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2020/03/12
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<issue_start>username_0: As per the title, I quit my second Ph.D. after 10 months, having quit my first after one year.
My first supervisor was narcissistic and a sociopath. (Nonetheless, I received prizes for my research.) After one year I left.
I took a lab position, in an isolated country, whilst seeking a second PhD program. The lab took advantage of my situation (low salary, humiliation, harsh work conditions). After 5 months, I was about to commit suicide, until I started a second Ph.D. I thought this was the salvation.
I didn't know my second supervisor. They seemed nice. Ultimately, I took the position out of desperation. However, after several months, I found myself stuck with a supervisor who was always jealous, in a constant fighting mode, moody, angry like infant. The final straw came when I was nominated for an prestigious award, which I was to collect at a conference, which waived the usual conference fee: My supervisor refused to support my travel, even though it was only around 500 Euro. They weren't constructive at all. Perhaps more importantly, the lack of dataset from our collaborators, sketchy understanding about my research which leads to lack of feedback, this was a wrong match in all levels.
I've found another lab in a different country. They are interested in my work and I've joined their
group.
**My question:** I feel so much stigma about the situation and I feel sometimes insecure about what happened. In my current position, they know my situation, but they did not know all the story.
Now, I have to move by the end of the month. But, I am torn. I feel a failure because this situation doesn't sound good. Even though I asked many wise people and having a discussion for hours to split the emotion and facts about my situation that my decision to leave is right, I am stuck somehow emotionally about all experience, I saw a psychoanalyst, but not so much helpful, how can I get out of this stigma, I am afraid this would jeopardize my academic career? How I can remove this past?<issue_comment>username_1: First things first, if you have suicidal thought, then you need help. The fact that you tried one psychoanalyst, and that did not work for you, does not mean that the entire mental healthcare system is useless for you. Finding a therapist and a therapy that works for you can be long process of trial and error. Don't give up.
As to your question: You can't remove the past, all you can do is focus on making a better future.
If you want to reflect on your past experience to try to learn from it: I notice that you externalize the blame a lot. In the way you present your story there are three person: you are a top-student who wins prices, while the two others (the advisors) are narcissistic sociopaths or jealous and childish. That is probably not the whole story, and sticking to it will probably prevent you from learning from your experiences. However, now may not be the right time to process this. The only advise I can give you is: find a therapist that works for you and discuss this with her or him.
If you worry about how to present your story to others, then it is this black and white presentation that raises lots of red flags with me, not the fact that this is your third attempt.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Actually there is no stigma. What you have is feelings of failure. Stigma is something imposed on you by others and you have found a group that doesn't feel that way. It is time to feel good, not bad.
Bad things have happened to you. You were put in unfortunate circumstances. Hopefully you have escaped them. Look to the future, not the past.
If you escape from a lion attack it is time to rejoice, though the wounds may take time to heal.
I've been in the profession since dinosaurs ruled the earth and I don't look down on you. You seem very persistent. I predict success.
I also predict that once you make it over the finish line you will have so much experience with bad advisors that you will be careful to be a good one.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/12
| 768
| 3,334
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<issue_start>username_0: I am the author and teacher of an online introductory course at my community college. Each chapter in my class is designed to take one week to complete, where the assignments are due at the end of the week. The students have the option to get ahead of the rest of the class by a couple of weeks, so if they have a trip planned, they can do the work in advance.
This week I had a student argue that I should not have assignments due for the week of spring break, as that time should be reserved for the students to relax. I never considered honoring breaks or holidays for an online class. Should I consider not having assignments due during the week of spring break or fall break?<issue_comment>username_1: What's the harm in "honoring" breaks and holidays?
I'd say you should give them a break, as well. It's not so much any supposed sanctity of breaks, but rather than students seem to benefit psychologically from breaks.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Terminology, and thus expectations, matter here.
When I taught at institutions with winter/spring **break**, I would not assign anything due that week or immediately on return. This is a time for students to take a break, connect with friends/family, possibly move ahead on a job or internship hunt. And possibly, at their discretion, do some reading, catchup, or getting ahead if they are real keeners, but not an expectation.
However, if your institution has a **reading week** or **study week**, that's different. The expectation is students will catch up on their reading, get ahead of assignments, etc. - make work a priority, just get away from the rolling juggernaut of new material one class after another. Yes, maybe they'll catch up on sleep or have a party too, but that's not a priority. I and others would cheerfully have assignments due during such a period -- ideally at its end, since students should manage their time on their own, not be micromanaged by faculty during this period in particular.
You use the term "break", hence my bias is to answer "no".
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: The student is correct, spring break is, as its name suggests, a *break*. The fact that no students had complained previously does not say much - students can be timid and may not complain about any mild abuse by an instructor (as I discovered recently when I accidentally kept my class going 10 minutes past its end time; no one said a word...).
Also, your own rationale that “*The students have the option to get ahead [...] by a couple of weeks, so if they have a trip planned, they can do the work in advance*”, seems flawed to me, as it is premised oh the assumption that students have extra time in which they are sitting around doing nothing and can redirect towards “getting ahead”. You should assume that in the normal course of things students are as busy as they can get and don’t have spare studying capacity. The option to get ahead is nice, and may be used by some especially studious/efficient students or those that want to undertake a trip during time not officially sanctioned as break time and are willing to make an extra effort and sacrifice their normal free time to catch up. But this cannot be used as justification for requiring students to study during official break time.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/12
| 465
| 1,960
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a question for anyone who might be a department chair or on a search committee. What does it mean if you get invited for a second on-campus interview? I have already been there once for a standard on campus interview. For context, this is for a tenure track assistant professor position in the sciences.<issue_comment>username_1: Generally it would mean that they are very interested, but not absolutely sold. It may be that some senior professor wants to see more of you or meet you for the first time. They may want some student opinion in some places. It isn't frivolous, since they are spending some money, but you still have to close the deal.
In the long term it is probably a good sign that if you get the job they are treating you as a serious contender for eventual tenure. They are doing more than just filling a temporary slot.
But, close the deal.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_2: I have been a department chair (math department, large US university) and nonetheless find your situation completely baffling. I have literally never heard of a TT job candidate being invited to a second on-campus interview. This is so unusual that I can’t really come up with a plausible guess for why the department that invited you thinks they need you to visit again; moreover, I think this may potentially bring the competence of the people who came up with this plan into question.
Please don’t rely on idle speculation by strangers online. My advice is to email the people who invited you and ask them to clarify what their plan is for the second visit and why they think it is needed. In my opinion, if you already had one on-campus interview, at least in a normal situation they should have all the information about you that they need in order to make a hiring decision. So I’m guessing their explanation may not be the most logical one. But at least you will have a sense of where they’re coming from.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/13
| 2,580
| 9,407
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<issue_start>username_0: This is a question I plan to self answer, but answers from others are very welcome too.
This term, I am teaching group and Galois theory. This is a heavily [inquiry based learning (IBL)](http://www.inquirybasedlearning.org) course, where almost all the time is spent on group problem solving. You can see the course webpage, with all of our problems, [here](http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~speyer/594/) (and the previous term's webpage [here](http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~speyer/593/) .) Like everyone, we have been told to move our teaching and office hours online.
I asked my students what tools they use to discuss math online, and several of them mentioned [discord](https://discordapp.com/). I am currently setting up a Discord channel for office hours and course meetings. I am planning to use this to document what I have learned so far, and hope others will help.
I would like to thank the denizens of the "[homework help](https://discordapp.com/channels/238956364729155585/238956364729155585)" channel on Discord for their help! We academics criticize online homework help sites a lot, but this could be their moment to shine!
Questions which I plan to write answers to, if others don't:
* How do I log onto discord? How do I invite my students?
* How do they add themselves to voice and text chats? How can I break them into smaller groups for group discussion, and how can I monitor those groups.
* How can I and students type math in discord, if we know LaTeX?
* How can I and students embed photographed images or hand drawn sketches in Discord?
* What are other useful things to know?
So far, the advice in this post is based on one test run with 6 students. I'll continue to update once our course comes online.<issue_comment>username_1: **Answer to "How do I log onto discord? How do I invite my students?"**
Head to <https://discordapp.com/> and follow the quick directions to make an account. You should then see a screen that looks like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zDTZ8.png)
Discord is broken up into "servers", which are subdivided into "channels". There is a list of servers you are currently logged into on the left bar. Click the plus icon to make a new channel. You'll see a screen like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NlwvN.png)
Click "create a server". You'll see the following screen, where you can name your server:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ATlvu.png)
You'll then see this. If you have interacted with people on Discord before, it will suggest you invite them to your class. (I've blacked out the names of the people I've chatted with.) Instead, select the shown link and e-mail it to your students. The channel will remain in existence and be permanently available.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eoszl.png)
**Answer to "How do they add themselves to voice and text channels? How can I break them into smaller groups for group discussion, and how can I monitor those groups."**
Each server is subdivided into channels. Voice channels play in your headphones and listen to your microphone; text channels are chat windows. You can only have one of each active at once, but you can easily switch between them; simply click on the name of a channel to switch to it. The list of your channels looks like this; each voice channel displays under it (scribbled out in the image) who is in that channel.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z7vK6.png)
What I've done is made two channels of each type and asked students to split themselves among them. I click back and forth to eavesdrop on and join conversations.
Note that the past history of the text stream is continually available. So, if students have been typing a lot, it is quick for you to scroll back and see what has been said. **I would suggest you encourage students to type, the same way you would encourage them to write things down when doing group work in person.**
**Answer to "How can I and students type math in discord, if we know LaTeX?"**
You can add bots to Discord channels. The way I know to do this is, after you have already created the channel, go to the webpage associated to the bot and click on the invite button; invite it to your channel. For example, go to [<https://top.gg/bot/510789298321096704>](https://top.gg/bot/510789298321096704) and click on the Invite button as noted here:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SDLi7.png)
[MathBot](https://top.gg/bot/mathbot) provides a quick text interface to LaTeX, a basic calculator and WolframAlpha. If you type `=tex` before something, MathBot will render it in LaTeX mathmode. Beware that this means that, if you want to mix text and equations, you'll need to say something like
`=tex \textrm{Let}\ k \textrm{be a field and let}\ S \textrm{be the polynomial ring}\ k[x_1, \ldots, x_n]`
Preceeding a line with `=calc` will access a simple built in calculator, for example, `=calc 9*43` should produce 387. Using `=wolf` should pass whatever you type along to WolframAlpha.
[TeXit](https://top.gg/bot/510789298321096704) allows people to type LaTeX (demarcated with dollar or double dollar signs) and have it turned in to TeX. This is far more user friendly than the TeX feature in Mathbot: Simply typing `Let $k$ be a field and let $S$ be the polynomial ring $k[x_1, \ldots, x_n]$` should work with TeXit running.
For more help regarding TeXit's commands (which also include a calculator and WolframAlpha), type `,help` and it will send you a direct message.
**Answer to "How can I and students embed photographed images or hand drawn sketches in Discord?"**
You can also drag and drop files into a Discord channel. PDFs turn into links; standard image files such as JPG, PNG, GIF are embedded in the stream. See [here](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/211866427-How-do-I-upload-images-and-GIFs-). This could be useful if your students have tablets, or have paper and cell phone cameras, so they can take pictures of their work and upload it.
I will report, however, that in a recent test run, most students found the "make image, transfer to desktop, drag-and-drop to Discord" workflow to be clunky and awkward. We are considering whether we want to use shared whiteboard software as an alternative. **Other suggestions are welcome.**
An easier way to share quick sketches is by pasting images directly into discord. You can draw a sketch in MSPaint or some other program, copy it the image itself from within the program (no need to save it as a file), and then paste the image into any text channel. This is also convenient way to share screenshots; Windows can snip portions of the screen with `Win`+`Shift`+`S`, and Mac and Linux have similar features. After taking a screenshot into your clipboard like this, it can be instantly pasted into Discord.
For more complex things, you can share your screen in realtime if you are using the desktop Discord application. Simply click the "Go Live" button in the bottom left:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FqBe3.png)
You can then share either a specific application or your entire screen. Others can watch by clicking your username (it will have a bright red indication that you're live), and then clicking Join Stream.
[More information here.](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151)
**What are some other tips?**
* Note that you can mute your microphone when you are not talking, to cut down on static. If you frequently forget to do this, Discord's "push to talk" feature makes it so your microphone is only on when you hold down a specific key on your keyboard. See [here](https://appuals.com/enable-configure-push-talk-discord/) for more.
* A protocol which has worked well in large VOIP calls I have been in in the past is that, if someone else is talking and you want to talk next, type the letter "Q" in the chat window. When they finish, all the people with Q's speak before anyone else starts. That wasn't much of a problem for my class today, but I plan to enforce this protocol if it seems like some people are never getting a word in edgewise.
* You can adjust the volumes of other people in the chat individually. See [here](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205287897-How-do-I-adjust-the-volume-level-of-individual-users-in-my-server-).
* You can edit past messages to remove typos. Click on the ellipses in the upper right of the message, then click on the edit option. Other options here are to pin a message, so it is permenantly at the top, or delete it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zKgDU.png)
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: Discord is for gaming and the existing networks of friends will prove too distracting. I recommend Slack. Slack is also a platform with 116 apps listed on AlternativeTo. Browse all 116 apps for [Slack.](https://alternativeto.net/platform/slack/) You get ten free integrations on a free account.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/13
| 363
| 1,498
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<issue_start>username_0: I was recently accepted by a college or university. I was planning on graduating from high school soon and then enrolling in college. My high school has just announced that it will be closed for a reason such as the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic. Will I still be able to start college?
(Question limited to students who are already admitted.)<issue_comment>username_1: You will probably be able to start college.
* Even if your high school is closed, you will probably receive a high school diploma. Schools and governments will adapt their rules to the emergency.
* In many cases, you do not need a high school diploma to enroll in a college or university. For example, at Simon's Rock College, most of the students do not have high school diplomas.
* After you graduate college, most employers do not care if you have a high school diploma. If you never receive one because of a disaster, you will be fine.
* In some cases, the college or university may be closed at the time you wanted to start your studies. You might have to wait for it to reopen.
What happens depends on the rules of your university. Those rules might not be written yet, but this is what they will probably say.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: **Ask them.**
You mentioned that they accepted you already. Only they can tell you whether the admission process is affected by the recent events and whether they're willing to accomodate last minute changes to your academic schedule.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/14
| 1,218
| 5,032
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<issue_start>username_0: Does any one have an experience with a hearing impaired student undertaking an oral defense of graduate thesis? I have a colleague in my graduate program who is profoundly impaired in both ears (to the point that hearing aid is absolutely useless). He would be defending his thesis this coming July or August and concerned that he might be failed if he is unable to communicate well with the examining committee. Does any one have any experience and can advice? My colleague neither signs nor understand sign language. The situation happened recently and he is still trying to adjust. But he speaks quite well and normally, and can talk if asked something he hears and comprehends. And if it helps, the university is in Canada, although I can not find any laws, either Canada's or the University's, dealing with this specific issues. If you are aware of any one who had similar challenges and undertook an oral defense, I will appreciate anything you can share on it. Thanks in advance for your kind response<issue_comment>username_1: Almost all universities in Canada have a disability support services office. You should contact them. They will discuss the situation with the student and the examining committee and recommend a solution - probably something similar to what you have suggested in the comments.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: I think that your friend needs to find a way to get advice to the examiners about things they can do. This should probably come from someone in authority, such as a department head or dean. Even the student's advisor might be a good source of such a reminder, but the administration has to be behind it.
The basic idea is that it should be the responsibility of the person asking the question to make the question clear to the other. The accommodation should be on their part, not that of the candidate here. Make sure that the committee understands that. This is just the same as the responsibility of the presenter to be clear to the listeners.
In many places the law and common practice will support this view as [username_1](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145405/75368) points out for Canada.
I am also hearing impaired but not to the same extent, but I can give some advice for things that questioners should think about. I'm profoundly deaf on one side and partially on the other. I sometimes wear a hearing aid on the (not so) good side and it increases the sound level, but doesn't really help with comprehension of the spoken word. I can determine that words are being spoken (as I can by just looking) but can't distinguish the words themselves. I developed ways to respond to questions of students, but they wouldn't be of help in this case. Especially since this was a sudden problem for the person you describe where mine developed over years.
One reason is that we write like this butourspokencommunicationisactuallydonelikethis.
It is called continuous speech and understanding it depends on catching the unspoken breaks between words as well as the words, because we don't speak with breaks. Worse, if you don't hear and comprehend the first word you (i.e. "we") find it very hard to catch up with the meaning. It is just *sounds*, not speech.
And, increasing the level of sound (as with hearing aids or yelling) can be counterproductive, making comprehension harder. Some people learn informally to read lips to some extent, but it is difficult, especially given people's different accents and continuous speech.
The suggestion of <NAME> in a comment is a good one. Provide a way for questioners to "ask" questions using some visual means rather than aural.
And make sure that the administration guarantees that some curmudgeonly professor doesn't fail a student due to their own frustration or unwillingness to accommodate a candidate who has no effective way to respond.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: Writing is too slow and intrusive.
What you need is a real-time transcriptionist who will provide a live on-screen transcription at 200+ words per minute.
<https://www.chs.ca/services/speech-text-transcription-cart-communication-access-realtime-translation>
<http://stenoknight.com/index.html> (New York City, but a very informative website with videos of the process)
and this is how it works in an intensive television quiz show:
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00pl1kb> (content may not be available outside UK)
<https://limpingchicken.com/2012/04/18/news-deaf-contestant-set-for-mastermind-appearance/>
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: I'm working peripherally with a woman who is deaf that is not an ASL user this year. When we need everyone to rapidly understand each other, we hire a *captioner*
We use one who is present in the room. She's very good. There are other web-based services that do much the same thing.
If your colleague is new to deafness, I suggest that something amounting to a dry run should be tried. This is worth working hard to get it right.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/14
| 1,005
| 4,200
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<issue_start>username_0: I don't know if this is the right question to ask, but I have been seriously reconsidering whether I want to continue with my PhD. I am currently a first year graduate student in mathematics (PhD track). I had wanted to get a PhD in mathematics since I was a freshman in college. I got into my top choice for graduate school, have already passed two prelims, and really enjoyed my first semester.
The prospect of being a professor has always interested me. I do not want a research position, in fact, I would prefer a job at a smaller liberal arts school. I have really enjoyed my time as an instructor much more than I expected and would enjoy a job that is more teaching focused.
However, I have heard multiple stories of people in my program applying for 70+ jobs. This seems very stressful to me and I am worried I cannot handle it. I also have geographic limitations. My entire family lives in new england, so I do not want to leave this area. I am also worried that I could be on short term contracts for several years of my life. It seems stressful to be entering a job and immediately start applying for new jobs.
All of this has really made me question whether or not to continue with my degree. I know that the jobs are scarce for research positions, and thought that I was being flexible with the prospect of working at more liberal arts schools. However, it seems to me that people are struggling to get jobs that are less research intensive. I do not want to leave my program (I am doing well in it and really enjoy it), but I have just been super stressed about the future.
I am nervous to talk to anybody about this because most people seem to not care about where they live and don't mind bouncing around from appointment to appointment. However, I do!! I feel like I am alone in caring about these things! Does anybody have any advice? Is this a sign that I might not be cut out for such a profession?<issue_comment>username_1: There is nothing wrong with having specific needs when it comes to job search, and that does not disqualify you for a PhD. To really understand the current state of the job market a good place to start is to talk with people in your field who have recently been on the job market, even if they didn't share exactly the same concerns as you. In the end whether to get a PhD or not is a personal choice; if you can justify to yourself that there are jobs outside of liberal arts colleges that you want and that require PhD, then stick with it. Also keep in mind that there may be jobs in industry, government, consulting, etc. that may have some teaching component that could be a good fit for you.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Sounds like the contradiction in your situation is that you 1) want to become a professor at a smaller liberal arts college, but 2) don't want to go through the job search necessary (70+ applications, having to do postdocs where you move around constantly, etc) to get there. Unfortunately, you can't have both. You'll have to choose one or the other.
If you choose to become a professor then you'll have to put up with the job search process. That's just the way the job market is (see <NAME>'s comment). If you can't put up with the job search process then you'll have to do something else for a job. Make sure you know what the jobs you can get are. Search your local job portal and see what jobs are available in New England to people with undergraduate Math degrees. See if you like any of those jobs. Then search your local job portal for jobs that require PhD Math degrees. See if you prefer those jobs. If yes, you have a fallback plan for if you don't get one of the few teaching professor jobs available. If not, then you might as well apply for those jobs now and quit the PhD if you get one. You might even be able to apply for a sabbatical in your PhD to let you "try out" the job, returning to the PhD if the job doesn't work out.
By the way: even in non-academic jobs, there will be competition, and the competition can be fierce. Expect to have to send at least 20+ applications. You will be more stable though, and not have to float between postdocs.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/15
| 2,617
| 11,177
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<issue_start>username_0: I am an associate professor in a department, mostly focusing on progressive topics related to spatial applications of artificial intelligence.
Besides my research projects, I have innovative and novel ideas, with I just don't have time to deal. If students interested to work with me, I used to give them ideas like that.
They can present their results (under my consultation/supervision) i.e., in a Student Conference at the university. But according to our university licensing, consulting does not lead to any authorship for the mentor.
If I think in the long-term, there is a good chance they will leave the university after a BSc (or even MSc) thesis. In that case, my shared (sometimes novel) ideas get stuck. Since I won't publish their 'managed' contribution to the research, it's a moral thing for me.
So I was thinking, instead of (or beside) draining them to the Student Conference, I should motivate them to write journal or conference paper, where copyrights are better solved, I can be a senior, last co-author.
But I am afraid that journals/papers don't support BSc student authors that much. Am I right? Are there journals/papers where the acceptance rate doesn't depend that much on the authors' affiliation?
Do you have any hint, feedback on this idea?<issue_comment>username_1: Journals do not care about the credentials of the authors. They care about the quality of the paper. A low-quality paper by a BSc student will be rejected, just as a low-quality paper by a full professor will be rejected. [You can find other questions on this in the forum.] The main point here: they will not accept a bad paper just because it is written by a BSc student ... is that what you mean by "journals don't support BSc student authors that much"?
Also note: When you try writing a paper on "innovative, novel ideas" outside your area of expertise, you may easily write a bad paper since you do not know the existing relevant literature.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> But according to our university licensing, consulting does not lead to any authorship for the mentor.
>
>
>
You may want to consider double-checking what exactly that means. It's highly likely that your university does not *forbid* you to be co-author of a paper written under your supervision *if* you contributed intellectually to the paper, which is the case if the student uses your ideas. The rule most likely states or is meant to state that supervision *alone* is not sufficient for authorship.
>
> But I am afraid that journals/papers don't support BSc student authors that much.
>
>
>
How would they know that the student is a BSc student? The only case I've ever seen where this is mentioned is in IEEE journals, where some authors may have ", Student Member" attached to their name if they pay the student rate of the IEEE membership - but even then, it could still be a PhD student.
If you want the paper to be published at a good venue, you will most likely take an active role in the writing process, and in the resulting paper, it should not be visible what status the individual authors had.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: Nobody cares about the degree of the student. Often in the US, you don't even have the whole comma Ph.D. thing\* and people just figure the asterisked (communicating) author is a PI, professor, with Ph.D. and the others are postdocs or grad students (i.e. pre Ph.D.) But they could even be other PIs in a subordinate role. Really unless the reviewers or editors are familiar with the PI, nobody even notices or thinks about authors having a particular degree.
That said, there's a pretty normal way of writing, submitting papers, etc. So you should be seen as fitting in that. And this will help avoid any worries you have about degrees...but really nobody cares. But somehow reading between the lines, I don't get the impression that you are a skilled, "blooded" writer for peer reviewed literature yourself. So I am a little leery of the fate of some of your "new idea" papers or your ability to supervise a student through the process. That does NOT mean, don't do it. It does mean...know your blind spots and buckle down, write tight, follow the notice to authors, etc.
The other considerations to think about are if you can really package things to they result in at least an LPU. Probably very possible, but requires some thinking, strategy. Don't assume that the bachelors students will produce the way a full time grad student would, don't plan projects or deliverables with this exact expectation.
I would also think, please, to disentangle the issue of getting students good (right difficulty) projects with a citation (nice for them) from the broader topic of "have ideas but not time to develop them". Frequently that Venn diagram intersection will be small since the ideas really require more dedicated and skillful research to develop. Again, you're being naive if you think you can use the pre-bachelors students like a real grad student (and even that can have issues, delays...but still I can understand using them as "leverage").
\*Amazing the strong correlation of how the weakest Ph.D.s take the most pleasure in the title and the strongest don't care (not that hard really...world is even arguably flooded with excess Ph.D.s), but take pleasure in discoveries instead.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_4: I have several (3) papers published in good math journals, where the research was done jointly with either a BSc level student or below. I expect three more papers where my former master student is a coauthor, where one of the papers is the continuation of his masters thesis.
There are no issues whatsoever, in my experience, only quality matters. I suggest to let the students be involved in the submission process, to learn the ins and outs of publishing.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: I published multiple papers with my BSc and MSc students. Some loose observations:
* It is easier for you, the advisor, to write the manuscript, even if the student has already written their thesis. Proper scientific language with very concise and controlled wording is a matter of exercise. Your student might have not enough of it, even if their thesis is superb.
* If the student intends to pursue an academic career, however, investing more time into writing helps them a lot. Let them write the paper the way they would do it, then do all the revision suggestions. Basically, do what your PhD advisor did with your first paper.
* I put my students as first authors on their papers, they deserve it.
* It makes some sense for you, the advisor, to be the corresponding author – even solely for the reason you would be more easily google-able or still around. Another option is discussing this with a student and putting their private email address on the paper.
* In some cases, there is a GitHub repository to the paper, typically running on the account of the student. If it is referenced on the paper, this is a yet another method to contact the student, even years later.
* Based on my limited sample base, a prospect of a possible paper publication motivates a student a lot, even if they do not aim for an academic career.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_6: TL;DR It shouldn't matter that much what *their* degree level is. *Your* affiliation will probably make the most difference, to the extent that it makes a difference.
When I was an undergraduate, I had a job as a research assistant in our chemical engineering department.
We did not have **any** graduate research assistants at the time in our group, and we published two papers in my time there (had no problems with publication). It was a joint ChE/EE project, so each student was listed by the department that handled their major (if you're admitted into the degree program, you're affiliated with the department). The senior faculty advisors took the final author slot, and they motivated us by offering the position of first-author to the one who contributed the most. There were a dozen of us, and we did quality work. We wound up with a lot of co-authors on one of our papers, but I wouldn't hesitate to say that each made significant intellectual contributions to the work.
I was struck by the comment that you wouldn't publish work done by a student who leaves with a BS thesis. Any student I've worked with would be thrilled to know their research went *somewhere*, rather than occupying an empty shelf. If you don't think their contribution was significant enough to deserve co-authorship, include them in an acknowledgement, *that's what they're for*.
As a senior researcher, your job isn't to do the actual experiments. You're there with the big ideas, and the know-how of what probably won't work. Rarely do I see a professor in a lab; their time is too valuable.
I would recommend you reconsider publishing students' managed contributions. Under no circumstances should you take credit for their work, but sending them an email with something like, "I thought you did quality work on this project, and would like to see it published! If you can do x,y,z, we can submit it to a journal together. If you aren't interested in publishing it with me, I could include you in an acknowledgement, and it could still make an impact." would usually be met with a positive response. The whole process would be very helpful to any student considering graduate school.
Facts are not copyrightable, and university student conferences don't serve the same purpose as peer-reviewed journals. If you're concerned with copyrights on the figures, you should make better figures for the paper using the same (non-copyrightable) data [though you can hold a copyright on a collection of data]. Chances are the you'll want different figures by the time the paper is finished anyway.
Maybe it's colored by my experience, but to me final authorship is a stamp of approval from an experienced researcher who is personally vouching for the work with their reputation. The final author should obviously be very involved in the research process, but doesn't necessarily need to have done all of the work by themselves.
I've heard of people who have problems publishing because they didn't have a university affiliation, but the affiliation of any individual will probably suffice for the whole, to the extent that matters. You still have to get past peer-review, and should still make sure the writing is quality. Undergraduates may especially struggle with quality literature review, but I strongly recommend involving them in the process. It's what pushed me towards a PhD.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: It is definitely possible, and I would actually encourage students to do so if they intend to pursue an academic career. I had the privilege of having incredibly supporting mentors, and published the work for my BSc thesis as a first author in an IEEE journal (not even a member). The bio explicitly stated my BSc status. Being thrown into research like that was an exhilarating, albeit stressful, experience. Journals care about the quality of your work, not your degree.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/15
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<issue_start>username_0: I recently came across a book written by two senior scholars in my field (anthropology), who cite a paper I published with a colleague two years ago. They cite us quite favorably and in most places they cite us correctly. However, there are two passages which they have copied verbatim from our paper but without attributing them to us, nor even citing us anywhere on the respective pages.
What should we do about that? We certainly don't want to ruin our relationship.
What are appropriate steps to be taken?
We have never met the authors in person but been exchanging emails with one of them a few times – all very positive exchanges. He is also supposed to participate in a conference panel with us this year. How to bring it up and what should we expect from them to do?<issue_comment>username_1: It is difficult to say if this was intentional or only an oversight - though an improper one. But the fact that they cite you generally, seems to imply sloppiness, not malice. Ask for a correction.
I would simply point out the passages to them and provide them a proper citation for them. Since this is a book, it will likely go through several printings and it may be possible for the future printings to be corrected. Published books often come with an errata page, usually online these days.
You don't need to make accusations, just point out the correction.
If you get a poor response from the authors, then try to contact the publisher, starting with just the same information and request.
But if you get a favorable response, then thank them and, if you desire, say positive things about their work and point again to your own. From a bad situation it might turn in to a good one. But that assumes good will.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Since you do not supervise these senior scholars and you did not coauthor the plagiarism, you are under no obligation to do anything.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_3: I have had my own work plagiarized and I know it does not feel good, in fact I was quite upset when it happened. In that case the plagiarism was pretty extensive and clearly done with malicious intent (by a graduate student at another institution), and I acted to inform the relevant people. I also had a mild concern at the time that the timeline of events might lead others to conclude erroneously that it was me who plagiarized from the student rather than the other way around.
In your case, however, it sounds like the incident is really too trivial to risk hurting your good relationship with these researchers over. In a comment you say the book contains many errors and there are obvious signs that this was nothing more than sloppiness on the part of the authors. And it sounds like there is no concern you will be mistaken as the plagiarist. So it’s not clear to me what exactly there is to be gained from correcting the mistake in a practical sense, other than to address your own feeling of injustice (which as I said I completely understand and absolutely do not mean to belittle). I assume that these two passages consist of ordinary, everyday text rather than some masterpiece of human ingenuity that will be remembered for many centuries.
My suggestion is to leave it to readers of the book to draw their own conclusions about the professionalism of these authors. If the sloppiness is that obvious, I doubt anyone will be too surprised or shocked to find two unattributed passages in addition to all the other errors. And it is generally not your responsibility to help sloppy scholars improve their work. So, as much as it may be emotionally difficult to do, the best course of action may be simply to do nothing.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/15
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<issue_start>username_0: One of my good friends is a history professor at a local college; in order to preserve anonymity I will not specify which one, but it is a conservative Christian private school in my state. We were discussing some of his curriculum and he mentioned that he is feeling nervous about one of his literary choices, since a paragraph of the document contains one instance of a racially charged word (ne---) and he is not sure if this is appropriate to present to students in the context of an academic discussion. He is not going to read the passage aloud or say or write the word, but the word does exist in the passage and the students are probably going to bring it up. He doesn't want to just not use the passage because it feels wrong to just discard a historical document for that reason alone.
I was intrigued enough by our discussion to ponder what I would do in that situation, since I am hoping to become a professor or educator in my own career, so here is my question:
**How does academia treat literary texts that contain offensive/racially charged language? What is the etiquette around presenting texts in class that include these words?** Would it be better to simply present the passage in a censored version where the words are modified or removed, or is it better to use the source without any modification but carefully explain it to the students and make sure it is treated in its proper historical context? How would you handle this situation as an educator?<issue_comment>username_1: It is counterproductive and anti-intellectual for a historian to "sanitize" history. One of the reasons to study history is to learn from it. If we provide only a nice-nicey view of history it is basically impossible to learn anything. We use innuendo instead of plain facts, perhaps, but that is just sweetener in a bitter pill.
Historically bad things have happened. The bible, for example, has some pretty brutal sections. Does a "christian" educator also want to sanitize that.
If you sanitize Huckleberry Finn, for example, the story loses its point entirely. It is what it is.
I don't think there are any black people in America over the age of two who aren't familiar with these terms and how they have been used. Sanitizing the history of racism only erases their experience to make others feel good about themselves.
We need to learn to behave better. Pretending that we haven't behaved badly doesn't help us get there. The fact that some dehumanizing terms are still used today is the problem, not that that we find them in the historical record.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: A perspective from a different but adjacent issue I have had to deal with - specialized historical scholarship that ends up relying on sources that incidentally use offensive/jarring terminology and stereotypes regarding (North American) Indigenous peoples. (Sometimes esp. in emotionally charged situations like race, reframing in terms of adjacent issue minefields is helpful to figure out best to proceed in your situation.)
The following has worked for me:
1. **Query** whether using the source is worthwhile or appropriate. The question is not censorship of ideas, but rather that anachronistic and discriminatory attitudes can be deeply embedded in reasoning. Jarring language is a red or at least yellow flag to consider whether the point you are trying to engage with is biased more deeply than by language itself, and whether a more nuanced and recent treatment of the topic would serve your purposes better.
2. **Alert** readers/learners if necessary. Regardless of whether the terminology is offensive or merely jarring, it is helpful for learners to be aware and prepared, to demonstrate you have considered the matter -- and to set up a fruitful discussion in class on the topic you want to engage on as well as on this side issue. And more broadly, to the extent something is trigger language or a trigger topic for someone, let them bypass. This is particularly important but not limited to situations where your audience may include people who have suffered the dehumanization implied in these terms.
3. Where the charged language is integral to the topic you do seek to discuss, **engage** unashamedly with it, including its deleterious effects at the time and now, and what *is* important/relevant/beneficial now in spite of the language. History happened. It is dysfunctional to hide it.
4. If (and only if) it is *not* integral, **paraphrase** with the no-longer-appropriate terminology changed. This can even include making edits, in [ ] of course, to quotes you explicitly use. The alternative to engagement is not thoughtless repetition but visible, aware avoidance. You feel it beneficial to make a point; go ahead and make it but steer the discussion away from the charged or shocking side-elements that would *detract* from the discussion you're seeking to have.
5. If you're finding you're using #4 often, **challenge** your framing of the topic. You may claim it's not integral, but repeated instances suggest it's more integral than you'd like, and engagement might be part of your intellectual responsibility to yourself and to your audience. This might in particular involve deliberately seeking out sources presenting historically marginalized perspectives as complements or alternatives, and/or explicitly addressing (and engaging with your audience on) the biases that the portfolio of sources you are using is imposing on you.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: I agree with [username_1's](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368/buffy) answer that is is counterproductive to try to "sanitise" history. Whenever you are using some literary text, you should not censor any aspect of the text that would detract from understanding the point you are making. In some cases, if the text is used only to make a limited point that does not relate to the offending word, it may be okay to quote the relevant material with an editorial replacement of the offending word (e.g., replace it in the quote with "[epithet]"), but this should not be done if the loss of the actual word detracts from understanding the point being made.
