My student published a preprint of our published paper without me as an author One of my former students uploaded without my name a paper we just published in a top physics journal. The fraudulent paper is now appearing on the Google Scholar search results below the original paper we published in the physics journal. If people try to cite the fraudulent paper from Google Scholar, my name does not appear.  The fraudulent paper without my name is appearing in the Google Scholar profile of all the co-authors.

I wrote to Google Scholar to report this. But not sure if they will change their search results to add my name. I am a woman of color, and I feel the former student is making my work invisible and not respecting my contribution. I was the adviser and the main driver of the work.

Any thoughts on the actions I should take? The student has graduated.

Responding to questions and comments here:

The student uploaded the paper without my name onto his own repository. He then manually created an entry on Google Scholar with the article that does not have my name. I tried earlier today to create a similar article to what he did so I know the steps. You can add things manually on Google scholar.
The student left my lab because he did the same thing for another paper we had. He submitted the paper without my name. The editors contacted me because they knew I was doing that research and it seemed strange to them that I was not an author. I was also leading that research, proposed the idea, wrote almost the whole paper, and the student simply conducted the experiments with my guidance. Because of this prior I do not think it is accidental. I don't feel like asking a bully to please be nice and take down the paper from his repository. I know he is problematic and do not want to engage with him.
I mentioned that I was a woman of color because to me the actions of my student are because he does not value my work or contribution. In his mind I do not deserve to be an author. He is making my work invisible. We black women have historically had our work made invisible. Our contributions are seen as not worthy. Similarly, he likely does not see the value I bring to the work and hence is making my work invisible and removing me. In his mind I do not deserve to be an author.  I think it is helpful to contextualize that I am black because I think this is one of the reasons why he is blind to the value I bring to the research.
Good ideas on promoting the paper on the official site a lot. I will do that. I think that is the best solution and something I can control. Also good points that this is primarily annoying.

As far as I know, Google Scholar is entirely automated, and so those results will likely only change if the offending paper is updated or removed.

When you say the student 'uploaded' your paper - where did they do this? On a personal website? In a repository? Regardless, your first step is probably to contact the student and ask them to add your name or take the paper down. Bear Hanlon's Razor in mind: "never assume malice if incompetence would suffice".

If the student refuses, or ignores you, then (if applicable) you might contact whoever runs the website/repository, and ask them to amend/remove the paper. You might find that the editor/publisher of the original journal article is willing to support you here, as the republication may not be compatible with the licensing agreement originally signed.

Finally, since Google results are based on measures of how 'important' a website seems to be: you can cite, reference and advertise your original paper as much as possible, to promote it in search results.

This answer is not being updated based on edits to the question.

If the upload does not look like a journal article (e.g. no journal logo or journal formatting) and is not on a journal's website, then you should not worry about it.

People might post a large number of preprints to a large number of places.  There is no reason for them to be careful when they do it.  It's just a preprint and is not expected to be particularly accurate.

  If people try to cite the fraudulent paper from Google Scholar my name does not appear.

You still get credit for citations that contain typos.  You also deserve credit for  these citations as well.  The only issue here is the minor inconvenience of counting those citations, which you can probably achieve by manually adding the incorrect document to your Google Scholar profile and combining it with the correct document.


Professor uses academic employees to write proposals I am working at a German university after I obtained my PhD. My professor asked me to write project proposals to get funding. One and a half years ago, I spent all my time during 6~8 months writing a DFG proposal that is supposed to be a joint effort between our university and another institution. No one contributed to the proposal except me. My professor used to give me some general feedback.
When we submitted the proposal, I wanted to submit it under my name but my professor convinced me that it would have higher chances under his name than mine and at the end, it did not change anything. I accepted, and the proposal was submitted under his name and the name of our partner and me as a co-applicant.
During the review process, my professor changed university and asked me to join him. However, due to private reasons, I couldn't join him. Now, the proposal has been accepted and I asked my former professor to keep the project in my university as my contract will end soon and because I wrote the entire proposal.
His answer was "No, I don't want to". I argued with him and he replied “it is normal to write a proposal for me when you are at the beginning of your postdoc”. In this situation, I am not getting any credit and the project will move with him and another person will be hired for it, where I might be unemployed.
Is it ethical that the professor uses his academic employees to write proposals and what to do in similar situations because I find it stealing my effort and credit?
EDIT
Currently, I am hired by the university and affiliated to a research group, so we can work on the project in our institution. Originally, the project was granted to my current institution.
EDIT 2
I think it is getting more into a discussion rather than answering a question. I allow my self to EDIT the question according to the answers and the comments. I didn't get a clear answer, but people were divided into three categories:

It is unethical and the professor did a terrible thing.
It is unethical but the professor has fulfilled his moral responsibility be offering a position in his new institution.
It is ethical and universities/professors can use employees or professional writers to write proposals. (Btw. I did not mention that I wrote the proposal but I also developed the ideas, where my professor did not agree with most of them).

The goal of my question is not to find who is wrong or to prove that I am a victim of my former professor's behaviour but to know if we are working in a healthy atmosphere or not and if it is unethical I would reject to write proposals for my next professor. Otherwise, I need to agree with the fact that this is how it works and continue doing it without feeling bad about my self.
EDIT 3
Consequently, I would vote to close the question as it is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations.

If I understand correctly, you (as a postdoc) developed a research proposal, your professor submitted it under their name, and the project was funded. Then you were sidelined --- you will not be a PI on this project and you will not even take any role in it. This is a terrible experience and I am sorry to hear it happened to you.
The professor's behaviour is wrong. Even for German academia, notoriously famous for being professor-centred and often exploiting young researchers unfairly, this is probably beyond what can be considered normal.
Now, what can probably happen if you expose the story? Likely, not much. There are two issues here:

It is impossible to verify reliably who was the author of the proposal. Even if you show the time stamped drafts, it only proves that you typeset the material and prepared it for submission. Your former professor may say that they explained you the main idea and asked you to type it. It's very hard to prove authorship.
Even when evidence is quite convincing, most academics and academic administrators won't pursue an established professor for a single case of academic misconduct, if it does not directly hurt the University. Ideas are stolen very often, but such stories rarely made headlines, so most administrators won't bother dealing with them. Of course, there are exceptions, when even a single problem can unexpectedly grow big and eventually cost academic their job (there were several such stories recently related to hot topics in political/social discourse). But as far as I see quite a few professors made their carriers by borrowing ideas of others and making their students and postdocs to do a lot of their own work.

So, what can you take from this story? First, you know that you can develop a winning research proposal. This is a sign of a great researcher! Not many people can do it in their postdoc. This is something you should be proud of, and this skill and dedication is something no-one can steal from you. If you decide to leave this story behind and focus on what's ahead, I hope you will be able to repeat this success and now get the full credit for your hard work and creativity.
Good luck!

Is it ethical that the professor uses his academic employees to write proposals and what to do in similar situations because I find it stealing my effort and credit?

Someone should come out and say it clearly. No, the behavior you described is not ethical. The professor clearly exploited your work and skills, and his blunt refusal to cede to your request at least partially shows bad faith on his part. How bad the behavior is precisely may depend on various details, such as whether he knew he was going to leave the university and was not straight with you about his plans and intentions at a time when you could have used that information to decide how much effort to invest in the venture. But any way you look at it, he took advantage of you.


Is it acceptable to cite people without putting the appropriate diacritics in their names? I've begun preparing my thesis and several key papers in my field are written by people with foreign accents in their names. While I have found a way to include this in my thesis with BibTeX. However it has come to my attention that many citations exported from online journals (as .rif, .enl, or .bib) or my previous EndNote library may not include accents in non-English names.

While I would like to attribute these appropriately it is clearly a laborious task to check for the sheer number of references included in a thesis unless strictly necessary. Therefore I have two related questions:

Is it acceptable academic conduct to cite authors without correct accents when citing them in an English language thesis (or publication)?
Is it common practice for reference managers or online export tools to support accents or author names (i.e., can I take it for granted that my existing library has included these characters correctly or will be necessary to check references previously imported by online databases)?

To clarify, this query concerns accents such as those found in names originating in French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Scandinavian and Te Reo Māori languages. Such as the symbols:

ó, ò, ő, õ, ø, ö, and ō

I'm not sure how far ethics comes into this, but omitting accents is, effectively, a misspelling of the name. If you need to cite something by Schön, and you instead write "Schon", I'd regard that as analogous to writing "Schöm" or "Schöh": pretty close, but certainly a typo. If I'm reviewing a paper, I will request correction of missing accents as I would for other misspellings, but I wouldn't regard it as an ethical breach.

