewers can be, i.e. not desirable).
Even if the first report is an honest and relatively positive report, the decision still might be reject, if the second report is sufficiently poor. In this case I would be more inclined to share the first report with the author before the decision, but I would stress that there is no decision yet.
It sounds like you're considering the case where the first review is damning enough to cause outright rejection. If that's what happened, the journal doesn't need to invite a second reviewer, they can already reject your paper. If they haven't already rejected your paper, then unless the editors are too busy to look at your submission, your paper still has a chance.
tl; dr: "Based on Reviewer 1's report, is the paper likely to be rejected?" is not an answerable question, unless Reviewer 1's report is well and truly damning, in which case they would already be able to make a decision. You could still ask for the review, but not every editor will show you the review.

You should not request special treatment because your paper is about a major current event.  Journals will have many papers about the event, and they already know those papers are urgent.


Value of a German Industrial PhD in India I have an offer for a full time job with a contract for 3 years in which I would be a PhD candidate in Germany at a reputed firm. I would have a supervisor at a technical university besides a supervisor at the company. The area of specialization is wireless communications. My plan is to go back to India in a couple of years and start working as an Assistant Professor in an IIT or some reputed institution in India.

Will this PhD have the same importance as compared to a PhD done at a university when looking for such Professorship in India?

As to address the second part of your question, almost all IIT's have a strict requirement that after your PhD (Which can be from Germany) you need to be a post doctoral fellow for a minimum of three years (assuming you took 3 years to do your PhD, bringing your total experience to 6 years). It is also mandated that this must be outside your home country.

Hope that helps.

I think you are going very much in a good trajectory. As for getting an Assistant Professor job in India, do not worry. Doors would certainly be open here. Keep doing the good work that you are doing and you will certainly be rewarded.


Our teacher is encouraging us to use cracked software I'm taking a course named Numerical and Computational Methods Based on Mathematica (Or in Chinese: "基于Mathematica的数值计算方法"), but Wolfram Mathematica is a bit expensive for me to afford. On the first lesson of this course, the teacher told us how to crack this software, and asked us to have Mathematica 11.0 installed on our computers by this Wednesday. However, I just don't want to use cracked softwares.

While it is true that software cracking is inappropriate and even illegal, almost everyone around me uses cracked softwares(such as PS, AE...). As far as I know, nobody in the rest of our class refuse to crack and install the software.

So what should I do? Having a talk with my teacher or simply quitting this course?

Follow-up:

Finally, I've decided to quit this course, because I think I can gain the same knowledge by learning Mathics, a free software recommended by some answers below.

Thank you for all the awesome answers!

Follow-up II:

I feel obliged to mention that now everyone can download the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers. From my understanding, the Wolfram Engine implements the Wolfram Language and is the very kernel of Mathematica, so this is basically a free full version of Mathematica, just without the notebook interface.

My advice is to just use the pirated software and not rock the boat, just like Drunken Code Monkey, for example, mentioned.

This issue isn't something that you're likely to solve yourself. Instead, you're most likely going to spend large amount of time and energy on nothing and produce no results. The fact that your teacher just expects you to get cracked Mathematica is a proof enough that it's something completely normal and accepted by your society. Now, I'm not going to preach to you about your own personal ethics or if you should feel bad about the situation or not. Others have given more than enough options.

Instead, I'm going to talk a bit about how things like this are resolved in other places. I myself am from Serbia, a country that has been recently opening itself to the idea of actually giving money for software, so I've seen a bit of how negotiations between foreign software companies and locals work.

Basically, on one hand, the "manufacturer" of the software is suffering what some might consider a loss, since you, your fellow students and the institution aren't paying for licenses.
On the other hand, keep in mind that they also have a direct benefit from you: You're increasing the user-base of their software.
 Mathematica isn't new and it's not going to disappear because you aren't paying for it. Instead, it has a chance to thrive: You're using Mathematica and not competitors. That means that you'll be most likely comfortable using Mathematica and not some other tool that take getting used to. At your future employer's place, you'll probably feel more comfortable again using Mathematica than alternatives.