This kind of censorship of the offending terminology is generally reserved for cases where the goal of discussion is on some other point, and the teacher feels that the use of the offending word would be an unecessary distraction to the point being made. However, even if you replace an actual epithet with some form of censoring, this will generally invite the reader/listener to imagine (or speculate) on what word was replaced, and they may end up imagining the excised word anyway. In any case, if the offending word is quoted without any censorship, university students should be old and ugly enough to understand the distinction between quotation of a document, versus support for its chosen language.
There are some particular contexts in academic work where racial epithets are of direct interest, such as in linguistic analysis and in some areas of legal analysis, such as those involving hate crimes, etc. In these contexts the particular epithet being used is extremely important, and so it is customary for the epithet under analysis to be used explicitly, without any censorship of the term (see e.g., [Kennedy 1999](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999172?seq=1), [Kennedy 2003](https://www.amazon.com.au/Nigger-Strange-Career-Troublesome-Word/dp/0375713719), [Fogle 2013](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2326274), [Parkes and Jones 2008](https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/jclc98&div=38&id=&page=)). In such papers it is common for the author to use quotations containing the epithet under analysis (or in some fields the word is given in italics instead of in quotes), and also to use this epithet explicitly for analytically purposes in their own writing. Indeed, if an author censored a word under analysis in this context, that would probably be considered to detract from the accuracy of the paper.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: One thing worth noting on this topic is that student exposure to antiquated racial terms
(e.g., in historical documents) can be a useful catalyst for learning about historical patterns of language use, and linguistic issues pertaining to euphemisms and dysphemisms.
The case of the word "negro" is interesting from a historical and linguistic perspective because it is a word that has gone through phases of being considered inoffensive, neutral, or offensive, at various times. The word is the Spanish word for black; according to the [Oxford dictionary](https://www.lexico.com/definition/negro) it came into common usage in English in the seventeenth century as a racial referent, and began to be supplanted in the 1960s.
This case is part of a broader linguistic pattern called the [euphemism treadmill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan), whereby terms that become imbued with negative meaning through pejorative usage (or perceived pejorative usage) are supplanted by new words (see e.g., [Pinker 2016](https://stevenpinker.com/publications/blank-slate)).
This often gives rise to a cycle where a series of initially neutral words become regarded as dysphemisms, or at least as antiquated terms. This particular case is also interesting, insofar as it is a case where a neutral foreign word was incorporated into the English language as a referent that was later replaced with the corresponding English word as a more polite term (i.e., the term "negro" was supplanted by the term "black", with the latter being considered more polite).
Anyway, all of this stuff is pretty interesting for anyone interested in history or linguistics, and it explains the regular cyclical change in words that refer to categories of people who are subject to negative perceptions by the dominant majority in a society. (Other examples include the euphemism treadmill involving terms for mental disabilities, etc. In this case, formerly neutral clinical terms came to be regarded as epithets through pejorative usage.) If students do indeed raise the use of the term in their reading, this could be a good opportunity to introduce them to some interesting linguistic principles that will help them understand why words like this periodically fall into disuse and are replaced by other terms. That is valuable knowledge for students, far beyond the particulars of the present case.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/16
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<issue_start>username_0: I have an on campus visit for assistant professor position in CS department. The search committee sent me an email that they will soon send a topic for teaching demo. I am thinking of asking her to give a teaching demo about a specific topic. Is that proper to ask?<issue_comment>username_1: If the search committee has decided to assign you a topic, you should teach the assigned topic.
If they ask you to choose a topic, then you should choose.
The committee makes the rules, not the candidate.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Generally speaking you can ask for just about anything as long as you do so in a professional way. If you suggest a topic, however, try to assure that it is one that would be interesting to them and at the teaching level they are interested in hiring you for. At a liberal arts college it would be undergraduate, but at an R1 type of university it would probably be at an upper level or graduate level.
And if you express a preference, don't make it a demand, they may have a reason for wanting to see you deal with a specific topic. And it might be better to mention a few topics than a single one.
However, once they have assigned you a topic, it would be a mistake to complain about it.
And, once you have the topic, make sure you understand the level of education of the likely attendees if they will be students.
Upvotes: 1 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: If they say they will send you the topic, then you should prepare and teach that topic.
This may well be because they are asking all candidates to teach / demonstrate that topic so they can see who has the deeper knowledge or those who "miss" or "gloss over" important points or concepts.
If you ask, they may find that curious as they have already told you they will send you the topic - that might send them the wrong impression...
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/16
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<issue_start>username_0: I am now doing my Ph.D. in Europe and I think I am not a good fit for my research group. It is not possible to change to other research groups in Europe and I was planning to drop out of my program and then reapply to some other group working on a different topic. I need some advice on whether it is possible to do so?<issue_comment>username_1: It depends a lot on which university you apply at and what the new supervisor thinks about it.
In most cases you would be asked if you have been enrolled in a Ph.D. program before, wether you finished it or not and if not, why you dropped out. In many cases it would be up to the new supervisor to make the decision. It's generally not seen as something positive, but if you are the best candidate, then it shouldn't be a problem.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: *Context: I have had candidates in similar situations apply to positions I offered in the past.*
It's certainly *possible* - you are not a slave to your current group, and there is no law that says that we cannot hire people who have already started (and quit) a PhD elsewhere.
However, in practice, applicants in your situation raise an interesting question for the hiring person. On the one hand, you already have some experience in research, potentially decreasing the amount of training required before you will become effective. On the other hand, people *will* be wondering what went wrong the first time, and whether the same is likely to happen in your next PhD position.
In truth, most such candidates end up not being accepted. There is normally at least one other highly qualified candidate who is perceived as lower-risk. However, oftentimes this is also because the candidates don't do a particularly good job *explaining* their situation, and transparency (and plausibility of the story) are key. The instinct of many candidates seems to be to try to keep the topic out of conversation as much as possible, and only provide highly generic answers when probed. This is not a good strategy, as it keeps people wondering - and wondering people make up their own explanations (or they simply decide that the risk is too high).
I feel that before you go back onto the PhD student job market, you may want to head over to the [Workplace.SE](https://workplace.stackexchange.com) and carefully study the (many) questions there related to how to, and how not to, talk negatively about previous employment. Your challenge will be to convince your next advisor that you are quitting your previous position for good reasons which are unlikely to repeat in the position you are applying to, *without* thrash-talking your previous research group. It's certainly a capricious edge to walk.
Upvotes: 4
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2020/03/16
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<issue_start>username_0: More detail: After a failure of communication, I turned down other funded offers to accept an unfunded PhD. I had some money saved and tried it out anyway, but after *one month* quit and went with a previous offer (after telling them I'd made a bad decision)!
I worked for 3 months specifying my skills for the defaulted PhD, do I mention the experience on my CV? On one hand I don't want the blip recorded as it leaves a little time gap between finishing MSc and entering PhD and records my bad decision making, on the other the institute name is a major buzzword for careless recruiters. Thoughts?<issue_comment>username_1: While it is a bit of a grey area, I'd suggest that it isn't necessary to do so as it hasn't contributed to your qualifications for the future.
You need to be able to give an explanation for the gap if asked, of course. But not everyone's education trajectory is a smooth and unbroken upward curve and people understand that. As people we aren't perfect and we suffer setbacks. Having made a poor decision isn't career ending and you have wisely found a better path.
People change programs for lots of reasons.
However, if you decide that you should list it, I doubt that there would be any downside. It will probably guarantee a discussion about why, but that is fine also. "I made a mistake and worked to correct it" is a pretty human response.
While it isn't precisely the definition, a CV normally lists accomplishments, not setbacks. Long gaps are suspect, of course and can be explained or not.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: **I think you should not bother mentioning the first (unfunded) PhD program.**
From your post (emphasis added):
>
> After a failure of communication, I turned down other funded offers to accept an unfunded PhD. I had some money saved and tried it out anyway, but **after one month quit** and went with a previous offer (after telling them I'd made a bad decision)!
>
>
>
Since you only spent a month in this PhD program, I can't see how it is really relevant to your experience, nor will it result in a significant gap in your CV if you omit it. Moreover, you probably do not have many achievements from this month, so it is more likely to just result in unnecessary questions when people read your CV.
>
> I worked for 3 months specifying my skills for the defaulted PhD, do I mention the experience on my CV?
>
>
>
What do you mean by "specifying my skills"? This could be a good thing to mention if you were working on, e.g., online coursework, but you don't need to mention that it was for the PhD that you quit.
On the other hand, if it was just you working on skills on your own, then it won't help to mention it.
>
> On one hand I don't want the blip recorded, on another it leaves a little time gap between finishing MSc and entering PhD
>
>
>
How long is the gap of time? If it's just a few months, it will be ignored. If it is a full year, it may be something you will want to explain to someone if they ask, but I don't think it will be necessarily critical.
>
> and the institute name is a major buzzword for careless recruiters.
>
>
>
I am not sure I understand why it would be a "buzzword" -- is it a poorly regarded institute? Anyway, combining this concern together with all your other reservations, I think it would be fine to leave it off.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: My personal experience says **don't**.
Similar to you, my CV included a semester of irrelevant PhD studies. It helped me a lot to find a position after I removed that part completely.
If you mention some unfinished business, then the question
>
> Why did you quit/dropped off?
>
>
>
is inevitable. This is not because people want to come down on you, but the thought is
>
> If the candidate mentioned this piece of information, **which is
> obviously useless**, it must have a reason.
>
>
>
Then, it is not very helpful for your interview process if you don't give a satisfying answer. So, *in my personal opinion*, I suggest you leave that period out, and answer only if you are asked about what you did in that month.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/16
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<issue_start>username_0: I am reading '*The life and letters of <NAME>*' from [Gutenberg Project](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2087/2087-h/2087-h.htm) ebook. I want to cite some quotes from this book in academic article. How can I cite it?
Project [FAQs](https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Permission_How-To) suggests following
>
> No permission is needed to credit, cite or link to Project Gutenberg
> as the source of something you use. This applies even for commercial
> use.
>
>
>
However, I want to cite this book (maybe with page number of the quotes). Project homepage did not give any other metadata about publisher and ISBN number. This metadata is available on [Amazon](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1402183879). I am little confused, whether I should cite without publisher and ISBN or use the one from Amazon.
I know this is not a big deal but I just want to be correct :)<issue_comment>username_1: I note that the Gutenberg version doesn't have page numbers so chapter is about all you can cite if you use it directly. I'll also note that the Gutenberg editions are sometimes taken from multiple editions of a work and that they modernize spellings for some works. This makes citation difficult when you need to be definitive. You are better off citing from original editions whenever possible in scientific/scholarly work.
But in this case, I'd think that a decent library (and any academic library) should be able to get you a copy of a print edition that you can use. Consider that.
While you don't need to cite Project Gutenberg, you do need to cite the work itself. Being in the public domain doesn't mean no citations are needed.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> No permission is needed to credit, cite or link to Project Gutenberg as the source of something you use. This applies even for commercial use.
>
>
>
Firstly, I think you may have misunderstood this a bit. The text isn't saying you shouldn't cite Project Gutenberg; in fact, it's saying the opposite -- that you don't need permission to cite them.
Project Gutenberg even has explicit instructions for how you can cite them [here](https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Permission_How-To#Citing_Project_Gutenberg). They give an example:
>
> <NAME>. (2006). *Alice in Wonderland.* Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved February 21, 2016, from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19033.
>
>
>
The above assumes that Project Gutenberg is the publisher for the version you are citing. That seems valid enough to me, as many books are published in various versions anyway, and you would just be citing one of those versions. The most important thing is not the publisher, but the author and title of the work -- the rest, including the year, is just there so that someone else can find the book that you were reading.
[Here](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3017/what-year-to-use-when-citing-second-editions-of-books?rq=1) is a related question about 2nd editions of books. Note the advice there: You cite the version of the text that you read, not a version that you didn't read. The problem is the quote, page number, etc. may differ in different versions, so you want to be careful. I see Project Gutenberg as an online version of a previously in-print book.
**However, some caveats:**
* It is confusing that the year will be off if you cite Project Gutenberg, so it would always be good to include a parenthetical in the citation: e.g. `(originally published 1865)` for Alice in Wonderland.
* Be aware that citing Project Gutenberg is a bit nontraditional; probably most people would prefer to cite a print version. But that culture may be changing, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with citing the version that you read.
---
If you prefer to be safe, you can choose to instead cite a print book, e.g. using an ISBN found on Amazon. In this case, if you wish to credit Project Gutenberg for their help, you can include something in the acknowledgements to your article:
>
> **Acknowledgements.** The authors would like to thank Project Gutenberg for making some books referenced in this article available online.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/16
| 1,912
| 7,824
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<issue_start>username_0: Recently I received a rejection by the editor of SCI Expanded journal (which I consider to be a legitimate journal):
The reviewer's comments (just a few days after I submitted the manuscript):
>
> Sorry, this paper lacks novelty, is not well written, and will not be considered due to overwhelming submissions to X journal (SCI Expanded journal).
> Suggest to try: (gives me a URL to a journal listed in Beall's List of predatory journals).
>
>
>
(I have removed the names of the journals above. I have personally checked <https://beallslist.net/> and confirmed that the suggested journal falls inside the Original Beall's List. The suggested journal comes with a publication fee of 1500 euros for each article.)
I am quite new to academia. Is the above considered normal practice for a reputable journal listed in the Science Citation Index (Expanded)?
Any advice of what I can do?
---
Update:
I found that a member of the editorial board of the SCI Expanded journal, is also in the editorial board of the Beall's list journal.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> I am quite new to academia, is the above considered normal practice
>
>
>
No. This is abnormal and unacceptable for a reviewer or editor to suggest this.
>
> Any advice of what I can do?
>
>
>
If the journal you submitted to really is legitimate, contact the editor and escalate this. Simply point out that the review you received pointed you to a predatory journal, and ask if the editor can reach out to the reviewer to see if this was a mistake.
>
> Update: I found that a member of the editorial board of the SCIE journal, is also in the editorial board of the Beall's list journal.
>
>
>
This is a red flag, and the review you received is another red flag. These red flags suggest that the journal you submitted to is *not* reputable. I would check with online journal ratings, impact factor, etc. to make sure you are not already submitting to a very low-quality journal (even if it is not predatory).
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: [This answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145473/69206) is on point. I will only add that it is common in some fields for editors to make such a suggestion; in such cases they offer to transfer the manuscript to another journal by the same publisher.
This practice is followed by a very reputable journal in my field of materials science/engineering. The second journal is new, doesn't even have an impact factor yet, but researchers appear to welcome this option, because it is affiliated to the primary, reputed journal.
The reason for adding this is that such practices are not always unethical; use your caution and check the referred journal. However, ensure that it is an actual transfer that is being proposed, not just a suggestion to resubmit (without the mechanism of carrying the submission/review history).
In the present case, I concur that you should report this reviewer to the editor.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: First: it's likely you mistook the decision - it's not a reviewer's comment, it's the editor's comments, and they are desk rejecting your manuscript. In this case it is decently common for the editor to suggest another journal (especially if it's published by the same publisher). I would not find it a red flag if they did - it is after all only a suggestion which you are under no obligation to follow.
You write that the editor recommended a journal on Beall's list, but remember that [Beall's list is not gospel](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23719/why-do-open-access-consortia-affiliate-themselves-with-questionable-publishers/115704#115704), especially since it is now defunct and not being updated. There is a real chance that the editor does not consider the journal predatory, or even that the journal isn't predatory in the first place. The editor is very unlikely to have anything to gain if you submit to a predatory journal either - the other journal might not even know your paper has been referred.
If you do not want to submit to that journal (especially since it is open access with an APC), simply ignore the editor's suggestion and submit your paper elsewhere.
>
> I found that a member of the editorial board of the SCIE journal, is also in the editorial board of the Beall's list journal.
>
>
>
This doesn't mean anything. [It is conceivable that a reputable academic will elect to serve on the editorial board of a "predatory" journal](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/104526/why-would-the-editor-of-a-reputable-journal-act-simultaneously-as-the-editor-of) (inverted commas because what is predatory isn't well-defined). Or it could be that the predatory journal is simply listing the editor's name without their consent. Either way, this doesn't say anything about the SCIE journal.
Even if this editorial board member is the editor who rejected your paper, it's still possible they are be acting with completely benign intentions (if your colleague told you their paper's been rejected from X journal and you knew of journal Y which would consider it, would you suggest it?). Bear in mind that if they are editorial board members of both journal they would have a pretty good idea of the standards of the other journal, and that your paper meets those standards.
I would take the fact that the journal is indexed by the SCIE as a very strong sign that the journal is reputable (anyone who's ever tried to get a new journal into the SCIE will be able to vouch for how difficult this can be).
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_4: I don't think it's unusual for a reviewer to suggest another journal if they are recommending rejection for the reason of "not strong enough for this journal". I try to do this myself; sometimes I receive an article to review that strongly suggests the author is not very familiar with the relative strengths of journals in the field, so this comment may be helpful.
There are other worrying signs in this case, though. It is very unusual for a review to come back so quickly (in fact it would be surprising that the submission has even reached a reviewer by this point), and the editor doesn't seem concerned about the perfunctory nature of the review. One might even start to wonder whether there really was a "reviewer". Of course the fact that the journal is on Beale's list may be a legitimate mistake or an historical artefact, but with these other factors I would be suspicious about both journals.
I wouldn't want to publish in the original journal any longer. Just resubmit to another journal of your own selection, and count yourself fortunate not to have lost more than a few days.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_5: First, given the wording, this is the editor desk-rejecting your paper, and you are confused because you are new to all that. *If* the editor somehow implied the *reviewer* wrote that, ignore his recommendation and run away, submitting elsewhere. Otherwise, consider that *if* the paper is in fact as weak as the editor claims it is, you are likely to be unable to publish in any much better journal. This is hard for you to judge - we all have blind spots for our own work.
You can submit to that journal and check the review process there by yourself. If it seems suspiciously short with few or no relevant comments regarding contents of your manuscript, this journal is indeed predatory and will publish whatever crap anyone sends. Then, you can either opt to publish to get it over with, or let them know you changed your mind and that you will publish elsewhere because you were unsatisfied with their review process. Sure, you will waste some time to get the response, but you can simply keep working on other stuff while you wait for that response.
Upvotes: -1
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2020/03/17
| 3,046
| 13,016
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<issue_start>username_0: There has been a lot of talk about online teaching in relation to covid-19 and campus shutdowns.
This question isn't about that though: my question is about what ways online examinations should be treated in counterpoint to written examinations.
I'm going to be transferring my course's written examination into an online environment. This examination involved 2 hours of students, with a pen and paper, answering questions both short and long in a typical examination environemnt.
An online exam however cannot be policed. Demanding it be anything other than open book is unrealistic. What methods can be deployed such that it is a genuine test of students' knowledge and capabilities?<issue_comment>username_1: First, a two hour time limit might be difficult to enforce or to guarantee, especially if it uses a real-time clock. At some level of scale you may start to find that some students didn't get the exam paper or were unable to return it by the deadline. So, I'd start by rethinking if a time limit of less than a day is really essential to your exam.
Second, you can pre-vet any questions you ask by doing searching yourself online for possible answers and responses. Reject questions that have too much online presence, or be prepared for getting that back as answers. Presumably the test isn't about effective online searches.
Third, give up the idea of asking students for facts. That is obvious, I'd think, as facts are cheap. But even facts requiring computation, such as in mathematics or statistics can be generated with tools such as MatLab or Mathematica.
The best sort of questions, I think, are those that require either or both of interpretation and insight. Questions about the *why* of things rather than the *what* and *how* are much better. However, these are the hardest to create, the hardest to answer, and are likely to have the widest variation in quality from students. To grade them might require quite a lot of interpretation: does this student show any insight at all into the subject? Pass-fail grading can be considered. Repeat attempts can be considered.
As an alternative to an exam, you can consider individual *portfolio* development by students. Students write or otherwise create some artifacts according to some criteria. Plagiarism concerns come in to play here, of course.
I'll note that honor codes can help to a certain extent, though provide no guarantees. And honor codes created *in the moment* are probably less effective than those of long standing.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: I face the same issue.
One point I am considering is **time** , if you write the questions such that if they answer based on memory then you get a (relatively) structured answer.
But if they spend most of the time shuffling through books then the answer will tend to be “chunks” and “lumps” that don’t perhaps flow as well.
So take care with the amount of time...
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: I thought this might be useful as I haven't seen it posted yet.
One idea I have seen professors deploy (I am a PhD student so I sometimes get to help think of these things) is to introduce some complication into the test. Some ways I've seen this done (and some ways it's being done to *me* this semester):
**Open book, harder problems**
The idea behind this one is to tackle the problem you pointed out directly - how to make a test a *test* while more-or-less being forced into an open book scenario. In this option, you would simply increase the difficulty of your test appreciably. Perhaps have some questions that, when answered correctly, would confer a C (or equivalent) grade. For the other questions make them incrementally harder. The idea here is to ensure the student is learning something. One way to do that is to push them modestly outside their comfort zone with questions that can't be simply looked up in their text. My program is Computer Science. One way this could be done in my field is to, instead of requiring a student to demonstrate the steps of an algorithm, prove something small. Maybe an example of proving an invariant of something, or a challenging application to something they learned in class. Enforcing a time constraint would be very difficult for someone unless you had a proctor for each individual.
**Open book, research**
Ask the students to interpret something they've learned in class in perhaps a new light. Depending on the course level you are teaching this could be something very basic all the way to something a PhD student might be expected to do in their research (obviously it must be attainable and reasonable - but I think you get the idea). Again, unfortunately enforcing a time constraint without a proctor would be difficult.
Both of them require more work from you unfortunately. At my level I have not seen any timed online tests mostly because the infrastructure just isn't available to be spun up quickly for classes that weren't already doing it. Additionally, the material is quite complicated and doesn't lend itself well to chunking out into online questions that a computer could grade.
Good luck!
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: I’m considering making my final exams oral via Skype/Zoom/WebEx/Teams.
My reasoning is that, for the size of class I teach (20 to 24) and the usual exam duration and marking time, it will take me about the same amount of time.
I believe that I can usually ascertain a student’s grade to A/B/C/D/F within about five minutes of questioning. The finer grades will take a little more time, but again still within the time I usually spend on grading and proctoring.
I have a midterm coming up, and will try it out there.
Advantages: you’re pretty sure it’s the right student. They don’t have time to look much up. And any in-room help will be obvious.
Disadvantages: scheduling it may be difficult. Students are not used to it. Getting them to do computations / calculations may be problematic.
—-
Edit:
=====
So far, I’ve done about about one hundred oral exams and it’s worked very well. The scheduling issue has a tech solution: I’ve used Microsoft Bookings which has direct access to my calendar and let’s the students manage their booking. Plus, I get to schedule *when* they can book their exams.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: I would resist the COMMON ADVICE to go for some harder, research-y, project-y type questions. They are not as pedagogically helpful for a neophyte. (Less progressive, less basic skills testing.) Instead I would decide that some loss in cheating is worth the cost, versus a cost in learning.
All that said, the following actions can be taken to mitigate\* the cheating danger:
1. Make the exam timed, AT a specific time (this is a good idea in general to exert some discipline...CLAIM your regularly scheduled time), with typed answers submitted in last few minutes of the test. NOTE: you don't need some fancy system. It can be as simple as an email which they "reply" to by adding answers.
2. Make the tests LESS high stakes by doing more frequent AND shorter exams. A weekly Friday hour long exam is not unreasonable for a 5 day per week class. An every two weeks hour long exam is reasonable for a 3 day per week class. Several studies have shown that lower stakes, more frequent tests are less likely to be cheated on.
3. Add a signature block (can be typed name) that no assistance was received. The intention is not to stop ALL cheating. But some fraction of it.
4. Make the exam 10% shorter based on the time for the kids to access the email and reply to it. (And let them know this.)
5. Make it a little easier than normal. The benefit in driving some feeling of success and lessening the "need to cheat" feeling is worth the small loss in challenging the best students. But if you want, you can do an extra credit (with the clear communication to the class, that it will be significantly more difficult and not to attempt it until all other problems have been attempted. Make the stakes relatively LOW (points awarded) for the EC, so it really is just for the kids that are "acing" the easied-up material.
6. Make all the questions very clear and more mechanical. Avoid problem formulations that require explanation (possible, but more difficult/distracting to communicate a clarification with students not in the room). No tricky words. Use the symbols they are used to, etc. In mathematics or chemistry or physics, stick to problems that mimic the examples.
7. For chem/math/physics, it is unreasonable to ask for writing in LATEX or the like. So I would eschew the normal problem style where you check the work and instead ask for actual answers (grade only those, only require the typing of those). But you can compensate by giving more (but more simple) problems or by asking for answers to intermediate steps. For truly essay style questions (English, history, biology), this is less a concern. Just let the kids type (they all type nowadays...but typing an equilibrium problem in chem is not trivial under exam conditions).
8. Probably some things like diagram drawing (geology, biology, etc.) will be more difficult and I would eschew these questions during the "situation". But if you want, you can do the work to devise questions (e.g. give the word that corresponds to A, B, C, D on a diagram.)
9. (For 7 and 8, the rationale is not to expect them to have a scanner or to challenge yourself with grading their smartphone snapped pictures. That will be a nightmare.)
---
Bottom line: 3/4 of a loaf WELL EXECUTED is better than a whole loaf that falls in the water.
\*"Mitigate" means partially eliminate; NOT totally eliminate. SE Q&A pedants, please note.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: I think a lot of us are dealing with this right now. Here's what I and some of my colleagues are doing.
**Open book exams:** As a lot of people are saying, there's no practical way to police students' use of outside resources, so don't. Write the exam with the expectation that they are using notes and possibly even Google, and **let them know that.** You don't want to disadvantage students who think they're being honest!
**Interpretive questions:** Google is great for facts, but lousy for providing interpretation. As a math instructor, one of my major concerns was the existence of software like Symbolab and Wolfram Alpha that can do most calculations. But there's no software in existence that can solve a decently well-written word problem, or that can explain what particular features of a graph mean in context.
**Class-specific questions:** One of my colleagues, a history instructor, has the problem that the topics involved in the exam are sufficiently well-studied that interpretations are actually freely available online, and a reasonably clever student would be able to paraphrase well enough to avoid detection. What he's planning to do is to ask the students to *relate the topic to the class itself*, asking the students to reference in-class discussions in their answers. Because Google has no way to know what was discussed in class, this is pretty robust against cheating.
**Image recognition:** Google does have reverse-image-search functionality, but it isn't very effective if you made the image yourself. As a result, asking a question that requires students to understand an image can be useful; in my exam, I asked students to supply a function that matched a given graph. *It's worth noting that, since images are largely incompatible with screen readers, you might have to be conscious of any disabilities among your students.*
**Time:** If a time limit is important, have the exam available for only slightly longer than that time slot. My exam was two hours long, and I had it available for three hours. That limited the ability for students to communicate questions to each other, and it also allowed some flexibility for students running into technical problems. Personally, if possible, I recommend just writing an untimed exam, written with the expectation that students might be communicating with each other.
**Justification:** Most students do a very poor job of explaining reasoning that isn't their own -- use that. If an exam problem requires students to justify their answer, it's that much harder for them to get answers from one another.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_7: A minor suggestion if you're worried about cheating and this is about objectively graded subjects (as opposed to writing a 2-page essay on Machiavellian philosophy).
With minor programming-fu, send each person a test with a random subset of problems from a collection, **and** every time a problem goes out, change the value and name of some of the variables. You might jest, but my Dad, who taught college math, handed out 2 different paper exams. A kid got a zero on a problem in versionA, and went to my Dad and said "why a zero? the guy next to me had the same answer and it was marked correct."
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/17
| 2,499
| 10,635
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<issue_start>username_0: One of the most common things I think any students has seen is walking into the office of a professor to a miniature library of textbooks and books geared towards disseminating research to researchers and practitioners. I am wondering how often these books might be paid for out of pocket or if it is common for universities to pay for these books as if they were something like an educational allowance.
How do universities (if at all) try to financially support professors in their continuing education?
I understand there are travel grants for conferences, but I am wondering if professors can take MOOC's or purchase books to help them explore new research areas and receive financial support from their academic institutions?<issue_comment>username_1: This is probably as variable as the educational system generally. But I'd doubt that more than a few professors get special allowances for such things.
Some of the books you see are text books given to professors by publishers in hope that the professor will adopt them for a class. Some of them are "ancient" texts that the professor used as a student back in the ice ages.
Some quite useful advanced books might be given to a professor by some publisher when the professor adopts some elementary text. It is a form of bribery, I suppose.
When professors retire they sometimes open their own bookshelves to their colleagues (or students) who are free to carry away things that interest them. Some books actually wind up in boxes outside a professor's door and others are free to expand their own libraries with them. Sometimes such books actually have some educational value.
Some of the books are funded by grants also, but normally grants from funding agencies outside the university.
A few new professors will get some "start up funds" from a university department and while intended for bootstrapping research, books and papers are part of that.
I accumulated hundreds of books over the many years. Some were donated to educational systems in Kenya eventually. But I still have far too many. No one other than publishers ever funded them, however.
Generally, however, the salary of a professor should be high enough to support quite a lot of such things out of pocket. I paid for professional memberships myself, for example, which generated a lot of journals on my shelves.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: It depends upon the specific department and university. I know some "teaching universities" where faculty get faculty development grants either formally through the university or their department for continuing education and professional development For example [the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse](https://www.uwlax.edu/grants/faculty-development-grants/), offers faculty development grants to:
>
> The UWL Faculty Development Committee (FDC) awards grants to support the professional development of faculty and instructional academic staff and projects intended to improve teaching and learning. There are three types of grants:
>
>
> 1. Teaching Innovation
> 2. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
> 3. Professional Development
>
>
>
Conversely, many faculty at research programs are expected to fund their own needs through grants. Some research universities have "seed" grants that are designed to help faculty development, but these tend to be more research focused starter grants rather than continuing education. For example, [Texas Tech](https://www.depts.ttu.edu/research/faculty/index.php) offer faculty development grants described faculty development as
>
> **Faculty Development**
>
>
> The OR&I offers a variety of learning opportunities and internal funding programs to promote faculty success in research and creative activities, and to assist faculty develop successful external funding proposals.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Some of my colleagues who are editors for various academic publishers do get copies of advanced texts and monographs. It's not at all a budget from their university.
In my experience, people who have lots of books have paid for them our of their own pockets. Yes, this can be a significant expense. All the more motivation to create "free/on-line" versions of things when one is in a position to do so.
(For myself, I estimate I have a few thousand non-elementary mathematics books, and fewer than 10 were not paid for by me out of pocket.)
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: In Canada, most universities provide a *professional allowance* that can be used with some discretion towards various costs (professional associations, cloud storage etc) including books. The value is variable but even CEGEP teachers in the Quebec system have a small allowance; outside Quebec some school boards also provide a small allowance.
In addition it’s usually easy to get a desk copy of a relevant textbook. I still do pay for about 1/3 of my books.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: Something that hasn’t been mentioned much yet is the fact that many professors are given books for free by publishing companies in the hope that they will then cause others to buy the book. In general, professors accumulate books from grants, university resources, book giveaways, free books from publishers, their own money, and many other sources over time.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Some universities have budget and programs to buy books for departments - for example, I know Barcelona University does. Books bought with funds from such programs, although university property assigned to a department, may end in the shelves in the office of a professor who is using them for their work at the university.
Furthermore, books can be bought with project grand funds, as any other item deemed necessary for the program goal.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: Every German university I know of has a part of the annual library budget earmarked for the chairs, like several hundreds of Euros per year for a chair. It is called the "Handapperat" and it is listed by the library. Students can borrow those books for a short time (overnight or for a weekend). The books are owned by the library, but their official location is the professor's shelve. The books are selected by the professor (or their team) and cover usually advanced topics.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: It depends on the institution, but it's possible that some of these may actually be library books, or former library books.
Libraries have to regularly weed out titles that aren't circulating enough to make room for either new editions or other books that are seeing more use. Some libraries will have an off-site archive, and will move older books there (until that too is full). Others will dispose of the books -- sometimes they'll offer them to other libraries (and often in a consortium, they'll try to make sure that there's a minimum number of copies in their system), but I've seen at least one case where they offered them to the people who had previously checked out the book.
I've also worked at places where professors were allowed to check out books for an entire semester, so it's possible that a few of the books aren't actually theirs. (I've also worked at a research institution where people could keep book out until someone else requested it ... I don't know if this is similar to [what username_7 mentioned or not](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145587/1622))
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: You do not even need to be a professor, it is very easy to accumulate a huge collection of books at a university without paying a single penny.
As an undergraduate student I was already picking up several free textbooks from outside the used book store of our campus: many classes required students to buy the most recent version of a textbook, so the old versions would go obsolete and they'd be left outside the book store for people to take. The library might also have a similar system for damaged or obsolete books as they need to make room on their shelves for new books.
What about books for more specialized topics that are not covered at the undergraduate level? When a professor retires and moves out, books are often given away for free. This happens often enough.
More opportunities are available for professors, still without paying out-of-pocket:
- start-up allowance: when you are first hired as a professor, you get some money to help you get started, and this is usually enough to pay the salaries of some graduate students or a post-doc, so it is definitely enough to fill up a library of books (not that anyone would ever use it for only that).
- professional allowance: many universities give about $1000 per year, which is more used for conferences, laptops, printers, and teaching materials, publication fees, but sometimes also for books.
- many professors apply for and acquire research grants.
---
Despite all of the above, it is still common for some books to be purchased out of pocket. In my case I did buy a lot of textbooks for my undergraduate courses, and some of those books are still relevant enough for me to still have today. Many books were on sale for $0.99 at the used book store, and I bought them almost entirely because it was a great deal. Some books were payed for out of pocket because the system for getting reimbursed was too inconvenient for me.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_10: Depending on the place, systems may be in place that allow faculty members to buy books without paying from their pocket. For example, in India, government universities have something called "learning resource allowance" (LRA) for faculty members which can be used towards anything which the faculty member can justify as "learning". Usually, these funds are accumulated through the year and faculties cash it in towards the end of financial year to buy stuff. I know professors who have bought things like cameras, laptops, printers, paid for publication charges, books, projector screens, software subscription, and what not. Depending on the institution policy, books purchased under the LRA may carry a stamp that says that this was purchased with LRA funds but the book remains with the professor.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_11: Many universities have deals with Springer Nature and other publishers whereby a large portion of the books from those publishers are available freely for download by anyone with an account at that institution. Springer will even send a paperback edition for a small charge, of the book is already available for download to that professor.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/18
| 591
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<issue_start>username_0: I applied for a faculty position and did a video interview. It was supposed that they let me know if I have been selected for campus or not. In the middle of the interview with other candidates, this COVID-19 happened and I am not sure what strategy they will take as the target university has canceled all in-person classes and shifted to an online model.
Would it be appropriate to ask the committee about the status of the search?
What factors would affect the university's response in such a case?<issue_comment>username_1: In this situation you should send a carefully worded and kind email to the chair of the department asking how the pandemic is going to affect the timing of the search. Make it clear that you understand that this may not be their main priority now. There’s no way for anyone outside their search committee to know what’s happening, it’ll be different at different schools.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: It’s certainly appropriate to ask. Virus or not, the world will move on from this crisis, hopefully in a timeframe of a few months, you will still need a job, and the university will still need faculty to teach classes and do research. Students will still need to be educated. Higher education can be affected by economic recession, put probably less so than many other sectors of the economy. So don’t panic.