In practice, there's a bit more leeway for missing accents than for other misspellings, partly due to former limitations in computer typesetting, and partly due the dominance of English as a scientific language and the frequent belief among native English speakers that accents are always optional. As Burak Ulgut says, some authors won't mind missing accents, while others will care a lot -- but since you can't know which is the case for any particular author, you should keep the accents. In some cases, missing an accent may have unfortunate consequences in the author's native language: if you cite a Swedish Dr Hörberg as "Horberg", you've just turned them into "whore mountain".

For citation purposes, the correct spelling is (almost always) the one on the publication itself: if, say, Miloš Blažek chooses to publish as Milos Blazek then that's how you cite him, no matter what it says on his birth certificate.

On the technical side: unfortunately you cannot take it for granted that exported bibliographic records will handle non-ASCII characters correctly, or for that matter that they will handle anything correctly. Bibliography record formats are a mess of partially supported, poorly defined standards interconverted by buggy code, and you should always eyeball the record after importing it to catch any errors (not only accents).

As you say, it's clearly a laborious task, but so are many aspects of writing a thesis :).

Generally it is standard practice to use as much of the original accent marks as the format allows.   (For instance a 7-bit ANSI or 7-Bit ASCII Email is very limited in what characters it can display.)

It deemed respectful to use the added effort to use special computer tools to support the proper accent marks.  Most word processors have these built in, but if not your OS should have a character select tool with "related characters" to find the various accented versions of a particular letter.

Additionally, you should check if there is a localized version of the research material for your region, some authors like to use localized versions of their pen-names, and in this case it would be rude to use the wrong pen-name, and citing a localized version of a resource can provide a lot of ease to the audience of your work when they are doing further research.


Undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate student — is that Bachelor/Master/PhD or Bachelor/Master+PhD/postdoc? I received an invitation to nominate students for an award that could be for an undergraduate, a graduate or a post-graduate student. I've seen those terms used before, but never been sure what they mean. I know Bachelor student, Master student, PhD student and post-doc.

The timeline:

Being a Bachelor student → Getting the Bachelor degree → Being a Master student → Getting the Master degree → Being a PhD student → Getting the PhD degree → Being a post-doc → ...

Then what do undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students refer to? Are undergraduate students exclusively students studying to get a Bachelor degree, or can it also refer to students studying to get a Master degree? After all, that's a graduation that they don't have yet. Literally speaking, it could also be "under" the PhD degree, but that's surely never used as such.

And a graduate student, is that then someone studying for the Master degree, er is it used only for people studying for the PhD degree?

But then what is a post-graduate student? Is this a post-doc? But post-docs aren't students anymore, so then it could only refer to PhD students. Or are post-docs considered students, too?

I am almost certain that post doc is not what is meant.

In English speaking systems outside of North America, and especially referring to Europe under the Bologna accords, an undergraduate refers to someone who is studying for, but has yet to receive, his first post-secondary education degree. Typically this degree is some equivalent of Bachelors, but in some cases students maybe enrolled in accelerated programs with a longer term of study that leads directly to (the equivalent of) a Masters degree.

A graduate student can, but not necessarily, refer to someone who is studying for a graduate diploma. In many countries having a Bachelors (or equivalent) is not sufficient in itself to qualify one for starting a postgraduate degree. One often requires a "good enough" Bachelors degree (such as one with honors). The graduate diploma is an intermediate step in which a student who has already received his first post-secondary degree studies further in order to qualify to enroll in a masters (or sometimes doctorate? I am not sure about this) degree program.

A postgraduate student refers to someone who has already obtained a first degree, and is now pursuing a second, third, or Nth degree beyond it. See, e.g. this Wikipedia entry.

A postdoctoral researcher is generally not considered as a student.

In English speaking North America, an undergraduate typically refers to someone studying for a bachelors, since almost all (if not all) degree programs go through that stage in North America. And a graduate student refers to any student studying for any degree beyond that of the bachelors (so that would be typically the masters or the doctorate).

In the USA  An undergraduate student is one who's working towards a bachelors degree; typically a graduate student is one who has a bachelors degree and is either working on a Masters are higher level degree; a postgraduate degree level refers to someone who has earned a masters degree and is in route to a higher level degree; a postdoctoral Student is when they have completed coursework for the doctor degree but still has other requirements to finish like a thesis or disertation.


Academic Misconduct with alternate exam? Minimizing damage? An individual I know is in an interesting situation and I was just wondering what you guys thought about it.

This individual had an exam conflict and emailed the instructor to arrange an alternate exam time to get rid of this conflict. Meanwhile the rest of the class would be taking the exam for this course at a later time that day.

After the alternate exam was finished, this individual answered questions and provided specific topics regarding the exam by his peers who would be taking that course exam later that day.

Now this individual received an email from the instructor accusing him of leaking information and reported it to the academic misconduct board.

Now I was just wondering if this is truly a form of academic misconduct.

Just a few notes to add:

I have fellow peers who have done the exact same thing and not face a single threat of being reported to the academic board.
Is it not the instructor's responsibility to prepare a different version of the exam for both the individual and rest of the class?
Furthermore, is it not also the university's and/or the instructor's responsibility to highlight the confidentiality of an alternate exam and notify the possible consequences? In all the rules and regulations, there are no clear cut rules for alternate exams or any offences that can take place.
Does this just come down to miscommunication and failure to provide reasonable notice?
From the rumours going around, the evidence gathered is a screenshot of a facebook conversation, is this even enough evidence?
And if so, would it not be a breach of privacy?
Another update: The individual did not know that it was going to be the same exam.

Thanks again and I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

UPDATE:

As a user pointed out, the second part to this question is how can this individual minimize the damage and not face severe academic misconduct?

If the facts are as you report them, your "peer" has engaged in academic misconduct.

  I have fellow peers who have done the exact same thing and not face a single threat of being reported to the academic board.

Your "fellow peers" didn't get caught.

  Is it not the instructor's responsibility to prepare a different version of the exam for both the individual and rest of the class?

No, the instructor is not responsible for preparing a different exam; the professor should be able to rely on the integrity of university students.  In any case, a fair separate exam would necessarily cover the same material.

  Furthermore, is it not also the university's and/or the instructor's responsibility to highlight the confidentiality of an alternate exam and notify the possible consequences? In all the rules and regulations, there are no clear cut rules for alternate exams or any offences that can take place.

Probably the the professor should have told the student with the advance exam to keep it confidential, but I'll bet if you look in your student handbook, you'll find a statement about illicit knowledge of exam contents.

  Does this just come down to miscommunication and failure to provide reasonable notice?

No, it comes down to someone revealing the contents of an exam to students who have not yet taken it.

  From the rumours going around, the evidence gathered is a screenshot of a facebook conversation, is this even enough evidence?

See Anonymous Mathematician's answer concerning Facebook:  "Why not?"

  And if so, would it not be a breach of privacy?

See Anonymous Mathematician's answer concerning Facebook: "Only if the Facebook account was hacked."

  The individual did not know that it was going to be the same exam.

Then he couldn't know it wasn't, either.

Your "peer" knew what he was doing was wrong and he did it anyway.  Now he must accept the consequences of that action.

The question was updated to ask about how to minimize damage.  That will depend heavily on the individual's history of conduct, any circumstances not brought out in the question, the institution's rules of conduct, and how tough the misconduct board is. However, I can tell you how not to minimize the damage: approaching the professor, dean, or misconduct board in a way that is obnoxiously defensive and argumentative.  If, for example, the individual says, "Nobody told me, and besides it's the professor's fault for not writing a new exam.  A screenshot is not evidence and it was an invasion of my privacy to rat me out!"  That will almost certainly lead to the worst possible outcome.

While not a prediction for the case in question, a similar case where I teach, if a first offense, would lead to a penalty grade in the course and a one-semester suspension from classes.  Second offense?  Dismissed from the university.

Note: It has been pointed out that this answer is generally in the context of higher education in the United States.  Given that a professor accused a student of academic misconduct for breaching the integrity of an exam, I expect it applies in the context of OP's question even though the institution is not in the U.S.

An individual I know is in an interesting situation and I was just wondering what you guys thought about it.

Before addressing this particular incident, let's consider that students are customers who pay a lot of money to buy the necessary tuition to get an education in some particular subject. However, universities do not treat their students as customers, they abuse their monopoly power they have for issuing university degrees. This is how you get into the problems associated with exams in the first place. The term "academic misconduct" should not apply to students unless they have engaged in fraudulent scientific work.

But given how the system works, it was a mistake to give the student the same exam as all the other students. Punishing the student for having talked about the exam (when not very clearly told that he was to keep his mouth shut about the exam) with his fellow students is another mistake. Students should be expected to freely discuss the subject, it's natural if someone has already taken an exam that this will be discussed, not because students are trying to find ways to cheat but simply because students are interested in the subject and want to be as well prepared as they can to take the exam.