This means that your area is a very interesting potential market for Wolfram. Sure, you're not paying now, but directly, that fact doesn't cost Wolfram anything. Keep in mind that software prices are not calculated by how much a license costs (because it costs pretty much nothing and the trend is to reduce physical costs as much as possible), instead they're calculated by how much potential customers want to pay for it. In some cases, the "normal" prices might be very far away from what you can normally afford.

The bottom line for software companies is that they want money, specifically, more money than they invested into the creation of software. Their user-base is a potential source of money. If the users are paying, that's great, if they're the non-paying type of users, you want to convert them eventually into paying type of users using various methods (student licenses come to mind, for example). If you spend resources to convert the non-paying users into non-users, you just wasted your own money for no profit at all.

The result is that, if Wolfram has a sufficiently large user base in China, and at the same time, the political situation in China changes to a point where Wolfram can start negotiations on licensing, the educational institutions could end up getting real licenses for their computers.

These licenses could be either payed individually, or through an agreement with your government for a form of collective licensing. They might even be "donated" as a show of "good will". There might be an agreement for a combination of donated and purchased licenses or a certain ratio of tolerated "non-purchased" and purchased licenses, eg. you'll buy 5 and we'll let you use up to 15 licenses or similar. There might be an agreement that a company could be allowed (or maybe even given government backing) to persecute or at least aggressively negotiate with commercial pirates in return for giving licenses to government and educational institutions. Sometimes, it's much easier to put pressure on a large for-profit company that has money to pay licenses than to put pressure on a smaller institution that in the end won't even be able to pay anything.

Possibilities are great, depending on what the company and relevant institutions manage to officially or unofficially negotiate. Do note that, if the political climate is ripe-enough, such negotiations can be very profitable for the company. After all, some money is much better than no money, as long as it doesn't take too much effort to obtain it.

The teacher did not tell you to get the cracked version of the software
If I may interpret your description literally, this is what happened:

The teacher showed you how to do a crack
The teacher told you to have the software available

Surely step 1 is unethical, and probably immoral, but it is still your choice whether you want to use the crack, or whether you decide to get the student license (which is in fact not unreasonably priced from my perspective).

In response to some comments: In my university it was not the responsibility of the university to provide resources, but students were expected to buy their own books and software.
Teachers sometimes showed us how to use the copy machine, or how to perform a crack, but it was always our choice whether to follow their example.
As a courtesy most (not all) software was made available on a few computers, but that is besides the point.


Is it fair to offer students a last-minute extension to finish a test? A friend of mine who is a CS grad student at a US university took a class in which the students were given an extra hour on a two-hour exam. The trouble is that this offer was made in the last five minutes when the professor realized the students were not able to finish answering all questions.

I am personally against this kind of offerings because it feels like they do more harm than good and reflects poorly on the professor's planning. Students plan their approach to solving a test based on the available time and often speed up in the last hour or 45 minutes to complete as much as possible. This certainly degrades the quality of the answers. Now when there is a sudden offer of extra time, many students will be confused on how to make use of this time. Ultimately, it will come down to the students who have better time management skills rather than those who really know better answers.

So, the question is: Is the practice fair and if not what a student can do about it?

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this site, students often seem to think in terms of "fairness", but upon sufficiently intense scrutiny the concept is so fuzzily defined that it may well be that the only "fair" grading scheme is to give all students the same grade...an outcome which would certainly be unacceptable to many students.  Moreover:

Ultimately, it will come down to the students who have better time management skills rather than those who really know better answers.