So yes, it’s fine to send them an email and politely inquire about the status of the search. Keep in mind that it’s possible they are scrambling to figure out how to keep instruction going and dealing with other urgent matters around the current crisis unrelated to faculty hiring. So the most likely response you’ll get is they are still figuring things out and don’t have any news.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: >
> Would it be appropriate to ask the committee about the status of the search?
>
>
>
It's pointless, but not inappropriate.
>
> What factors would affect the university's response in such a case?
>
>
>
Either they invited someone else to campus, or they don't know what is happening next.
>
> I am not sure what strategy they will take as the target university has canceled all in-person classes and shifted to an online model.
>
>
>
Some universities are doing online campus visits. Some searches will be canceled entirely (this happens even when there is no disaster).
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/18
| 532
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm a MSc student (second year) in a math department in Europe and I have to check and correct the exercise sheets of the students of the first year of Master degree attending a course this semester. Those points can add up to **+2** extra points in the final mark.
These exercise are taken from the course of the last year, which was given by another teacher.
Unfortunately, in the e-learning platform of the past year all the solutions by the previous teacher are still available and anyone can access it.
I think I should tell this to the teacher, but I'm afraid to be inappropriate, as I'm a student like them.
Best regards<issue_comment>username_1: Just send the prof an email or tell them in passing.
It's not your fault but they either know already or will be pleased to know so they can evaluate what they do.
What they do is either nothing or they may update the exercise material - students who want to progress will do the work anyway...
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: I reckon most professors know that the solutions are available online. Nevertheless, telling them is a nice thing to do. It's a way of showing, that **you** care about the quality of the lecture, and it might even trigger a fruitful discussion.
I am well aware that the solutions to my problem sheets are available online. Students told me so, but it is also obvious from the number of correct and wrong solutions. How do I know this?
1. I use a random number generator to obtain different starting values for the problem sheets. Students, who don't pay attention, might get it wrong.
2. Whenever I add a new problem this particular question gets the least correct answers.
Now, filtering the scores from old problem sheets according to the two criteria above and correlating them with the scores of the final exam, it gets pretty obvious that "doing the homework" and "coming to "consultation hours" significantly influences the final grade. I show this data every semester, at the beginning of a new course. During this presentation I also mention that the solutions are online, however, I try to put this into the context it deserves: Trying to cheat on the problem sheets is a waste of time. The time is better spent, having a beer and discussing the subject with your fellow students.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]
|
2020/03/18
| 832
| 3,481
|
<issue_start>username_0: One question we often get on this site in one form or the other is: [Is my paper under review (or similar) for too long and if yes, how should I react?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/88355/7734) Now, suppose I have gone through all the steps to answer this question in a normal situation: I have procured statistics of the journal’s handling or peer-review times, added a fair margin for individual variability, etc. My question is: **How should I modify these in lights of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis?** I do not want to bother editors more than appropriate.
The obvious thoughts are:
* Some reviewers and editors are busy with challenges arising due to the crisis, e.g., due to having to switch to online teaching, having no childcare, etc.
* On the other hand, some reviewers and editors now have more time available due to conferences being cancelled, not being able to access their labs, and similar.
* Some fields are obviously directly affected by the crisis, in particular medicine, virology, and epidemiology. I am not considering those.
**I am only interested in answers that go beyond such obvious thoughts**, for example being based on experience as an editor.
The ideal are answers based on statistics, but those likely do not exist yet (but will be welcome when they eventually will).<issue_comment>username_1: >
> **How should I modify these in lights of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis?**
>
>
>
I don't think you should modify anything about your approach. **That is the journal and editor's job, not yours.** Watch for official updates, if any, but otherwise proceed the same as before.
>
> I am only interested in answers that go beyond such obvious thoughts
>
>
>
**This is an unprecedented situation with a large amount of uncertainty: no one has experience with it.** So the hope for an answer rooted in experience or statistics seems unrealistic.
The "obvious" thoughts you listed are on point.
Some people will proceed the same as before, and others may have more or less time.
On average, it is unclear whether things will proceed faster or slower than usual, and I don't see why it should affect your behavior as the author.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: I am an associate editor for two journals, and although the situation is fairly new, I expect to have no substantive change in the time for me to handle papers.
The reasons for this are:
1. Pretty much everything is handled purely electronically anyway, so there's no physical interaction to be disrupted.
2. Reviewing is typically a sparse activity by people who are mostly always overloaded anyway, and it's always fairly low triage for people. As such, I don't anticipate the availability of reviewers to particularly change: if people have more time, they'll fill it with things more important to them; if people have less time, I'll just have to ask a few more to find a full reviewer set.
3. The time to review is typically dominated by the time that a manuscript ages quietly on the reviewer's desk before the review deadline arrives --- actually carrying out a review often does not take all that much time, by comparison. The number of weeks we give our reviewers isn't going to change, so that dominating time won't either.
4. Because of the preceding factors, there's already a lot of stochasticity in time to review. Even if it does go up a bit, I doubt it will be readily detectable against the background of stochasticity.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/18
| 1,562
| 6,193
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am a Master's student in epidemiology. It's an insane time in our field right now. Of course, I find what's going on fascinating (that's why I am in this field), but extremely stressful as well.
I have 2 advisors. My primary advisor is not working on COVID-19 related stuff. So, although she's really busy trying to re-plan all of her classes to be remote and just reorganize everything, she is not responding directly to the outbreak. My co-advisor, however, is on the response team for the outbreak in my country. Basically, she is working with the government to create models to predict the trajectory of the disease. I had a meeting with her 1.5 weeks ago and she said basically all she has on her mind is COVID-19. That was before the world went into quarantine so I imagine things have become even busier for her.
My primary advisor sent me an email today talking about how to move forward and in the email she mentioned that it does depend on how busy my co-advisor is (but also assured me we would figure this all out).
Unfortunately, the project I am working on now is a modelling project and my primary advisor isn't a modeller, so it's my co-advisor that needs to move the project forward. I still have other things to do for my thesis, but I am almost done those other things and I am just in the editing stages. I have a lot more to do on my modelling project, but my co-advisor is extremely busy right now. I am finished what she asked me to do a couple of weeks ago and want to send it to her.
Sorry for the long post explaining my situation. **My question is, should I send her the things the I have finished or would that be a bit tone-deaf? What should I even say in the email?** I don't want to come off as not caring about the biggest health crisis in at least a decade while asking her to review something that's not even related to COVID-19. How should I even frame the email or should I hold off from sending her things for a few weeks?
If it makes a difference, although I do have an office, I can do 100% of my work remotely (and do usually work from home at least 3 days a week).<issue_comment>username_1: I don't see any harm in sending this co-adviser the work you've completed, provided you include a cover message saying that you're aware how busy she is with the high-priority work on the COVID-19 epidemic but you'd really appreciate it if she could find time to suggest what you should do next.
That was assuming that, when you wrote "she tells me what to do next", you meant that you really have no idea what to do next without being told. If, on the other hand, you do have an idea, you might mention it in your cover message. Something like "Might it be reasonable to look into X next?" could make it easier for her to either just say yes or suggest an alternative.
By the way, although things may be very different in your field, my experience has been that the students who always need to be told exactly what to do tend to be the weaker students. You (and in particular your letters of recommendation) might benefit if you can produce, on your own, some ideas about how to continue.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Yes, it’s fine to email her, but the email should be a lot shorter than your post here. Keep it to an absolute minimum and spare your poor overworked co-adviser having to read any unnecessary apologies, hand-wringing, expressions of sympathy and whatnot.
Something like this might work:
>
> Dear co-adviser,
>
>
> I’m following up on our meeting from last week. As you remember, I need some input from you on Project X. Specifically:
>
>
> 1. A (by March 29 if at all possible)
> 2. B (deadline April 21)
> 3. C (anytime before mid-May)
>
>
> See attached documents.
>
>
> I understand you are extremely busy with COVID-19 related matters. If you think you cannot help with this, could you please at least reply with a quick acknowledgement and/or suggest some other people or resources I could use to be able to complete the project? I would greatly appreciate it.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> aspire94
>
>
>
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: As someone who's been out of academia for a while, I would like to offer a different perspective. Yes, occupying your co-advisor's attention when the roof is on fire is tone-deaf. However: you have acquired skills that are obviously in high demand these days, and are thrown into a (hopefully) once-in-a lifetime situation to apply these skills. Especially since you're not on a strict deadline with your thesis, there are now more important things than finishing the thesis at the scheduled time. See this as an opportunity, not an obstacle.
Check if this is okay with your primary advisor, then send a mail to your co-advisor saying that you would be glad to put your thesis on ice and help her with her COVID work if she has anything you could be of help with. If you are a capable student, she probably will.
Then, when things have calmed down, reevaluate the situation, see what you have learned in the meantime, and continue from there.
Upvotes: 7 <issue_comment>username_4: Can you adapt your model to deal with the problem that is interesting everyone else? You don't have to come up with a magical solution to modeling the COVID outbreak, just use your knowledge to say something interesting and relevant. Help your co-advisor with the collection and synthesis of data, do your bit of modeling and write it all up. The level of interest in the topic will out-weigh the downsides of having to change tack at this late stage of your studies.
You need to discuss this (or any other option) with your primary advisor first.
Keep the material you have already completed, and try to discuss it with your co-advisor in if and when the COVID outbreak is under control.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: I would go with
```
Dear Co-Advisor,
last week we agreed on ...
Of course, all our previous plans are now obsolete.
Please let me know if I can be of any help.
If not, as I want to continue my work withouth putting any burden on you,
I appreciate if you point me towards someone I could get in touch with.
```
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/18
| 1,252
| 5,003
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am a masters student in Germany.
On the contrary to how most people's thesis work turns out, mine looks like it is quite far from what I planned to gain expertise in, in that it seems like it is an oversimplified topic. I was looking to work with machine learning as a center point of focus ( did a bunch of courses in data mining, information retrieval) , but after working as an intern for nearly 5 months in the institute, the topic I was offered was to do with optimising pairwise intersections of lists for which I do not need to make use of any machine learning tools.
I am afraid, this will make it very difficult for me to get a job in the industry and also, I feel like, the topic is not really giving me much to write as part of the literature survey in my thesis report. The whole thing has gotten me really worried sick.
I would greatly appreciate any guidance on where I stand and what I should look out for.<issue_comment>username_1: I don't see any harm in sending this co-adviser the work you've completed, provided you include a cover message saying that you're aware how busy she is with the high-priority work on the COVID-19 epidemic but you'd really appreciate it if she could find time to suggest what you should do next.
That was assuming that, when you wrote "she tells me what to do next", you meant that you really have no idea what to do next without being told. If, on the other hand, you do have an idea, you might mention it in your cover message. Something like "Might it be reasonable to look into X next?" could make it easier for her to either just say yes or suggest an alternative.
By the way, although things may be very different in your field, my experience has been that the students who always need to be told exactly what to do tend to be the weaker students. You (and in particular your letters of recommendation) might benefit if you can produce, on your own, some ideas about how to continue.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Yes, it’s fine to email her, but the email should be a lot shorter than your post here. Keep it to an absolute minimum and spare your poor overworked co-adviser having to read any unnecessary apologies, hand-wringing, expressions of sympathy and whatnot.
Something like this might work:
>
> Dear co-adviser,
>
>
> I’m following up on our meeting from last week. As you remember, I need some input from you on Project X. Specifically:
>
>
> 1. A (by March 29 if at all possible)
> 2. B (deadline April 21)
> 3. C (anytime before mid-May)
>
>
> See attached documents.
>
>
> I understand you are extremely busy with COVID-19 related matters. If you think you cannot help with this, could you please at least reply with a quick acknowledgement and/or suggest some other people or resources I could use to be able to complete the project? I would greatly appreciate it.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> aspire94
>
>
>
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: As someone who's been out of academia for a while, I would like to offer a different perspective. Yes, occupying your co-advisor's attention when the roof is on fire is tone-deaf. However: you have acquired skills that are obviously in high demand these days, and are thrown into a (hopefully) once-in-a lifetime situation to apply these skills. Especially since you're not on a strict deadline with your thesis, there are now more important things than finishing the thesis at the scheduled time. See this as an opportunity, not an obstacle.
Check if this is okay with your primary advisor, then send a mail to your co-advisor saying that you would be glad to put your thesis on ice and help her with her COVID work if she has anything you could be of help with. If you are a capable student, she probably will.
Then, when things have calmed down, reevaluate the situation, see what you have learned in the meantime, and continue from there.
Upvotes: 7 <issue_comment>username_4: Can you adapt your model to deal with the problem that is interesting everyone else? You don't have to come up with a magical solution to modeling the COVID outbreak, just use your knowledge to say something interesting and relevant. Help your co-advisor with the collection and synthesis of data, do your bit of modeling and write it all up. The level of interest in the topic will out-weigh the downsides of having to change tack at this late stage of your studies.
You need to discuss this (or any other option) with your primary advisor first.
Keep the material you have already completed, and try to discuss it with your co-advisor in if and when the COVID outbreak is under control.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: I would go with
```
Dear Co-Advisor,
last week we agreed on ...
Of course, all our previous plans are now obsolete.
Please let me know if I can be of any help.
If not, as I want to continue my work withouth putting any burden on you,
I appreciate if you point me towards someone I could get in touch with.
```
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/19
| 721
| 3,047
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm wondering how much Covid-19 affected scientific productivity, if it affected productivity negatively at all (c.f. Newton actually did a lot of his most important work while the University of Cambridge was closed due to plague).
I'm using the rate at which papers are published on arXiv as a proxy for "scientific productivity", fully aware that it is not a perfect proxy and probably lags actual productivity by quite a bit. If country-specific statistics are available, e.g. "The number of publications by authors from Italy changed by \_\_% on 9 March 2020, the date the lockdown started", that's even better.<issue_comment>username_1: I think your assumption that scientific productivity can be measured by arXiv uploads is flawed. Surely it can measure that the usual workflow has been changed - but especially for short periods of time, productivity cannot be measured by number of papers.
Taking myself as an example. I am using my time at home to do research tasks I have put off for too long. Cleaning up a large code base. Revisiting some old results. These are not tasks that results directly in arXiv uploads, but tasks which are needed in the long run. What I hear from my colleagues, is that they are doing similar things - if not completely worn down by teaching and supervising remotely, of course.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: ArXiv posts its monthly submission statistics [here](https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions). It's noisy data even in the absence of viruses, so I can't tell if there's an effect yet or not. Then again, I'm no statistician. Extrapolating the March data as of today (March 19th), it's at least set to be larger than the February number of submissions, as is typical for March submissions.
However, even if the number of monthly arXiv submissions is to be considered a good proxy, it will likely lag by more time than we have seen so far. Yes, closures, adapting to online classes, and changed schedules will delay new experiments and other activities. However, finishing writing up manuscripts already in the pipeline, or analyzing already collected data are still productive tasks that will lead to new submissions for quite a while. Not to mention people such as myself, who can continue our theoretical/numerical work from home.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: I think it will be interesting to study this 5 years from now, but right now is way too soon. At least in math, people don’t post papers at a steady, constant rate. I personally post around 3 papers per year, and most of those represent work that is at least a year old (often much longer than that) by the time I get around to writing it up. Given what I’ve got partially written right now, I suspect that I will post about the same number (or even a little more) this year, bit that’s just part of the ebb and flow of research. What is harder to predict is the effect of all this chaos on the production of new math, which won’t be visible for several years.
Upvotes: 3
|
2020/03/19
| 743
| 3,316
|
<issue_start>username_0: When you are doing a second round review, do you read other reviewers' comments? Why?
It seems to me that all I need to do is seeing whether the author/s satisfied my comments and whether I find any more problems in the current version of their manuscript.<issue_comment>username_1: It is probably best to be as informed as possible at that stage. There is likely no need to repeat comments of others. It might also inform you of things you missed.
However, it does reduce the independence of reviews. If that is important to you, the journal, or the field, you should probably avoid it and deal exclusively with the paper itself.
So, the answer is, *it depends*. But if you have been sent those reviews by the editor, they may expect you to read them.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Tangential, but I'm guessing that you'll be interested: it is pretty rare for reviewers to explicitly refer to another reviewer's report in their comments. "The authors have not addressed my comments #1, #5 and #9" is very common; "the authors have not addressed the comments #2 and #4 by the other reviewer" is not.
That said, this does not mean the reviewer is not looking at another reviewer's report - there are reasons to do so, e.g. if the paper changes in a way the first reviewer did not like but was requested by a second reviewer, or they might just be curious what others thought about the paper. However, if the reviewers are doing this, they don't indicate it explicitly.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: I do read the other reports, and other reviewers should too. A few reasons:
* If the editor has an author's response letter and two reviews, and the three documents say different things, then the editor will be very confused. If I see the other reviewer and the author disagree, then I try to be a tie-breaker to help the editor.
* Authors are not in a place where they can convincingly say the other reviewer is wrong. If I see that the other reviewer has made a mistake, I can point it out much more effectively than the authors because I am a neutral party. Ideally, editors would be able to do this, but they have limited time.
* By reading other reviewers' comments, I can learn to be a better reviewer.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: Different people have different ways of looking at things. In my experience, the issues that different reviewers raise are rarely overlapping completely, and sometimes even not at all. I think this is one of the key reasons why there are multiple reviewers in the first place.
Looking at the comments of the other reviewers will give you the opportunity to look at the paper through someone elses eyes, someone with a different education, different experiences and different methodology. By observing and analyzing what shortcomings others have found that yourself have "overlooked" or better, not perceived as such, you will learn a more holistic approach to reviewing and a better idea of what others - and not only yourself - need to find a paper well structured, interestig and understandable.
I always found it very beneficial to look at the other's commments for that reason, and I strongly believe doing so will make you both a better reviewer and will also enhance your own writing and research skills.
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/03/19
| 1,395
| 5,420
|
<issue_start>username_0: I’m sorry for asking a dumb question I already know the answer to, but I’m asking it because I feel desperate and need someone to talk sense into me.
Some background:
I’m a fifth-year PhD student, with no real graduation in sight. I’m in one of the most packed and competitive subfields I know of (let’s call it field A), and I haven’t had much success, only a handful of small publications. To graduate my advisor tells me I need at least one or two major publications, but field A is so competitive at this point that many of these journals/conferences have nearly 10% acceptance rates.
But that’s not even the real issue. The real issue is I hate the research area I’m in. I’ve hated it since at least my third year. I thought maybe I would just push through it, but I’ve only hated it more and more and it’s come to the point where my hatred for it has become so visceral that I just don’t know how to keep pushing on. Not to mention a host of other problems - I feel like a complete outsider in my lab, and my advisor couldn’t care less if I come or go; he’s never provided any help and I’ve basically been left to fend for myself for the last 5 years.
Which brings me to the main reason for my question. This might sound strange, but since around my third year I found another research area (let’s say field B) that I’ve actually been very interested in, and on and off I’ve been reading a lot of results from this area - there were some stretches where I spent significantly more time reading results in B than in A. I know it didn’t get me closer to graduation, but field B was just so much more interesting to me. I’d have loved to do research in field B, but at the time there were good reasons why I didn’t really pursue trying to change or even contact the professor at our university who works in that area:
1. I had a decent career lined up in field A. I’ve had several internships in major industry labs, and I have an offer waiting for me if ever I graduate.
2. I may have an avenue to research that is essentially in field B. During one of these internships I met a researcher who told me if I get hired I could possibly do work related to field B on the side and maybe transfer entirely if things go well.
3. Location matters to me. There are fewer jobs in field B, but field A is booming. I’d be much more likely to find a job close to my family, and in fact, as I said in (1), I already have.
4. Timing. It was already 3 years into my PhD, I didn’t want to start over. Now it's been even more.
5. Maybe I would actually hate field B just as much when I got into it? I don't think so, but who knows?
With all that said, here’s my question: Knowing that all of these things are still just as true, and seeing as it’s my fifth year, how stupid would it be for me to try to change areas now? What barriers would I face?
I can’t imagine it would be anything other than idiotic to attempt it, assuming that I’d even be allowed to, but as I spend yet another day staring at my computer, unable to muster any willpower to work on my research, instead procrastinating with yet more papers in field B, I have to wonder if it’s all worth it? If I did switch, I’d still start from scratch and need mentorship, but I think I would have at least as much background by now as maybe a third-year PhD who had been researching field B from the beginning, maybe more.<issue_comment>username_1: Your profile does not say, where you are from. I suppose there are still areas on the globe, where academic titles matter. However, this is certainly not the case where I live. So, in order to provide useful answers, we need to obtain detailed informations.
I still don't understand your motivation!
* If you don't like working in field A, why do you consider taking a job in this field?
* And if you do it to pay the bills, start doing it now. If you're doing a great job in industry, nobody will ever let you go. However, if you underperform, no phd will safe you.
So I reckon the question you should ask yourself is, why do **you** believe you need a phd? What do you believe does a phd proof?
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Exhaust any opportunity/possibility of just getting done in A before moving to B. Once you have the Ph.D., you can use it on whatever (even chemists doing engineering or physics, if they can get it done...i.e. much bigger changes of field than within parts of CompSci.)
Don't just take the dictates of your advisor as the last word. Push, argue, fight, write up a draft thesis (without "permission"), bring in the department chair, etc. effing etc. to get your butt done and out of there. A job waiting for you is strong support and will be noticed by the department chairman, etc. (Much better than their grads they have hanging around having a hard time getting hired! Looks good.)
Only abort to the other field, if a STRONG effort to get the little tinpot dictator to cut you loose has been unsuccessful. You have zero idea how long that other effort will take. And even then, the department is more likely to feel a duty to help you get out of that new one, fast, if you've already raised a ruckus about the old one (versus being perceived as just a lost soul flitting around).
Ignore any comments about how you need to suck up to the old prof for better letters and the like. That time is over. Throw down and get your ass graduated.
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/03/20
| 456
| 1,756
|
<issue_start>username_0: I found some websites for free graphics like icons. But, they require attribution. to the website. Is there any website that provide free graphics for research purpose without the need of attribution?<issue_comment>username_1: Pixabay.com and select Vector Graphics and use the search bar.
Rawpic.com and search for your icons, make sure you then click 'free' and 'graphics' you will recieve 7 free downloads a day. If you need more just like their pinterest page and get 10 more.
They both do not require attribution.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Benjamin provides some suggestions for graphics that do not require attribution, but I gotta ask - why not just attribute the ones you already have appropriately?
In all sites that my students use it is completely acceptable to add a single sentence to the acknowledgements ("Icons in figures 3, 4 and 7 have been produced by user XYZ on ABC"). As long as you clarify copyright questions, this seems substantially easier (and gives you a lot more options) than limiting yourself to visual elements that don't require any sort of attribution.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: phylopic.org has some great animal and plant silhouettes which can be used in your graphics under a Public Domain or Creative Commons license. For instance, silhouettes from phylopic are used in figures in these papers (sorry they might be paywalled):
* <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818116301540#f0005>
* <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21498>
Neither of these studies acknowledged or attributed any image to phylopic.org, but some images may need to be acknowledged depending on the license - which can be seen on each image.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/20
| 476
| 1,820
|
<issue_start>username_0: Could you please recommend a **good free** software for recoding my screen. I want to record a lecture and upload it to YouTube. I am looking for a software that can allow me to **pause** while recording. I want to record the screen and my voice with high quality.<issue_comment>username_1: Pixabay.com and select Vector Graphics and use the search bar.
Rawpic.com and search for your icons, make sure you then click 'free' and 'graphics' you will recieve 7 free downloads a day. If you need more just like their pinterest page and get 10 more.
They both do not require attribution.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Benjamin provides some suggestions for graphics that do not require attribution, but I gotta ask - why not just attribute the ones you already have appropriately?
In all sites that my students use it is completely acceptable to add a single sentence to the acknowledgements ("Icons in figures 3, 4 and 7 have been produced by user XYZ on ABC"). As long as you clarify copyright questions, this seems substantially easier (and gives you a lot more options) than limiting yourself to visual elements that don't require any sort of attribution.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: phylopic.org has some great animal and plant silhouettes which can be used in your graphics under a Public Domain or Creative Commons license. For instance, silhouettes from phylopic are used in figures in these papers (sorry they might be paywalled):
* <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818116301540#f0005>
* <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21498>
Neither of these studies acknowledged or attributed any image to phylopic.org, but some images may need to be acknowledged depending on the license - which can be seen on each image.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/20
| 697
| 3,131
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm writing a review paper. I'm in the field of computer science.
There are many related papers in my research area. Some are good, some are not.
I'm planning to include only Q1-papers based on [Journal Citation Reports](https://jcr.clarivate.com/)
But, does this enough for the paper?
Should I include other papers in Q1, Q3, Q4 and conference papers too.?
If I include all, it will make my review paper really long especially when I create a table to summarize all related papers.<issue_comment>username_1: If there was an easy algorithm to determine, which papers are important for a topic and which are not, we would not need review articles. A list of Q1 articles with short descriptions can be automatically generated from a citation database and the paper's abstracts. There would be no need to put it into a separate publication. Your primary job as author of a review article is that of curation. You should consider all (or at least as many as possible) papers on a topic, select the important ones and put them into a coherent thread based on their content alone.
It will likely be skewed towards the highly cited, because they are highly cited for a reason. But the point is, if a paper is good and advances the topic, I want a review article to tell me about it even if it only ever appeared as a preprint and hasn't really been cited by anyone. Equally, if it appeared in the best journal, is cited by hundreds, but is only tangentially related and doesn't really offer any new insight into the topic, I don't want to waste my time looking it up just because it was mentioned indiscriminately with the others.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Different literature reviews have different purposes which my determine what kinds of articles they look for. But for most literature reviews, a systematic literature search should include ALL possible sources and there is no justification to include only articles from "top-ranked" or "elite" journals (such as the Q1 that you referred to). That would be saying that it is unlikely for articles in other journals to have anything interesting to say related to your topic, but you have no logical reason to expect that. Your reason given, "If I include all, it will make my review paper really long", is not an acceptable excuse. Any such review article would likely be rejected for publication by any journal in Q1, Q2 and even Q3.
Moreover, in computer science specifically, you absolutely must include conference articles since much of the best original research is published there.
So, what do I recommend for computer science? If you search only in the [ACM Digital Library](https://dl.acm.org/) and including anything and everything you find there, then your literature search would often be considered sufficiently comprehensive for the computer science domain. However, some specialized domains might need additional database sources, even in computer science. (If you want to be really exhaustive, you could add [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/) for grey literature [preprints], but that would probably not be required.)
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/20
| 771
| 3,734
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<issue_start>username_0: I am writing a systematic literature review and the problem is that in my subject there are multiple cases of previous work re-publishing or self-plagiarism: the same authors write multiple (2-3) papers on the same topic with almost no changes. I wonder how to deal with it. I am reviewing a theoretical models, so I cannot simply decide whether the paper describes the same or different experiments. The duplicated papers usually differ in some minor ways. I would like to create a graph of how my chosen topic was developed in time by plotting different papers and their citations and which model was based on which previous one. But I don't know how to deal with this kind of duplicate papers. Merge them into single, first paper? Plot all of them as a derivative models? Or maybe I should somehow graphically mark the papers which describe the same content?<issue_comment>username_1: >
> I would like to create a graph of how my chosen topic was developed in time by plotting different papers and their citations and which model was based on which previous one.
>
>
>
I think the answer to your question will not actually solve your problem. Publications and citations do not describe how the research has developed. Instead of doing this, I suggest creating a graph of how the research outcomes have changed over time.
Classic example: <https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html>
This approach will avoid the problem of duplicate publication.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: Since you do not want to address the matter of duplicate or multiple publication (I prefer those terms; I dislike the dubious notion of "self-plagiarism"), I will focus only on the matter of handling the existence of such works in the literature other than choosing to ignore some of the publications.
What you describe seems similar to a concern that comes up in meta-analysis (a statistical approach to literature reviews). For the statistics underlying meta-analysis to work, an important statistical assumption is that each publication being analyzed is independent of each other so that each publication counts as a distinct piece of evidence. But this assumption is violated if two or more studies were conducted on the same dataset (which might involve the same group of authors, but not necessarily so, especially if the dataset is public). There are different ways for handling the resulting statistical problems, but they generally involve giving each of the non-independent studies a lower weight so that altogether they would have around the same weight in the overall meta-analysis as any one independent study.
Following this principle, if you have a case of non-independent studies (that is, your case of duplicate publications), you could weight them in some way as just one study. I cannot recommend how best to do this without knowing in-depth the nature of your study, the nature of the duplication, the extent of overlap, etc. You would need to consider your particular situation and then decide how best to represent these duplicate publications as one data point (whether that means taking an average of results, the first publication, the last publication, the most highly cited result, or whatever representation you think most appropriate).
In your final analysis, it might be a good idea to present and compare two sets of results, as is sometimes done in meta-analysis: one set treats each duplicate as an independent study, and then another analysis uses your chosen aggregation approach to group all the duplicates as one piece of evidence. That way, you could see if the duplicate publications sway the overall evidence significantly or not, which is valuable to see.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/20
| 1,167
| 4,851
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<issue_start>username_0: I joined graduate school in the US with interests in theoretical chemistry/chemical physics. Though I was enrolled for a PhD in chemistry, I was taking classes in physics for an entire year. This made me realize that I was more interested in physics related research than my current work in theoretical chemistry. While I was still in a dilemma, I convinced myself that I should continue in chemistry and joined my current advisor's group. Things were going fine for a while until I ended up having a minor confrontation with my advisor that made me feel sick about myself. I didn't know some of the basic things he was asking me and I was left stupefied by him. This made me think if I really wanted to pursue research in this direction. As a reaction to the flashpoint I had hit, I approached another professor in the physics department. While he rejected my request, he also notified my current advisor about my intentions. I really didn't mean to hurt my current advisors' feelings about this but, I was dumbstruck when he confronted me about my emails to another professor and accused me of unethical behavior. I am really confused about what to do with my situation. There have been a few students who have had similar issues of feeling disconnected from their research in my current research group, in a case even one of them switched to another group abruptly.
What should I do if my current advisor decides to step down?
**Edit**
How do I really find out what I am passionate about and is there a way to separate the reality from noise?<issue_comment>username_1: Things were said between the two professors that you couldn't control. It puts you in a difficult position, but might also be an opportunity.
To switch fields you need to satisfy the university about some things, but also find an advisor in the new field. Either of these could be a stumbling block. The worst case, I think is that you need to find a new university, but that isn't entirely uncommon. It would cost you a bit of time, of course.
But there is little worse than spending your life doing things that don't interest you. There is no *replay* button on life.
Re-evaluate both your desires and your options. But also connect to those at the current university who see you in a positive light. They can also give you advice.
FWIW, I think your advisor behaved badly in making accusations against you. I don't see your explorations as unethical in any way.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: I feel like a big part of the problem here is that by the time you're at the PhD level of work, you're expected to *know that you want to do that work*. You're making an enormous commitment to go through a PhD, and, rightly or wrongly, the time for flirting with different majors is when you're in undergrad.
At least that's how it's "supposed" to work, and is likely what both of these professors expected of you.
I don't mean to make you feel bad here; what I'm wondering is if you've asked yourself if a PhD is really right for you. Why did you start a PhD in chemistry in the first place? Was there something you loved about the subject that made you want to go this far, or was it an ill-thought out decision to begin with? If it was a good decision at the time, then is this really a change in your interests, or is it just a reaction to the difficulty of PhD work? It's quite normal to get discouraged and/or become sick of your work as a PhD student - it's something we all push through. Or was it just a reaction to the confrontation with your adviser, and can you get back on track by clearing that up? Are your reasons for changing to physics more compelling than the reasons you had for starting chemistry, or are you just repeating any previous mistakes?
If you've asked yourself hard questions like this and are sure you should be here, you need to commit. Fully and right away. The whole thing with being a chemistry student while taking physics classes seems bizarre to me. Assuming you are funded through chemistry, I'm surprised you were even able to do that. Regardless, I would strongly discourage you from continuing anything similar.
If you do decide to stick with chemistry, get with your adviser and have a frank talk, right away. Explain what happened and express your commitment to continuing on. If you decide to change to physics, username_1 had some advice in his answer. All I would add is that you shouldn't lead on your current adviser and take up their time if you're not committed to staying, so start collecting information and make a decisive move. And if, when I said "you need to commit" above you though "Well that doesn't help! Where do I commit?" then it comes back to asking why you want to do a PhD in the first place. Maybe consider some time off to re-evaluate?
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/20
| 667
| 2,714
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<issue_start>username_0: I am amateur mathematician with some formal training but am not a student and did not get some college degree, but, much of the time (really really too much) I think about mathematics and mathematical tasks and problems and I expand my knowledge of and about mathematics.
Sometimes I am solving some (mostly) undergraduate exercises, and sometimes I even do try to settle some unsolved problems.
Of course, if I dwell onto and into some mathematical theory, I try to understand basics and then the more general results.
Now, there are some ideas and a few results on the papers next to me, but I am extremely non-motivated to do the research in the future because of lack of support.
I can expect that even if I prove something of major interest, or if I prove something known by some other methods, that my work will hardly be published, because of lack of support.
So, if really I have written some results which could be published in some journal, or if I prove in the future something worthy of publishing, what are your general guidelines of what to do?<issue_comment>username_1: Sorry to have to say it, but the first step is to assure yourself that you aren't a crank. You don't sound like someone trying to "square the circle", so the first comment was just for completeness. But if you aren't sure about the validity of your research then getting some feedback on it from a pro would be helpful. Perhaps you are close enough to some university to make contacts and talk about what value your ideas might have.
But in the final analysis, you publish in a journal by submitting your work to the journal. If you get desk-rejected by an editor you have some information that your work isn't up to the required standard. But otherwise your work will be given to experienced reviewers for comment.
You don't need any credential or affiliation to publish. Just quality work.
Longer term, however, forming some circle of collaboration can help get you in the game. It can help you up your game as well.
---
You don't say what you mean by "lack of support". If you edit the question to add more, I might have more to say as well.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Perhaps you could 'practice' by submitting solutions to the venerable 'Problems and Solutions' in either the [College Mathematics Journal](https://maa.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07468342.2020.1680235?journalCode=ucmj20#.XnVABC2ZM0o) or the [American Mathematical Monthly](https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/american-mathematical-monthly). I submitted a solution to this in my student days (early Pleistocene...) and they published it. These journals are great for amateur mathematicians.
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/20
| 2,110
| 8,414
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<issue_start>username_0: It looks like I may completely write a paper while in coronavirus-related quarantine. Would it be appropriate to thank my local government in the acknowledgements? If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I would have been able to do this with such focus and efficiency if all other aspects of my life hadn't been suddenly shut down.
People often acknowledge visits to other institutions, which seem to serve a similar purpose, hence why I pose the question seriously.
Edit: I'm also in an at-risk group, and the government-mandated quarantine is kind of saving my life, so there's also that.<issue_comment>username_1: To me, it would seem unusual and tongue-in-cheek to acknowledge a person or organization who did not make any conscious effort to assist you. Acknowledgements are typically used as a means of recognizing the effort of others and thanking them for their contribution. Your local government's quarantine may have incidentally benefited you, but no effort was put into helping you with your paper.