Requesting All Student's Grades From Professor For the last few months I have been tutoring a student in a university math course and they just received their finally course grade which numerically was a 78, but to my surprise the letter grade they received was a D. The letter grade they received was due to a grading policy along the lines of the top 15% of students get an A,next 35% B's, then 35% C's, and the bottom 15% receive a D/F.

While a D is technically considered passing the student I am working with needs at least a C- for the course to count towards their program. Is it unreasonable for the student to request a list of all other students grades from the prof to verify that they were actually in the bottom 15%?

Normally for a student to verify their grade they can simply check their grades against the letter grade requirement in the course syllabus but that is not the case here.

Is it unreasonable for the student to request a list of all other students grades from the prof to verify that they were actually in the bottom 15%?

Yes, it's unreasonable.  It's perfectly fine to ask something like "My reading of the grading policy is that only the bottom 15% of the class receives a D or below.  Is that correct, and is my grade of 78 really in the bottom 15%?  I felt I was doing better than that, so I'd like to check that the D is correct."  Requesting the other grades themselves offers no more assurance that it's right (the only situation where it really helps you is if the professor just isn't capable of computing 15% correctly), it's more work for the professor, and most importantly it leaks information about how other people are doing.  For example, one of the top students in the class could use this data to make a good guess as to whether their rival had outperformed them or not.  The particular risks here might not be a big deal, but at least in the U.S. grades are considered private and should not be revealed.

Hard truth:
Grades are subjective, professors can give any kind of grade they want and there is little recourse. I've known more than a few cases where a parents whining to a dean will result in that dean leaning on the prof to change the grade, but if they're tenured the dead doesn't have that much leverage (go tenure!).

Also, by asking this you're implicitly accusing the professor of lying. Maybe they are lying, but you should be aware that this is what you're communicating and be prepared for what you get.


Is it ok to use "and/or" in my dissertation? I'm elaborating a small scorecard for a comparison between two technologies, I was wondering if it would be formally acceptable to use "and/or" in my bullet points, e.g., "Not automated and/or involves excessive configuration."

The construction "and/or" generally betrays a weak sentence construction. It's almost always possible to replace the use of "and/or" with a more satisfactory construction (such as "either . . . or" or "at least one of").

So while you are allowed to use it (unless your style manual tells you otherwise!), I think it's always better to avoid it in such writing. (One sign that it has not really gained widespread acceptance is the fact that most style manuals still tell you to eliminate "and/or" constructions entirely.)

I think that "or" means "and/or", but I might use the latter in rare cases where emphasis of the "and" possibility was called for.


How do people have so many papers in just one year? I am a 4th year Ph.D. student majoring in computer science. My advisors don't do anything for me unless saying that my ideas are really simple. I've got so many rejections for my papers, on the other hand, I see people who write more than 20 papers in a year. Can someone guide me on how is it possible? I cannot change my advisors and I should do it on my own.

A few remarks:

Those who write 20 papers a year typically write with co-authors. At this level of productivity, the authors often take over a part of the research and writing for the paper. More senior authors often do not conduct the experiments, but rather have a share in designing the overall idea developed in the paper and a part of the writing process. If you are really on your own and cannot join a team (e.g., take over a role in some other project work in your research group), then you can't expect this level of productivity from yourself. And ultimately, it's also not needed.
If your advisors dismiss your ideas as too simple, there are four possibilities:

the idea is actually quite simple, and others have tried it out and published about it
the idea is so simple that it's non-publishable
the idea is simple, it has been tried out, and the results were bad
your advisors are wrong

I've seen cases where the second case held, but later another researcher tried it as well and successfully wrote a paper about it.

About paper rejections at conferences: In my experience, the quality of reviews varies greatly between the conferences and the reviewers. Sometimes, reviewers take a lot of time to write precise reviews for why exactly they recommend a paper for rejection. These are very helpful reviews and should be taken very seriously. But then there are others in which for clear rejections the reviewer does not take the time to write up why exactly the paper should be rejected. Quite often, when the answer should be "the paper is overall not written well enough" or "I don't believe that the result is significant", the reviewer singles out something that is easily defensible objectively, such as a missing comparison against something else, missing references, or the like, and  bases their rejecting recommendation on that. The problem with these reviews is that while the reviewer is normally correct (but sometimes isn't), it doesn't help the author to address the core problem. Normally, your advisor should spot such reviews and tell you what to focus on, but if you get little help, that's not good.
If you see other published papers that are similar to your own ones, read them and then think about why they were accepted. What is the core contribution that the paper made? What is so cool about it that the paper was accepted, despite its inefficiencies? It may simply be that for the papers you are submitting, no program committee member has a good reason for why they should make a case for you that exactly your paper should be accepted. And then it is rejected even though it's not actually bad on any scale.
Solicit feedback from peers (fellow PhD students) if your advisors won't give it. Don't ask peers about feedback on grammar, spelling, and the like on your papers. Ask if they would be writing an "accept" review for the paper or not. Any why they would do that. Get feedback on the paper story and if the argument and structure is convincing.

Research a particular specific open problem until you are an expert on it and know its state of the art. Then think of a promising solution to it. Write it down. That is a non-simple paper, journal article material.


Should I mention undergraduate research history when writing a resarch statement for a faculty position? I am a PhD student applying to academic faculty positions in mid-sized institutions in the United States. I am writing research statements for ecological/environmental positions with a major focus on my current (graduate) research and my plans for extending my research in the future. However, I had almost 5 years of research experience prior to coming to grad school (4 of the 5 were while I was an undergraduate).

My question is, should I mention or incorporate in any way the research I was involved with as prior to graduate school? I am especially curious about work done as an undergraduate.

Also, does the quality of work matter? for example, I researched and published an undergraduate thesis but also worked as research assistant on a number of projects.

Do you feel that your undergrad research is a significant part of your research profile, or tied in with your current research interests?  If so, then yes.  If not, then I don't see it adding much value to your research statement.  For research schools, you want your research statement to be impressive, not watered down with minor results.  I was involved in 1-2 (unpublished---1 became a paper, which got accepted, but I decided not to publish) research projects as an undergrad, but I did not even think to mention them in my research statement.
Note any papers you published will appear on your CV, so the committee will already see these.

However, one place you might mention it is in connection with the prospect of supervising undergrad research.  You can say what a good experience it was for you, and how you would like to be involved in it on the other side now.  This could come up either your teaching statement and/or your research statement, depending on your application.  (I might put it in my research statement if the projects I was already discussing lead to good projects for undergrads.)  This could be a boon, depending on how much the departments you're applying to value undergrad research.

You should mention it (You still feel proud of it, don't you? Also, "full disclosure" is key, don't try to hide good/bad aspects of your career, they will come out and bite you in the worst way.), but emphasize your later performance. They are interested in your future research performance, of which presumably your recent performance is a better predictor than what came long before. Sure, seeing that the candidate has long be involved in research is a bonus, but I'd not consider it tipping the scales.

No, only tangentially involved in search committees, don't just take my word for it.


Is it OK to review a paper which builds on my work? Suppose I've written a paper which someone else (who I do not know) has built on. The new work is intimately related to mine; it would not have existed without my paper. I'm now asked to review the paper. Should I:

Accept because I am an expert on my own work, making me very qualified to review the paper; or
Decline because of conflict of interest - the paper cites my work so I could be biased towards accepting it since it boosts my citation metrics, plus I'm obviously flattered someone thinks my ideas are interesting enough to work on and I'd hate to discourage them with rejection?

You were probably chosen to be reviewer because it is built on your work and therefore have intensive background knowledge on this topic. As long as you have not worked and do not intend to work on something really similar during the review process you do not have a conflict of interest.

You should of course try to be objective. Giving a rejection does not have to discourage the authors if you give constructive feedback and make it clear that you find their direction promising.

If you feel like you might not be able to be unbiased you can talk to the editor about it.

No need to worry about a conflict of interest simply because your work was cited — as noted earlier, it's almost certain that either the author or the editor identified you as a reviewer because you had published in the field. That's how we find reviewers!


How to reference Chinese names? Following a question on here, I also decided to reflect on my referencing skills. My style guide APA Harvard 6th wants names as Last, First. But with Chinese names I have this problem: do I reverse their name or has it already been reversed?

And do all Chinese authors follow this last name-first name convention, so because of this ambiguity is it correct to cite all Chinese names e.g. Xiu Ling, with the italics always being the last name?