Any way of administrating a course favors students with certain incidental skills over others.  Giving a prearranged, timed exam favors students with sufficiently good time management skills over students with very poor ones.  And not only that, the students who live "on-campus" are advantaged over commuter students.  Students who have a watch can look at it, whereas others need to twist around in their seats to look at the clock in the back of the room [if there is one], and so forth.
Every seasoned instructor I know would agree that most exams test subject-unspecific study skills as well as "real knowledge".  Not to be too much of a downer, but the idea that a student has a well-defined "real knowledge" is a convenient reification, something that modern academic culture must believe in approximately in order to function but which it is dangerous to take too seriously.
The real issue is to design the exam experience so as to test a reasonable set of skills, weighted in a reasonable way.  There is no universal way to do this: it is better to be as explicit as possible about what skill set you want your exams to test and look to see if they do what you wanted.
Anyway, a better question is: is this a good practice?  I think the answer is no, at least in many situations.  Here are two obvious issues:

An announcement which occurs five minutes before the end of an exam may come too late for students who have already left the exam.

Unless the cohort of students taking the exam has the identical academic schedule [this is prohibitively unlikely in many graduate programs at American universities], it is very unlikely that every student will actually be able to stay for the extra hour.

I would describe the above two issues as concerning "fairness".  Any student who did not get the extra hour for either reason would have a very legitimate complaint.

I am personally against this kind of offerings because it feels like they do more harm than good and reflects poorly on the professor's planning.

I agree that it reflects poorly on the professor's planning.  Whether it will do more harm than good to the students' performance depends on the exam and the students.  I agree that many or most students would find the experience of learning that they have 50% more time at the very end of an exam stressful, and many would be resentful that they would have used their time differently had they known this information at the beginning of the exam.
In summary: unfair?  Yes, if certain things happen, otherwise maybe not.  A good practice?  No, I don't think so.  It sounds like a rather inexperienced / sloppy instructor to me, honestly.

I'm surprised so many people think that's fundamentally unfair; I've had professors add time to a test on several occasions that seemed to make the test more fair.

Example: one of my physics professors (in a Thermodynamics class) always scheduled our midterms (3 of them) for 7-9 pm on Thursday nights to make sure it didn't interfere with class schedules. He once added an hour to the end of a test because we were slower than he expected, and he did so with only a few minutes left. His reasoning was that he made us set aside two hours to guarantee that we could finish it if we studied hard enough, but he didn't care if we needed extra time to prove we could figure the material out -- the test was about what we knew and could solve, not how quickly we could do it. So if you couldn't stay the extra time, it wasn't his problem -- you would've done fine if you'd studied as much as he recommended, and you knew in advance what topics the test was covering. Basically, it was your own fault if you did poorly in the initial two hours, and not his problem if you needed more time but had to leave. In that case, it absolutely was a case of the class not studying enough -- we readily admitted it -- and it was up to the individual whether they wanted to use the time to review their work, finish/improve partial answers, or start problems they hadn't yet gotten to (or leave without using the extra time).

As for everyone complaining about people who'd already left: either they were already done with the test and satisfied with their answers (if I don't want to use my last ten minutes, why would I use an extra hour?) or they had no idea what they were doing so they gave up and left early. Either way, it's not the prof's fault. Example: another physics professor (in a Quantum Mechanics class) made a typo on a midterm once, making the problem unsolvable. Nobody pointed this out to him until we had twenty minutes left on a two-hour test, by which time several people had already left. He told us what the question should have been, and gave us an extra half-hour to make up for time we may have wasted on his mistake. Someone asked what he would do for the students who left early, and he responded that either they: figured out the typo for themselves, solved the problem, and left (unlikely); applied very incorrect math to wrongly solve the problem, thus demonstrating they had no idea what they were doing anyway; or they gave up early, in which case it wasn't his fault that they chose to forfeit their remaining time (and who would give up early if they thought they knew the material?). In no situation was it his problem that they weren't there to benefit from another student identifying the typo, so he wasn't going to give them more time. If they didn't have time to stay, it wasn't his fault -- as in the previous example, students who knew the material well enough never should've needed that much time to begin with.

I do see a problem in non-STEM fields, or on short-answer/essay tests. That would be unfair since it would give some students more time to proofread and otherwise analyze their answers when there never should've been a time management issue in the first place. But when the test is all about do you understand these math/science concepts well enough to apply them?, extending the time allowed for an exam can be very fair.