This would seem like thanking the local lottery for making you independently wealthy enough to pursue research, or thanking the local government for a parade that really got you inspired, or thanking Ikea for the comfortable bed you bought there - none of those things relate to your study or were specifically intended to benefit it. You might as well acknowledge the weather, as it is equally indifferent to your manuscript's success.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: If you sincerely want to thank them you can try. The journal might make you remove it. A [2019 PLOS](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226727) article did a review of acknowledgements. One quote from the article demonstrates you're not the first person to be uncertain about acknowledgment:
>
> The literature also underlines the elusive nature of acknowledgements, pointing to their form and tone, which have been described as sometimes flowery, personal, and even manipulative
>
>
>
An [Insider Higher Ed post](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/best-academic-acknowledgements-ever) by <NAME> rounded up *The best academic acknowledgements ever*. Some examples describe similar situations to yours:
>
> Others explain the occasionally unusual circumstances surrounding their work:
>
>
> * “Most of the paper was written during my daily commute from Vancouver to Surrey, Canada, and I would like to acknowledge TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation authority, for making the task of writing in buses and trains such an enjoyable exercise.”
> * “If the book is not a success, I dedicate it to the burglars in Boulder, Colorado, who broke into our house and stole a television, two typewriters, my wife Helen's engagement ring and several pieces of cheese, somewhere about a third of the way through Chapter 8.”
>
>
>
**Although,** just because you can, it does not mean you should. In this case, you may want to think about the tone of your acknowledgement. As noted by [Azor Ahai](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441/azor-ahai)'s [answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145641/33210), there is a large chance your action will quite likely be taken in bad taste and tarnish your reputation as both a scientist and decent human.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: I decided to elevate my comment to an answer.
>
> When this is all over, and most of your readers will probably know multiple people who died during the crisis, this would not be a good [look].
>
>
>
This is a global crisis that is only just beginning. [By the time the dust settles, **millions** may have died from the virus alone](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf). It would be a rare reader who does not personally know someone affected. More will have died because of how overwhelmed the global healthcare system is.
Even more will be affected by the economic fallout.
Viral infections can have lifelong consequences, even if you live.
If you're in a medical field, many of your readers will be caregivers who were worked to the bone for months, and had to make impossible triage decisions.
For your readers, researchers are forced to halt research, often at great expense. Many studies cannot be paused for three months and picked up at the same place.
And you're proposing to put in your acknowledgements "*gee I got so much done while quarantined!*" This is offensive at best, and obscene at worst. We in universities are *extremely* lucky that our pay will most likely not be stopped, and we can just pick up and work from home. That is not happening for most of the nation.
Frankly, I would be ashamed to be your co-author, and if you were in my field, put you on blast across every channel I knew how. **Do not do this.**
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: The acknowledgments are the one location in a paper where you can put personal stuff, sometimes not to be take too seriously. I have a paper in which I thank jet-lag for giving me the nocturnal clarity of mind to write most of the paper in one (very early) morning. A colleague thanks a particular brewery for their product. I think it is fair game to put a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment into a paper.
I do appreciate @AzorAhai's perspective on the issue, but I don't share his opinion.
(If you do want to try: Put the acknowledgment in after review is over and your paper is in its last edits. You're unlikely to be called out by anyone at this point ;-) )
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: To add to the other answers, which already clarified the problem with your idea quite clearly, if you truly are grateful to the government and to your community for helping to protect you and other at-risk individuals, there are many ways to show your appreciation that would be more meaningful than a perfunctory acknowledgement in a paper, which frankly no one in the government will ever read, or care about if they did.
Specifically, it would be much more helpful to express your appreciation to the local health authorities on social media or by writing blog posts and newspaper letters/opinions, or to donate money to local charities that are helping your community deal with this crisis. You can also donate your time and skills to help, say, mentor local community college students who are struggling with learning difficult material through online instruction. Perhaps this may come at a small cost to your scientific productivity, but it would be a much more meaningful and genuine expression of gratitude and likely to be much better received.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: I'm going to agree with the consensus and say this is definitely a bad idea. I don't think it's nearly as bad as the higest-voted answer (by <NAME>) suggests.
It's neither wrong nor particualarly unusual for acknowledgements to be humorous and personal. However, inclusion of humor into published papers is a risky business - to make a successful joke, you need to understand your audience, which is difficult face to face and nigh impossible in writting. Hence, it's generally best to stick to jokes that cannot possibly be construed as offensive, no matter who reads them. Want to thank your cat - sure, go ahead, nobody is going to be offended by a feline. Puns are fine too, some people will roll they eyes, some will chuckle, but none will feel personally hurt. Jokes about an epidemic are a different matter entirely.
I personally would appreciate a flippant remark like the one you mention - if it was coming from a colleague who knows that neither me nor anyone within earshot was personally affected by the pandemic, beyond the inconvenience of having to stay at home. Even if we were being personally affected, I could see myself enjoying some dark humor (e.g. coming from a friend who was actually infected and reached some breakthrough during that time). The problem with putting it in writting is that it will be read by many people who lost their loved ones during the pandemic, and barring a miracle all of us will soon know someone who lost someone. Many of these people will be offended and will not see the fine line between making jokes about the daily life during the pandemic and making jokes about people dying in the pandemic.
Upvotes: 3
|
2020/03/20
| 2,995
| 12,307
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<issue_start>username_0: So a little bit of background first. I work in research and while i am fairly new to the profession ( going to be 10 months soon ), i am nearing the completion of a Conference paper.
This is my first **serious** attempt at an academic write-up and i have good reason to believe that the paper has a fair chance of being accepted at an international conference.
However, the lab that i work for, has some specific problems. For one, we are urged to author journal papers more than conference papers. secondly there is a huge issue with funding, the higher-ups are quite frugal when it comes to money matters and are reluctant to give additional funding ( aside from our salaries ) for any cause, no matter how genuine or valid it may be. And its not that they have a lack of funding ( the financial figures are public and common knowledge & they are quite substantial ), its just that the top brass mostly uses these funds to finance only their own trips abroad. They have never sent any researcher to any conference or symposium to a foreign country on the Lab's funds, as of yet.
This has recently come to concern me directly. When i sent an initial draft of my conference paper to the Lab's Principal Investigator, they asked me if it was possible to convert this into a Journal Paper. In response, i readily agreed to work further upon the paper & expand the work into a journal publication, while the paper is submitted to a conference. I also mentioned that this paper has a good chance in an international conference.
However, they seemed very reluctant in their reply. They simply said that as all conferences are being cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it would be very difficult to submit the paper. While this reasoning is sound, it was the other part of their reply which got me thinking. They specifically said that, " expensive registration fees & travel costs related to a conference " would be an obstacle. They urged me to instead work on transforming **THIS** paper into a journal paper, ruling out any conference publication outright.
Now, i am just starting out in research but i do know that both, conference & journal publication are considered academic writings. Also, i intend to pursue my postgraduate studies abroad & for that i need some published work to compliment my profile. I have already had 5 scholarship applications rejected ( probably due to my low CGPA; 2.854 ) & i realize that without research work, i would probably be up against it when searching for international scholarships.
Make no mistake, my work is my first priority over any personal ambitions that i might have. My sole reason for asking this question here is to find help on **how to properly approach this issue of being refused the funding & the right to at least submit my paper in a conference ?**
Would i be better off submitting it myself ? Although please know that i cannot fund any trips or registration expenses to a conference abroad. is there any other way i can get the paper under consideration for a prospective conference publication ?
I have been very perturbed over this & would be grateful for any help i can get from the academia community regarding this issue. I am just starting out, so feel free to give me any advice you think might be helpful in resolving this problem.
Thank you
**EDIT : I was advised by an esteemed member to include more details about my contextual information. I work at a government-funded lab, but it is located in a University and has the name of the university attached to its title. Apart from teaching, which we researchers don't do, everything else is closely entwined with academics. Also, every PI & Co-PI is an academic(PhD). My field is CS.I have no intention of defying a PI, i was merely looking for the best approach in this case. i have already completed my Undergrad studies, more than 2 years ago. I might sound desperate about this paper, but that's merely because even after 2.5 years of graduation, i am yet to have any published work under my name. Also, i am not currently enrolled in a Masters/PhD program as of yet, so the PI has no bearing over my postgrad studies. I am just a full-time employee at the Lab. If you think any more information is needed, PLEASE let me know. I am open to providing more context on this, but as i am a bit new to this, i don't exactly know what extra information to provide that would be helpful for you to answer this question. Thanks for your kind co-operation**<issue_comment>username_1: To me, it would seem unusual and tongue-in-cheek to acknowledge a person or organization who did not make any conscious effort to assist you. Acknowledgements are typically used as a means of recognizing the effort of others and thanking them for their contribution. Your local government's quarantine may have incidentally benefited you, but no effort was put into helping you with your paper.
This would seem like thanking the local lottery for making you independently wealthy enough to pursue research, or thanking the local government for a parade that really got you inspired, or thanking Ikea for the comfortable bed you bought there - none of those things relate to your study or were specifically intended to benefit it. You might as well acknowledge the weather, as it is equally indifferent to your manuscript's success.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: If you sincerely want to thank them you can try. The journal might make you remove it. A [2019 PLOS](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226727) article did a review of acknowledgements. One quote from the article demonstrates you're not the first person to be uncertain about acknowledgment:
>
> The literature also underlines the elusive nature of acknowledgements, pointing to their form and tone, which have been described as sometimes flowery, personal, and even manipulative
>
>
>
An [Insider Higher Ed post](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/best-academic-acknowledgements-ever) by <NAME> rounded up *The best academic acknowledgements ever*. Some examples describe similar situations to yours:
>
> Others explain the occasionally unusual circumstances surrounding their work:
>
>
> * “Most of the paper was written during my daily commute from Vancouver to Surrey, Canada, and I would like to acknowledge TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation authority, for making the task of writing in buses and trains such an enjoyable exercise.”
> * “If the book is not a success, I dedicate it to the burglars in Boulder, Colorado, who broke into our house and stole a television, two typewriters, my wife Helen's engagement ring and several pieces of cheese, somewhere about a third of the way through Chapter 8.”
>
>
>
**Although,** just because you can, it does not mean you should. In this case, you may want to think about the tone of your acknowledgement. As noted by [<NAME>](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37441/azor-ahai)'s [answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145641/33210), there is a large chance your action will quite likely be taken in bad taste and tarnish your reputation as both a scientist and decent human.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: I decided to elevate my comment to an answer.
>
> When this is all over, and most of your readers will probably know multiple people who died during the crisis, this would not be a good [look].
>
>
>
This is a global crisis that is only just beginning. [By the time the dust settles, **millions** may have died from the virus alone](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf). It would be a rare reader who does not personally know someone affected. More will have died because of how overwhelmed the global healthcare system is.
Even more will be affected by the economic fallout.
Viral infections can have lifelong consequences, even if you live.
If you're in a medical field, many of your readers will be caregivers who were worked to the bone for months, and had to make impossible triage decisions.
For your readers, researchers are forced to halt research, often at great expense. Many studies cannot be paused for three months and picked up at the same place.
And you're proposing to put in your acknowledgements "*gee I got so much done while quarantined!*" This is offensive at best, and obscene at worst. We in universities are *extremely* lucky that our pay will most likely not be stopped, and we can just pick up and work from home. That is not happening for most of the nation.
Frankly, I would be ashamed to be your co-author, and if you were in my field, put you on blast across every channel I knew how. **Do not do this.**
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: The acknowledgments are the one location in a paper where you can put personal stuff, sometimes not to be take too seriously. I have a paper in which I thank jet-lag for giving me the nocturnal clarity of mind to write most of the paper in one (very early) morning. A colleague thanks a particular brewery for their product. I think it is fair game to put a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment into a paper.
I do appreciate @AzorAhai's perspective on the issue, but I don't share his opinion.
(If you do want to try: Put the acknowledgment in after review is over and your paper is in its last edits. You're unlikely to be called out by anyone at this point ;-) )
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: To add to the other answers, which already clarified the problem with your idea quite clearly, if you truly are grateful to the government and to your community for helping to protect you and other at-risk individuals, there are many ways to show your appreciation that would be more meaningful than a perfunctory acknowledgement in a paper, which frankly no one in the government will ever read, or care about if they did.
Specifically, it would be much more helpful to express your appreciation to the local health authorities on social media or by writing blog posts and newspaper letters/opinions, or to donate money to local charities that are helping your community deal with this crisis. You can also donate your time and skills to help, say, mentor local community college students who are struggling with learning difficult material through online instruction. Perhaps this may come at a small cost to your scientific productivity, but it would be a much more meaningful and genuine expression of gratitude and likely to be much better received.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: I'm going to agree with the consensus and say this is definitely a bad idea. I don't think it's nearly as bad as the higest-voted answer (by <NAME>) suggests.
It's neither wrong nor particualarly unusual for acknowledgements to be humorous and personal. However, inclusion of humor into published papers is a risky business - to make a successful joke, you need to understand your audience, which is difficult face to face and nigh impossible in writting. Hence, it's generally best to stick to jokes that cannot possibly be construed as offensive, no matter who reads them. Want to thank your cat - sure, go ahead, nobody is going to be offended by a feline. Puns are fine too, some people will roll they eyes, some will chuckle, but none will feel personally hurt. Jokes about an epidemic are a different matter entirely.
I personally would appreciate a flippant remark like the one you mention - if it was coming from a colleague who knows that neither me nor anyone within earshot was personally affected by the pandemic, beyond the inconvenience of having to stay at home. Even if we were being personally affected, I could see myself enjoying some dark humor (e.g. coming from a friend who was actually infected and reached some breakthrough during that time). The problem with putting it in writting is that it will be read by many people who lost their loved ones during the pandemic, and barring a miracle all of us will soon know someone who lost someone. Many of these people will be offended and will not see the fine line between making jokes about the daily life during the pandemic and making jokes about people dying in the pandemic.
Upvotes: 3
|
2020/03/20
| 751
| 3,086
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<issue_start>username_0: Of course, the bread-and-butter of an academic CV are degrees and publications, and citation index is a primary means of judging the value of said publications, but it's also common for academics to give out acknowledgements to people who contributed to a paper, but not in a way deserving of a citation or authorship.
Is a history of being thanked in acknowledgements worth putting on one's CV or otherwise touting in the context of academic faculty appointments?
I can come up with arguments both ways. On the one hand, an acknowledgement without a citation or authorship implies that one's contribution was *non-academic* in nature or, if academic, was too minor to merit being cited or granted author status, but on the other hand, an acknowledgement could be seen as demonstrating so-called "soft skills". For example, one might claim,
>
> My biochemistry citation index speaks for itself, but also see that Dr. Jones acknowledged me for "faithful emotional support while [he] was undergoing cancer treatment while also teaching a heavy load", and Dr. Smith acknowledged me for "standing firm in support of the department's goals and [her] projects in particular as major funding cuts rocked through the university in 2018 and 2019". I have thus demonstrated excellent hard academic skills as well as organizational and interpersonal soft skills, and that is why I am the best candidate for department chair!
>
>
><issue_comment>username_1: **No.** We don’t hire people to be our friends or to offer us emotional support, and I don’t even understand what “standing firm in support of the department’s goals” means. We hire them to teach, do research, and do other more or less well defined tasks, none of which are evidenced in any meaningful way by being mentioned in the acknowledgements to someone’s paper.
You can be the world’s most amazing, virtuous, supportive person, and that’s great, but no one will hire you for an academic job for those qualities. For your CV, focus on quantitative, measurable achievements that hiring institutions actually care about.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Honestly, I think mentioning the first acknowledgement would be seen as a negative by a selection committee (i.e. not even just neutral). You would presumably have provided emotional support to Dr. Jones while he was undergoing cancer treatment because e.g. (i) you're a decent human being, and/or (ii) you care about Dr. Jones' wellbeing. Trying to use that as a CV point later would be extremely tacky and would suggest to people that you were only being nice to him so you could tell everyone about it later. Few people are likely to want to hire someone who would use their friend's (or colleague's) illness for personal gain.
**TL;DR:** Basically, hell no, in as far as the question relates to whether or not you should mention an acknowledgement like that one in your CV. For acknowledgements more generally, also no, because they're too trivial to mention - people will just assume you have nothing better to tell them about.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/20
| 1,356
| 5,977
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<issue_start>username_0: My university, like many others, has recently moved to remote teaching in response to the corona virus situation. In my department, the faculty have taken the lead on finding and adopting solutions to the difficulties posed by the transition. I am a postdoc and not directly involved in a lot of the big changes. But I wonder if the faculty are sealing their fate, being so helpful when there is a counterparty, the administration, that may not have the faculty's best interests at heart (note, I have no direct knowledge either way).
Specifically, barring any big disasters in remote teaching these next weeks/months, I would guess 1) smaller schools close to insolvency, many of which have closed these last few years, would instead have an opportunity to cut costs by dispensing with or heavily decreasing in-person instruction, without facing the PR issues or other pushback that would otherwise bring, and 2) even in schools with secure finances, or where it is unrealistic to get rid of in-person instruction, professors would lose a lot of bargaining power in any negotiations with the administration, since they will be regarded as that much less necessarily. Possibly the next few weeks/months will demonstrate that the professors are in fact less necessary, and remote learning is perhaps preferable. I am not really asking about that, my question is more selfish as someone going on the job market soon. Are these outcomes likely? This type of concern must be on the radar of professors' unions, no?<issue_comment>username_1: I think that outcome is unlikely, but not impossible over time. There are too many advantages of personal interaction in a more traditional setting to simply let it go. I don't have figures, but think that successful completion of something like a degree is much more likely with face to face interaction with experts than with internet delivery of material.
All of the world knowledge, other than very advanced and recent developments, is available on line. But people still need guidance and they need individual feedback on their learning.
The nature of a university education may change, of course, incorporating more online resources, but my prediction is that the traditional university and all it offers has a long future.
And note that a university does more than teach undergraduates. It provides a collaborative environment for research and the training of scholars. If we go to a mass market approach with only a few providers (rather than the thousands we have now) the rest of that could easily be lost.
People have a lot of trouble learning without support. A few can get by on only their individual personal drive, but most require a scholar-guide that they can interact with. Online education does a poor job of that. And a mass market approach will make it worse.
Of course, the current situation is also an experiment. We shall see how many successfully complete the year, compared to a standard situation. I worry that many will have problems.
Note that successful online education (not just individual courses) has a similar student to staff ratio to classroom education. The ration in CS50 at Harvard, for example, with hundreds of students, has a ratio of about 20 students to each staff person.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Well, based on the 3 institutions I have close contact with, their attempts in the past few weeks hardly represent a shining example of hugely successful online learning! It feels more like the [Keystone Kops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Cops)!
That bit of snark out of the way, effective teaching in the online/MOOC/e-channel, etc. is not easy, and making the transition between a face to face course and an effective online course requires a lot of thought and a lot of design a prep, which of course no-one has has time to do this time around. So my snark was not meant as a true criticism, but at the same time, it means that mainstream universities' efforts in the balance of this semester are themselves unlikely to make anyone -- teachers or learners -- say, "hey, that went really well; let's dispense with classroom instruction altogether".
That being said, I do think this will **strongly accelerate** the shift towards e-learning in the medium- and long-term, and that in 2 ways.
1. In the long term, this will make e-learning a much more mainstream offering that students and faculty will become more comfortable exploring and integrating into the curriculum. Forced immersion brings familiarity and less fear. Up to now, in North America at least, we tended to have old-school in-person institutions, a few more e-learning focused disruptor institutions, and a select few dabbling in MOOCs layered on top of their usual approach. There was a lot of mutual mistrust. That will lessen. And just like a greater degree of teleworking throughout the economy, with the Pandora's box on it opened, will persist past current social isolation, so will demand for -- and willingness of faculty to explore -- e-learning.
2. Next year, there will be a lot of financially and emotionally wounded students, whose life plan took a pretty big hit. Some will be keen and able to return to their university campuses and continue as before. Some won't be, and when they get their affairs in order a few years later, in a world that will have lived through months of forced virtual work and socialization, they will probably be keener to explore online offerings than they were previously. And the more they start work somewhere and become mature learners, or the more straitened their financial circumstances become, the more they will seek out good-value-for-money education with schedule and geographic flexibility, and the less they'll be keen to return and pay for the conventional on-campus student experience. Of course that won't apply to all, but I suspect to enough that it will make a difference at the macro level.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/21
| 1,840
| 7,683
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently in a job in the US (on STEM OPT). I had a postdoc offer from a large US university that was supposed to start April 16. I signed an offer letter for a two year contract. We were in the process of deciding which visa to apply for (H1/J1).
Today I got an email from the PI (HR copied) saying she would like to put the position on hold until things settle down. I asked for a clarification on what "on hold" meant and whether the offer letter was still valid. The HR replied this (PI copied):
>
> As for the offer letter you signed (due to redacted’s current
> situation) please consider it void until future notice.
>
>
> Professor [redacted] will contact you if you are still being considered
> for the position.
>
>
>
This is the last communication I had with the HR or the PI.
What does this mean? Since I have the signed offer, when things do *settle down*, is the university legally obligated to offer the position back to me before anyone else? Or the university is formally rescinding the offer and I should just move on? Can they do that?
**EDIT**: Some answers have asked about my eligibility to work in the US. For clarification: I’m in the US now, in my current status, I can work in the US till the end of May. If the university applied for an H1B (which is typically approved for non profit), I could stay in the US as long as I didn’t leave the country (in which case I would have to get a visa stamped). Things could have gotten more complicated with J1, so we did not discuss much about that.<issue_comment>username_1: They seem to claim that they aren't obligated, but that may not be a valid claim. But only a (local) lawyer can answer definitively. It might be worth pressing them outside the legal system, pointing to the letter. But a signed offer letter may be considered differently from a signed contract.
There might be some emergency legislation that permits this or they might just be hoping you won't press it.
But you can, at least ask why they think rescinding an offer is a valid action.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: A signed offer letter is normally a valid contract. Usually it is the only contract document. Only someone who has read the offer letter can give you a perfect answer to this question.
They have announced their intention to break the contract. That is illegal unless the offer letter says otherwise. Moving on is probably your best option.
There are two possibilities:
1. The university is unable to pay you, so they are forced to do something that could potentially cause them a lot of harm in the form of bad press or litigation.
2. They did this voluntarily or out of incompetence, in which case the university is a bad place to work and you are lucky not to be working there.
In either case, you should look for employment elsewhere.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: This is not a forum for discussing legal questions, and in any case it seems to me that to try to pursue the matter through legal means would lead you down a rabbit hole from which your academic career would never emerge in one piece. As others have said in the comments, a postdoc position obtained through legal coercion is not one worth having.
Since you mentioned that the institution that made you the offer is a large university, so presumably one that values its reputation and that employs serious researchers who value their own reputation, perhaps the best course of action would be to apply pressure on the PI through your advisor and the advisor’s informal network in the research community. If some well-known colleagues of the PI’s write to the PI to tell him/her that it is unseemly and unprofessional to rescind a postdoc offer at the last minute based on external circumstances, however grim, perhaps he or she will reconsider.
While you are pursuing this route, it’s also good not to assume anything and to keep looking at all your options. People are in panic mode right now and it’s entirely possible that the PI will be unwilling or unable to re-extend the offer in the next few months, and possibly not after that as well.
It’s a tough position to be in. Everyone’s suffering right now but beginning academics like you are suffering more than most of us. Good luck!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_4: Surely this is a case of force majeure. The university made the offer in good faith but circumstances outside its control mean it cannot proceed with this offer.
America, like many other countries, has closed its borders. If you are an American citizen, you have an absolute right of return if you can find a ship or a plane to take you there. America is not issuing new visas to non-Americans. The university does not know when American will open its borders. It could be weeks or months or even years before international travel becomes the norm again. I doubt "years" is very likely but "months" looks very feasible. What do you expect the university to do?
With the clarification that you are already in the US, your problem changes. I had read your original post to mean that you were applying for admission to the States.
**Edit following clarification**
It is not clear from the latest version of your post if you now know what "redacted’s current situation" is. If the university has been told that no visa application for you will be considered for the foreseeable future then it is still a case of force majeure.
As I understand it, "redacted’s current situation" means "Professor X’s current situation". This implies it is not about you but about Professor X. If, for example, Professor X is being investigated over some allegations, then HR's reluctance to give a clear explanation would become understandable. Or perhaps Professor X has lost a grant and can no longer offer the position you accepted.
Have you tried for a better explanation since HR's letter? Perhaps a phone call would help. They may be willing to tell you what they cannot put in writing.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: My personal take is to try to salvage something from this situation. I think, and as others answers here conveyed, that the university simply won't pay you right now if it can't. I would reply saying I understand the touch circumstances and their need to postpone the start of your employment. Suggest to postpone your start-date *in the contract* to June so that you guys can talk when the situation is more clear.
Best case: they agree and you can start then or at least be where we are now with a less panicked world.
So-so case: they may say they'd happily reconsider comes summer, in which case you have an email chain to go back to.
Worst case: no worse than now..
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_6: Contrary to other answers I am not sure whether the university actually intends to act as badly for you as this letter looks. You where supposed to start in the middle of April and that is not going to happen. The university also doesn't know right now whether you could start in the middle of June instead or whether the situation will last for years so they won't make commit to anything timewise. But I am not sure whether they actually meant to say 'we are not giving you the job, period'. Suppose by June the Corona situation is mostly over and life is mostly back to normal. It seems quite reasonable to me that in such a situation the university would still honor its promise and have you start in say mid July. I would try to talk to the professor, preferably by phone, and ask him what he thinks. Don't expect any promises but a general intent what he wants to happen. Maybe things are not as dire as they seem.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/21
| 496
| 1,909
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<issue_start>username_0: The following research paper is written in a story-telling manner:
* [One Mentor-teacher's Personal Narrative of Collaborative Research on the Teaching Practicum](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0965079940020303)
What is the name of this style of research paper writing?<issue_comment>username_1: In a medical context, storytelling is sometimes a "case study" (cf. <NAME>' work, for example).
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: A formal word for a story is "narrative."
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_3: One word for this is an **experience report.** [This search on Google scholar](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22experience+report%22) reveals that many experience reports seem to have a similar purpose to the paper you ask about.
An experience report relays some important, often qualitative information about the authors' experience in deploying a method, hypothesis, or idea in the real world, whereas a regular research paper focuses more on proposing a *new* method, hypothesis, or idea, and arguing why it advances the state of scientific knowledge.
Also, I think we should separate two things here: **the style of the article,** and **the style of the writing.** The style of the article is accurately described as an *experience report*. On the other hand, many experience reports (see the above Google scholar list) do not have such a flavor of a story -- unlike your article, which begins
>
> I remember sitting on the green couch...
>
>
>
I would say this is more a matter of writing style than actual content. I have read articles in my field (computer science) that are like this, but it is rare and unorthodox. It likely varies by field, and in some fields (I would guess that philosophy and comparative literature are examples), *storytelling* is a standard and accepted style of writing.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/21
| 1,353
| 5,812
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<issue_start>username_0: In September 2016 I saw a PhD advertisement in a forum. I emailed the advertiser and he sent me a half-baked draft of a research project and told me that if I want this position I would need a first-author publication and therefore I should make that draft publishable. I did that and sent the draft back to him.
After some time I asked him about the paper and he told he has submitted that and we will hear from the journal soon, but he did not give me any confirmation email from any journal. After few months he asked me to do the same analysis on another topic but this time from the scratch.
I started research on that topic when I was waiting for the journal he mentioned to inform us. One night, in Skype he asked me to send him some of my personal pictures. First I thought he might just be curious but he started a nasty conversation about my marital status etc. I felt that something was going wrong and I told him that I don’t want to carry on that that collaboration. I stopped research on the second topic and ask him about the status of the submitted paper. He replied that he didn’t want to publish that with me anymore.
I was just shocked by his reaction and got too upset feeling being badly abused. I then submitted the draft to a journal in 2017 without mentioning his name, but he asked for retraction.
I sent all of conversation via Skype and Teamviewer to the editor and him. The editor told me I should disclose this with his university, but that the journal could not help and has to retract the paper.
The paper has been fully retracted in November 2019.
The retraction note of the journal says:
>
> This paper is significantly overlapped and based on an unpublished research by ...
> The author disagrees with this retraction
>
>
>
Does this retraction note imply that I committed some academic misconduct? How can I handle it in future academic applications.<issue_comment>username_1: *In the following, I may misinterpret what happened.
In this case, please correct me.
I just don’t want to append “if I understand correctly” to every second sentence.*
Let’s first consider **whether you did anything wrong**:
As your “collaborator” designed the research underlying your paper, he was entitled to authorship.
You understood that he waived that right, which may be correct or at worst an honest misunderstanding.
However, when submitting the paper, you did not disclose this situation to the journal, and as a result, they could not double-check that your collaborator waived the authorship, etc.
Thus I can understand the journal’s reaction.
This failure of disclosure is the one thing others can truly hold against you, but I would not consider this to have career-ending severity, in particular given your collaborator’s abusive behaviour.
Second, **how bad is the retraction note?**
If I were to read that note without knowing anything else about it, I would primarily be confused, asking myself things like:
“How is overlapping and being based on unpublished research a bad thing?
Why was that research not published?”
It’s nothing which clearly says that you committed misconduct.
In particular, I have no idea what actually happened and would not judge you without hearing your version of the story.
Of course, others may jump to wrong conclusions, but then you probably do not want to work with such people anyway.
Now, **how can you handle this situation in the future?**
I strongly suggest to be upfront about it.
Should you not mention it and somebody will find it, this can get you into big trouble.
Keep in mind that as long as your collaborator is around, they may inform any of your employers about it.
Also, sitting on this ticking bomb will not be good for your psyche.
For example, mention the paper in some special section on your CV, noting that it was retracted due to “misunderstandings/disagreements about waived authorship” (be careful not to present it as an achievement).
This is accurate and explains the retraction note.
Hiring committees and similar may ask you about it, but then you can tell the entire story, presenting your evidence if applicable.
When you do so, make clear that you are aware of your mistakes, but also that your collaborator was far worse.
Finally, follow the journal’s recommendation and **contact your collaborator’s university** about this.
If your abusive collaborator was officially discredited, this could substantially strengthen your point.
Whether this is feasible depends on how strong your evidence is, and I strongly recommend that you seek professional help with this (your current university may provide some).
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Wrzlpmft addressed most of the questions. I would like to add an additional answer to this part of the question.
>
> How can I handle it in future academic applications.
>
>
>
You should ask the journal to change the retraction notice to indicate your agreement.
The prospective supervisor committed misconduct. You were correct to stop working with him. However, he does not seem to have waived his coauthorship. Unfortunately, his misconduct does not remove his coauthorship. So the professional thing would be to agree that the paper should be retracted so as to demonstrate that you respect his coauthorship. This does not imply that you respect him as a person. Anyone evaluating academic applications will not select someone who does not respect authorship.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Agree with username_1; based on the scenario described in your OP, by providing an explanation before it comes up you show that not only are you innocent of misconduct in that incident but also that you have learned a valuable lesson from the experience and you're a better researcher for it.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/21
| 1,181
| 5,264
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<issue_start>username_0: Over the space of a now concluding 20 week long project, my appointed supervisor has made a number of questionable decisions that appear to have negatively affected my work and solidified her grip over any avenues of complaint i can make.
One of the more recent incidents included her refusal to complete a strictly compulsory progress report, unless i removed a statement about her absence for a three week period that affected my ability to receive feedback. Stating during the incident, that if anything reported made her look bad, then it would be reflected on my final grade(As she is one of two, who marks the project).
Her general lack of support throughout the entire process has been difficult and while i appreciate that some supervisors and some students prefer the more independent approach, it doesn't work for me and I've made this clear many times. She has also enforced a number of design decisions that convert the project to a very similar format to one she had previously partook in. Additionally insisting on heavy reference to her previous work.
I'm at a loss of how to proceed and the advent of the global pandemic has only narrowed my ability to discretely contact any support staff.
UK, final year undergraduate student<issue_comment>username_1: Let me make two suggestions, though I can only really recommend the first.
You could just *go along and get along*, but mostly as a strategic move that helps you get away without damage to your future. For a single course a nice grade would be good and you will have learned a lot from the project no matter what the write-up looks like. If it is to be published, especially as a joint publication, then you need to take care that what you say is actually valid, of course. I recommend this course since the professor has power over you and has threatened to use it against you. Strategic retreat is often the best course of action.
The second, *burn the bridges* strategy, is to send the entire correspondence stream to the department head and ask for advice. This may be what you really want to do, and it might have some positive outcome for others in the future, but it is also the one most likely to damage you and your career. If you embark on this course, copy the head on all correspondence.
There are options in between but most of them might have the flavor of one or the other of these. I recommend something closer to the first option.
For doctoral research, however, the situation is a lot more dire and might require drastic (escape) action such as changing supervisors or even institutions. But your undergraduate program will ultimately be judged on a lot of things, not just this project.
Upvotes: 1 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Some of the actions of your supervisor that you are describing may be defensible, but some sound to me to be highly innappropriate, and they compromise the feedback mechanisms you have mentioned. As the academic supervisor on the project, your supervisor probably has a legitimate prerogative to steer the project in the direction she prefers, in terms of research design, etc. This may simply be a matter of steering you to a project in which she has the proper expertise to supervise. If this makes the project similar to her past work, and makes her past papers relevant references for the work, then it is probably also reasonable for her to expect that these papers will be cited in the new work. If you raise a complaint on these grounds, it is likely to be quite tenuous, and unlikely to be successful. However, it is dubious for your supervisor to demand that you censor your progress report to remove mention of her absence, and it is *certainly* not okay for her to threaten to penalise your grades in the event that you give feedback that raises matters that she would prefer you not to raise. If your supervisor has been absent, and has a reasonable reason for this, she should let you mention her absence in the progress report, and then respond to that issue in an appropriate way.
As [username_1](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368/buffy) has suggested, you are going to need to make a decision of whether to "go along to get along" or raise a complaint. Since you at the end of your undergraduate degree, this might be a case where discretion is the better part of valour, but you have the option to complain formally to the Head of Department under the relevant complaint procedure (look up the details for your university department). One advantage of this latter course of action is that the complaint rules probably prohibit "retaliation" and "victimisation" of a complainant, which would include penalising the student's grade due to the complaint. If you do decide to complain, I recommend you focus solely on the absence of your supervisor (and its effect on your project), her censorship of your attempt to mention this in your progress report, and her threat to penalise your grade if you raise this issue with her. Bear in mind that if this was just a conversation, she may deny saying this; a person who is willing to penalise a student grade when they raise a complaint is probably also a person who is willing to lie about a threat they made.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/21
| 996
| 4,159
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<issue_start>username_0: I am reading IEEE's policy on uploading a conference paper to other venues such as arxiv. Here is the current policy: <https://conferences.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/get-published/post-your-paper/>.
What is confusing me is that IEEE differentiates between preprint and author-submitted paper, where it is okay to put a pre-print on ArXiv, but not okay to put the author-submitted version.
**Is the following understanding of the rules correct?** One is allowed to upload any version of the paper to ArXiv except for (1) the version submitted for peer-review, prior to any changes being made to the paper, i.e., before addressing the reviewers comments, and (2) the final version of the paper, which is different from the accepted version, as it undergoes final styling and copy-editing.
Also, on a meta level, what is the logic between allowing preprints, but not author-submitted papers, and how much difference does there have to be between the two versions to not count as the same?<issue_comment>username_1: >
> what is the logic between allowing preprints, but not author-submitted papers?