  When writing academic articles or essays, espeically in the bibliography, I also have trouble deciphering which to use for Chinese authors and what I do is tend to reverse it, because I know authors would not be aware of the Last Name, First Name convention in the west ***, especially if the Chinese authors in question do not have a big online presence (a name format set out by the authors themselves). And espeically if the style guide wants it a certain way e.g. APA Harvard wants it: Last, First too even for Western names e.g. Julia Roberts. Roberts, Julia. etc.

*** and if Westerners cite the wrong format e.g. Xiu Ling and they have to write it in APA style they may write it as Ling, Xiu incorrectly.

In publications outside China, I would expect Chinese authors to publish in the same format as other authors, "given name family name". Of course it is possible that the authors made a mistake, but ultimately you cannot necessarily account for that and I would suggest that it is not particularly likely.

However for Chinese publications, even those Chinese journals published in English, the order of the names may well be written in the Chinese format of family name first. Another thing to remember is that the vast majority of Chinese family names are one character/syllable, while given names may have multiple characters/syllables. So if there are authors with multiple syllables in the name, there is a good chance (although not 100%) that this is not the family name.

We are all living in one world. Giving names is different. So are Chinese names given in Singapore different from mainland Chinese names. If the family name precedes the given name, the original order of names is used in all kinds of references. There is no need of a comma since the order is not reversed. Also, everyone has to cite the full name as there is a limited number of family names for many people and the given name may help to really identify the author. No worries, the names will still be short. I find the ignorance of Chinese scholars unbearable and all these APA-style abbreviations not well thought for academic writings outside the psychlogical field. This needs definitely an update soon.


How should I handle poor English in reviewing an article that claims to be proofread by two native English speakers? I was asked to review an article written by non-native English speakers. I had never seen this before, but the manuscript includes a link to a certificate from a website called Textcheck that says:

  We hereby certify that Textcheck has checked and corrected the English
  in the manuscript named above.

  A specialist editor with suitable professional knowledge (M.Sc. or
  Ph.D./M.D.) reviewed and corrected the English. An English language
  specialist subsequently checked the paper again. The first language of
  both editors is English.

Unfortunately within the first few pages I'm already encountering clauses that make it obvious that this was not done to any depth. The issues are so blatant that even a quick glance by a native English speaker would catch them.

Should I point out major grammatical errors such as these in my review? Should I comment to the authors that they essentially got ripped off by this service (in more polite terms, obviously)? Should I comment to the editorial office?

EDIT: I also see that I can email Textcheck about the article. Should I do that? If so, what should I say/ask?

You should not email Textcheck about the article. The journal review process should be confidential, and you should not take the liberty to violate it. You should put the quality of the writing in your review. If it's still bad even after review by this company, then those are the breaks. It sounds like it still needs some help.

Just express your opinion, try and be objective and don't worry about what does not depend on you.


Do I need to disclose my academic misconduct on this grad school application? I have one incident of academic misconduct on my record from my sophomore year (I was guilty), and I received a grade sanction and disciplinary probation. This does not appear on my transcript and I am no longer on disciplinary probation.
I am now applying for PhD programs and some applications ask about conduct. On one application, I'm not sure whether I have to disclose my academic misconduct because of the wording of the question.
It asks if I have ever been "disciplined for academic performance" and gives examples like "academic probation, dismissal, suspension, disqualification, etc." For the same question, it also says: "Academic Infraction: Indicate whether you have ever been disciplined or placed on academic probation while attending an academic institution."
At least at my university, academic probation is something you receive for poor grades (like having a dangerously low GPA), whereas disciplinary probation is something you receive for misconduct (anything from underage drinking to academic misconduct). So I'm thinking I can answer "no" to this question, since I was disciplined for misconduct not academic performance, and it was disciplinary probation, not academic probation. It seems that "academic infraction" would be discipline for poor grades. But that "etc." makes me nervous and I wanted others' opinions.
I don't want to answer "yes" and put myself at a disadvantage when I don't have to, but I also don't want to mistakenly answer "no" and then be caught and have my application disqualified (or worse, get accepted, have someone find out about my academic misconduct halfway through my PhD, and be dismissed). I want to make sure I'm being truthful, but only as truthful as I have to be. For obvious reasons, I don't want to disclose this unless directly asked/required. Do you think I should answer "yes" or "no" to this question?
Edit: To be clear, I am not intending to deceive by being so particular about the word choice. I have disclosed my misconduct on other applications where it was clear that my answer should be "yes". I think it's understandable that I want to be absolutely certain that I am required to disclose it before I do. I am trying to be honest and accurate.

It seems that "academic infraction" would be discipline for poor grades.

That is wrong.  Misconduct is a type of infraction.  You were disciplined for an infraction.  Disclose it.

How likely are your LoR going to mention it? If they won't I would probably ignore the question if it's not on your transcript.


Going into a PhD expecting to take longer I'm in the following situation: currently I'm finishing my Master's in (mathematical) Logic in Amsterdam. I'm interested in doing a PhD (preferably in the US), either in something more applied or in continuation of my current research (set theory/proof theory). I've understood this logic department has excellent placement for PhDs (many go on to places like CMU, Oxbridge, Berkeley, Stanford) and the study program is considered fairly intensive. However, I have significant chronic health issues preventing me to study much beyond 70% of what is considered ordinary full time studies here, without it affecting my mental health (although I should add that in this program around 25-40% of the people don't fully reach the 100% rate). The illness does not affect my ability to do mathematics, just how much I can do effectively of it in a day. Therefore, in all likelihood I would need more time, or at least the possibility of more time, to finish a PhD successfully. Say the average time of some PhD program X to finish is 5 years, I might need 6.5-7 years. I've read many questions on this site related to my situation, but I get very mixed signals in the answers.
So:

Given the situation is it even reasonable to attempt a PhD?

Suppose I were to apply for a PhD in (say) the US, and I am honest and upfront about the  situation to my potential supervisor, would such extensions be possible? Or would it just mean an instant rejection?

If I'm open to pursue more applied avenues (logic in computer science perhaps) would this change the answer to the above two questions? The reason I ask is that I've gotten the strong impression that such programs are in general somewhat less intensive than those in pure mathematics. But this can also just be a symptom of superiority feeling that floats around in many pure math departments ;)

My advice, for the US, is to share your medical condition as narrowly as possible. Most US universities will have an office for student support in such things and they may need to know so that they can provide some services that will help you. But I, personally, probably wouldn't share it even with an advisor unless and until it proves to be an actual issue. I don't know whether this is a purely US view, but there are rules about discrimination for medical conditions here.
I also wouldn't try to work out in advance some "part time" degree. Just take as long as you need to take (caveat below).
I'm guessing a bit here, but also suggest that you are better off in pure math than applied math here, since the former seldom has deadlines to worry about. Research takes as long as it takes. And you are probably better off in a subfield that you already know pretty well to help you get through any coursework and comprehensive exams.
Don't worry about or suggest "partial stipends". Most doctoral students in the US serve as TAs, working with students in elementary classes, grading or running study sessions. Stipends without duties, as such, are pretty rare, though you seem to be writing about a pretty high level place where they may be a bit less rare. But they are likely funded by grants, even then.  If you can put in the time for that, then it doesn't need to end since you are providing a service that the university vitally needs.
Caveat: Some universities have a quite firm maximum number of years of study. Make sure you know about that before you begin, but also that you know what accommodation can be made in your case. And many students take seven years to complete for other reasons. You don't have to hit the median to be successful.
Again, the student support office can be your friend.

It sounds like what you need (subject to consideration of some issues that I will discuss soon) is to seek a part-time PhD candidature.  It is not impossible to get this, but some universities are reluctant to grant entry to the program because of the long period it takes, and the risk of non-completion.  Some candidates enrol in a part-time candidature because they have a full-time job (one of my past PhD candidates was a part-timer and graduated successfully) but there is no inherent reason you could not seek a part-time workload for other reasons, including health issues.

Given the situation is it even reasonable to attempt a PhD?

This is a matter of opportunity cost and it depends on many factors (e.g., how old you are, your ultimate career goal, etc.).  Don't kid yourself --- seven years is a long investment of your time and is a substantial opportunity cost.  You will also need to consider how you will sustain yourself financially for this time.  Nevertheless, if you really want to develop further in this research field, and you are still pretty young, you might find that seven years of study is a worthwhile investment of your time.

Suppose I were to apply for a PhD in (say) the US, and I am honest and upfront about the situation to my potential supervisor, would such extensions be possible?  Or would it just mean an instant rejection?