Whether to report someone receiving extraordinary levels of help for PhD This is a real life scenario, but I'll refer to the people involved as A and B.

A and B are both retired. A is doing a part-time PhD (humanities), but for at least a year* B has been working nearly 9-5 every day helping A. The help seems to involve research (finding and reading papers/sources), discussion and input, proof-reading and re-touching the thesis, but I don't know about actually writing large chunks although I wouldn't be surprised.

As far as I know Masters and PhD theses usually need a declaration saying something like "this work is all my own except where explicitly marked".  To me it seems as if the declaration would be false, and anyway, even if person A declared they'd received significant help presumably joint PhDs aren't granted, and B isn't enrolled on a course of any kind.

What's my best course of action? Ethically, I feel as if the university should know about this, although presumably the fact that a lot of work has been done (by whomever) shouldn't go to waste.

(*The help has been going on for years, but I only know the specifics of the time invested for the past year or so.)

Getting help is in and of itself not a problem. Proof reading is perfectly fine. Discussing research with others is very much a part of doing research, so having a sparring partner is a good thing. Even finding and reading papers is not a problem if person B is just interested in the research and the discussions. So a lot of the things you mentioned are not necessarily problems.

If B wrote large portions of the text and A fails to clearly mention that, then that is a problem. But you will need proof before you can take action.

I understand your concern and the issue at hand. While others have alluded that you may be jealous or have an ulterior motive, I will put that aside and consider the task at hand. Yes it is possible that person B could be helping person A in a more than reasonable acceptable manner but how can you prove it? It's acceptable to have discussion about points and have some proof-reading your thesis as I am sure you already know; but what is the tipping point? Unless you can prove that Person B wrote Person A thesis for them then I would leave it alone. I guess one could consider Person B, a research assistant, in that case. I guess another question is if Person B feels exploited in some sense.

As you mentioned you can wait to see how the person is acknowledged in the manuscript but in my mind it would have been at the end of the road in any case.


Advisor threatening to pull his name from accepted paper that I submitted without his knowledge Recently, I submitted a research article in the journal "Applied Mathematics and Computations" and fortunately my work got accepted with a very good response from reviewers.

However, I made the mistake of submitting this paper without the knowledge of my coauthor (who is my advisor). When I told him that our paper had been accepted, he became really upset with me and warned me that he would withdraw his name from the article.

Nothing is wrong with the article except that I did not ask him before submitting it. The reason I did not ask him was because he took an unnecessarily long time (2-3 months) to edit the draft of the manuscript.

How should I convince him now?

PS. Please also see this "Query".

You are wrong for putting the name of someone on a paper and submitting it without asking them for permission. Having them as an author communicates to the world that they approved the content and agree with the conclusions. Implicit in that is that they signed off on the manuscript. Some people get angry when this happens even if the paper is fine and they agree with the conclusions. Some don't. This happened to me recently, and even though I didn't agree with the recommendations of the paper, they weren't wrong, scientifically, so I decided to let it go.

You need to figure out a way to smooth this over with your advisor and to work with them to get edits turned around more quickly. That being said, don't lead the discussion by bringing up the turnaround time issue. That's combative.

This basically is the counterpart of the question:

Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?

In fact, the same ethical standards apply here. Authorship is only justified by a significant contribution to the actual work. The supervisor role by no means automatically qualifies for that – in neither direction.

The following is – again – from the "DFG Proposals for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice" (pp.82f, emphasis added):

  Authors of an original scientific publication shall be all those, and only those, who have made significant contributions to the conception of studies or experiments, to the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data, and to preparing the manuscript, and who have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it. [...]

So putting his name on a paper he did not consented to is actually a case of scientific misconduct.

However, if we assume that your supvervisor has high ethical standards, the situation is even worse: The unfortunate, but way more common system of misconduct is that professors insist on "automatic coauthorship" on their students papers (which, in some cases, they do not even read). By automatically putting his name on the paper, you leave the impression that he is a supporter of this unethical practice!

If you want to thank somebody or underline their great support, you can safely do so in the Acknowledgements section of the paper.