>
>
>
There is no logic behind this. It is part of the culture of publishers who want to restrict access as much as possible, so they can profit from selling closed-access research.
If it were just up to publishers, I don't think IEEE would allow preprints, either. But they make an exception for arXiv because the culture has changed such that people want to make their papers available there. Additionally, note that it is valid to post *any* version of your paper other than the final copy-edited version online on your website.
(*Note:* if you ask IEEE, they might come up with some reason for it. Perhaps they treat submitting to arXiv as a competing submission, and since you can't submit elsewhere while a paper is under review, you shouldn't be able to submit to arXiv either. But I don't think this objection holds water, because arXiv and posting to a personal website have similar effects. Also, I don't think it is the *real* reason, which is that their business model relies on limiting paper access to some extent or another.)
>
> What is confusing me is that IEEE differentiates between preprint and author-submitted paper, where it is okay to put a pre-print on arXiv, but not okay to put the author-submitted version.
>
>
>
It's worth pointing out that many researchers do wait to publish online until a paper is accepted. The idea is that papers go through lots of revisions, and the title, narrative, and main results of a paper could change after it goes through the publication process (possibly being rejected a few times). So, you may not want people to read the draft version and get a bad idea (or wrong idea) about where your work fits, and you prefer to make only the most impressive and clarified version available.
>
> how much difference does there have to be between the two versions to not count as the same?
>
>
>
There is no rule here, as far as I know. It could even be the same version, but that probably means you ignored the reviews, which is a bad thing. Often for my papers, there is also zero difference between the preprint and the "final" version, other than it having a new template and formatting to look pretty, which doesn't really matter. (And I prefer to treat the preprint as the real "final" version.)
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Well, by your own words, they want your paper to go through their peer-review before being unleashed on the world. On the one hand, they think it will make Arxiv, and the world, a better place. But more than that, they want to prevent headaches, drama, and confusion, whereby a hypothetically crummy version of your paper co-exists in this universe with a superior version that IEEE published. Imagine the bad version gets scores of vitriolic comments on reddit, which will never be forgotten by the Internet.
If the IEEE were 100% evil (as suggested by the other poster), they'd *only* let you publish the pre-review paper on Arxiv, to try to make Arxiv the repository of bad, unreviewed papers.
Upvotes: -1
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2020/03/22
| 4,821
| 20,320
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<issue_start>username_0: Both my girlfriend and I (both white) applied to the same PhD programs in mathematics. Most of these schools are AMS Group I and some Group II.
I got denied by a majority of these programs while she got accepted to a majority of them. I sincerely do believe my profile is stronger (see comparison below) so I think there is a definite unfair advantage geared towards females candidates for graduate admissions. Am I able to legally sue some of these schools for gender bias? Why are the admission committees doing this? Shouldn't admission decisions be based on "who is best fit and capable to be doing math research" instead of "who will look best for our department"?
Comparison:
* We went to the same college, and have the same math classes except for 5-6 courses that are not math since we knew each other since high school. My GPA is 3.9, 0.2 higher than hers.
* My Math GRE subject test score is above 80% while hers is less than 40%.
* I have done 3 REUs, coauthored some (over 3) papers while she only did one REU last summer with no publications.
Furthermore, in my school, some of the incoming female PHD students know less math (insufficient preparation) than a typical junior/senior undergraduates, which supports my theory.
Am I the only person thinking this is unfair? Aren't the actions of these admissions committee members jeopardizing the output of their math department by choosing less capable people?<issue_comment>username_1: The comparison you make is quite compelling, insofar as you both went to the same school, and have conducted similar tests/classes in your respective CVs, and there is no aspect (that you have mentioned) where her record is stronger than yours. I would recommend you take a careful look to see if there are any aspects of your girlfriend's CV that are superior to your own, and see if it is plausible that these may have affected the results. Assuming that there is no compelling difference in her favour, this comparison does indeed give rise to a suspicion of sex discrimination, but obviously it is just two data points, so it is not definitive. Possibly one or more of these universities are engaging in sex discrimination, or maybe they just did not make a very astute comparison of those two applications.
>
> Why are the admission committees doing this? Shouldn't admission decisions be based on "who is best fit and capable to be doing math research" instead of "who will look best for our department"?
>
>
>
If these schools are indeed engaging in discrimination, it is likely that this is a species of "affirmative action", geared towards the goal of increasing the proportion of females in mathematics programs. Universities have a long history of engaging in affirmative discrimination, and they have generally not been disuaded from this by legal prohibitions to the contrary. Many universities presently appear to be taking action towards trying to increase the proportion of females in STEM programs, so it is possible that this is what is occurring here (though without more detail, I couldn't say for sure).
Personally, I agree with your view that universities should just hire on merit, and let the chips fall where they may. However, that philosophy is contrary to the popular wisdom of the university sector, and the administration of most universities do not see things this way. Within the university sector, and the broader corporate sector, there is a great deal of emphasis on racial and sexual "diversity" in recruitment and retention. These institutions have been heavily affected by the neo-Marxist academic philosophy of the last sixty years, which holds that disparities in social outcomes are attributable primarily or solely to institutional discrimination against under-represented groups, and thus in need of affirmative correction through positive discrimination. (And really, if you have already gone through an entire undergraduate university degree and you have not noticed this, you must have been living under a rock.)
If you are correct that you have been discriminated against because you are male then I am very sorry --- that is indeed very unfair. I am just a lowly academic, and not the Lord-of-All-University-Hiring, but you have my sympathies, for whatever that is worth.
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> Am I able to legally sue some of these schools for gender bias?
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You can sue anyone you like for anything you want, but if you decide to do this you should get legal advice before doing so, since there is no guarantee of success, and an unsuccessful lawsuit can cost you a lot of money. If you are considering taking legal action over this matter, you should first speak to a lawyer who practices in anti-discrimination law, both to determine the legal rules for sex discrimination in your jurisdiction, and to get advice on whether your evidence of discrimination is compelling. You should also carefully document everything you can about the application process, and in particular, make sure to document any assurance given by the universities to the effect that they are an "equal opportunity employer" or that they "hire on merit". Remember that you cannot sue the university sector in general --- you would need to make a case against a particular university, based on their actions.
Please bear in mind that, although anti-discrimination laws provide a broad prohibition of sex discrimination in employment and recruitment decisions, they often contain exemptions for "positive action" or "special measures". This occurs when an employer discriminates in favour of an under-represented group for a purpose allowed by the statute. There are legal requirements on this type of discrimination, but it is allowed by law if it follows certain requirements. However, an employer cannot generally rely on this exemption if they have given a contractual assurrance of hiring solely on merit, or an assurance that they are "equal opportunity". (Strictly speaking, they might still not be in breach of anti-discrimination law, but they could be sued for breach of contract.)
Whether or not affirmative discrimination in favour of females would be allowed here is complicated, and depends on a number of issues. Modern universities generally have a high proportion of female students in total, but low proportions in the STEM subjects. It is a matter of legal controversy whether or not this circumstance allows them to legitimately engage in positive discrimination in favour of females within the STEM subjects. (Arguably they would only be able to do so if they likewise discriminate in favour of males in subject areas where males are underrepresented.) You will need to speak to a lawyer in this field to get an idea of the position in your jurisdiction.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Discrimination is when an under-represented group is excluded from an opportunity. Nearly everyone agrees that is unfair.
Affirmative action is when an over-represented group is excluded from an opportunity. This is your situation. Some people think that affirmative action creates justice because it compensates for unfair discrimination by resulting in a relatively equal outcome. Other people think that affirmative action is unfair because it is a process that excludes people based on their group.
What is fair or unfair depends on which is more important: process, or results. Both views are defensible.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_3: I have had people I know who are senior mathematicians tell me in private conversation that they believe it is right and proper to discriminate in favor of females in mathematics in things like graduate admissions and job hiring. In some cases they essentially admitted (in a circumspect, plausibly-deniable sort of way) to practicing this kind of discrimination themselves.
Based on these anecdotal experiences, I believe it is indeed quite possible that you were discriminated against. It’s also possible that you weren’t; there is simply no way to know for sure. It’s not even clear that there is an objective underlying truth to this question, since the notion of what it means to be discriminated against isn’t scientifically defined.
The people I mentioned are people I respect and believe to be quite sensible, well-intentioned people. Their views seem to be widely held among professional mathematicians in (US, and other countries) academia today, including many people whom I would characterize as very reasonable and moral. On the other hand, many other members of the academic math community disagree and believe that gender based discrimination in math and science is unethical and unfair regardless of which direction it takes place in. So no, you are not the only one, far from it.
I don’t think there is a legal remedy for this issue. Who will you sue? How will you prove that a *specific* program or person discriminated against you? Besides, the societal debate about affirmative action has been going on for several decades and doesn’t seem about to end. There have been numerous lawsuits with results going both ways. The battle lines move a little, then move the other way. Laws are passed, then get ignored or worked around. At the end of the day, there is simply a wide chasm in our society over the belief in the morality of such actions, and no law or court can change that.
For math specifically, the issue will likely subside in importance over time as the number of successful women mathematicians grows closer to (or reaches parity with) that of men in the profession and a younger generation takes over that doesn’t carry the baggage of the older generation and is baffled by the very notion that it was once believed women could not succeed in mathematics.
I understand that all of this big-picture stuff might offer only small consolation for you in your personal situation. It is reasonable to be upset, but keep in mind that most women also have plenty of things to be upset about, and while two wrongs don’t make a right, statistically speaking, you will probably end up getting just as much of a chance as your girlfriend to prove your worth as a budding mathematician, and you will probably be at least a little bit advantaged over her in other ways that you may not realize.
Life isn’t completely fair for anyone. Go out there and succeed anyway! Good luck!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_4: The is a degree of randomness to these processes and factors that are unknown or not described in your post. Think of any logistic regression model that you might have seen. Some proportion of those predicted to be 1 actually are 0 and vice versa. It could be due to an excluded variable but it could be random. Are you both proposing to work with the same faculty and/or on the same topics? If not, you have no idea how many other people were actually focused on the same topics/faculty as you. You also do not know what the letters said. You also may find it hard to judge quality of past work. GPA is not the be all and end all for researchers, sometime you might see a lower GPA because a student took more risks that are interesting. It could be that they look at your summer histories in ways that are different than you are. In the end, if you got into one program that is a good fit that is all you need.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: It is *possible* you were unfairly rejected. This is not really possible to prove one way or the other, from the information in your post.
Unrelated to that, however, **your post shows a lack of understanding for the standard justifications of affirmative action, and why admissions committees sometimes may try to improve the gender balance of their decisions.** I would recommed that, regardless of your opinion, you take the time to understand their point of view.
*The executive summary of that point of view is that they do not believe they are **giving an unfair advantage** to women and minority candidates, but rather they believe they are **correcting for an unfair advantage** that majority (male, white, etc.) candidates already have, that is not always easily measurable.*
Once again, you are free to disagree, but you should understand it.
With that in mind, let me present the standard responses to your complaints, from the admissions committees' likely point of view.
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> Aren't the actions of these admissions committee members jeopardizing the output of their math department by choosing less capable people?
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No, because they do not believe they are choosing less capable people. It has been shown in a variety of studies that people (including admissions committees) are implicitly biased against women and minorities. That is, given a female student and a male student (alternatively: a student with a female name and a student with a male name) with the exact same level of ability, people routinely underestimate the female student's ability in STEM compared to the male student's ability.
The admissions committees are trying to correct for that, so it is unsurprising that they choose to admit candidates who you perceive as being less capable and prepared. However, the committee does not see it that way; they think the female students are equally capable and prepared, but are unfairly discriminated against.
Moreover, who is right (you or the admissions committees) is actually an empirical question: are the students they are admitting actually less qualified, or are they actually equally qualified? In theory, given the time to make well-controlled studies and the ability to collect infinite amounts of data, we could resolve this question one way or the other. And there has been a lot of research on it already, although none of it is completely conclusive, and the world is constantly changing, so it is unclear to what extent the past studies apply to today.
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> Furthermore, in my school, some of the incoming female PHD students know less math (insufficient preparation) than a typical junior/senior undergraduates, which supports my theory.
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What makes you believe these students are not as strong? Once again there is a *possibility* of implicit bias here, since women are often underestimated by their peers. Few people have the capability to act as a "neutral party" and judge someone else independently of whether they look like them, talk like them, or share their personality type. You should consider whether, one way or another, you are biased in some way in your evaluation.
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> I sincerely do believe my profile is stronger (see comparison below)
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I'm not entirely convinced by your comparison. The coursework and grades don't matter too much; the GRE matters a little more, but not a lot. The REU experience does matter. However, we don't have access to the recommendation letters or cover letters, so it's possible that hers were a lot stronger.
Moreover, from the admission committees' likely perspective, your entire comparison is predicated on the idea that you and your girlfriend were given the *same opportunity* to succeed, and this seems unlikely. Although you are in the same department, men are more often participating in mathematical activites throughout high school and college; this includes, for instance, applying to REUs more often. Supposing that your girlfriend is equally qualified to you, it would be unsurprising (to the committees) that she applied to and participated in fewer REUs.
The admissions committee is likely interested in assessing, not just "how much stuff does this person have on their resume?" but also, "how likely are they to succeed in our program?" And the latter question is, while a lot more difficult to evaluate, clearly more important. From their perspective, they might believe that women have an unfair disadvantage on average when it comes to their resumes, even though they are still likely to succeed given *some* solid evidence (e.g., prior research experience and solid coursework).
Another way of saying this is that *more things padding your resume* is not necessarily better than *fewer things, which nevertheless point strongly to the candidate being highly qualified.*
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> Shouldn't admission decisions be based on "who is best fit and capable to be doing math research" instead of "who will look best for our department"?
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Yes, and the admissions committees believe they are selecting for the former, whereas you believe they are selecting for the latter. They believe that women are underselected and underrepresented despite being highly fit and capable.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_6: It depends on your local laws of course, but **if it can be proven that you were discriminated against because of your gender, there's a good chance it was unlawful.**
[Related question I asked on the Law StackExchange](https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/48042/is-it-legal-to-preferentially-hire-men-instead-of-women-because-women-can-get-pr). The law cited is for Australia, and the relevant section is [Section 21](http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/sda1984209/s21.html), which explicitly prohibits "educational authorities" from refusing or failing to accept your application as a student based on your sex:
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> (1) It is unlawful for an educational authority to discriminate against a person on the ground of the person's sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, marital or relationship status, pregnancy or potential pregnancy, or breastfeeding:
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> (a) by refusing or failing to accept the person's application for admission as a student; or
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> (b) in the terms or conditions on which it is prepared to admit the person as a student.
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[Section 30](http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/sda1984209/s30.html) provides exceptions to when it is lawful to discriminate based on sex, but they're not applicable in your case. The base argument would be that that women are better mathematicians than men, therefore it is preferable to admit women. However, per the answer to the linked question, the way to discriminate is to set a standard mathematics test, and disqualify anyone scoring below a certain mark. Since you scored better than your girlfriend this argument does not work.
That said: how are you going to prove you were discriminated against because of your gender? There're a lot of possible ways the program can defend itself:
* It can claim there was some material difference in the applications that led them to favor your girlfriend instead of you, e.g. in the letters of recommendation
* It can claim they had two admission pools, one for "standard" applicants and one for under-represented groups, and both groups of applicants were considered against members of that group only (I don't actually know if this is legal)
* It can claim that they need to achieve a diverse student body, which necessitates gender-based discrimination
There was a lawsuit about this some time ago, when the group Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard for discriminating based on race. Final result: [the judge ruled in favor of the university](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/10/judge-upholds-harvards-admissions-policy/).
Suffice to say, it's a minefield out there, and if you are considering legal action, get professional legal advice.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_7: Going forward, I would advise that you simply choose your gender status as non-binary or choose the “prefer not to say” option on applications. Academic institutions are moving towards a model of racial and gender equity in programs and unfortunately that means that you might not be considered as valuable to the program because of your sexual orientation, race, or gender (in the name of inclusivity, equity, and diversity of course). By simply identifying on your application that you are male, unless the program is female dominant, you open yourself up to the possibility of judgement based on the gender box you check. This approach might sound problematic or unethical to some, but unless there’s an explicit advantage of stating your preferred gender on an application, nobody really needs to know but you. Besides, gender is fluid and a social construct, you can always change it once you get accepted.
Upvotes: -1
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm planning on doing some reading projects that lie a little above the undergraduate curriculum. To be more specific, I'm a physics major and I plan on doing reading projects in a few advanced physics topics (eg. Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics) and math (eg. group theory, knot theory and complex analysis). I plan on majoring in theoretical physics for my masters where these concepts are very much relevant. Will an admissions committee view this in a positive light? Will this be a good addition to my CV?<issue_comment>username_1: A reading program directed by a professor who will somehow examine you on what you have learned is one thing, especially if it comes with a formal evaluation. But a private reading program that has no validation element isn't going to help in admissions or on a CV.
It is something you could mention in an interview, I think, but you would be immediately asked some question about what you have learned from it. You will need to show that you gained some insight from your readings.
That's not to say it isn't a good thing to do, but its face value (to another) is essentially zero with no external evaluation. But if it gives you insight then it will be good for your career in the long run even if you can't show in on paper.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Whether it is during your interview, or when they read you SoP, there will always read your enthusiasm between the lines. If you happen to be doing some self-study by yourself, it clearly shows that you are personally interested in the subject and enthusiastic about it.
Plus, by doing undertaking such projects, you will have a much wider perspective about the field and you will be familiar with more complex ideas. So, when they ask you "why do you want to work on this field", you can give a much more specific answer than "I find it interesting".
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I will have a postdoc interview soon. They asked me to introduce myself, what I am passionate about and interested in for a 30-minute. They did not specify if I should prepare a PowerPoint slideshow. Given pandemic circumstances, it is going to be a video interview. On one hand, if I prepare and go through the slides, they are not going to see my face anyway. On the other hand, if I don't prepare, it may seem like "unprepared." I am confused.
I appreciate your thoughts. Stay healthy and safe, all!<issue_comment>username_1: A reading program directed by a professor who will somehow examine you on what you have learned is one thing, especially if it comes with a formal evaluation. But a private reading program that has no validation element isn't going to help in admissions or on a CV.
It is something you could mention in an interview, I think, but you would be immediately asked some question about what you have learned from it. You will need to show that you gained some insight from your readings.
That's not to say it isn't a good thing to do, but its face value (to another) is essentially zero with no external evaluation. But if it gives you insight then it will be good for your career in the long run even if you can't show in on paper.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Whether it is during your interview, or when they read you SoP, there will always read your enthusiasm between the lines. If you happen to be doing some self-study by yourself, it clearly shows that you are personally interested in the subject and enthusiastic about it.
Plus, by doing undertaking such projects, you will have a much wider perspective about the field and you will be familiar with more complex ideas. So, when they ask you "why do you want to work on this field", you can give a much more specific answer than "I find it interesting".
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: A few months ago, I submitted a paper to the top journal in my field. I just received a major revision decision. There was an enormous amount of comments from the four reviewers on many different aspects but all of them specifically doubt if the proposed system advances the state of the art or if it is useful among other things. In reality, It is a novel and interesting idea/concept but it does not make the numbers (performance) better as the reviewers suggested.
The associate editor said that they will consider publication only if they received convincing responses but the wording indicates they doubt that I will be able to do. I could attempt to address the comments but I feel like my chances are close to zero given the number of comments and the tone of the AE.
As our group recently submitted another paper that was rejected by the same AE, I feel like the AE did not just outright reject this one because they just rejected the one before. Hence, a major revision.
I understand that the consensus in the community in the case of revisions is that the AE sees value in the paper but that does seem to be the case here from my understanding.
My question: with the information above, would it be a good idea to skip the major revision and submit to another Journal? My concern here is time as it will likely take three more months to get a high likely reject.
Also, how likely is it for papers to get rejected after major revisions?<issue_comment>username_1: Your call, of course. Either would be a step forward. But consider how much the revision will actually improve the paper. If a lot, then it is to your advantage to just do it, no matter where you submit. All suggestions should be, at least, considered for revision, as usual.
And a new submission will take its own time, of course. And a "top journal in the field" is probably worth some effort and even time.
As for the last question, each paper is different and each editor is different. A general answer does you little good. It is your paper that you care about.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: It is implicitly assumed that you have interpreted the AE's tone/intention correctly- however, that may still be worth re-evaluating, along with someone familiar with the field and journal. It is also assumed that the primary objection from reviewers is about the performance of the proposed method/approach, not its technical soundness or viability.
Now, top journals in different fields are often inclined towards different objectives. Some favor novelty, while others favor performance/application. You must first establish where this journal's preferences lie (this would be based on recent publication history). It seems like your work is more on the novel (but not necessarily high-performing) end. If the journal frequently accepts this kind of work, you should absolutely respond, and build a strong case around the novelty of your approach. This should stand out in the response/rebuttal to reviewers as well as in the manuscript itself.
A little effort here could go a long way.
On the other hand, if you find that your work and the journal's preference are fundamentally mismatched, you may like to withdraw, re-work it according to the other reviewer suggestions, and then submit to a more appropriate journal. Make sure to use these reviewer reports gainfully to improve the manuscript!
Good luck!
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: If you genuinely think that you can make a compelling case that, with the revisions you will make, the paper is important enough for the top journal, then resubmitting the paper is probably a good idea.
I had this happen to me once with a submission to a top journal, where all the referees asked for revisions, and I also got a note from the associate editor that they were concerned that the work, even if correct and revised in accordance with the referees suggestions, would not be important enough for that journal. However, it happened that when I did the revisions, adding in the analysis of an additional case, I found that the technique I was using could improve the state of the art in that new case by a large margin. So, when I resubmitted the manuscript, with the new cases added and other changes made, I pointed out specifically in my cover letter that the concerns about importance raised by the associate editor should also have been addressed—because the new case was such an improvement over preexisting work. This kind of clear statement, explaining why the associate editor's concerns were unwarranted, was key to getting the paper published.
However, I have had other papers rejected by the same top journal, because the referees and/or editors told me that the research was not important enough. And if I did not feel that I could make a convincing case that they had underestimated the work, I moved on and submitted the manuscripts to somewhat lower-ranked journals.
You have to take a hard look and see whether you can really make a compelling case that your work belongs in that journal. It can sometimes be difficult to be give a really honest and detached evaluation of whether your own work meets that threshold. So getting frank feedback from a colleague about the quality of your work may be useful. Moreover, as in my case described above, it may not be possible to make that evaluation until you have completed (or at least sketched out) the revisions the referees have called for.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: The tone of AE merely stems from the reviewer's comments. In general, the editor does not read the paper in detail. In your case, there is a big amount of comments from four reviewers and all of them, unanimously, have questioned the novelty of your approach. But this does not necessarily mean rejection. In fact, they have given you another chance to convince them.
In my opinion, try to make a systematic revision and address all the reviewers' comments. In particular, try to focus on the advantages of your approach and also clarify the objective of your study. So that the reviewers would know that you were aware of the weaknesses of your approach in the first place, however, your target was to introduce a new idea/concept.
Bear in mind that it won't take very long for the reviewers to judge your revised manuscript after resubmitting, as they all have read it carefully before.
Regarding submitting to another journal, I don't think it is a wise decision at this stage. As you say, the journal that you chose is a top journal, and you got four reviewers. Accordingly, if you submit your revised manuscript to another top journal, the chance that you get, at least, one of the same reviewers is high, who will not treat your manuscript in the same way (knowing that you were not able to address his/her comments about the novelty of the study and simply resigned).
Good luck
Upvotes: 0
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<issue_start>username_0: I am a STEM teaching assistant. I know some professors were using physical class materials in engineering classes. How do you think they should respond to COVID-19-forced online education and still ensure the quality of their classes?
It is a purposefully broad question. I was curious to hear what you think about the near term or futuristic/ideal approaches that could change STEM education.<issue_comment>username_1: Use video demonstrations of each section of the experiment and the results and use those for discussion.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: It seems that pretty much everything must now be done in virtual space. And, of course, this is hard to arrange in the short term. But in addition to videos, there is the possibility of software to provide hands-on simulation in some cases. It might be worth the effort in some fields to pair up (virtually) with a good programmer who can build quick simulations for student use. These can be refined later.
The really hard fields, though, are things like training surgeons, but even there, simulation can get you partway home.
Some fields, maybe physics, already have a lot of simulation software that is normally used. So some people have experience building such things. See if your university has someone or can find someone to help.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: >
> implement STEM classes that require hands-on lab experience in online learning platforms
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You cannot do that. "Hands on lab" and "in online learning platforms" are directly opposing goals.
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> How do you think they should respond to COVID-19-forced online education and still ensure the quality of their classes?
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Pandemics are not fair and suggesting that we can make them fair is dishonest and cruel.
Simulation, computation, and theory assignments are all good mitigations. Do not expect to end up with the same quality. Teach the hands-off content better.
Upvotes: -1
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2020/03/23
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a large figure with a long caption of 300 words, and they really don't fit into one A4 page. Can I enlarge the figure to fit in the first page and let the caption run to the next page?<issue_comment>username_1: Let the copy editor deal with this. That is, after all, their job.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: 300 words will be about 30-50% of the page. Such a large chunk of text seems substantial, so it's better to place it in the body of the paper.
In such situations, in the caption I usually just state what's in the figure, followed by "see text for details". And then I don't care if the text spills to another page.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: You can: Reduce the size of the figure or caption, move part of the caption into the body, split the figure into two independent figures, include the figure inline, or something similar.
(I favor inclusion of the figure inline as opposed to the figure caption running to the next page.)
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: This is not *that* unusual a situation. One sometimes sees a full-page figure, with the (full) caption on the facing page. I suspect this is less common than it used to be: back in the days where figures went on expensive 'colour plates', there was an incentive to maximise the area occupied by figure rather than text. I think it is less common to see the caption split across two pages (though this is sometimes done for footnotes, e.g. in humanities books).
As others have said, it is worth considering if you can reduce the length of the caption or reorganise the figure itself. However, it is not critical to do so.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: No. Don't break a caption over the pages.
I am a fan of very explanatory figure captions. One to two sentences is fine. Figure captions are THE MOST READ parts of the text of a paper. Pay special attention to them.
But 300 words is WAY too much. I would keep it under 25 normally and never over 150 (which is a normal, not over-long, paragraph). You need to move some of that to the text.
But please don't say "see text" (this is too "duh"). Just have a flowing argument that the figure fits into. Oh...and still try to find a way to make the figure relatively self contained to view and read caption. (Challenge yourself.)
Also consider to have a couple (or more) different figures if you are doing too much in one figure, such that it requires so much explanation.
P.s. I am the normal username_2. Cue Highlander...
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I will soon graduate with a data science MSc and am specializing in AI/machine learning, in which I would like to do research. I can read, understand and apply research papers pretty well, but I don't feel like I have the background to actually *do* research. When an author derives something, I sometimes need a few minutes to make sure that the math is sound. This comes from the fact that my undergrad school is only really good at teaching software development, and most of the courses I could take ended up being linked to that, neglecting the mathematical side of things.
The most worrying thing is that I don't feel completely sure about my choice of fields, since I have not been exposed to serious courses in most subjects that interest me. My bad results in math years ago were not from lack of interest, and I would have liked to take some serious courses in math and related areas, and give myself some time to decide what to do. This will probably become harder when I enter the job market. I may also have good PhD opportunities in machine learning through my job, which makes it even riskier to leave and start another degree without being sure I will like the field and do well in it.
I have started working through textbooks in various areas (linear and abstract algebra, statistics, machine learning), but without a clear plan, it's hard to prioritize self-study and focus effectively. There are too many interesting areas and not enough time and energy to learn all of them. Finally, I can't be sure that I am learning well or just getting the illusion of progress, since a set of textbooks can't replace a structured degree program.
How can I make sure that I'm ready and in the right field when I start applying for grad school? I'm not afraid of "losing" a few years to get another degree, if that's part of the answer.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> I don't feel like I have the background to actually *do* research
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Undergraduate degrees do not (generally) prepare you for research. By teaching *software development* and *neglecting the mathematical side*, your school prepared students for the workplace, rather than academia, which is their job.
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> How can I make sure that I'm ready and in the right field when I start applying for grad school?
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**Apply, learn what you need once hired, and hone in on your field as you go.**
Ultimately, *[t]here are too many interesting areas and not enough time [nor] energy to learn all of them*. That's not a problem, you can just learn what you need. Your supervisor will help you.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Just a guess, but the guess is that you are uniformly underestimating your own skills and the quality of your education. You say "When an author derives something, I sometimes need a few minutes to make sure that the math is sound." Well, it might take me hours or days.
You are undecided about field and find a lot of interesting things that you might study. This is natural, but could be a block, since doctoral study is all about specialization. So, pick something that seems the most interesting to you and that seems to have some future possibilities. Apply to a program that is good in that field and find an advisor. You will be led toward specialization over a year or so and your research will lead you deeper.
There are two hard parts to research (well, maybe three). You need to find a suitable problem and you need to find a way to resolve it. (The third is, in some fields, coming up with a methodology for the resolution). An advisor can be helpful, especially, in coming up with a problem - or at least suggesting several, or pointing you at places that might be hiding problems.
But you won't know until you get into the thick of it.
And, for all of the "other" cool things that you leave behind by specializing, they aren't closed off from you forever. But first, get a doctorate so that you again have freedom to pursue whatever interests you.
Some people (myself) have changed fields quite drastically for many reasons. Some because of the academic economy at the time, but others (not me) have actually invented new fields. Some just followed their thoughts and branched off into a new area.
As a researcher you are currently unformed. The forming will come through practice and with the (hopefully good) guidance of an advisor.
Narrow your focus a bit. Apply to a good school. Find a good advisor. Work hard. Hopefully success will come, but satisfaction probably will in any case.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]
|
2020/03/23
| 350
| 1,340
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am in the process of submitting a paper on arxiv and I would like to know if there is anyone who knows if the part in gray in the following picture gets automatically added on the paper or I should take care of it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6jctf.png)
Thanks in advance for your help.<issue_comment>username_1: arXiv does not add anything like this automatically.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: The gray part is added by the publisher (IEEE) on the early access version of the manuscript, once accepted.
Note that you may not be allowed to submit such a version to arXiv, see [this question and the accepted answer](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/145690/20058).
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: No, Arxiv only adds its own watermark on the left side of the first page.
Do note, though, that among the article's metadata on Arxiv there is a "journal ref" field where you can specify in which journal your preprint was published. Once you log into your account, next to your list of Arxiv articles you will see a "journal ref" icon.
This is the recommended way to add this information, since it gets added to the database and is not just inside the pdf in a difficult-to-parse text format.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/23
| 1,700
| 6,868
|
<issue_start>username_0: I have been asked to peer-review a manuscript for journal X (field of psychology). I recognised the author name as someone I've reviewed a past paper for last year, in journal Y. The topic of his research is still of interest to me, and before accepting, I wanted to see how their now-published journal Y paper (which I recommended minor revisions for, while correcting several mistakes) looked like - and noticed they did not bother to acknowledge the reviewers. I realised I was put off by this: to my mind it is a question of common courtesy to thank your reviewers by at least including a note in the Acknowledgements. I can see that other papers by this author also lack this 'feature'.
I know we all do peer-review without expecting compensation or recognition - however I feel this is contingent on us not forgetting to somehow thank (if even superficially) each other for what is a rather ungrateful albeit necessary work. This is especially necessary when journals (such as Journal Y) do not openly disclose reviewers' names, nor have any [schemes](https://www.springernature.com/gp/reviewers/publons?sap-outbound-id=9786798D4312E134B28793E2313C7B3DFC0B47F2&utm_source=hybris-campaign&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=000_PFM0524_0000019940_AEXS_AWA_PF01_GL_PeerReviewThankYouTotal&utm_content=EN_internal_42716_20200318&mkt-key=005056A5C6311ED999A0AA4D1CD43A14) whereby reviewers can add their peer-review contributions to an ORCID-linkable profile etc.
To make up for this (as I perceive it) remaining glitch in the peer-review system, I am myself always careful to thank my own reviewers, either directly if they disclose who they are (as I did in my journal Y review), or at the very least in the Acknowledgements, where I try to make the statement less banal by mentioning a specific way in which the reviewers' comments have improved the manuscript.
Am I putting undue weight on this, or am I right to think that, if I'm going to devote an entire day (sometimes two days) to peer-reviewing an unknown colleague's paper, and since I anyway cannot say yes to all the requests I get, I might as well do it for authors who don't appear to take this effort for granted?<issue_comment>username_1: For recommending "minor" revisions, perhaps you are overreacting. But a more important question is whether they are just a taker or also give back to the scientific community. Do you have any knowledge that they refuse to do reviews? That would be a more important reason for declining the review.
But, you are providing a service to the journal, to the editors, and to science itself by doing reviews, not just to a, perhaps, poorly acting author. Perhaps you want to just grumble and do the review as usual.
You could, of course, tell the editor about what you have noticed. Any request to the author to provide acknowledgements can come from them.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: In my opinion, you are overthinking this.
Academics do many things as part of their jobs, some highly visible, some behind the scenes; some acknowledged, some not.
In addition, social norms vary by discipline, by geography, and by individual. I have thus far once acknowledged a reviewer, since their comments improved a paper of mine signficantly, more so than others with whom I workshopped it with previously. However, I certainly don't write such acknowledgements as a matter of routine. To me it would feel like meaningless boilerplate.
And frankly, while I do appreciate the importance of the peer review process, fairly often the nuggets of gold are also mixed with piles of dirt -- reviewer comments which, while well-intentioned, are at best of marginal value and yet take lots of time to figure out how and whether to address for at best slight benefit. I think most authors feel this at various times, and so while we recognize the worth of the peer review process overall, and if we are honest also recognize it has on balance improved our paper, our mindframe may not be exactly condusive to writing effusive acknowledgements once we finally craft a reply to comment #17! And it's good to recognize this mindframe challenge when we are playing the reviewer role as well.
Finally, I view the activity of reviewing more as part of my membership dues to my profession, not as anonymous acts of kindness to authors. I feel positive when sometimes (and I don't go out of my way to check) my reviewer's contributions get reflected in the final published paper, but I'm not sure I would notice whether there is a pro forma acknowledgement at the bottom or not.
However, this is a worthwhile discussion to have. I will henceforth set the bar under which I as author acknowledge in this instance lower, since your question has brought to my attention that you, and presumably other people, care about this more than I do!
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: I am not in the habit of thanking reviewers, not because i dont appreciate the effort that they put in, but rather because it is anonymous, it feels fruitless to thank someone whose name I do not know. No one gets credit there, and it feels superfluous.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_4: First, reviewing papers is a service to the community more than it is a service to the authors. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that this author is an evil, selfish person who doesn’t deserve any favors from you. Does it still make sense to deprive the community of your feedback about this author’s paper, which may still be a good paper that makes a valuable scientific contribution to the field? (Or even better, it may be a bad paper and you’ll get the satisfaction of saying it’s bad and protecting the community from publishing junk...)