I can't really say whether being open about your circumstance will hurt your chances of entry.  That really depends on the views of the particular academics that scrutinise your application.  All I can say is that if I were the potential supervisor looking at your application, I would appreciate knowing up-front that you want to do the program part-time, and it would not bother me to have a student do this.  So long as the other aspects of an application are good (i.e., strong skills, good previous education, etc.) there would be no issue for me in accepting a PhD candidate on a part-time basis.  Probably the only issue would be interviewing the student to make sure they are confident that they can sustain interest in the topic for such a long period of time.  Other academics may have a different view, but that is my own view.
The other important thing to bear in mind here is that there is an existence after acceptance in the program that you want to think about.  It is best to get accepted under an explicit agreement that you will work part-time, and with work expectations diminished accordingly.  A PhD candidature can be quite stressful, and it will compound that stress if you put yourself in a position where your supervisors expect a higher workload from you than you are able to give.  Contrarily, if you have this conversation up-front, and you are accepted, you will be able to start on the right foot, knowing that the work expectation of your supervisors accords with what you are able to give.

If I'm open to pursue more applied avenues (logic in computer science perhaps) would this change the answer to the above two questions?  The reason I ask is that I've gotten the strong impression that such programs are in general somewhat less intensive than those in pure mathematics.  But this can also just be a symptom of superiority feeling that floats around in many pure math departments ;)

The entry requirements may indeed be different for different programs, but I do not think it changes any of the previous advice.


Should I take the TOEFL exam if I have graduated from a high school in the U.S.? I am currently a B.Tech. student in India, and am applying for Master's courses in the U.S. I took the GRE exam a week ago.

Does having graduated from high school in the U.S., where English is the native language, count as certification that my English is good enough? Should I still take the TOEFL exam?

Every school words the requirements, if any, for the TOEFL a little differently. For example, Harvard GSAS:

  Applicants whose native language is other than English and who do not hold the equivalent of a US Bachelor's degree from an institution at which English is the language of instruction must submit scores from the Internet based test (IBT) of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)

A quick look suggests that in general native language and the language of your Bachelor's degree is what matters and not the language of your high school.

If you are applying as an international student, you need TOEFL. It does not depend on you high school education. For international students, you will be considered as a non-native english speaker, so toefl is necessary. If you are applying as a domestic student (meanign you have citizenship/greencard), you dont need toefl.

Anyways, toefl is a very easy exam!


Should I call my adviser by her first name? I have worked with my adviser for a few months as a graduate student. Everyone, including her other graduate students, seems to call her by her first name. She never expressed a preference to me, so I've been calling her "Dr. Smith". She signs her emails with her first name.

I am worried that I am being awkward. I don't mind calling her "Dr. Smith", but during meetings where other students are present, it would be jarring to call her "Dr. Smith" while other students use her first name in the same conversation. So far, I have managed to avoid this issue by choosing my words very strategically to avoid directly addressing my adviser at all.

I don't wish my adviser to think that I am making some sort of statement by being unnecessarily formal. On the other hand, I don't wish to appear too informal either. Apart from that, once you've addressed someone by their title for several months, unceremoniously switching to their first name out of the blue seems like it would be very strange.

Is there any tactful way of resolving this predicament, besides waiting and hoping for the adviser to express a preference? I am in the US.

Excuse me, do you prefer me to call you Dr Smith or Ellen?

A polite question will solve all your doubts.

A person must never refer to there boss or somebody they work with who is in a higher position than you by their first name, if one of my employees called me by my first name, I would be deeply upset, it is unprofessional to use your bosses first name while talking to him/her, always use mr/dr/prof. [last name]!


Low math GRE subect test scores, but high scores on Major Field Test: Should I mention this in my letters of intent? I'm an senior math major in undergraduate planning on applying to around a dozen school's PhD programs in math. I think the rest of my application (grades, advanced classes, research experience, letters of recommendation, general GRE scores) is fine, but I am concerned somewhat with my subject test scores. Due to financial and time constraints, I was only able to take the test once, and I got a score in the 31st percentile.

Is this something that's worth mentioning in my letters of intent? Specifically, I was thinking of mentioning that when I took the MFT (major field test) in mathematics as part of the capstone course at my university, I scored in the 96th percentile, so it's not that I'm bad at university mathematics, I just had test anxiety concerning the subject test.

Also, for what it's worth, I thought the MFT was similar in content to the math subject test, but not as difficult.

Another option might be just to mention the high MFT scores on my CV that I send in with my applications, leaving out any mention of that in my letters of intent, and just hoping that helps my case with the admissions committees.

Unfortunately, whether it's better to address it or ignore it largely depends on who is reading your application materials.  Some may want an explanation, others (on the more cynical side, and they do exist) may view any explanation as simply making excuses.

If you can get one of your reference writers to say something about it, it may carry more weight.  Of course this may not be possible depending on how well they really know you, but it's something to consider.

There's also the possibility that addressing it may not even matter since the school could have an unadvertised minimum GRE subject test score, where any application with less than that score gets tossed out.  Or such an application could go in the "maybe" pile, in which case an explanation could help.

My point with the waffling is it's impossible to say what would be better in general.  FWIW it sounds like you have a very strong application otherwise, so I probably wouldn't stress too much over it.

I strongly recommend this as your next step:  Seek advice from professors in your department who have served on admissions committees.

Not including it on your letter will probably suit you best.

WHY?

You always want to put your best foot forward so only address this if they ask/mention it.

For Example

Let's say that you are a doctor and you're trying to apply for a job at a hospital.

Your previous employment includes working at McDonalds (during you undergrad), working as a nurse at your local clinic, and doing your residency at a different hospital.

Obviously, you would put your residency and maybe your nursing experience in your resume.

But what about your McDonalds employment time? Would you really add that too?


What can a professor do about an exam that was too long for the allotted time, after the students have completed it? I just finished a midterm exam. It was very easy but I was only able to finish about 3/4 of it. And I rushed through some parts in the final moments.

Talking with other students, there's a consensus that there wasn't enough time. Some of us mentioned this to the professor as we were leaving, and he acknowledged it.

What can the professor do to remedy this situation?

This is an excellent example of when a professor may choose to grade on a curve.  Grading on a curve normalizes the exam against observed performance rather than an absolute standard, and is a good way to re-normalizing when an exam proves unexpectedly challenging.

Your professor, however, might not choose to do so, or might choose to set the curve in a way that doesn't help you as much as you might like.  The key is what's happening in the class relative to the actual educational goals of the professor.

If the exam was harder or longer than intended, and the professor believes that the lower grades reflect that, rather than the knowledge of the students, then they are likely to grade on a curve.
If, on the other hand, the students are showing evidence that they do not understand things as deeply as they are required to, then the professor may not curve or may adjust with a curve less than you hope.

It's really impossible to know which case without knowing the details of the exam and peoples' performance.  A "long but easy" test sometimes is testing for deep facility that allows people to be extremely fast.  For example, think of the arithmetic exercises sometimes done in elementary school, which can only be solved quickly enough if the student has effectively memorized and internalized arithmetic, rather than working out answers from first principles (e.g., counting on fingers).  The same principle can sometimes apply in undergraduate and graduate education as well.

Bottom line: maybe the professor will choose a generous curve, but there are reasons that may argue against it as well, depending on the circumstances.

So...All of these responses are from the perspective of the student taking the exam.  What of the professor's perspective?

Students today think that the criteria of excellence on an examination is 100 percent.  They fundamentally misunderstand what a "test" is, and what information it gives the professor.

A well-designed test isn't given so that the student can feel "awesomesauce" about themselves.  It's given to assess the student's grasp of the coursework. If every student finishes everything and gets an A, what has been evaluated?  On some level, we can look at such a test as assurance that our students have met some "floor" criteria, but we haven't actually tested exactly what they know.  A well-designed test is one that "brackets" the expected student performance, such that most, if not all of the students will not touch the upper boundary...by this, we can assess what they know, and where their knowledge stops.  This is magnitudes more valuable to an instructor than giving the student a feel-good "all will ace" test.  The test INTENDS to drop you somewhere before the end.  And, the test is graded accordingly...getting an A doesn't necessarily mean you answered everything.

This concept will be anathema to the entering freshman and sophmores who were in elementary school when "no child left behind" was enacted, because when that happened, the whole constellation of what testing was actually for was bastardized.


Does it matter where you go to medical school? There are many reports out there that say you should not go get an MBA or JD unless you are going for the Top 5 or Top 10 schools respectively. The rationale is that the lost salary and tuition does not make up for the expected NPV difference (get a professional degree vs. do not get a professional degree).

I have never heard this about medical schools. It seems reasonable to assume that most patients do not inquire about their doctor's alma mater and that there is a lot of standardization in the final board exam. Also, most medical schools have an extremely low dropout/failure rate (<5%). However, there is huge variability among the selectivity of medical schools,  ranging from an average undergraduate GPA and MCAT score of 3.35 and 20 respectively, all the way up to 3.89 and 38.