I see a second problem with your logic. As reviewers we need to be completely impartial and make all our decisions, including the decision whether to take on a reviewing assignment, based on impersonal matters rather than emotional issues having to do with our personal opinions about paper authors, their personalities, whether they are nice people etc. If we don’t, we risk creating a culture where you’ll see authors trying to curry favor with their (present or future) reviewers by starting to include manipulative statements in their papers — think something along the lines of “I offer my advance thanks and eternal gratitude to the wonderful reviewer who will be reading this: Anonymous Reviewer, you are the best!!!” If you don’t want to see this sort of thing happening, don’t allow yourself to be swayed by personal stuff, and don’t give anyone (whether it’s authors, editors, academia.se readers etc) the impression that you are open to being manipulated in such a way.
>
> Am I putting undue weight on this
>
>
>
Yes. To put any weight greater than zero on such a triviality would be “undue” in my opinion.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/23
| 500
| 2,008
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm a Second year math undergrad with another year left. I want to continue my academics further. Really interested in theoretical physics and Applied mathematics. Can I get into a theoretical physics Phd with math undergrad degree if I ace Physics GRE?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes (you might not even need the Physics GRE). [Example](https://www.graduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/maampdmtp/requirements):
>
> The usual minimum entry requirement is a first-class honours degree, awarded after a four-year course in physics, mathematics or engineering, or a three-year degree together with a one-year postgraduate course on advanced mathematics and theoretical physics. Part III (MMath/MASt) of the Mathematical Tripos provides such a course. Note, however, that entry is competitive and a higher level of preparation may be required for research in some subject areas.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Really interested in theoretical physics and Applied mathematics.
>
>
> Can I get into a theoretical physics Phd
>
>
>
You might not even need to get into a physics phd. At least in some parts of the world mathematical physics are considered to be a mathematics subjects. From what I understand they do work on physics. Depending on what flavor of physics you are interested, you might be better suited with a math phd.
If you are sure that you want a physics phd you surely have a shot in having one. Usually graduate positions are open to people with *related* bachelor's but they often specify some degree of general proficency in the related area. You need to look into specifics for each position. Some phd positions have 2 years of teaching in which background material can be covered. Others start working on a thesis right away. The latter might prove more difficult to get in.
One anectode. Apperantly one of the master's students of my proffesor got into a very good physics post-doc after his phd in algebraic topology.
Upvotes: 1
|
2020/03/23
| 344
| 1,308
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am planning to record lectures. My lectures will be slides or notepad with voice-over.
I am interested in a simple to use video editing software. The major things I need to do is
* Cutting out a few seconds
* Freezing the video for a few seconds
* Speeding up or slowing down certain parts
* perhaps do a completely different voice-over
The software should be as portable as possible though I am using Linux for the most part.<issue_comment>username_1: I have found [Kdenlive](https://kdenlive.org/) to be a very good video-editing solution on Linux. It is free and open-source, with an active help forum and good documentation. It probably has many more features than you will ever need, but I didn't find the learning curve to be too high as a new user.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Lightweight online video tool: Kapwing (<https://www.kapwing.com/>)
Education edition:
<https://www.kapwing.com/resources/free-kapwing-pro-accounts-for-educators-affected-by-covid-19/>
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: I've been very happy with [OpenShot](https://www.openshot.org/download/). Free and open source, works on Windows, OS X, Linux. I had a problem at one point and the developer community was very helpful in diagnosing and fixing it.
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/03/24
| 360
| 1,472
|
<issue_start>username_0: I have published a paper in a conference proceedings of an IEEE conference. The paper has been published since December of last year. Unfortunately, I found some spelling mistakes in the text. Is there a way, how I can correct them? Does anyone have experience with IEEE. On the web I only found information about how to correct metadata (<https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/become-an-ieee-journal-author/publishing-ethics/guidelines-and-policies/policy-correcting-metadata-in-the-ieee-xplore-digital-library/>) but I could not find any information about spelling errors.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> Is there a way...I can correct them?
>
>
>
No, published works cannot (generally) be changed. (You can fix typos in copies distributed elsewhere, e.g., e-prints on arxiv.)
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: It may be impossible to get a change made, but a possible approach would be to contact the program chair of the conference (or the conference chair if necessary) and ask for advice. They will know what is possible and what is not.
But it is also likely that the errors are merely a nuisance and not fatal to the work. It hasn't been a long time, yet, but over a longer period things get harder to change and more likely to be ignored.
Print versions are quite unlikely to be changed for anything but books that go through multiple printings with some editor intervention between printings.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/24
| 776
| 3,119
|
<issue_start>username_0: The chair of my department has very generously offered to try and secure funding for some of the part-time and adjunct professors working in the department as compensation for adapting our originally in-person courses to an online format (this is in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic). I currently am an adjunct only teaching one upper-division class at this institution. The catch here is that my chair has asked me and the other part-timers to throw out numbers that we feel are appropriate. I really have no intuition about what to ask for, or to simply respond (graciously) saying that I trust my chair's judgement and allow them to come up with a number for me/us. I don't want to come off as greedy and pick a number they might claim to be inappropriate, but at the same time I feel that it's rather passive to blindly let my chair pick.
For reference, I'm a fairly new hire in this department and not really clear about my future there. The chair and the other faculty are very friendly and inviting, so I'm not particularly worried about setting off any personality conflicts. Just not sure what the appropriate response is here.<issue_comment>username_1: Take however much they were paying you monthly and divide that by the hours you actually work. This gives you an hourly wage. Multiply that by however much you need to turn your courses to an online format, and quote that number.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: There are really two parts to the Chair's question:
1. How much additional work have you had to do so far? What additional work do you anticipate going forward? Are there any time savings that should also go into the calculation?
2. What is the appropriate renumeration for that work?
You should be able to estimate the answer to (1), and explain where the number comes from. You should certainly include this information in your response to the chair. Then, as in the answer by @username_1, you can propose that they pay you for the additional time at (broadly) the same rate as you usually expect to get. For example,
>
> Hello,
>
>
> I estimate that I've had to spend 80 hours preparing new material, and
> there will be an additional 4 hours work each week going forward.
> However, I'm saving an hour on travelling between campuses. Assuming
> this continues for the next 12 weeks, we're looking at something like
> 120 hours additional work. I think my usual salary works out at around
> $30/hour.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Mndifldz
>
>
>
Note that all you have done here is state facts, so there is nothing anyone can criticise you for. You leave it up to the chair to do the maths, and decide what they can afford to offer. However, you lead them towards a number that (hopefully) you think is fair.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_3: I actually am in a similar situation from time to time when an online class I was offered and set up gets canceled, usually due to enrollment issue. The compensation is usually in the neighborhood of $100. Since you're doing this from scratch and in a rush, I would ask as high as $300.
Upvotes: -1
|
2020/03/25
| 1,050
| 4,618
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am a tenure track assistant professor in a relatively small university (approx. 6000 students). Without giving too much identifiable details, I'll just way that a student was unhappy with some aspect of the course (e.g. grading scales) and filed a complaint directly to the department chair and the dean of the college without giving me any opportunity to respond.
~~I certainly believe I didn't do anything wrong. At least no other student had a problem with the course. But that's perhaps not important to my question.~~ (Update: The department chair stated over phone conversations that (s)he does not believe I did anything wrong under the extraordinary situation that we and many other schools are facing. My tone, in email messages, is professional but cold. E.g., using "Mr." rather than first name, using "I can..." rather than "I'll be more than happy to...". The Chair said (s)he would not consider this to be an issue. So while it's less than perfect, the Chair cleared of wrongdoing in private)
Surprisingly, the dean of my college got involved directly. Sending detailed instruction through the chair telling me what to do. After several rounds of negotiation, I gave the student exactly what this student demanded. But still, the dean does not like my tone. My messages to this student now have to be reviewed to make sure I sounded friendly and helpful.
This whole thing strike as rather strange. My question is how common are these? Is it common for students to complain to a dean and get their support? Is it common for a dean to get directly involved like this?
A bonus question is, as a tenure track person, what should I do? (Shut up, do what they say, and update my resume, just in case?)<issue_comment>username_1: As a tenure-track person who presumably has the goal of making tenure, you must fall in line with what your dean has prescribed as behavior commensurate with one of their department instructors. If you feel the student has violated some part of the institution's enrollment agreement or your syllabus, these violations should be enumerated for your dean. However, if the dean is talking about tone and messaging, then this is likely an issue of your dean feeling like one of their tenure-track folks are not falling in line with what is expected of a tenured professor at your institution.
This question--and any answer, frankly--is very specific to your institution and your dean's management style, unfortunately. At the end of the day, if you want to make tenure, you need to consider that your dean will be a powerful voice during tenure review. Even if you don't intend to speak to your students in the way that you feel runs counter to your personal understanding of best practices, I think anyone else would recommend that a tenure-track person ought to focus on behavior and strategies that would more likely result in a positive tenure review.
That means, unfortunately, that you must start sanding down parts of your puzzle pieces so that they're fit with the existing puzzle.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Let me stick to answering your questions directly.
Yes it is common for (a few) students to complain. Usually the complaints will go to department heads but, especially in a small place, might go directly to the dean. This might also be the case if the dean has a fairly public presence, as my own dean did.
No, it is pretty uncommon that a dean would want to monitor an individual faculty member directly, especially at so fine a grain as the communication with a particular student. They have a lot of tasks that would normally seem to be much more important. The fact that the dean is intervening directly here seems to imply that *they* think the situation is especially (important, disturbing, disruptive, ...). The implication is that it is important for you as well.
This can affect your future both locally and more generally. Good relations with students is an important selling point of many institutions, especially smaller ones. Your relationship with students generally can be an important consideration when it comes time for a tenure decision.
I don't have any knowledge of how you acted or whether it was appropriate or not, but the fact of the dean's intervention suggests that you need to take it as an important message. Some interactions with students are entirely inappropriate, even when the student has erred in some way.
If you have a trusted colleague, preferably tenured, I suggest that you review everything with them and see what advice they have for you.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
|
2020/03/25
| 1,529
| 6,816
|
<issue_start>username_0: I'm taking a graduate course online this semester, and have noticed a few things:
1. Professor has assigned us a mid-term, a final, and a research paper as the coursework for the class. These are the only grades we will receive this semester from this course.
2. Each week, he assigns us a chapter to read, and around 8-9 hours of videos that are supposed to serve as supplementary instruction.
3. The videos are publicly posted YouTube videos from the textbook author, Coursera, and other online courses.
4. He has not provided any of his own material for this course. No PowerPoints, no lectures, no notes, no study guide. Nothing of his own work.
At no point in the course description, or anything provided before registration did he indicate that the course would be structured like this.
Is it an issue that we're essentially taking an uncredited Coursera course for a grade and graduate credits?<issue_comment>username_1: If your instructor is available for questions, comments and discussions, then you can learn a great deal this way, potentially.
I recommend that you try to do just that. If, after at least ten days of really trying, you have difficulties, or find yourself concerned that you may not be properly prepared for courses that build on the one you're currently taking, then I recommend that you reach out to a department administrator. Present it as a problem *you* are having, not as a problem your instructor is having. However, do lay out in as neutral a tone as possible, a description of the current course format, and if your instructor has been unresponsive to questions, do include that information. Draft the email and sleep on it. The next day be brutal and remove any trace of whining or complaining. Just state the problem as a problem *you* are having.
Hopefully you will not have a problem.
Happy studying!
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: Your question is stated as *"is it an issue"*. In this form I believe the right answer is "no, there are no issues". In some fundamental subjects like calculus or linear algebra I don't even expect for an average teacher to prepare "own" materials that would be different from more or less standard textbooks (after all, this is the purpose of textbooks -- to serve as standard teaching/learning materials). Next, I don't see any principal differences between "a textbook" and "a coursera course".
I understand you might dislike this way of organizing a course, but that's a completely different matter. At the end of the day I think you should be more concerned with acquiring appropriate knowledge rather than pondering on teachers' attitude. I believe Coursera provides decent content, so you should be happy (given that your submissions are properly evaluated and graded, and you receive appropriate guidance and feedback).
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: There doesn't seem to be any contravention of norms or flouting of rules here. Professors are not bound to create original content; they are required to obtain appropriate permissions while using existing material. That does not seem to be the case here.
It may be argued that this isn't an ideal way to teach, but I assure you, you will find enough people to argue on both sides (on this site as well). Pedagogical instruction is far from being homogeneous, and every teacher has a different way of going about it. I would suggest approaching it with an open mind, actively engaging with the resources suggested (including the professor/teaching assistants) doing the assessments to the best of your ability.
After doing so, you will be able to identify specific problem areas, which can then be highlighted in whatever means your institution allows (feedback forms, direct interaction, mediated interaction, dropping the course etc.)
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: With points #1, #2, and #3, he/she outlined the topics of the course including checkpoints to grade the participants' ability to apply the techniques the course is about. Depending on the field and level of instruction, he / she may think there is no need to create original material in the sense of «the instructor created new slides», and reasons may include
* there already is sufficient material made accessible by others (e.g., textbooks, the Coursera sites you mention), *as well as*
* he / she assumes participants of his / her course advanced this much that they are able to identify additional ressources by themself of in exchange e.g. with other attendees. The actual learning is not that you hear an instructor literarally reading slides, nor the mere writing on the green board. It is about you familiarizing with the topic.
Especially under current constraints, he / she possibly intended to apply the concept of [flipped classroom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom) where participants of a class attend the lectures to discuss and clarify their questions during the self-study instead of «only» listening to a monologue.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: My *personal opinion*, which is nothing more than that, is that yes, *this professor's behavior is possibly inappropriate*. [Flipped classrooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom) can be a wonderful thing, but then instructors can hold online discussions, "virtual office hours", moderate discussion forums over the Internet, or otherwise engage with their classes. If your professor is doing that, then *great!* -- take advantage of it.
That said, with the COVID-19 outbreak everyone is in *very* unfamiliar territory. In principle you could complain to a department administrator, but your issue is likely to be ignored. And keep in mind that other obligations may have ramped up significantly -- for example, your professor might be at home all day, with small children whose daycare just closed.
One possible course of action might be to suggest other course activities to your professor. For example, would you like to participate in an online discussion forum, moderated by the professor, where the videos are discussed? Have "virtual office hours" at fixed times via videoconference, where you can ask questions and listen to others' questions? Pick something you'd like to see, and ask if your professor if he would mind doing it.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_6: What you've described sounds like a very standard online class. The only thing missing is some kind of method for direct communication with the professor. Usually this would be accomplished through discussion boards although there are other options, e.g. live sessions via Zoom or WebEx. If the professor has included something like that to allow you to ask questions and get immediate feedback then I don't see anything out of the ordinary here.
Upvotes: 4
|
2020/03/25
| 223
| 982
|
<issue_start>username_0: My manuscript rejected by the editor of Journal A (MDPI publisher). Then I submit my manuscript to Journal B (MDPI publisher), it rejected again by the editor of Journal B. My question is editor of Journal B is able to see Journal A editor`s decision? Simply different journal editors in the same publisher are able to see each other`s decision?<issue_comment>username_1: If both journals are in the same publishing house then both editors have access to the same database of records so yes.
Editor B probably searched the database for your name as a first step and the result of editor A was listed...
Only a guess but possible.
Upvotes: -1 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: **No**. You can see the decisions of papers submitted to your journal, but not to other journals, even if they are by the same publisher. An employee of the publisher with access to both journals might be able to, but not the members of the editorial board.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/25
| 762
| 3,378
|
<issue_start>username_0: The editor of a journal asked me “Please confirm the title of XXX XX, Mr. or Dr.?” His title is Mr., as the manuscript was written by two students alone, without a supervisor or anyone with the title Dr.
I replied with this information to the editor’s email. After 10 minutes I got a kind email saying that the manuscript had been rejected by the editor. So did the title of the authors impact the editor’s decision? Does there have to be a professor or someone with the title Dr. on the manuscript?<issue_comment>username_1: There is unlikely to be a written rule stating the requirement of a PhD holder in the journal policy. There are two possible explanations for this action:
(1) The editor felt the need to desk-reject based on reasons other than author qualification (relevance to journal for instance), and simply asked for the title so that the rejection mail would address the authors appropriately.
What has the editor mentioned as reason for rejection? Most likely it is one of the boilerplate emails ("high demand"/"high submission rate" based), which is broad enough to cover almost any reason. Has the editor suggested submission to any other journal? (Why are you calling this Journal 'B'?)
(2) Given that you are both students (and are identified by your institution), the editor may suspect malpractice of some sort since no faculty member is involved. In this situation, the editor has to walk a fine line between risking offending the author and potentially permitting malpractice. If you suspect this, you could always write back, politely requesting the reason for a desk-reject. Please emphasize that you are not challenging the decision, but are rather seeking to improve your work for future submission.
Upvotes: 1 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: If a journal wanted to impose such a rule they would most likely state it plainly. But I think that is very unlikely. It isn't the qualifications of the authors of a paper that make it important, but what the paper actually has to offer. Of course, editors like to know that the authors know what they are writing about, but that is the job of the reviewers to determine and normally reviewers will spend more time with the paper than with the credentials of its authors.
In fact, a paper by an independent researcher without an academic credential might be especially "interesting" if the arguments and conclusions are sound. It might even introduce new ideas into a field. When Einstein did his early work he wasn't well respected by the established intelligentsia of the day. That only came later.
And on the other side, a paper by a brilliant and credentialed researcher that seems to spout nonsense can cause quite a stir.
But, I suspect that in this case, there is some flaw in the paper that the editor noticed independent of its authors. Maybe it was just a poor fit for the journal, or even for the editor's current needs.
---
One further thought. A restriction on who can publish in a journal, such as requiring a doctorate, would, over time, have a pernicious effect, lowering the quality of the journal. It is the restriction itself, actually any sort of restriction, that leads to some high quality papers not being submitted at all and other, lower quality, ones filling any gaps. The effect would be small, but additive over time.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/25
| 1,248
| 5,032
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<issue_start>username_0: I have a funded PhD offer from a R1 university in texas but its ranked in the 180s based on USNews, the advisor and myself click very well, he is nice, open-minded, and a young motivated and driven advisor always searching for new collaborations and the research area is in my area of interest. His background is in the sciences and I want to focus on engineering which isn't an issue as there are professors in other depts that I could collaborate with. Finally I will be his only student, he occasionally has undergraduates and his last PhD student will be graduating by the time I get in.
My research focus is in neuroengineering and rehabilitation for movement related disorders - focusing on restoration of grasping and posture. The main difference from top universities is the prestige, level of work (more translational and more grants), will have a better contact base when starting off, many professors working in the area.
Due to having a low uGPA from India ~ 55%, which is why I applied to mostly masters programs despite having around 2 years of research experience during my undergrad. I feel like I was lucky that the prof had an interest in my profile and asked me to switch to PhD and then I got it (as mentioned in the 1st para). I have also got an MS offer from a 40s ranked university based on USNews with funding only for stipend (would most probably have to take loan for tuition).
In the hypothetical situation that I take the MS offer I would have to apply for PhDs at the end of my 1st year @ around sept/oct of 2021 and I feel that I would only have a slightly better chance to get into top universities with professors that do amazing work in my area of interest like northwestern, ucsb, rice, university of chicago, and upenn. But at the same time I feel that my horribly low GPA in undergrad will hold me back as I would have to get exceptional grades and do good research; good research seems like an impossible goal in 8 months. Though I may be able to get something useful at the end of my masters but most probably not within 2 semesters. If this scenario of getting into the universities mentioned seems impossible at this point, another option would be to apply to these universities the next year 2022. When I would have finished my masters, but would have to use another extra year working in a research lab and then join the university for PhD.
My question has two parts:
1. The likelihood of getting into the mentioned universities for PhD after 1 year of masters and after 2 years of masters.
2. Is it worth using the 2-3 years to just work towards doing a PhD at these top schools with amazing professors or should I go ahead with PhD straight away and probably think about post-doc with those professors. I just feel that I may miss out on the environment and opportunities that I may get as a student.
Please do not take into consideration about what I want to do in the future like industry, academia etc. as I am set on doing research with these intellectual people and am driven to produce and make an impact on both human knowledge and the patient population (i know this seems like a child's fantasy but this is something that I like to think about) at the end of the day I may go into industry as I am a high-maintanenece person or I may chose to stay in academia as the gratification may overwhelm my needs.<issue_comment>username_1: I think you are vastly overestimating the value of ratings from a popular magazine as they apply to *doctoral* education and vastly underestimating the quality of doctoral education at any R1 in Texas.
Frankly the real difference, in an individual field between a school rated 180 and one rated, say, 40 is likely to be a mix of *random* and the value of a given helpful advisor.
Frankly, I think you would be wasting your time to do much of anything but take what looks like a very nice offer. You'd be halfway through a doctorate at the Texas place before you had a chance to start if you go another route. If you read a lot of questions on this site you'd notice how lucky you would be to have found a good and supportive advisor. Many are not so lucky. Who can say whether you'd have a better time of it if you look elsewhere?
And it is *you* that makes your career, not the journalist/researchers at US News rating places on general criteria.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: I am a first year PhD at UofH. I had these questions as well when staring out my applications. I had a list of 10 universities that I wanted to apply to. The lowest ranked school was UH. Do you know why I had UH on the list? Because there was a professor that I wanted to work with who was doing research in exactly what I wanted. Do you know how many schools I ended up applying to? One. I asked people around me and other PhD students on what they thought. Number one quality they emphasized was student-advisor relationship and research interests. That sold it to me.
What @username_1 said is on point.
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/25
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm writing my PhD-thesis in economics at a fairly small university.
Accordingly, there are relatively few scientists in my department.
I am planning to write a research paper on a specific topic that nobody else at my university is researching.
However, I think that it makes sense to write this paper with several people so that the expertise of others can also be included in this study (and many more reasons).
My question now is where I can find other researchers on this topic. Is there a "Facebook" for researchers? And how can I contact them?
I would also be pleased if someone would tell me about their experience on this problem.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> My question now is where I can find other researchers on this topic.
>
>
>
The usual approach is to build up your own credentials and reputation first, then go to conferences and give talks and meet people, and only then seek out collaborations.
In my opinion, what you propose is likely to be difficult. At least in my field, it is not common for reputable researchers to seek out collaborators in the way you suggest.
But there is one possible option: read others' research papers, and look for ideas based on what *they* are interested in. For example, if an author writes that "It would be interesting to do XYZ, but it isn't clear at the moment how to overcome obstacle ABC", and you have ideas on how to overcome ABC, then you might be able to strike up a collaboration based on a cold email with no credentials.
If you've already got a topic you want to work on, then it is okay to write to researchers outside your university and ask them for advice. But if you do this, then *keep it brief and specific, and don't ask them to assume any responsibility*. For example, "I am writing a thesis on X, and I want to increase my expertise on Y which you are an expert in. Could you please recommend a paper or two on subject Y which is particularly representative of recent work in the field?" Or better still, "I was reading your paper Z, and got hung up on W; could you recommend a good reference to learn about W?"
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_2: I don't actually think your situation is very different from that of others at large universities. I went to a very large place, one of the biggest in the US at the time. The math department was huge for the time with about 80 professors and twice that many doctoral students. But in the field I was working in there were only three professors in our working group. The fact that there were tons of topologists and algebraists in the department meant little to me. Research is specialized and normally done in small groups.
But, to actually answer your question, a facebook group for economics is probably going to be just what I describe above. Lots of people, but very few that have interests close to yours. What you need is a tailored approach not a broadcast one.
Your advisor or another faculty member in the department probably has already developed a circle of contacts and maybe collaborators. Ask to be introduced into such circles. See if the department can provide some funding either to invite a visitor to your institution for a few days or to send you on a visit to work for a bit with someone interesting.
Contact authors of recent papers that interest you. First just to say you are trying to join that field and value the paper, but also wondering if they would be willing to answer questions you might have in the future. First contact should be fairly light, so as not to overwhelm a potential contact. Or, better, get your advisor to introduce you and to recommend you to them as a future collaborator.
Go to whatever conferences in your field you can and introduce yourself to speakers there. Your goal is to establish contacts, not, specifically, to get help on your own projects. At a conference, take note of who asks questions of the speakers and introduce yourself to them. Ask questions yourself. Take a lot of notes with ideas about research ideas that look like they might be worth pursuing in the future. Associate those notes with the individuals that generated the idea in your mind.
---
As a faculty member, I had a wide circle of collaborators, but they were distributed worldwide - mostly US and Europe. No other faculty at my fairly small institution had the same interests. When I worked with a doctoral student it was either one on one or with the help of some colleague elsewhere than the university. That circle was developed over time as I've suggested above, but especially through conversations at conferences.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: In addition to the existing answers, "science twitter" is a thing in several fields and might be a way to hear about/connect with relevant researchers outside your advisor's network.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: This is a second-hand answer. My very close friend is in academia field (food safety) and he uses www.researchgate.net exactly for this purpose. It looks very much as Facebook for researchers. I can ask him for more details if I need to expand this answer.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_5: Facebook is not a collaboration tool. It is a tool for advertising companies and the government to gather information about people; that is the business model and the primary intent. Interaction and collaboration are at best secondary effects.
Now, other social networks controlled by commercial entities and many have business models which involve advertising, but Facebook is among the worst.
At any rate, have a look at:
* <https://researchgate.net>
* <https://academia.edu>
* <https://linkedin.com>
The first two are sites intended for researchers to showcase their work using a generic UI/UX. Users of both complain about their spamminess; and Academia.edu apparently has most functionality limited by a paywall. I personally have found ResearchGate less spammy than Academia.edu, but some comments below suggest otherwise.
The third one, owned by Microsoft, is more geared towards recruitment/head-hunting, and is about presenting one's professional profile rather than research. But I've found both ResearchGate and LinkedIn to be places where I've discovered people who are potential collaborators or sources of useful material for my research. I have *not*, however, used these networks to actually engage on collaboration.
But of course, that is also true for scientific conferences and journals, or rather their on-line form of websites and downloadable proceedings.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_6: Some examples:
* <https://www.username_1labs.com/>
* [Open Science Framework](https://osf.io/)
* <https://www.scilifelab.se/>: Open for collaboration: an username_1 platform for drug discovery and development at SciLifeLab (<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2016.06.026>)
* <https://www.kaggle.com/> to some extent can be used to find username_1 collaborations centered around a given data set ([example](https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge/discussion/136125)).
---
<https://researchgate.net> was mentioned in some other answers, but it is very scammy, see:
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ResearchGate&oldid=947542863#Criticism>
* [Should I send a “cease-and-desist” letter to ResearchGate?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/24127/452)
* [ResearchGate: an asset or a waste of time?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16870/452)
<https://www.academia.edu/> also has their own issues, e.g.:
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Academia.edu&oldid=945557467#Criticism>
* [Why does academia.edu reserve the right to sell, modify, and “exploit” my papers if I post them there?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16050/452)
* [Is Academia.edu useful?](https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/44632/452)
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: Most username_1 publications list an email address, or at least a postal address. Finding relevant publications (e.g. Google Scholar, arxiv, etc depending on field and preference) and then looking at the authors details would be a start.
Often, addresses might be out of date (e.g. moved to different university) but may still forward to an active email. Generally anyone still in academia and a potential collaborator / peer would be findable by most popular search engines. For particularly common names you may need to use other identifiers such as ORCHID or email.
Getting an engaging reply might be a bit of luck however! Show that you know their work and the field, and have the potential to contribute and help them. But also be prepared to be ignored a lot, though don't hold it against them if you meet them in future!
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_8: You are in economics. Therefore I will answer from that field.
There is a website called [Ideas-RePec](https://ideas.repec.org/) that summarises the whole economic field of research, from journals to papers to authors to institutions (it's actually a whole series of tools and websites). You might be familiar with JEL codes, found in any paper in economics. Well, in Ideas-RePec you can search papers and authors by JEL code. So if your field is JEL code D31, search for it and you will find papers and authors. [Here](https://ideas.repec.org/j/D31.html) is the example for D31. Alternative, you can use [this tool](https://ideas.repec.org/i/e.html) they provide to see a list of authors by field. For example, [here](https://ideas.repec.org/i/ecba.html) is central banking.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_9: Read the literature. You don't have to know it all (impossible since the 1700s). But you need to be dipping into it, tracing sources back, etc. in such a way that you find out the key references in your field. You don't need someone social media chatting with you if you learn to research the literature.
Do your own stuff. It's good for you and good for the field. Earn your stones.
Nothing wrong with collaborating when you have a strong reason for it. But just "I'm gonna put on a play" is not a good rationale. And really nobody will want to collaborate with you until you have at least some basic beginnings to show you can hold up your end. That you have something precious for them.
Time is precious and nobody is sitting around wanting to Facebook with adrift, beginner researchers in small freshwater colleges. I would think an econ student would grasp this. But I still encounter tenured profs at big schools who make sunk cost fallacies. (The state of micro teaching...sigh...)
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_10: I can't speak for economics but in other fields yes, definitely. It is called *conference*.
The large majority of all collaborative projects start with meeting another researcher at a conference, listening to each other's talks and then finding someone with a common interest.
Electronic communication afterwards is great but for an initial start into a collaborative project nothing beats the investment of sitting down for half an hour face to face and figure out if this would be a beneficial collaboration.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/25
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<issue_start>username_0: How do you usually name the chapter of a cumulative dissertation (PhD thesis) that describes the research? A cumulative dissertation basically has two part: One part includes (published) research papers and the other part is an explanatory chapter that motivates the research and summarizes the it.
So basically I thought of the following:
'Background chapter'
'Frame chapter' (that would be the direct translation of the German term
I'd apprciate every comment. Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the current answer. Are there any other suggestions. I'd be happy to hear any comment on that.<issue_comment>username_1: Some places, such as Heidelberg, simply call it a "Summary". Others indicate that the Summary must place the papers in their "Scientific Context". I would favor the latter. But a specific university might provide specific guidance on this, as might an advisor.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: If your thesis advisor and you settled for a cumulative dissertation, s/he may have examples by previous PhD candidates in the shelf which meet the standards by your local department. Or offers a suggestion, like e.g., *theory* if the papers share a significant portion of background.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/26
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm relatively close to someone who is currently attending an [Ivy League](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Proper_noun) graduate program. He believes he has it all made in life and yet here he is paying one of my friends to do his coding assignments and projects.
It is an online program, so it makes getting away with this even easier. This situation only benefits both of them, but it's just bothering me. I just hate the idea of someone bragging about being in an Ivy League graduate just to pay someone else to do his work. Should I just drop it or report the student?
In response to questions: no, I am not a student myself.<issue_comment>username_1: Just my personal view. I think you can do that if it makes you happy, but... it reminds me of an old joke: *"I cheated on a train line -- I got a ticket, but didn't ride"*. Your friend is basically paying for education he doesn't receive. Will it do him any good? If no, he'll just punish himself by paying for nothing; if yes, then something is wrong on a somewhat deeper level of society, I am afraid.
As a teacher, I am trying to identify and punish cheaters, because it's my job, and it keeps our educational environment healthy. But when I think what *motivates* people to cheat, I cannot find a good answer at my or other students' level of responsibility (okay, it is possible that a certain course is poorly designed, but usually it isn't the case).
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: This is a moral question and each person has their own morals. It seems like you have already decided what you want to do and ask for validation but you need to decide that for yourself and live with the consequences.
I suggest to think about whether "it is bothering you" is enough of a reason for you to report someone or if there are other facets to the issue. Is the life or health of someone in danger if the cheater gets the grade but doesn't earn it? Is the cheater in danger of failing the course or is it just laziness? Would the cheater be deported back to a war-torn country if they drop?
However there may be more options to consider than just the two you listed (report or ignore). You could also talk to them.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: What would I do? I would report them both, anonymously.
What is my rationale for this? Mainly because it is not a "victimless crime":
1. There are plenty of employers who weight the reputation of a university very highly (perhaps too highly) in hiring processes. A more-deserving and capable candidate might not be given an interview or an offer as a result of this person having cheated.
2. To the extent that any university's reputation is well-deserved, this is founded upon other people's judgements of its integrity. i.e. that the degree means something. If that impression of integrity is eroded by unqualified people receiving degrees, that hurts the employment chances of everyone with a degree from the same school.
I feel these two points are basically just statistical. Given enough incidents of cheating either or both seems to be a likely consequence.
Somewhat more subjective reasons:
3. Bad outcomes are possible when an unqualified person is granted responsibility. Crashed airplanes? Deadly medical devices? Losing money for their stakeholders? Maybe the odds of great harm are small. And perhaps such a person has no actual interest in taking a job like that. But I don't think this can be totally ignored.
4. More broadly, what other harm are these people likely to cause in life? Chances are that this is not at all their first case of untrustworthy behavior and won't be their last -- as long as they perceive it to be in their interest to act this way. On the other hand they may be early enough in life that a "shock to the system" from being caught could actually be helpful. Or at least a deterrent.
---
Why an anonymous report? I think this is pretty obvious, but I would not want to take any personal risk (in any sense) from this. People can be petty, angry, etc., and I see no reason to expose myself as any kind of 'target' of those emotions.
On the other hand you might have to trust the institution to protect your identity, it depends on how you can make a report.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_4: The school isn't going to be able to prove anything and is not going to make any effort to investigate. There will be no consequences for your friend. If you want to report him go ahead but you'll probably be the only one negatively affected by it.
EDIT: Aight, so I'm just gonna lay this out cause some of the comments that are here are wildly unrealistic.
1) It is unethical to take anonymous accusations about your students. Whistleblowing is protected when the target of the complaint is powerful and can retaliate. Allowing anonymous character assassination of people with no resources to fight back is not some sort of noble gesture, it's abusive. Once you open this door you can't close it.
2) This is an accusation which is essentially impossible to disprove. If I want to pursue it, I need hard evidence. I am not going to grill someone without being sure that they've been cheating; incorrectly accusing students of misconduct is deeply damaging to the student, and quite frankly to you as a professor. I can be sure people who have plagiarized have cheated.
3) I would chose not to protect your identity if you weren't also a student. If you are also a student, the university's misconduct system will not protect your identity if this gets escalated. Either way the person will find out who you are (as is appropriate; there is a reason you get to face your accusers).
4) There is no investigative system for misconduct that doesn't start with the professor. Most professors will be familiar with all these things that I've laid out here and will take no action.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_5: Considering you asked this in **Academia**, and Academia is all about objectivity, integrity, trustworthiness and reputation: report them.
However, considering you used the phrase
>
> it's just bothering me
>
>
>
I would like to give an answer as if you had asked in **Interpersonal Skills**:
I would talk to the one you consider a friend (or both of them). Tell them how you feel about this topic and make the moral implications clear. Explain to your friend how this is beneficial to them money-wise, but hurting their reputation and their relationship e.g. with you. Ask them to stop. If you already had this discussion or it goes badly, you should probably reconsider the term 'friend' for your relationship. Doing nothing or pretending this is ok will likely hurt your relationship anyways, at least unconsciously.
Depending on your relationship with your friend you can also consider informing them about being on the brink to reporting the actual cheater (or both of them) and you may give an ultimatum.
If you are friends, this will likely resolve the issue without further escalation. Even if not, you'll better understand the relationship you have with them, and this will likely make it easier to report them.
However, keep in mind that you cannot report them anonymously afterwards. We cannot estimate the chance of success or their potential level of aggressiveness without knowing them personally.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_6: If the university is willing to give someone a diploma for someone else's work, then it reflects badly on the university. They should design their programs (in particular online programs) to make this harder: for instance, have live interviews with participants and ask them questions about the work that they have supposedly done, and catch those who can't answer.
But I would not say that you have a moral duty to report this. You are not in charge of defending this university's reputation. (No matter the university, actually -- would this be somehow OK if it were a less reputable one?) I guess you could, if you wish, and if you don't fear negative consequences (e.g., your acquaintance figuring out it's you), but I wouldn't blame you for not doing it.