What advantages does a Duke M.D. have over a Marshall University M.D.? Am I correct in assuming that the average salary distribution over all US medical schools is relatively flat?

I disagree. There are very little differences between medical schools so long as you do well on your STEP I through STEP III exams. Basically what really matters is how you rank compared to the national average.
I have interviewed residency candidates from around the country-their alma mater means very little to me. Their STEP scores and extracurricular activities matter as well as their personal statements. Don't worry about medical school ranking-just worry about Step exam scores-that will really help you get into any residency program you want.

The consequences of rank apply to medical schools just as they apply to undergraduate or graduate education. A more highly ranked medical school can make it easier to get a residency that you want or acceptance into a better quality residency. It may also make you better prepared to pass board exams.

If you want to do medical research, then you should look for schools that are performing similar research, just as you would for a non-professional graduate program.

Update per comments --

I don't have any experience with medical schools (I knew at 5 I didn't want to be a doctor), so I contacted my resident expert, a relative who both graduated from the Ohio State University School of Medicine and was a professor there. In her words:

  Harvard and Yale grads can be more picky about the residency programs
  they apply to. But the other comments are true also [that I sent to her].
  If they almost
  flunk out of school, have an abrasive personality, have poor test
  scores, etc., they will need to set their sights lower for residency.


Public dataset without license: what is allowed? Many public scientific datasets are accompanied by a license, for example variations of Creative Commons are used quite often. However, in many cases public academic datasets lack any licensing information. Here are two examples:

At PhosphoSite we find it is "created by Cell Signaling Technology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License", so permissions of usage are clear from the license.

Here is an other dataset where we don't see anything about licensing, not even a statement that the data is free to use for academic purposes. It only states that "can be downloaded", but what can I do after downloading? Can I redistribute it, modify it, sell it? From the context I suppose they intended their data for public use, they are happy if more people use it so they get more credits and citations. But this is just an assumption.

The copyright holder is clear in both cases, the permissions are missing in the second case.

I am wondering, if I write a software using this data, or I construct a more complex dataset including this data, what solutions are legally correct:

1: The software downloads the dataset at each user's own machine from the original source and processes it. However this is not always possible or not easy to implement.

2: Distribute a copy of the original dataset, or a modified version, with attribution to the original source. This is more problematic, I think, but I am not expert in law.

Asking for permission is an obvious solution, but in case of dozens of datasets, it is a tedious and long process to contact all the copyright holders, and wait for their responses. Also, some datasets are supplements of published papers. In this case, if the journal has a license, e.g. Nucleic Acids Research is published under Creative Commons, is this valid for these datasets?

This may vary by country, but in the US at least, the default terms (if no alternative is specified) are "all rights reserved", which means that you are not allowed to reproduce the work (the dataset), prepare derivative works from it, sell/rent/lease it, or publicly perform or display it. In particular, redistributing it to others is not allowed. In practice, the authors may be fine with it, but legally speaking, you're not allowed to redistribute the dataset in the form it was published in, without having explicit permission (which could be provided by a Creative Commons license, for example).

If you wanted to reproduce the dataset in a different form that conveys the same information, that may or may not be allowed. It would be up to a court to decide whether that counts as a derivative work or just a use of the underlying ideas, and a copyright lawyer could advise you better on whether your desired use is legally acceptable.

You are allowed to read the published dataset and use the ideas contained within it (i.e. the data) to draw conclusions. Copyright law does not allow for the restriction of those rights. I think doing an analysis on the data and publishing the results of that analysis (but not the data itself), as you would do in the process of writing a paper, is generally considered to be fine.

Copyright law says that the creator of a work is allowed to retain all rights of use of said work, period. Unless the owner of the copyright explicitly allows some use (e.g., reading, copying, translating, ...) nobody is allowed to do so. The fancy, legalese word for "allowing" is license. There are some subtleties with data collections, like what you describe, but as far as this non-lawyer understands, nothing that makes a difference here.

If the data is "supporting data for a published paper", the publisher presumably has secured copyright (or some form of license) on the paper itself to publish it, they probably did not secure rights on the supporting data.

So, in short: they (implicitly) give the permission to download, but nothing else. Yes, less than useful. Sure, it is extremely unlikely that they'll turn around and sue you for copyright violation for reading the data or doing some other personal use of it. But in theory, they could. What the court would make of such a suit is anybody's guess.

Unless you get a clear statement from the collector of the data, you aren't allowed to use it. You must contact the owners of data and ask for permission.

You might want to look at some data collection licenses, like the Open Data Commons Open Database License .
Please note that licenses like the Creative Commons set or open source licenses are a poor fit for data. Check them out, and suggest the data owners to explicitly license their data under a permissive licence.


Should you always use appropriate letter conventions when emailing a teacher? Usually, when I send an email to a teacher/lecturer, I always start "Dear Mr. Atwood" and end with "Regards/Best wishes (etc.) Leo". If I have to send a followup email after they have replied, I omit the opening and closing sections entirely, and just write my message. Is this considered rude? Would you prefer that a student always lead an email with "Dear" and signed their name?

I do the same. In an ongoing correspondence, where the next email is a reply to the previous one, I usually omit the complete introduction and ending sections. However, there are two cases in which I stick to the full option:

The person I'm writing to keeps their emails formal, so I do the same
A significant amount of time has passed since the last response (e.g. a recent update to a past correspondence)

I always place some kind of salute at the end, e.g. Regards, . The complete end section would include a footer with my contact details and affiliation as well my full name.

I actually learned over time, that a lot of professors like an informal way of communication. Especially when a relationship exists. Scientiest like to see themselves as a community and as a student you are on the way of becoming part of that community. In that sense I found many professors being very informal themselves.

I also think that it is accepted in communication between scientists to omit the academic title in the salutation.

That being said a first "Dear Mr. Atwood" should be totally sufficient to not be rude.


How can I convince graduate students in China to not copy/paste from the Internet into their research papers? I'm posting from an anonymous account, for reasons that will be obvious.

I'm an associate professor in China at one of the top 10 universities in China, and have been working in China for a number of years. Most research in our lab is respectable and unproblematic.  We get some papers in top journals and conferences.

As a native English speaker, I help on papers from graduate students.
Some of these papers are conference papers, and some are journal papers.  The conference papers I work on are international.

However, probably between 30% to 50% of the Chinese graduate students I work with copy and paste from the Internet into their research papers (from Wikipedia, from other papers, from software documentation, and so on).  The amount ranges from a sentence here and there, to whole sections.
It's usually easy for me to notice copy/pasted material (it's where they suddenly write like a native English speaker with 10+ years of research experience).  Yesterday, I encountered the worst instance of copy/paste I've ever seen, and I flatly refused to be listed as a co-author.

What's become clear:

The students generally think it's acceptable to copy/paste; they're unconcerned even if it's published.
Part of the motivation behind copy/pasting is that English is their second language.
The Chinese professors (i.e., their supervisors) mostly do not read their students' papers; they might take a quick check before submission.
The Chinese professors push the students into rushing to meet conference submission deadlines, and I feel this has a negative impact on both their research and paper-writing quality.
The university doesn't outright condone plagiarism, but they don't seem to think of it as a negative.  I get the impression that it's considered efficient use of time.  The focus is on getting it published, while significance, errors, and plagiarism are less important.
Many of the students do not intend to have careers in academia.  The paper will not have much significance, but it's either required for their degree, or their supervisor is pushing them into writing it.  They don't care much.

I've explained how serious a matter this is, over and over.  And honestly, I'm fed up repeating myself – it makes me feel like the university (and research in China) is a joke.  It makes me feel ashamed to work here.

I've tried repeatedly explaining this to everyone, but the seriousness is not getting through.  They just think I'm overreacting.

Q: How can I convince graduate students in China to not copy/paste from the Internet into their research papers?

I'm looking for an answer along the lines of "the negative consequences of copy/pasting from the Internet in publications are blah".  I have no intention to pack up and leave; I just want to get the message across and convince them that plagiarism matters.  So I'm thinking about writing a document entitled e.g. "why we shouldn't plagiarize" and sending it around.

OK, it's getting weird now. I thought this would be much less common in top 10s.

There's a simple path here: tell them plagiarized papers are not going to get published, or will be retracted in the future, and this will hinder their graduation & will create trouble for their advisor (+ advisor would lose face) if they insist on submitting such papers.

When your students (and everyone else) care only about the "pragmatic", give them "pragmatic" reasons! Chinese people generally do not like creating trouble/making others lose face, so that's a good path.

Convincing them that plagiarism is morally incorrect and not right would be harder, and students would likely not buy into that. But the pragmatic path gets the job done :-)

From the situation you described, I infer two things about your situation. Correct me if I am wrong:

The university you're at is likely not top-tier. I would be surprised if even the researchers at Tsinghua or Jiaoda (Shanghai Jiaotong University) engage in academically dishonest conduct frequently. I suppose you're likely at a local (provincial) university.
Your colleagues/students are mainly targeting domestic conferences/journals (and likely not the top ones). Otherwise they will surely know that academically dishonest practices will get their papers rejected.

If both are true, I'm afraid little could be done. You could try very hard to at least make your students not plagiarize, but this will probably have a very negative impact on future recruitment, and even your students are not going to 100% listen to you. The best option at hand is trying to move to another university (preferably in another country) if this bothers you (it would bother me for sure).

The ranty part: I decided to delete this, but just keep two key points.

Plagiarism is not dealt with seriously enough and people let it happen. Awareness of what constitutes plagiarism is low, but for reasonably experienced researchers this should be obvious. So, as you see, the problem is not that people don't know it is plagiarism; they likely do know, but they have no reason to care.
The quality of most domestic journals & conferences are questionable, so the problem is even more serious at this level (because not even the editors care).

Point out how it's in their favor to examine things, even if they end up making it less "proper English" in the process. Even if they don't care about the academics of it, they still want to learn, get a degree, and get a good job. I'd suggest attacking it from the angle of personal growth - Something like...

  "If you simply copy and paste, you aren't checking the veracity of the claim, and you aren't synthesizing the information into something new. When you find information for your paper, you'll improve yourself more by first making sure the claim is true, and then digesting and re-working the claim into your own words, so that you can be sure that you've internalized the claim that you're using. Once you've done this, doing the actual additional work of citing the source is not much of a time or effort investment."


Shifting a review process from one journal to another journal I have two articles under review. In first round of review both got decision of "minor revision" within 3-4 months. I submitted the revised version 5 months ago but since then the status of both articles is "Under Review". I sent follow up emails but always I got response from Journal Manager that the article is under review and he sent an email to Associate Editor to prompt the review process.
During the course of time I submitted another two articles in IEEE journals; both were accepted and came online within 5-6 months of time. I am thinking to withdraw both under review articles form Springier and Elsevier and submit them to IEEE Journals.
Is it possible to shift review history of those articles to IEEE?
Will it be helpful for further accelerating the review process in IEEE if I submit both articles as new submission and provide review reports as a supporting documents?

At this point, it will not be fair to the reviewers that are currently refereeing your paper to receive a notification that the paper has been withdrawn.

Although you might think they are not doing their job properly, reviewers are busy persons and a lot of things can happen in the between. Given that 5 months is not that much time even fr a revision (at least depends on the fields. I my field of applied math/TCS it's OK) I would suggest to wait a little bit more but also bring the issue to the handling editor (which you already did).

On the other hand, even if you decide to withdraw, which is your right, I think that supplementing the current reviews to another journal is way off and I would strongly recommend against that. For start, the new journal would have no idea who is behind that reviews, not to mention the ethical levels of such action.

Five months for a review of the revision when the revisions are minor is way too long, IMO. Typically, the revisions are reviewed by the same people that reviewed the first submission. Given that, I suspect the Editor might be having difficulty in getting the reviewers to submit their reviews and might even be looking for alternate reviewers.

I don't recommend withdrawing the manuscripts from review right away. Instead, it may be better to write to the editor explaining your concerns and when he thinks the reviews will be done. You can check the previously published papers in this journal and see how long the submission-publication periods typically are. If your manuscripts are taking much longer than these periods, you could point that out to the editor as well.


How do I cite my own PhD dissertation in a journal article? I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm in the process of submitting a journal article on the work I did in the final few months of my degree. This work is an extension to some conference papers that I'd published earlier, and so I've cited them in my journal article stating how the submitted work differs from the published material. When I submitted the article to the journal, I mentioned in a cover letter that the same results/algorithms exist in my PhD dissertation.
After submission, I received a note from the journal to also cite my own PhD dissertation in the article, as there is a fair bit of similarity. The note said:

You can resubmit after you have referenced the original article, and explained in your new article how this new work builds on your previous publication(s).

Considering the work presented in the journal article is not really an extension, and is pretty much the same as in the dissertation, how do I properly reference it? In my experience, I have not seen papers where the authors cited their own dissertation in the text.

In my experience (Theoretical Computer Science/Mathematical Logic) this issue is typically handled by having the sentence "This article is based on Chapter X of the author's PhD thesis \cite{myThesis}." as a stand-alone paragraph at the end of the introduction section.
Having just the plain sentence is consistent with the article having been edited only minimally to turn a chapter into a stand-alone article. If there are substantial differences, these can be pointed out in addition. Eg "We refer the reader to \cite{myThesis} for a much more detailed exposition of the proof."

You could try pre-printing it and citing the preprint. Benefits are short time to `publication' (a couple of days, maximum, and only on a weekend) so very short delay to resubmission, moreover, the citation still counts for h-indices etc. I am sure that arXiv does theses as I have definitely read some there.
A proper citation could simply be a sentence like ``[type of result] [number or name if applicable] was developed in [citation], and is [restated/extended/some other word] here."
[citation] Your Name, Year, Your Dissertation Title, Dissertation from [your univ.]
This citation may be adapted if you do indeed arxiv it.


Why did I receive a negative response from a professor when emailing about course content and prerequisites of a course I am considering taking? I wrote the following email to a professor (I've removed any personal or specific details):

Dear Prof. Last name,
Hope this email finds you well.
I am Name, an undergraduate in the mathematics department.
I write to enquire about Course code - Course name being offered in fall semester. What can I expect from the course content and what are the prerequisites? Would it be along the lines of Name of a Book?
One sentence describing previous courses I've taken
Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your time!
Best,
Name
Department
Institution

The subject line was:

About Course Name next Fall Semester

I thought this email is perfectly fine, and it's how I generally write to professors. To my shock and surprise, I got the following response:

I am sure very soon you will be writing many more official emails, so you must know how to address them appropriately. You may see course content on the department webpage.Initials

Could someone help me figure out (i) how to respond to this, and (ii) what went wrong so I can avoid it in future emails (to any professor in general)? Thus far, no professor has pointed out so explicitly that something is wrong with the language of my email - so I'm in a state of great confusion right now.

Additional details:

I haven't interacted with this professor before, so this was my first email to them.
It seems I was at fault for not checking the course content on the department webpage before writing this email. However, that page has not been updated in years and I just wanted to make sure the content is still the same. Lastly, I think this wouldn't have made them feel that I addressed them inappropriately - since that has more to do with email etiquette than the content of the email.

Follow-up question:
I'm thinking of apologizing and explicitly asking how I can improve my email's language: "Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the seemingly inappropriate language of my email. I would be grateful if you could kindly pinpoint what part of the email was inappropriately written, so I can be more careful in all future communication."
Would this be a good idea? I read somewhere on this very site that it's never impolite to ask how to be polite.

There is nothing inappropriate (that anyone can see here) in the way that you've written your email. The response from the professor suggests that they're some combination of (a) incredibly time-constrained, (b) sloppy and unclear in how they communicate, and (c) a jerk.

It's possible (as user2768 suggests) that the essential "offense" in their eyes was to ask about things available in the online site. If so, then their first sentence was a sloppy and mostly mindless piece of aggression that doesn't really mean what it says.

The curtness, snarkiness, and level of aggression communicates that they don't like interacting with students by email, do not want to spend time on it, and want such querents to go away and not bother them.

Given the above, writing them again and asking for more time to be spent on even smaller minutiae -- like revisiting what they meant in a hastily-written throwaway email, and to spend even more time parsing the grammar of the original student email that they've already expressed contempt for handling -- is only likely to make things worse.

I suggest that you accept this line of inquiry as not useful and likely to produce only further confusion and frustration on both sides. Do not email them again on this matter. If you must email them again in the future, on some different matter, make it as brief as you possibly can (shorter than your original email), and try to pose a question that can be given a very short, clear-cut answer.
I'll say that the only thing the professor really got right there was in accurately predicting your next instinct would be that, "very soon you will be writing many more official emails", and to be aggravated-in-advance by that prognostication. Resist the temptation to fully prove them right!
Also, consider asking around if this professor is good to interact with (maybe people you know or a ratings website). If their course is not required, then you may be getting a signal that they're just not a good professor.