To answer @UuDdLrLrSs's points to argue that this should be reported:
1. If employers value degrees too highly, and don't test that candidates are able to perform the work that they're in charge of doing, then I'd say it's their responsibility.
2. If the university's reputation suffers, it's the job of the university to defend it, and people with an interest at stake (e.g., alumni) can pressure the university to do it.
3. I think it's the same as 1. I could imagine exceptions for some areas, e.g., medicine, when you have jobs with high responsibilities which can legally only be practiced with people having a certain degree (and with legal oversight on which institutions can grant these degrees). Then I would see a clearer moral imperative of defending the value of such a degree.
4. In general could see a moral imperative of denouncing criminals that do harm, even when you're not the victim. But when the crime is made possible by the victim's negligence (here, the university not making sufficient efforts to catch cheaters), I think the imperative disappears.
To summarize: it's a broken system if a university must rely on bystanders to report cheaters. If they grant degrees with online programs, they should make the necessary efforts to ensure that the person who's getting the degree is the person who's been doing the work.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: I personally don't like the idea of people cheating like this in an academic setting, but reporting them is a very serious undertaking with a potential to damage lives and should be considered carefully. I suggest that you proceed through this sequence of questions to help determine if you should report them or not:
1) Is the person who is helping really your friend? If so, don’t report them out of loyalty to your friend. Most likely you only know about this because your friend told you, or the other person told you because he knows that you are a friend of the person who is helping him cheat. I feel that your loyalty to your friend is a higher obligation than reporting them. Of course, it’s OK to talk with your friend and tell your friend that you disapprove, or possibly even break off the friendship if you disapprove of this behavior strongly enough. Obviously if your friend was involved in a more serious crime then your duty to your friend would not necessarily be your highest obligation.
2) On a spectrum of “bad things” this is fairly minor. Have you ever done anything that is this bad or worse than this? Would you have wanted to have someone report you for that behavior and face the consequences? You are in a position to help guide both of these people to a better path of behavior and you can potentially do so without reporting them.
3) Do either of these people know anything about you that could put you in a bad light if it was revealed? You should consider that they will probably know that you were the one that reported you and if they know something bad about you, they might reveal that information after they figure out that you were the one who reported them. Although this might seem like item two above, it is not. Item two was concerned about your behavior, regardless of if anyone knew about it or not. This is concerned with protecting yourself from harm by one of the people that you report.
4) Are you in academia? If so, you would probably feel a higher obligation to report it and that would be understandable.
5) Why do you want to report them? You said “I just hate the idea of someone bragging about being in an Ivy League graduate just to pay someone else to do his work.” That sounds like you are resentful that this person is going to get an Ivy League degree. Did you want to get an Ivy League degree and you were unable to for some reason? If not, what is your reason for wanting to report them?
6) What do you want to accomplish by reporting them? Is it just to satisfy a moral duty that you feel that you should report them, or are you wanting to see the person removed from the program or some other punishment?
After having been out of school for a long time, I have adopted the philosophy that the real world is an open book test. For most things in life, it doesn’t matter if you know how to do things, or you know how to get things done (by yourself or others), as long as you can produce the results in the end. This person could end up being a dismal failure, or he could end up running a company one day. In the real world, knowing how to get a good or great result is what matters. Also, a person who bends the rules like this might be more likely to bend the rules in the future about more important things, but there’s no way to know if that will happen or not. I don’t like the idea of people cheating in a program like this because it is an academic setting, and the rules there are different than the rules in the real world, but I don’t see that this situation rises to the level that you should report it.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/26
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<issue_start>username_0: I was recently invited to give a seminar talk at another institution. Ordinarily I would have travelled there for the day and given my talk in person. However, due to the travel restrictions imposed by the UK government in the wake of the coronavirus, I will instead be giving my talk via video conferencing.
I had already prepared some slides for this talk, and have given variations of the talk before. I tend to prefer a lighthearted style of presentation, and have a couple of humorous slides. I'm concerned that this style will not work well with a virtual seminar, as the audience feedback will be non-existent if everyone has their microphones muted and cameras switched off. I'm also not sure if I should change the layout of my slides in any way, to reflect the fact that people will be looking at them up close on their small laptop screens rather than from a distance in a lecture theatre being projected on to a large screen.
My question is this: how can I best adapt my talk in this situation? I'd appreciate answers that address dealing with the lack of audience feedback and interaction, as well as practical points regarding slide layout and so on.<issue_comment>username_1: To avoid the problem of people just reading your slides and ignoring you, you might try to use a system that lets you overlay text on a live video stream. If you organize it properly the text will supplement what you say rather than interfering with it. To do this effectively the text needs to be pretty sparse. But that is usually a good solution in any case. I assume that some, at least, of the available tools will let you overlay things other than text; graphics, for example.
A separate feedback channel, voice or text, would also be good to arrange, perhaps something like a group chat room.
I've never done this and don't know what software would be best for it, though I know such things exist. An internet search for "text overlay on live video" will turn up some solutions.
For recorded video there are more options in which you can overlay text during post production.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: There is nothing more boring that watching static slide after static slide while listening to someone who you can't see. If at all possible, come up with a system where for the most part, people see you via video chat, and if you have something that absolutely needs a slide -- a picture, a formula -- switch to screen sharing.
This kind of system requires you to think carefully about what actually needs to be on a slide. Minimize the amount of text, maybe to zero on many of the slides you would ordinarily have (and then skip those), so that your audience doesn't actually *need* the slides. This way they also get to pay attention to you.
All of this is of course good practice anyway: Packed slides often lead to people reading ahead of what you have to say and not paying attention to what you actually *say*. The best talks are those with minimal text that serves to abstract and highlight what you say, but not distract. This is your chance to practice this!
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/26
| 844
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<issue_start>username_0: I am in the first quarter of the second year of my PhD. I learned to code as a hobby and have been quite passionate about analytical stuff. I got taken for a PhD basic research project which required a candidate with both wet lab and coding abilities, to be able to apply various programmatic tools to analyse various types of data. During the first year of my PhD I did an extensive analysis of single cell rna seq, bulk rna seq, microarray and Chipseq data for various endpoints. I mostly used already available programmatic tools. It was fun and my supervisor was higly impressed.
Now at the start of the second year of my PhD I discovered that my passion and motivation to perform wet lab activities are very weak. I seem to have lost many reflexes necessary for various wet lab activities. I am almost hating wet lab activities. I have to use some of my time to analyse data for my colleagues and I constantly find myself more passionate about the Bioinformatics stuff than with with wet lab activity. I am still familiar with Biological concepts.
I want to ask my supervisor to modify my project such that I get completely exempted from wet lab activities and do only Bioinformatics. I wish is to focus on different types of analyses of genomics/transcriptomics/proteomic data within the context of the projects going on in our research group. I plan to apply available tools, modify methods in available tools or possibly develop my own methods to analyse various data. I last studied Mathematics in high school and I have never studied Computer Sciences. Online platforms including EDx and co offer basic courses in Mathematics and Computer Sciences. Could such online courses bring bring me up to date in Maths and Computer Sciences such that I can handle a purely Bioinformatics PhD project in this context? I have completed the [Data Science Path from the Codecademy platform](https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/data-science). So I have basic knowledge of statistics and basic concepts in machine learning. I am very familiar with self-learning especially online.
Thank you in advance for you highly cherished advice.<issue_comment>username_1: There's a ton of useful abandoned or semi-abandoned R and python packages related to my work, and I'm sure you can find some that are related to your science. What I've been arranging for people like you is to take over maintaining something, with the goal to build a full test package, put together a CI pipe, and make it easier and more robust for users. This usually takes some time, and once it's shaped up you can decide if this is what you want to do or if this is a nightmare for you and something more statistically-driven is the way to go (I find that most bioinformaticians are statistician types or software engineer types and not many are both). I think it's good to have a bridge project before committing full-time to a bioinformatics dissertation topic.
I'm not convinced any formal classwork would be valuable for the development side unless you have no coding ability at all. Something like DataCamp is enough to help polish up areas that you're missing. Formal coursework for statistics is very useful for people with a weaker background in stats though.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: Some online bioinformatics resources that I can recommend:
* [Bioinformatics ALgorithms](https://www.bioinformaticsalgorithms.org/read-the-book)
* [Rosalind bioinformatics problems](http://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/?location=bioinformatics-textbook-track)
* [The Biostar Handbook](https://www.biostarhandbook.com/)
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/26
| 1,742
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm a Ph.D. student and I have been studying one paper and had some doubt in one point. More specifically the author defines a concept in a way which is a little bit different from other texts I've read before and I'm failing to understand why it is the same thing. I believe I would benefit from understanding this correctly.
More specifically to the situation, the paper has been posted on arXiv and is really some lecture notes which were latter transformed into a book. The author also says to email any questions or corrections to his email in the first page.
1. Considering this situation (that it is really some lecture notes later transformed into a book and that the author says to email any questions to his email) is it considered ok to ask it?
2. More generally, if it is really some paper published in some journal, and if there is nothing written saying that "any questions should be sent to that email", is it still ok to ask of the author in case of any doubts?
3. My main issue is that I fear if the author might consider my doubt something "too basic". Is that really a problem?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes it is fine to send such an email. If it is polite and/or phrased in the form of a question you might be more likely to get a reply than otherwise. Errors happen. The authors generally want them corrected.
But it is also possible that you have misunderstood something, of course.
It is also a way to establish a relationship for the future, provided that your questions and comments are useful.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: The author says to email them, so email them. You’re overthinking this. You would be using their publicly listed email address for exactly its intended purpose.
In general, people who prefer not to contacted by PhD students who have questions about their work will find a way to make that known or to avoid receiving such questions. Leave it to those people (who don’t really exist, by the way) to worry about such things for themselves.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_3: By all means ask. A person who goes through the trouble of writing up lecture notes, is almost certainly a person who would be happy to answer.
As someone who receives a lot of questions from PhD students myself, here are a couple of pointers for how to phrase your question. This could be obvious to you, but I know for sure that it is not obvious for everybody.
* If you have a local supervisor, it makes sense to ask them first - maybe it is a trivial question.
* Read the paper first, and use the notation from that paper when you can.
* Cut to the chase as quickly as possible. Don't explain their paper back to them in the mail, they know what they wrote.
Upvotes: 7 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: I agree with all the other posters. (Go ahead, ask!) Two additional points:
* You might not get a response; sometimes, non-urgent emails get lost in the shuffle. (Especially now, with the sudden shift to online teaching.) If this happens, try not to worry about it.
* I'd avoid the word "doubt". It suggests (to me, anyway) that you believe there's a mistake in what the author wrote. Even if you do suspect this, it's still polite to write from the point of view that the misunderstanding is likely on your end. In the past, I've saved myself some embarrassment by doing this!
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: >
> My main issue is that I fear if the author might consider my doubt something "too basic". Is that really a problem?
>
>
>
Virtually everyone I've met has not felt "too basic" questions are not worth answering. Think about your own work and the questions you might get from your children/nieces/nephews/parents. They're likely to be too basic. They might not even be well-posed. But chances are you're happy to answer them simply because it's flattering that others are interested in your work.
So don't worry about asking - but be sure to make a serious attempt to understand whatever they're saying before asking a second time, to avoid giving the impression that you're asking them to solve your research question for you.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_6: Book authors are not some kind of demi-gods whom you cannot look in the eye.
If someone writes a book, pushes some code on GitHub, write a blog post or whatever is public - you can contact them.
* Some of them will be delighted and they will answer with joy.
* Some of them will be happy but do not have the time to answer. They may send a short note, or answer later, or not answer.
* Some of them may feel that your question is stupid and that you should learn something before asking questions. Well, there are assholes in all populations.
If you write a nice note (everyone likes to receive nice notes) and keep it to the point, normal people will reply.
When I was a kid I wrote a letter to the President and I got a reply. A few months ago I wrote a letter to the mayor of my small city and I am still waiting for them to "find time" to reply. You never know the odds.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_7: As someone early-career (about to be a postdoc) who has a few first-author papers, I would be delighted if someone emailed me about them!
Except a predatory journal... I hate predatory journals... but anything else, even an email from a 3rd grader asking what a p-value is, would make me very happy because it means someone read my paper!
The only scenario where I could possibly imagine this being annoying is something that happened to me at a conference, not by email. Someone who did not understand the analysis I was using as well as he *thought* he did came up to my poster at a poster session and started asking questions trying to "prove" me wrong. And even though I corrected the premise of his questions multiple times and tried to clarify things for him, he just kept going until he finally decided he had "won" the argument, told me I had no basis for my conclusions, and left before I could respond. So don't do that... people asking ignorant questions with a tone of "I want to prove you wrong" gets annoying fast!
I have also had a few different times when I wrote to authors of papers who were more senior and had a lot more publications than I do. I'd say probably about 80% of the time I get a positive response (even when I asked a fairly basic question because I'm not in the same subfield/specialty as the author), and the other 20% of the time I get no response (that just happens sometimes when you email professors - they have too much email). I have never had anyone get upset with me for writing to them or tell me that my question was dumb.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_8: 'Dear Dr. Gasbag,'
I am pursing a PhD in the field of offensive odors and recently had the pleasure of reading your interesting 1978 paper, "On The Origins of Stomach Gas." I am sure you are very busy with your research, but I wonder if I might call or correspond with you to briefly discuss some aspects of your work and to gain clarity on a few points in your paper.
Warmest regards,
<NAME>
Rikers Island University
College of Kusai
(808)000-0000
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/26
| 495
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<issue_start>username_0: I am a CS PhD student in my final year in North America and I will be applying for academia jobs starting Fall 2020. As far as I know, there will be some sort of background check during the hiring process.
As for my past background, I had an incident during my undergraduate year where I submitted a project with citations at the end, but omitted in-text citations and so I was charged with plagiarism. The committee decided that it was unintentional and allowed me to redo the assignment with a 30% grade reduction penalty and the incident didn't show up on my transcript. So how should I report this incident with my prospect employers? Is this considered a crime or misdemeanor conviction?
Any suggestion is appreciated. Thanks!<issue_comment>username_1: Mistakes of this nature, when handled appropriately at the time, are part of the learning process and you can move beyond them without additional penalty. I assume you don't make such errors now, intentionally or otherwise.
There are a few exceptions, however, as when applying to a national intelligence organization and being asked specific questions. You need to answer them honestly and openly. But an old offense such as you describe is unlikely to be a problem if you are honest about it when asked. Lying is a crime in such situations, but the old offense is not.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: The purpose of the background check is to find out if you are likely to abuse children on campus, assault your colleagues, or steal from the university. It is not related to academic integrity.
Academic integrity is evaluated by reference checks and transcript checks.
Convictions are decided by law courts, not university committees. You have a conviction if a judge or jury convicted you in a court. This does not include university honor courts that are not part of the legal system.
>
> So how should I report this incident with my prospect employers?
>
>
>
You should report it if you are asked to do so. You probably will not be.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/26
| 994
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm submitting an article to an Elsevier journal, but I'm hesitant about the file format I should choose as the first submission. According to this journal:
>
> Your Paper Your Way
>
>
> We now differentiate between the requirements for new and revised
> submissions. You may choose to submit your manuscript as a single Word
> or PDF file to be used in the refereeing process. Only when your paper
> is at the revision stage, will you be requested to put your paper in
> to a 'correct format' for acceptance and provide the items required
> for the publication of your article.
>
>
>
My field is computer networking.
The reason why I'm hesitant is that sometimes word files look different in other people's computer and the reason why I'm hesitant about submitting a pdf is that the quality of the images in pdf file is a bit lower than the word file.
I wanted to know which one is better for the first submission? pdf file or word file? or both of them in a zip?<issue_comment>username_1: There's no better - they both work.
What is "better" is what is more convenient for you. For example if you're not proficient at Microsoft Word, you're better off using something else (like TeX) to generate a PDF file, and submitting that.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: I recommend you submit PDF, for two reasons:
1. Only PDF gives you full control over the formatting of the document as received by peer reviewers;
2. Those who are accustomed to typesetting in LaTeX (of which I suspect there are a fair few in your field) may be biased against authors using Word. Admittedly a Word document with default formatting settings could not be mistaken for a regular LaTeX document, if only because of the characteristic typeface used by the latter, but a well designed document might almost be mistaken for a XeLaTeX-generated PDF. At any rate no one will be triggered from the production-neutral process of opening a PDF file, but some may resent having to deal with `.docx`.
The PDF image quality is a concern. Have you set image compression in the PDF export dialog to prioritize quality?
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: td, lr: Use the .pdf set up «printer ready».
Check the `.pdf` generated to contain all text, all tables (if applicable), all illustrations (if applicable, in color [if applicable]) and all literature references to be present, in the order of consecution as the journal wants, and all completely readable. Then print it on paper (because the screen output may fool you in terms of resolution (72 dpi vs. at least 300 dpi on printer) - don't hesitate to read it aloud.
*Note:* Some pdf writers allow you to save file space by lowering the resolution of the images, allowing an easy transmission as attachment in an e-mail -- *double-check* that this *does not* happen (i.e., you must retain at least 300 dpi resolution). If this `.pdf` file is ok, submit the `.pdf`.
Why submitting a .pdf? Publishers may offer to convert the Word file for you into a `.pdf` which then is sent (with added line numbers) to the reviewers. But, how many versions of Word are out in the field (plus, did you use Word for Windows, or Word for Mac?) You have no control how Elsevier's engines are set up to identify this, nor are you able to change their settings; a `.pdf` however is intended to keep the content and layout regardless if read on Unix, Linux, Mac, Windows (it is standardized).
If the interface asks you to submit the compuscript (here: your `.pdf`) once, and later asks for the image files at high resolution / as vector files: upload *both* the pdf compuscript (with images embedded) for the reviewer's work *plus* the individual image files which will be used to set up the galleys by Elsevier later. You typically get this line-numbered .pdf and a tracking number (sometimes already the doi) you need for further communication with the publishers.
Good luck for the reviewer's suggestions. Meanwhile, keep and backup the word and both `.pdf` files at least until you see your paper in the journal with final page numbers.
Upvotes: -1
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2020/03/27
| 4,420
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<issue_start>username_0: I am about to finish my PhD, which means I have to write a lot. I am also a non-native English speaker, so my English sucks a lot, especially when it comes to formal writing. In contrast, my adviser is a very good writer and good writing is very important to him.
Whenever I write anything, from an e-mail that gets CCed or a draft or a paper, it attracts relentless criticism. I know that I am supposed to use this feedback to improve, but I am a bit tired of this “tough love.” I often get desperate and anxious because I feel I can’t write anything worthy at all. It causes severe writing blocks because whenever I am about to write a sentence, I immediately imagine it being totally destroyed and thrown into a garbage bin.
I do try to improve my writing by reading a lot of high-quality English texts and practicing on my own. I took an online course on writing and developed my own writing routine: at first, I plan paragraphs and the flow between them, write a first crappy draft, then edit into something tangible during multiple rounds.
I also try to incorporate my adviser's guidance. However, my writing morale is currently so low that it stalls my productivity. I do try to not take my adviser's criticism personally, which is quite difficult sometimes, but I am just so tired of being judged all the time. I know many students lack feedback from their advisers, but I am just fed up with feedback. Is there any way to get out of this hole?<issue_comment>username_1: Do not let this criticism destroy your confidence in your intellectual capacities. That is the main thing. Let it also not interfere with the progress of your work on your thesis.
I am a non-native English speaker myself. Notwithstanding that, some of my works I published in prime English language scholarly journals are today part of the canon of the scientific literature. They are today cited by hundreds of scholars worldwide. And I find your English at least as good as mine. So, be optimistic!
P.S. None of journal editors I contacted during my university career ever signalled any deficiencies in my English. On the contrary, they praised, among others, the lucidity of my English communication. Once my English got up to the level that was required by these very demanding journals (it took me about 3 years) my papers were never rejected since. I think I ought to stress here that some of these journals reject up to 97% submitted manuscripts. I suspect, most of those rejected are written by English native speakers. The conclusion is: while the quality of your English may be important, there is a very good chance other things are even more important when it comes to ensuring your manuscripts get published and cited by hundreds of scholars. I wish you good luck!
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> I often get desperate and anxious because I feel I can’t write anything worthy at all. It causes severe writing blocks because whenever I am about to write a sentence, I immediately imagine it being totally destroyed and thrown into a garbage bin.
>
>
>
Your writing course is giving you the correct guidance here. Good writing is mostly about clarity and good editing, so it is not terribly important that one's initial sentences be of good quality. When you are writing academic work, it is best just to get your thoughts down on paper in the first instance, to express the substance of your ideas and their logical connection. Once you have some material down on paper, you can edit and polish as much as you like to improve the clarity, structure and prose. The most important thing is to edit to make sure your writing is clear, and does not tax the reader. If you are having difficulty with structure then it is useful to work from an outline, and to create a reverse-outline from your written work to check that it follows the structure you intended.
Developing good prose is more difficult, but the best way to do this is to *read material by good writers* and then analyse why you found their writing so compelling. Make sure you do not confine yourself only to reading academic papers; read novels, other prose pieces, and even good journalistic works (very rare these days). When you read good writers, over time you will begin to pick up techniques they use to make their writing clear, compelling, and powerful, and you will also expand your vocabulary. This will allow you to improve your own writing and develop your own style.
>
> I do try to not take my adviser's criticism personally, which is quite difficult sometimes, but I am just so tired of being judged all the time.
>
>
>
I guess this is the nature of being in an educational program, even as a higher-degree student in a PhD program. These kinds of programs generally entail non-stop judgment of your work and critical feedback, with the goal of having you gradually improve. It is important to balance judgment and critique of work with occasional morale boosters, so it may be time for you to take a break and look back on all the things that you have already accomplished. If you are feeling burned out by all the criticism, talk with your supervisor and see if it is okay for you to take a break from your program to take stock of your existing work and accomplishments, and give you time to boost your morale.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: This doesn't answer your question, but I think your real problem isn't your writing, but the way how you and your advisor communicate. What I suggest is that you have a sit-down with your advisor and raise the issue with them. Tell them what you told us - that their barrage of negative feedback is hampering your motivation and productivity, and that you would have an easier time incorporating their feedback if they could find a more positive way to phrase it.
Of course there is no guarantee that this conversation will go over well (some people think that "tough love" is the only way to give feedback, and others understand on a rational level that a more "[sandwich](https://www.rightattitudes.com/2008/02/20/sandwich-feedback-technique/)" style of feedback works better for most people but are unable to change). However, you will never know if you don't raise the issue with your advisor.
**Edit:** to say a little bit about "writing better", the actual topic of your question -
You should also try to understand if your advisor is really dissatisfied with the mechanical aspects of your writing (spelling, expressions, grammar, paragraph construction) or with your skills in scientific storytelling. It seems to me that basic command of the English language is not a real issue for you, so potentially what your advisor is actually dissatisfied with is that you do not know the terminology of your field well enough, common rhetorical moves in your discipline, how people like to construct arguments, etc. If this is your problem, a general-purpose writing course is not going to help - you will need to study papers *in your discipline* to improve.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_4: I am in the same boat. Trying to get my PhD Thesis written currently.
To add to all the great advice from others: Try also to read the papers/project proposals and other text you wrote in the beginning of your PhD, and compare them to what you wrote now. This really helped me a lot to see how my writing (non-english native as well) developed over the course of my PhD. I am sure yours has developed too!
What also helped me is to note down/realize my most common mistakes and then when proofreading specifically check for those. For me usually it is using "that" in all places where it is unnecessary. While proofreading I do one run just paying attention to that one mistake.
And in addition: Do you have friends/family/colleagues or even english natives willing to proofread? Even if they do not understand your Topic they could give you feedback on your language. So you can send your advisor a first draft where you already polished the language a bit.
But generally keep your workflow up! Writing a draft and polishing it is the best strategy to get something done. Polishing is always easier than writing the perfect sentence in the first place.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: Yes. Improve your writing. You are smart enough. Put the effort in and do it.
Will you be perfect? No. Even most professional, native, writers are not capable of flawless flowing first-try prose.
But you could take more of a strain. Seriously. Like in your question, why do you write in one long paragraph? At least chop it up. And ditch the Schoen-like ellipses.
I am SURE that you could make a significant improvement. Yeah, maybe you still get chipped away even after that. And that's a different issue (basically requiring developing some rhino hide--life is like that). But first improve. I mean, heck, even if you NEVER get any attaboys/girls/things from the critical fooker, at least YOU will have improved. And writing well, in English, is a pretty damned important skill for academics.
Furthermore, I don't think all the issues are just native language use. Sure, some very particular word choices and nuances of intonation may be. But having a strong structure to your writing is a transferable skill to all languages. As is proofreading (e.g. developing and using a checklist of common previous mistakes).
Oh...and don't shy away from writing because of the criticism. Do MORE of it. Wear the guy down with how much he has to correct you. ;-) And not because you troll him or make deliberate errors or don't give a shit. But because you, while still trying to do your best, are continuously practicing and "out there". (This is THE WAY in foreign languages, written or spoken. Plunge in!).
N.B. I am guilty of every grammar flaw that I call out. But that does not change the points I'm making. Take it as from a fellow sinner.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_6: How do you know your adviser is a good writer? Most academics, other than English or literature professors, aren't particularly good writers. The reason is that no one ever criticizes academic writing. When professors submit papers for publication, the reviewer may criticize their ideas or conclusions, but almost never their writing style. Who really cares if a paper in an academic journal is well-written or not?
By contrast, the average journalist or other professional writer is usually a far better writer than the average academic. Why? Because people pay for newspapers and magazines, and they're not going to pay for badly written articles. If a journalist doesn't write well, his or her editor will tell them so in no uncertain terms. And if they continue to write poorly, they get fired - something that will never happen to a tenured professor who writes poorly.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_7: You are not alone. I am a native speaker of the British standard English dialect, and fluent, for reading, writing, and listening, in the US formal business dialect. I got 800, then the maximum score, on the verbal portion of the US GRE.
I hated writing until I got access to word processing software in the early 1980's. Since them, my approach has been to first get down what I want to say, without worrying about telling a story, paragraph organization, etc. When I think I have all the points I want to make written, I switch to polishing. What you are reading is not the first version of this answer.
My excellent PhD dissertation advisor cares a lot about the quality of academic writing. When I sent him a draft it would come back covered with comments, very few about the technical content and most about how it was expressed. I had to fight writer's block because of that. I tried to explain my writing process to him, but he could not resist the temptation to make expression comments even when I told him a document was an initial draft and would be reworked later.
In the end, I had to decide to ignore his expression-related comments until I was ready to use them. When I was in the polishing phase I found his comments extremely useful. I think I write better now because of them.
From the quality of the writing in your question, I am sure your problem is nothing to do with not being a native speaker, but is similar to the problem I had with my advisor. Your advisor is trying to take good writing and turn it into excellent writing.
I suggest dealing with his comments in two phases. During the first phase, look for comments that are about what you are saying, and firmly ignore any comments about how you are saying it.
For some writing, such as an e-mail, I would simply ignore any expression-related comments. You have as much right to judge the usefulness, to you, of your advisor's feedback as your advisor has to comment on your writing.
For writing you want to make really good, such as a paper you are preparing for publication, go into a second phase during which you consider each of the comments about expression, remembering that you are trying to turn good writing into excellent writing, not fix bad writing. Treat the comments as suggestions. Would the suggested change make your draft better? If so, make the change. If you disagree, make a note. Look for general themes in the comments that you may be able to use. Discuss the most important disagreements with your advisor.
Ultimately, you may never produce anything that makes your advisor completely happy. You are different people. The objective is to produce clear, readable papers, not to mimic perfectly your advisor's style.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: You are vrey mcuh aehad wtih you're wrting tahn msot of tdoyas yuoth.
It wasn't terribly difficult to read that first line was it. I believe in education and having pride in your work but I think it is possible that the criticism you are getting is just a bit too much on the OCD (obsessive compulsive) side of things. I can't imagine anyone having absolute expectation of excellence in the writing from a non-native person that has what seems to be very good communication in the English language. English is the hardest of all languages to learn and with the way young school students that are native to the language defile and tear the language all to hell I think he should give you some respect for your accomplishments and how far you have come instead of constantly chopping you down. He would probably start calling me bad words and spitting in my face if he was given the line above in his email but truth would be he wouldnt have a problem reading it and therefore has received the message I wrote and that is the important part of it anyway. Isn't it?
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_9: At this point, as you are close to finishing your PhD, it is best to avoid any distractions. Clear writing is important and many academics love to point out faults in the writing off others: you have to get used to that.
You need to be analytic about the feedback from your supervisor -- mark every bit of advice (e.g. green if it is stylistic, orange if it is about clarity, red if it is about the content) and then work with the bits that are important to you. You have to thank your supervisor for everything, but it is worth doing some prioritizing and focusing on the bits of advice that really help.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_10: In addition to other good points: an underlying problem is the nature of most of the world's educational systems is the idea that "no critique, no comment" (apart from vague praise) is the goal.
Yes, encouragement is good, and people too often do forget to be positive...
But/and it would be a mistake to interpret "criticism" as "assertion that you're failing". Rather, it is a constructive response to the work you've done so far. Ok, and, now, next round of revisions?
It's not "oh, you are wrong/bad/evil/stupid", but more like "you can do better at this point... and better serve yourself, make a better impression, be more successful with other people".
And, yes, for example, one does *not* want one's English to be soooo obviously an issue that it distracts people, or makes them wonder about whether they can trust that you are saying exactly what you intend...
If nothing else, apart from native language..., decades of experience *can* (but does not necessarily) give a person a refined sense of what language choices "work best" in a specific professional milieu. In particular, merely "trying hard" is almost disconnected from this, since the "useful/correct" answer is to "sound like you fit into that milieu". (No, I'm not really a fan of this kind of conformist pressure, but I am well aware of it, and would hesitate to recommend trying to ignore it!)
So, quite possibly, it's not even whether your grammar is literally correct or not, but whether you "sound like" established people writing in that milieu. Until you are well established yourself, it can be a good survival strategy to conform in some ways. I do remember imagining, years ago, that "math (my own subject) is objective", so that, surely, it didn't matter how one wrote about it. Oops... :)
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_11: Let me provide an analogy that may help you determine more about the problem. When you first learn to drive a car it takes most of your focus just to keep the car in your lane, not hit other cars, not exceed the speed limit, and other essential skills needed to just drive the car. Once you master those skills then you can advance in your driving and learn to drive to another city, and later even have a conversation with someone else in the car while you are driving to the other city. Ultimately, you have to learn to navigate well as an essential part of driving. If you drive from New York to Maine by driving through Texas then, even though you have done an outstanding job keeping your car in the correct lane the whole time, people would not say that you are doing a great job driving.
This is analogous to writing. You can write great sentences that obey all the grammar rules, but if they go through Texas to get to Maine then your writing will be viewed poorly. It is unclear if your advisor is saying that you don't know how to stay in your lane, or if your advisor is saying that you go to Texas to get to Maine, or that you are never getting to Maine at all. The first step in fixing this is to find out exactly what the advisor thinks is the nature of the problem. Is it a problem with grammar and sentence composition, or is it a problem with the flow between sentences, or is it a problem with never reaching your destination. Once you understand the main area of the problem, then you can focus on fixing the problem.
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/27
| 768
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<issue_start>username_0: I do not know if this the suitable forum for this question but I would like to give it a try.
In my thesis I have several very long tables that cover almost one page. Because of this I am getting into the problem of pagebreaks within the tables. I would like to know what you would consider to be typical in scientific contributions about how to handle this. As far as I see it, there are 3 options:
1. Simply break the table and continue with the remainder on the
following page
2. Do not break the table and display the table as a
whole --> This leads to huge empty spaces at the previous page
3. Split a the table into two similar tables with different entries but
with identical column names and headers. In this case I reckon that
I should also use two headers for the table something like Table 2.1
and Table 2.2
Has someone of you encoutered this problem in a thesis or scientific paper?
Of course, if you can think about other options,I'd be quite happy to hear about them.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.<issue_comment>username_1: I suggest splitting the table (3) and suggest rotating the table and using facing pages, this aids your examiners, since they can see the whole table, having rotated their printed copy.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2C55U.png)
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: I would avoid breaking a table that does not need to be broken (that is less than a single page). It is much easier on the reader instead to have some blank space in the text and turn the page. This is especially true in a thesis, where there is strong emphasis on clarity over space economy. (Theses tend to have wider margins, spacing, etc. versus printed journals.) So, yes, a page break is much better than a table break.
You can just expect the reader to go to the next page(s). Does not need to be a facing page. That is fine for numbered figures, tables, etc. And basically required if you have text that discusses several figures or tables such that they can not all be easily embedded because of the number discussed in a small section of text. But after all, that is what the numbers are for!
I have even seen it acceptable to put all figures, tables, endnote citations, etc. at the end of the chapter. Similar to how you submit a journal article. Basically required in the typewriter era. And still acceptable when I wrote my thesis c. 2000. (And yes, using Word.)
Note: If you have tables in Word that cover more than a page, please DO turn on the Word feature that copies the header row to each new page. (Highlight the top row cells, right click...table properties, "row" tab, click the box that says repeat as header row.) It is also useful if you have bold or shading or the like to call out the header row of the table, so it is not confused as a data field.
Also if you do have tables breaking across pages, make sure you select the whole table and then DEselect (uncheck) the same-place row tab box that allows for rows to break on separate pages. Don't allow that. No, no, no. ;-)
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/27
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| 5,761
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently writing a cumulative dissertation which is based on several published papers. I am supposed to shortly (one page) summarize each of the papers. These summaries come before the actual papers in the thesis.
Now for me the question about the correct tense in these summaries comes up. For example I have the following sentences
>
> The results reveals that in all weeks the methods **led** to reduced costs of 10 %.
>
>
> On average, method B **needed** 14:06 minutes.
>
>
>
Would you rather use the past tense or the present tense in these examples. [Here](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/86741/tenses-in-introduction-and-summary-of-every-chapter) it is said that I should only use the past to refer to something that has been mentioned before. Basically the results and simulations have not been mentioned before. But at the same time the linked page says that I should use the past tense for summaries and to refer to specific simulation runs (which is obviously the case in my examples).
I tend to use present because I have used the present tense for the whole thesis.
What would you advise me to do?<issue_comment>username_1: Your university may have specific guidelines for this, which compel you to make a specific choice. In the absence of those, I would say that this is a matter of personal style. So you can choose whichever style fits you best.
I personally find it most pleasant to write any piece of work, whether it is a single conference paper or a cumulative dissertation, as if the content all appears as a monolithic whole right here right now. Hence, I write everything in present tense, active voice. Others, however, strongly feel that academic writing is more appropriately served by writing dispassionately about it, and that implies writing in passive voice.
I'd say that there is no single correct answer here, which leads to the pleasant conclusion that you cannot really do wrong. I would write your sentence in present tense, since this suits my overall writing style. You should choose the solution that fits your writing style. More important than which tense you choose, is that you apply your choice consistently.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Actually using present tense could be dangerous, depending on the situation. Your data was probably gathered in the past. Your conclusions are based on that data. If the study is statistical, based on samples, then there is the measurable possibility that it reached the wrong conclusion.
If the way you write *seems to imply, even indirectly*, a prediction for the future you could be on dangerous ground. It isn't a question of writing style, but of honest presentation of what you did and what was (past) concluded.