I would not reply to the answer of the professor, which I find dismissive; I agree with the other answers until this moment. It seems to me that the professor shows zero interest in making that subject interesting for students. Maybe they don't care about the number of the students enrolled on it. Maybe the course content isn't worth signing up for.
A better answer would be "I've checked the course webpage and it reflects the current requirements. It's similar to that book. You're welcome to join."
Regarding your email, I think you can make it shorter and you can specifically cite the course expectations/content on their webpage that you wonder about.
If you write in an email "thank you for your time", you are implying that they are doing you a favor by using their time resources to answer your question or helping you with something. Maybe they don't consider this as an opportunity that would benefit them in the long-run, but just as a waste of time.
Maybe in your email you have used an excess of polite clichés.
If you want you could ask one of your colleagues or one of us to ask the question to the professor in a new email to get a better answer. Or send the question to another responsible for the course.


Could one become a successful researcher by writing some really good papers while being outside academia? Would it still be possible today to go from relatively unknown to a respected figure in physics by writing some spectacular papers being outside the academia?
(Just like Einstein did)

My impression is that the likelihood of this is proportional to how theoretical the field that you have in mind is. In math or theoretical physics, it's at least imaginable for an outsider to produce an important new discovery. In High Energy Physics the idea alone seems outlandish.

That said, even in math the ratio of cranks (deluded amateurs who are convinced they have made an important discovery without having actually done so) to actual amateur geniuses is almost infinite to one. If you want to do research, in any field, the winning strategy is to study under a respected member of the community and learn how to produce, evaluate, and communicate your ideas in this way.

It does not matter how great the paper's discovery is if you are publishing regularly in important journals in your own field of research. The quality and number of revisions of your data is not as important as being published many times over in high quality peer-reviewed journals. Being published in quality journals automatically implies that some contribution has been made to the field.
Think about your aims before you start. Why do you want papers in the first place? Why not publish to trade magazines and businesses? Or where do you want to perform research? How would you measure success? You ought to think on that first. Having clear goals will make it apparent if your work will be viable without having access to academic resources. Academia and academic publications have become full of negative incentives, and not being part of it will make some goals difficult but not impossible.


Should you disclose the name of an institution that made you an offer? I am in contact with institution A about a potential tenure track position. Meanwhile another institution, let's call it B, has offered me a position. Naturally, I have to mention to A that B has made an offer.

  Should I mention the name of B to A when being asked? Or should I just say "another institution has made an offer?

You may not have a choice. If I were A and you were to tell me you had an offer from another school, I would immediately ask the name of the school B.

Your refusing to tell me B's name may raise some red flags for me (indicating a level of shiftiness about your candidacy that I may not have been aware of). I cannot think of a good reason why you wouldn't tell me -- other than B is so far below my institution's rank that it'd be laughable (aka, A=MIT and B=Poconos Community College).

However, if B=CalTech and A=MIT, then I would very much make sure that we were processing your application with all due haste.

With the new details that A=preferred for personal reasons but B=higher ranked, then certainly you can tell A that you have an offer from B. It would likely lead to increased interest in your candidacy if A is at least somewhere the same ballpark as B.

That is, if A were Poconos Comm College and B were CalTech, then A may feel that there is no possibility of getting you and drop you even before an offer for being overqualified. You need to emphasize why you are so interested in A.

Note that lying is a bad idea. If we phoned  our colleague at CalTech and they had no idea who you were, you'd be immediately dropped.

Tell A that you would prefer to work for them, but that you have another offer which you must accept or decline by [date certain] and ask whether they can help you.  It is neither necessary nor helpful to name B.


Article that shows the complete publication history of acceptances and rejections of a successful academic I remember reading a journal article  where a researcher in psychology analysed their entire manuscript submission and publication history. The way I remember it, the researcher had around 40 publications, many in top-tier journals. A large number of the publications were rejected 2,3,4 or more times before they found a home. As an early career researcher, I found it to be a really interesting read for highlighting just how much rejection is a normal part of the publication process.

Does anyone know the reference to this article?
Equally, are there other equivalent documents written by other academics?

Update: I found the article. See answer below.

I don't know if this is the article you're referring to, because the researcher is in biology, not psychology; and the journal article doesn't include the list of manuscripts, only the recommendation to keep one:

  Stefan, Melanie. "A CV of Failures." Nature 468.7322 (2010): 467. Doi:10.1038/nj7322-467a. Web. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7322/full/nj7322-467a.html.

I can't seem to find the link to the author's actual CV of Failures (though I feel like I've seen it before), I can only find the article explaining it. However, if you search "CV of Failures" you will find some publicly available examples from other researchers.

P.S. I keep an ongoing CV of failures as described in the Nature article and  I highly recommend the exercise.

I think you are talking about this article;

Overcoming Fear of Rejection, by Marty Nemko

Even if it is not what you are looking for, the following article might definitely brighten up your day if you are just interested in knowing that rejection is not the end!

Nature rejects Krebs's paper, 1937, By Brendan Borrell


Talking to professors without attending that University I tried looking up the answer for this one online already, but I couldn't find something for my specific scenario:

I am interested in reaching out to a few professors in the field that I am interested in, Computer Science, in regards to some specific problems I might be facing in the immediate future.  However, I'm slightly unsure of how to do this.  That is, I don't attend the University they teach at and I do not have a college degree.  Does this make a difference of some sort or can I contact them without having to explain that I don't attend their University?  Is this something that I should even bother bringing up prior to speaking to them, or is it a complete non-issue?

I feel like if highly technical, learned people like professors are so easily accessible - completely free of charge - then I find the entire concept of attending college kind of hard to grasp.  Maybe I'm missing a basic underlying concept here.  Perhaps they would be under some kind of NDA in how much information they would be able to provide if it was on cutting edge research, or something else I might not be accounting for?  The entire concept of just e-mailing some of the top scientists in a given field strikes me as kind of odd, especially if I don't have to pay them for their time.

Okay, so this might sound a little bit too honest.

You can email them, and if you're sufficiently interesting or intelligent, they will write back. For example, if you asked things like "what is the best sorting algorithm? Can you explain why that is?" they probably won't respond, because it's boring. You have to realize that the professors usually also get a lot of "crank" messages (false claims to amazing results) to which they don't respond to. However, if you actually read and understood their research, and had something that you could contribute to, then they probably will respond. Your pedigree isn't extremely important, as far as I am concerned. It is true that the top scientists are available for free, but only if you are worth their time.

The university system requires the professors to talk to the amateurs that they normally wouldn't talk to (i.e. students). My university had a student who claimed to have proven P vs NP problem. Normally if someone sent me a proof of that by email, I'd have deleted it without reading it, but since it was a known student, the professors still looked over the proof (it was actually quite clever, albeit wrong), and the student was eventually offered a summer research position. So I wouldn't say that the university system is pointless.

Before you talk to a Professor at another university I would recommend you read their Bio, research all their projects, read any papers they have written, and always a BIG PLUS is buy their book. If you choose to go in person I would advise you wait till the end of their office hours to approach them or try and get them after their last class to set an appointment. Calls and emails are great but you run a chance of being denied. Professors are people too and don't always jump at the idea of doing more work. It's harder to shoot someone down face to face. Hope that helps.


How to show a student the work done in the lab is the lab's (or is it?) Difficult to title this, but in essence, I am working on the premise that ethically, the work done in the lab belongs to the PI and the lab as a group.  So if there is another question that deals with this I have not found it.

In the case where a lab takes undergraduate interns or UROP positions, such that the undergraduate is not a student of the PI, how to inform them (as it is their first research experience) that the work they contribute to is not their own research to go and publish.

In a situation such that the student is put on a project and is guided to developing some code or doing some analysis (without their own substantial intellectual contribution, just development and applying standard methods), the student then leaves the internship or position.  How to make it clear to the student without some threatening way, maybe by showing some international/online standards that explain, they can not take the work they did and publish it on their own?

Likewise, how should the PI reasonably decide authorship, and explain that students authorship or lack of, due to insignificant contributions of the final work.

For example, on a given project, I may have 4 or 5 undergraduates over time interning and doing some develop, exploration, etc.  I want to be encouraging, and so I try to over emphasize the 'great job' they are doing.  At the same time, I do not want them to misinterpret this as them being given authorship.  In some case, I had an undergraduate that after awhile of working together, decided to drop everything and quit.  The student now seems to have an attitude that the work they had been doing is theirs to go and publish on their own (in some low quality journal, as it is just part of a larger project that they do not have all material for).

I think that you are not referring to the right reason why your former students cannot simply go on and publish the small projects they did under your supervision in lower-tier journals (or any other journal for what matters).

It's not that the work done in the lab belongs to the PI and the lab as a group, it's that you and possibly other people in your group contributed to these projects, at least by providing scientific guidance and supervision (I think the answer to your question is to explain them that bit).

As such, your former students cannot claim that the work is solely theirs by not mentioning you as co-authors and, as a corollary, cannot publish without your explicit consent.

In the United States, if you paid them, it is work for hire.  I think it is more ethical to pay undergraduate researchers.