The examples you give certainly seem to imply that past tense is preferable here. You are describing a study that was carried out in the (perhaps recent) past.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: You should consider all of:
* **Present tense**: "The results **reveal** that XYZ", "This method **reduces** costs by 10%". Use this one when being more abstract, dispassionate, theoretical. You're "committing" less on concrete facts with this tense (but not much less).
* **Present perfect tense**: "The results **have revealed** that XYZ", "This method **has reduced** costs by 10%". The period or duration you're alluding to with this one can be the course of your own research, the period of time in which your research was conducted (as experienced by others, e.g. in the field rather than in academia), or even to recent years up to the present, independently of the time you've done research.
* **Past tense**: "The results **revealed** that XYZ", "This method **reduced** costs by 10%". With this tense, you're alluding to specific events and processes which have concluded already in the past and are known - or will be known by reading the thesis. This is more of a commitment to things having actually happened, and having had impact.
* **Future tense or sorta-future infinitive with qualification**: "We expect the results **to reveal** how that XYZ", "This method **will, in all likelihood, reduce** costs by 10%". With this tense, you're discussing ongoing processes which have not concluded, but of whose conclusion you are certain or almost certain.
* **Present Progressive**: "The results **are now revealing** how that XYZ", "This method **is reducing** costs, by an expected 10%". With this tense, you're strong alluding to very meaningful ongoing processes in the field which are the application of your research. Actually, it's rather similar in rhetorical effect to the future-tense option, except that you're committing that progress is occurring at the very moment you're writing your text.
Don't expect all of the text to use the same tense. Try to choose an overall narrative tense (Present or Present Perfect would be my preference), and choose other tenses in specific sentences or paragraphs in which they're relevant (not too many IMHO).
Also, as others suggest, your university or department may have guidelines on this matter.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_4: It's not really about if you have mentioned the work before (don't get confused by the instructions), but that the work itself was done before. So stick with the past tense for the situation here.
In general\*, the past tense is safer than present or future. Probably 95%+ of the time you should be in past tense when writing a technical report. And if debating, past or present (either might work), you are usually better off going with the past. Only do the present or future if you know what you are doing as a writer and have a strong reason to change the tense.
\*Caveat.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/27
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| 3,680
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<issue_start>username_0: Suppose a research group publishes an article after thorough data analysis, statistics based on repeatability and reproducibility of experimental data. Now I consider three cases:
a). Published article had erroneous uncertainties associated with measured data
b). Published article had erroneous measured data notwithstanding repeated experiments
c). Published article had wrong interpretation of measured data
Now, in such cases, what is the standard protocol for withdrawal of published paper, and whether it is really necessary? If the same research group publishes another article giving more accurate experimental data with revised uncertainties with more reliable and logical interpretation, does this in any way puts a question mark on the credibility of the research group?
What according to the strictest ethical rules of publishing should be done in order to accept mistake and provide justification on why the earlier interpretation was wrong and what makes the research group change its view on the same experimental data (in this case, revised data)?<issue_comment>username_1: Not every published paper is right. Publications are a snapshot of authors' understanding at a given time. If they don't stand up to history, the literature corrects itself. Descartes's publications on the pineal gland as the generator of motor actions have never been retracted!
If a paper is wrong because new data or new understanding has changed the authors' outlook, perhaps the best course of action is to publish a new paper, specifically discussing the previous paper.
If there is a real MISTAKE or MISREPRESENTATION in the original paper, the editor should probably be contacted about the possibility of publishing an ERRATUM. Retraction should be reserved for the most severe of cases.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Some papers can't be "retracted" if they have been printed and widely distributed. Corrections can be issued in some journals.
But, another way to correct the record is to attempt at least to publish another paper updating and *citing the old paper*. Spell out the errors in the original. You may or may not want to say why this happened.
However, such a paper is only likely to be accepted (I think) if you provide a correct interpretation. I think this is your situation here.
Whether it puts a negative slant on the group or not, leaving it uncorrected will probably do more harm.
You might want to try to work this out with the editor of the original journal if possible. But, as [username_1](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/145937/75368) implies, people make mistakes. It goes along with being human.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: Retraction is usually only used when there was misconduct. If you made an honest mistake, it's sufficient to contact the publisher and ask to publish a corrigendum to the paper (different publishers have different procedures for doing this). If you just no longer believe the conclusions you made are correct, that doesn't even need a corrigendum, it's just part of the normal scientific process; next time you write a paper on that topic you can spell out your criticism of the previous work and why you don't agree with the conclusions. This is part of why science is supposedly "self-correcting".
I certainly don't think publishing a corrigendum or a new paper criticizing your previous work would cast doubt on your credibility. To the contrary; being able to criticize one's own work and recognize problems in it is an important part of doing science, so doing this would not reflect poorly on you, it would reflect well on you.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/27
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| 4,601
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<issue_start>username_0: Due to coronavirus, many places have been forced to shift to remote online exams. Have any schools issued guidance about the acceptability of proctoring online exams by requiring students to use a webcam to share a video of themselves taking the exam? For instance, one could have students join a group video call where teaching assistants can monitor the video stream of students taking the exam.
I could imagine there might be privacy concerns about this practice. Have any universities either adopted this practice for some of their exams or prohibited this practice?<issue_comment>username_1: I assume some university has adopted this practice, otherwise businesses like [this one](https://proctorio.com/) or [this one](https://www.psionline.com/en-gb/platforms/rpnow/) would not exist.
(Not affiliated in any way, I am just pointing out they exist.)
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: This puts students on unequal footings. Not all students have access to webcams, a stable internet connection, or even more basic, access to a quiet room where they can work for several hours straight with no interference, for example. And what about disabled students who need special accommodation, e.g. someone to write down the answers for them because they can't move their arms, blind students who need other kinds of accommodation, etc?
Where I work, university is a public service and we can't sweep such issues under the rug. Maybe you can, but you should think long and hard about whether you want to.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: This sounds comparable to any other assignment where students must record a video of themselves, so I don't see how universities could have a problem with it. I also don't think it is any different than an in-person exam, such as an oral exam. But there are some possible *logistical* pitfalls, that I would be worried about:
* **Technical difficulties --** How do you expect to proceed if the connection is bad between the student and the TA? Is one TA monitoring several videos at once, which greatly increases the likelihood of bandwidth problems? You will have to have a plan for this. In reality, preventing cheating in the case of technical difficulties would not be feasible, so you just have to hope to minimize this somehow. And you don't want students fiddling with their computer, webcam, and internet settings during the exam, as that could be a serious distraction.
* **Students have a computer in front of them --** OK, so you made students get on webcam with you, but now they have a computer in front of them during the test. They could have the computer, for example, open to a cheat sheet. Have you thought about this? Is it allowed? I think you would have to:
1. Allow cheat sheets for all students;
2. Set guidelines surrounding whether students can be touching / typing on their computer during the exam. (But see "technical difficulties" for an exception that needs to be made -- there has to be some line of communication open between the student and the TAs in case the TAs cannot see them...)
* **Access --** You can't assume that every student has a webcam (and demand for webcams online has spiked recently, as well as delivery times for such items). So you need to give students a chance to inform you if they don't have access to a webcam, and come up with an alternative solution.
* **Privacy --** It probably goes without saying but I don't think students should be able to see each other on the webcams. That seems too much. Additionally, you should give students guidelines to make sure they have a webcam setup that doesn't reveal personal details about the inside of their homes, instruct them to put a desk against a blank wall if that makes them feel more comfortable, etc.
Overall, I see a lot of possible logistical challenges, especially technical difficulties, as well as the exact rules surrounding how the web camera must be angled, whether students can touch the computer, have something open on the computer, etc. So evaluate whether despite the logistical challenges, it is worth it.
**An alternate approach** is to have each student identify a "proctor" who signs a form saying that they proctored the test and ensured that rules were followed. However, this comes with its own set of challenges, and doesn't eliminate cheating in the same way since the proctor might just be a student's parent. Still, this is the approach we took for a recent exam that we unexpectedly administered online, and I think it turned out fairly well, with no obvious cases of cheating.
Upvotes: 3
|
2020/03/27
| 789
| 3,247
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<issue_start>username_0: Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, it is possible that the economy will enter a recession. As more people will want to get into grad school, will it be more difficult to get a Ph.D. position?<issue_comment>username_1: An article in the [Chronicle of Higher Education](https://www.chronicle.com/article/Recession-Reshaped-College/128223) suggests that the overall enrollment picture for undergraduate education was only mildly effected by the 2008 recession.
However, many of those students chose community colleges rather than traditional four year colleges. This might suggest a downward pressure on doctoral admissions as there might be a lesser need for TAs in such a situation. This might affect admissions in such fields as mathematics that depend heavily on TAs for undergraduate teaching and teaching support.
Of course there is more to the picture. Research needs go on and it might matter more whether governments (the NSF, say) can maintain funding for doctoral students. If a recession is mild or short lived, expect small effects, though more negative than positive. But it also depends on the attitude of those in congress who provide the funding levels for such things.
Moreover, if there are fewer positions open for doctoral education, and more applicants, the competition might increase and it might be harder for any given individual to find a slot. Unfunded slots are probably easier to come by, of course, since the student helps fund the education to a greater degree than one who is grant or university funded.
But in this case there are effects beyond the economic ones. In a pandemic it is hard to predict what might come. Some pandemics (bubonic plague and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas) have been devastating.
Finally, the outlook for graduates of doctoral programs might be clouded in such a complex situation. But, the economy is cyclic in any case and some of us graduated into terrible academic economy conditions and others not. It is hard to predict what will happen over a five to seven year period.
Your own field is probably a good one to be in, since many trends seem to imply an increase in the need for non-fossil energy production and storage. And in general, the effects can vary tremendously by field.
But competent government helps.
But all of the above is crystal ball gazing with not a lot of hard evidence. A deeper plunge into the question will likely reveal some research on the topic. But with the caveat that things that seem the same might be quite different. There are a lot of variables.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Just to be clear: in the U.S., given the bad handling of The 19, there is awful uncertainty about many things... in particular, about the economics related to universities. It's not literally about "if the US economy enters a recession": I think it is worse than that.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: Recessions with elevated unemployment increase the number of applicants for each PhD position (and any other position that pays or has opportunity cost). This makes it harder to get a position.
All other factors (undergraduate enrollment, subsidies, grants) are relatively minor and slow to respond.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/27
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| 1,983
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<issue_start>username_0: This question deals with PhD programs which guarantee their students funding via teaching assistantships in the US.
In order to have more time for themselves (e.g., for PhD research, or for working a higher-paying part-time job), are PhD students normally allowed to decline teaching assistantships, as long as they're willing to forgo the department's stipend?
In addition to losing the stipend, are there other disadvantages to declining a TA position? (E.g., would tuition no longer be free?, could the department be frustrated?, etc.)<issue_comment>username_1: Turning down a teaching assistant position in your position is probably a very poor idea.
The renumeration for working as a TA normally covers **both the a stipend and your graduate tuition**. If you do not have some other form of support (research assistantship or fellowship), you will have to pay your own way entirely. This is normally financially prohibitive, although there are sometimes exceptions.
Moreover, some doctoral programs (such as my own) actually require that students spend a certain time working as TAs. The teaching is considered a part of their professional training. So even students who might have other ways of funding their entire graduate education may have to spend a certain amount of time teaching.
Upvotes: 4 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: If not explicitly forbidden by other stipulations this can indeed be perfectly acceptable and in your interest.
However, my recommendation is to tread carefully. For example, doing so might be frowned upon by the department because they need TAs which can lose you significant goodwill. Or your supervisor disapproves because they think you are refusing an important opportunity to mature as a teacher and scientist. Thus you should definitely take into account whether there are any (local) drawbacks. If in doubt, talk to your supervisor! We on the internet cannot tell you what those are.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/27
| 885
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<issue_start>username_0: With covid19 continues to spread, this might affect the universities in the next semesters as the number of students might drop and many universities are offering cheap online degrees compared with the expensive traditional degrees. Who can lose a job due to covid19 in academia? Instructors with annual contracts, postdocs, adjunct-faculty, pre-tenure faculty, tenure faculty, or even all and many could universities shut down.
* [Universities Issue Hiring Freezes in Response to COVID-19](https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/universities-issue-hiring-freezes-in-response-to-covid-19-67334)
* [Some offers were withdrawn and one case of layoffs- see comments](https://www.facebook.com/TheProfessorIsIn/posts/2910549865658208)<issue_comment>username_1: Of all the examples you name, I think only those on annual contracts have much of any risk and I think that is small. The world isn't actually ending. Universities still have their mission(s): Teaching, Research, Service. That won't change unless the disruptions are much worse than are now foreseen or even likely.
Course delivery is being affected, but hasn't ended. Research goes on, though interrupted/slowed in some fields for safety. Funding for research is still in place and will probably continue. It will be a boon for some (biomedical) research.
Some marginal colleges will be in trouble. Think Walden University from the Doonesbury comic, but they were in trouble before this began. Tenure Track professors are unlikely to be affected because they represent the future of the university, not some disposable resource. Postdocs have contracts and funding in place for the most part, often by grants.
There is even a chance that the current disruption will increase the need for faculty in the short term.
But for long term effects we need to see how the hundreds to thousands of variables now in play work out over time. And it will take time since universities have quite a bit of built-in inertia. Whether "cheap online degrees" have any actual value is something yet to be determined. And they may not be as cheap as you think. Some online programs are extremely expensive to create. And the issue of the actual qualifications of those who take them is important and, perhaps, doubtful.
But even if a university were to try to deliver such a "cheap" degree there is the question of still needing to do research and that requires highly qualified personnel. There isn't a "cheap online research path" that has and likelihood of success.
Diploma mills have a poor history, being more associated with exploitation than with excellence.
Relax. Stay healthy. Do a good job. Climate change is a bigger risk than what we are going through in the current months.
---
Some people normally employed by colleges are at risk, of course. The people who clean the dormitories and prepare meals for resident students, for example. Lots of service jobs are at risk. Likewise, there are lots of small businesses in college towns that are at risk of failure, leaving their employees (including students) without resources.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Anybody might, anybody might not. Job contract duration and institutional/regional/disciplinary factors are more important than job title.
There are some institutions which are doomed over the long term to close, merge, or transform themselves because of demographic changes. Some of those institutions will be closing much sooner than was previously expected.
People with short-term and at-will contracts will loose their jobs first, just like every other industry.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/27
| 1,493
| 6,657
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<issue_start>username_0: I started grad school last September, and so far have been primarily busy with courses, but have been trying to do a little research on the side whenever I can. I recently finished all my courses though, and now I'm expected to dive into research.
My advisor hasn't assigned me a project and expects me to come up with one on my own. I don't mind this really, I like the freedom to work on whatever I want. However, this was only really feasible when I was in my lab and surrounded by senior PhD students with whom I could bounce ideas off and get a lot of guidance from.
However, now I'm stuck at home because of the COVID19 lockdown and don't really know how to productively spend my time doing research. My advisor is busy taking care of his family at home because of the lockdown, so he isn't very responsive right now understandably. I'm all alone at home so I don't have the guidance of senior PhD students either. I've tried messaging senior PhD students but it's not fair for me to constantly be harassing them for help...
Apart from heavily guided stuff in undergrad, I have next to no real research experience... Since I assume I'll be stuck at home for the next several months, how can I be productive research wise with basically no guidance or help from anyone? I don't want to just waste the next few months...
FYI, I'm doing research in engineering but everything is done using simulations, so while I have all the tools and equipment I need to do research at home, I just don't have the experience or guidance to efficiently do so.
I've been trying to just read papers in the meantime, but I can only read so many before I get sick of it. I don't want to just be reading papers for 40 hours a week for the next 3 months...<issue_comment>username_1: You can try to fill the gaps in your knowledge and skills. For example, learn some techniques that are commonly used in your field. Even if you will not need them for your immediate project, there is a chance that they will be useful for the next one. For example, if you do engineering, you are likely to need to write some code, so you can improve your software engineering skills. Your colleagues may give you some more ideas on what is useful to learn.
If you feel sick of reading papers alone, you might try to reach to other junior students and form a virtual study group where you discuss and critically analyze recently published papers. You may actually come up with some ideas for research project based on the discussions. Good luck!
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: First, although your anxiety about not knowing how to research productively without the normal support structures is completely understandable, here’s a suggestion: *try it*. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. You may end up being successful beyond your expectations, and all the anxiety and worry would have turned out to be premature.
Second, and this is equally important: you need to make your advisor, and more generally your department’s leadership (graduate program chair, and possibly department chair and others coordinating the response to the COVID-19 crisis) aware of your concerns. I can tell you they have all been really busy lately coming up with appropriate responses to the situation and solving all kinds of problems that come up all day, pretty much every day for the last few weeks. It’s completely possible that the particular difficulty you are concerned about is something that’s escaped their attention amidst all the noise and other urgent (probably more urgent than this one, let’s be honest) problems. But that doesn’t mean they don’t care, or wouldn’t want to help or wouldn’t be able to help if they were aware of the issue. So reach out to them and discuss it. In a well-managed department they would add it to their list of things to figure out, and hopefully come up soon with some workable solutions.
At the very least, if you talk to the department administrators they might reassure you that although you can indeed expect to have somewhat reduced productivity in your research endeavors while working from home, the same is true for everyone else and they will be adjusting their expectations accordingly and not penalize you. This could help relieve some of the stress and anxiety if nothing else.
Good luck!
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: In my experience scientific PhD life roughly looks like this
```
while funding > 0:
gap = gapAnalysis(literature)
rq = formulateResearchQuestion(gap, phd_topic=None)
experiment, performance_metric = design_experiment(rq)
data = experiment.perform()
results = performance_metric(data)
paper = Paper(intro=contributions(rq, gap),
relatedWork=gap,
methods=experiment.description(),
results=(data, results),
discussion=defend(contributions(rq, gap))
)
paper.addSupervisorFeedback()
paper.peerReview()
paper.publish()
```
Guidance on what to do comes from your experimental design, which is heavily informed by your research question. If you are unsure about your experimental design, i.e., what experiment you want to perform, than you should think more about how to test the consequences/implications of your research question. If you are unsure about your research question, you need to reflect on the knowledge gaps in the literature and on how to approach them. If you are not even sure what the gaps in your area are, you will have to go back to the drawing board and spend more time reading papers *with a focus on open questions*.
Personally, I have noticed that people in 'pure' engineering (by that I mean non-interdisciplinary) often do things backwards. They start with an experiment, i.e., build some system / create some model, then try to come up with useful research questions that fit with the experiment post-hoc, and, finally, try to find related work that supplements this idea. This hinges a lot on strong guidance from your supervisor, because you start doing stuff without knowing if it will be relevant to the community; whereas your supervisor, knowing the literature, does.
So, the answer to your question is: Likely, you will have to read more literature. You can also consider creating more documentation around what you are doing: spreadsheets / notes for papers, drafts of experimental designs, documentation of code or results, ... This will help with long distance supervision, because your supervisor can look at those documents in his own time and then provide async feedback via comments / email.
Upvotes: 2
|
2020/03/28
| 386
| 1,521
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm currently writing my IB Extended Essay in physics. I wonder how I can define variables in a formal way. I originally used a triple bar (e.g. "F≡buoyant force"). However, I'm not sure if this is formal or even correct. What is an academic and formal way to define variables?<issue_comment>username_1: The academic way to define variables is to simply describe them in the text. For instance,
>
> *F = ma*,
>
> where *F* is the force acting on the point mass *m* and *a* is the acceleration.
>
>
>
In fact, we want scientific texts to be readable, and not overburdened with unnecessary and obscure notations. Symbols have their role, but don't overuse them. Even more, a symbol like the triple bar has different *technical* meanings in different disciplines and using it in that way may just generate confusion.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: In most contexts involving applied mathematics, the triple bar symbol will be recognisable as stipulating a definition, but it would only be used if you are defining one variable in terms of others. If you are merely giving the textual meaning of the variable, it is better just to write that out in ordinary prose, just as [Massimo](https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058/o) shows in his answer. However, if you want to distinguish a definitional equation from an equation arising as a logical consequence of other premises, it is perfectly acceptable to use the triple-bar sign for a definition.
Upvotes: 2
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<issue_start>username_0: I live in India.
Currently due to the coronavirus pandemic, all colleges have been shut down and the country has gone in lockdown. As a result, my final year project work on electrocoagulation has come to a standstill.
The apparatus and the materials took time to arrive, and when they finally did and I was beginning to do the experimental work, the colleges were shutdown.
In the light of these events, my mentor has suggested me to write a review paper instead, however I am afraid it might not be accepted as a final year project.
Therefore, for my own peace of mind, I would like to know if a review paper could work as a final year B.Tech project.<issue_comment>username_1: You'll have to ask your university - they are the ones issuing you a degree, they're also the ones who know what you need to achieve before issuing you a degree.
That said, there's a good chance the answer will be "no", because these final year projects are intended to give students a taste of research. Writing a review isn't a taste of research. It's the first step, but one still needs to do something more before getting to the end product.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: You should check the official site of your university and see if you get the solution for your question otherwise you can ask your mentor or guide for research and they will help you for sure.
It is probably possible that they will allow you to write a review paper, rather than doing a final year project because the system is totally based on credits and credits are nothing but the amount of hours you put in to get a credit and writing a review paper is a difficult job and needs lots of hours to do , so I think they will allow you to that.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/29
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<issue_start>username_0: I am at the verge of completing my PhD in South Africa, and I started applying for Post PhD positions around the world. However, I am a little bit disturbed by all the therminology of academic titles which differs a lot from a country to another? So,
Is a Research Assistant/Associate in the United Kingdom equivalent to a Post Doctorate elsewhere?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes, postdoctoral positions in the UK are commonly advertised as research associates, research assistants, research fellows, teaching fellows (if the position focuses on teaching rather than research), etc.
You can normally judge the level of a position by the salary. A salary of between £28,000 and £35,000 will usually be a postdoctoral position (with the exact salary paid normally dependent on the candidate's experience). A higher salary would likely indicate a more senior or permanent position.
If you're unsure about the level of a position, it wouldn't hurt to send an email asking for clarification to the person advertising the job, or the department's research administrator.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Many jobs advertised in the UK as research assistants are not postdoc positions. For the UK, all jobs will have a position statement that has a list of selection criteria (marked essential or desirable). It is only a postdoc position if one of the criteria says something like 'PhD in relevant discipline, or close to completion'. As noted in one of the other answers, salary is also a good guide.
Other countries typically have similar formal selection criteria that the hiring panel uses to select the candidate and those selection criteria will state whether a PhD is required.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: A research assistant can be both pre-doctoral or post-doctoral - its bascially anyone who does research under the driect instruction of a principle investigator. post-doctoral resarch assistants are often reffered to as PDRAs, where as pre-doctoral ones as RAs. pre-doctoral RAs are very much like technician jobs - although often an RA will be fixed term, but a technician open-ended.
As others have mentioned, look if a PhD is required in the person-specification, which will be available for all UK university jobs (ask for it if its not linked in the advert). Also salary - PDRAs (at least in biology) are usually hired between point 28 (£31k) and 31 (£35k) on the national pay spine.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_4: >
> Is a Research Assistant/Associate in the United Kingdom equivalent to a Post Doctorate elsewhere?
>
>
>
Just to clarify, "Post-Doc" typically is short for "Post-Doctoral **Researcher**", not for any position in academia after finishing one's PhD. It refers to the first research position one would get after the doctorate.
In that sense yes, a Research Assistant/ Associate is typically a Post-Doc position in the UK but there is significant variation in the contract type, payment, duration and situations. Think of it as a blanket term for an entry-level research position, but the contract could be anything. A bog-standard Post-Doc is tied to either a project or departmental funding, meaning that at the end of the project you are out of a job and continuation is subject to the progress of the project and whether funding is available. It is fixed time (ranging from 6 months to 3 years, more commonly 1-2 years and renewable at the discretion of the university), but you should become familiarised with how you fulfil the requirements for a permanent contract. In the UK, this is possible after 2 years of continuous employment on renewable contracts (e.g. two consecutive 12-month contracts) or 4 years of employment on renewable contracts but with breaks (e.g. four 9-month contracts with 3-month gaps between them). The difference with a Research Fellow (RF) is the wage, which is often higher than an RA, and that RF contracts refer to a permanent position more often.
Unfortunately, the above do not always hold in practice and you should always read the job description carefully to see to what the "Research" bit in the title refers to. There is also a trend to harmonise naming with the US system (Assistant/ Associate Professor etc) which further complicates things.
The career equivalence between the three tracks (research only, mixed, teaching only) is Research Fellow, Lecturer, Teaching Fellow, which typically and ideally refer to permanent positions with comparable workload and responsibilities. This is not always the case, as RFs are often not permanent and TFs are paid less. Prior to those, you have Research Associate and Teaching Associate, with nothing for a Lecturer equivalent.
Now, for "post-doc" as in "any academic employment after the PhD", you are looking for both research and non-research positions. This includes everything: RA, TA, Lecturer (a long-shot at present), RF, TF.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: In my senior year. I have put so much effort in writing my thesis and my supervisor didn't even read what I have done or even bothered to do his work, I wrote my thesis in a topic in mathematical analysis. I think it is interesting to read, no new results but, there are many undergraduate publications that are just interesting to read and contains no new mathematics! so I think my thesis is interesting to read.
All undergraduate journals I found requires a letter from the supervisor, I can't get a letter from him because:
1. He didn't read it and he won't
2. My relationship with him is not good
I thought maybe I should ask an external professor to give me a feedback but, who would do that!
I am even embarrassed to ask for such a favour. I just want to learn even if my thesis is not as good as I think it is, it is okay but at least I would then know why and learn something!
If I had it published. It would then help me when I try to apply for scholarships and stuff.
Can someone suggest me a solution or something?
Do other professors normally agree to review other student's work?
Thank you.<issue_comment>username_1: 1. Look for other magazines that don't require such a letter. (Do they all?)
2. Find a professor that you can talk to. Or a postdoc. Or a visiting scholar. Some won't give you time of day, but some will be OK for a conversation. Then maybe talk about what you've done that was interesting. (Make some notecards and then be able to show/talk about the topics on the board.) Keep it a little lighter than "read my manuscript". That's a little leaden to be expected to read amateur work. But a meeting where you are able to say interesting things like
"lots of people want to have geometric interpretations of analysis and say that is novel, but they most likely think in areas or volumes. I like to think in decision trees and nodes. It's not really novel, as Russian authors from the 50s like Guestanovitch have written this way. But it's kind of rarely seen nowadays."
[Made up example...I don't know analysis...but you get the drift.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Having a poor relationship with your supervisor is a more important consideration than publishing an undergraduate thesis, I think. Perhaps you should address that in whatever way is open to you.
If you contact a professor at another institution blindly, you are pretty unlikely to get much of any feedback. That is especially true currently due to the general disruption of the pandemic.
Hopefully you have a better relationship with some other maths professor at your institution. I would talk to them. Perhaps they aren't able to give you much direct advice, depending on their own field of interest, but they probably have some circle of collaborators and might be able to introduce you to someone who can give you some feedback.
If a letter comes to me from an unknown student it is easy to ignore, but harder if it comes from another professor who is known to me.
If this is impossible, then there is another option. Find an institution to which you would want to apply for graduate school and find a professor interested in analysis there. Start a conversation with them about becoming a student there and also mention your thesis, giving the title, say, if it is informative. Don't go into detail about it or your desire for feedback in the initial contact. And don't send the thesis initially. If you get any response at all, then you can ask for advice on the thesis.
An additional idea about publishing your thesis is that an undergraduate journal might be willing to accept a recommendation from the department head rather than the direct supervisor in some situations. Perhaps not, but it might be worth having a face-to-face with the head in any case and ask for some help.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I am starting a PhD abroad, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic I cannot leave my country at the moment. My advisor has agreed that I can work remotely (starting later is not an option). While we can Skype and most of my work can be done online, I am concerned that having no access to the department, not being able to attend seminars/workshops, and not being able to meet/talk to other students in person will put me at a big disadvantage.
I am keen not to spend these initial few months slacking off and want to catch any problems before it is too late. However, I have always found it difficult to judge my own progress when studying alone, and with a PhD it seems that it will be especially hard as I need to learn a lot of skills in a new area. Also, because my advisor seems like a very 'nice' person who does not demand that his students work very hard, I am concerned that he will not tell me if I am underperforming.
Would it be appropriate to raise this with my advisor, asking him to tell me if I am not doing as well as his students usually do? Or are there any strategies for people working from home to judge if they are doing enough?<issue_comment>username_1: Yes, you should raise this issue, both with the advisor and with the university administration. Students need some feedback on their work and it is the university's responsibility to provide a way for that to happen. They need to provide the channels and you need to find a way to use them.
But things are in a bit of chaos now, of course, and effective response can be slow to occur.
Virtual seminars are possible using simple or sophisticated software. Perhaps you can set up (or the university can) a group of students and a professor or two willing to have an online session regularly. It isn't the same as face to face, but it can keep you engaged.
But at a minimum, write a lot and note where you have problems. Ask a lot of questions, but make sure they are pretty focused. Share what you write with your advisor, by email or by posting it somewhere.
Ask your advisor directly how you are doing and ask explicitly for next steps. You will most likely get suggestions about reading. Take a lot of notes on the readings and note things that puzzle you. Ask about them.
If you are starting the research phase of the degree it is normally a fairly solitary effort in any case, but the advisor should be willing to review and respond to your efforts and your questions.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_2: Under the circumstances, I would not worry about whether you are working "enough".
Indeed, under these circumstances, many universities (in the US, anyway) are presuming that many students and faculty are unable to work effectively. For example, many universities have either changed all grades to pass/fail for the term (see [here](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/grades-vs-pass-fail-colleges-grapple-with-student-demands-to-change-grading-during-coronavirus)), or else are allowing students to switch to pass/fail grading until the end of the term. For faculty, many are delaying tenure clocks by a year (see, e.g. [here](https://sfdora.org/2020/03/24/universities-are-adjusting-review-promotion-and-tenure-expectations-due-to-covid-19/)).
If your advisor is usually reluctant to make demands, or tell people that they're underperforming, then he will be even more reluctant now. I don't think you can realistically have this conversation now -- it's up to you to set your own standards and work towards them as best you can.
But I would certainly recommend being in communication with your advisor: ask his advice; ask questions about whatever you're studying; discuss ideas for research projects; and the like.
One thing you might do is ask to have a regular weekly Skype meeting, where you talk about what you've been reading recently. This might help to keep you on task.
Best wishes!
Upvotes: 3
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<issue_start>username_0: I emails professor A about a chance to study with him, and he answers that he's on leave next academic year so not accepting new students, and I might want to check professor B. Should I mention to B that A refers her to me?
More specifically, I think that A is best suited for me. Should I be honest in saying that I have email A first? I think being honest upfront will set a better expectation from him, thus saving time for both.
Below is my intended draft:
>
> Dear Prof. B,
>
>
> To introduce myself, my name is X, from country Z. I'm writing this letter to ask you if you are planning to accept new students this year. I have asked prof A about studying with him, but he has kindly refer you to me since he's on leave next year.
>
>
> From reading your profile, I can see that our interests align in many aspects. My interests can be divided into two main categories, which mirror yours:
>
>
> * The cognitivism in Daoism and Buddhism's epistemology
> * The physicalism in Daoism and Buddhism's metaphysics/cosmology
>
>
> In case you are interested, here is a [proposal](http://lyminhnhat.com/the-cognitivism-and-physicalism-in-daoism-and-buddhism?utm_source=SE%3A%20Academia%20%C2%BB%20Should%20I%20mention%20in%20an%20email%20to%20a%20professor%20that%20they%20are%20referred%20by%20another%20one%3F&utm_medium=Cognitivism%20%26%20physicalism&utm_campaign=Perspectives) I crafted for your reference.
>
>
> Do you think the program could be a good fit for me? Would there be an opportunity for me to work with you as a grad student?
>
>
> Best wishes and regards,
>
>
>
Both A and B are in the same school in Canada.<issue_comment>username_1: Chances are, the referee has told/will tell anyway. Just be upfront about it.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_2: The letter is fine, but I'd actually suggest that you replace this:
>
> I have asked <NAME> about studying with him, but he has kindly refer you to me since he's on leave next year.
>
>
>
with something like the following:
>
> <NAME> has referred me to you as being a good fit for my research interests.
>
>
>
There is no real need for the rest of it, and might be inferred without saying it directly.
But, your original is fine, also. Good luck.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]
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<issue_start>username_0: I am PI of a research group and in different projects regarding sample analyses, it looks like we will be able to license 4 patents to 4 different companies. I can tell you this success was not neither expected nor planned. And now the problems come; the money we receive from each patent, how to distribute it among the different participants. In order to avoid problems, I decided to distribute it equally between the number of people involved on each patent, which varies from 5 to 7, including me.
But some people are disappointed because they consider that other people did much less and should receive less percentage. In addition, I do not like this completely since I got all the funding for the projects, infrastructures and negotiate it hard with the companies, so I think I should deserve it a bit more, but I know that with this I will have problems in the group. Of course, I should have written everything down, the regulations, before starting the projects, but now it is too late. In order to solve this I thought about preparing a document, in which everybody writes down what they think they did, and how that part contributed to the invention. Then I think we could start a reasonable discussion, so people that did less, could not say the opposite, and finally we would reach an agreement. Another solution I thought would be to leave my University to decide on this.
My questions here is, how would you solve this problem, and if you think (and why) that a PI should get more part of the contribution.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> How to equitably divide the economical benefits of a licensed patent among academic inventors?
>
>
>
First and foremost, you must abide by the law:
1. Establish who owns the patent, it mightn't be the inventors;
2. Establish how ownership is distributed, according to the law; and
3. Distribute accordingly.
You'll probably need to hire an attorney, since you may be liable if you get it wrong.
---
Without an agreement asserting otherwise, ownership will be defined by [patent law](https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/joint-ownership-of-patents-a-to-z) (my emphasis):
>
> Under patent law, each co-inventor...owns [the patent]. **In the absence of any agreement, each co-inventor owns 100 percent of the patent, regardless of how much each individual contributed to the invention.** Patent law gives co-owners of a patent the right to make, use, license, sell and import the patented invention within the United States in whatever way they please, without the consent of the other co-owners.
>
>
>
Thus, under US patent law, it seems the OP has the sole right to license and collect royalties, unless an agreement asserts otherwise. The [OP believes](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/147018/how-to-equitably-divide-the-economical-benefits-of-a-licensed-patent-among-acade#comment389411_147018) the university gets 70% of royalties, since that's what other researchers have said. To be sure, contractual agreements must be checked, and ownership is then defined under the terms of any such contractual agreements.
---
Only when the law has been followed can royalties be further distributed. For instance, supposing the OP collects all royalties, then they may choose to gift their newly established wealth, noting that royalties and gifts may be subject to tax.
---
For small royalties, the costs incurred in establishing who gets what might well outweigh the royalties themselves...
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Google translation of original:
First clarify what right the university can have. The balance is distributed. That is easy. Now, each invention can be quantified by the scope and number of claims. A list of the participants indicating their participation in each claim would be a starting point. This would be worth 50% of the patent. The rest of works, direction, administration, investigation. writing, experiments, would complete the other 50%. Then each participation is valued over 100 and calculates the individual percentage. This may be the combined result of various participations. In this way, a more objective map of the situation could be obtained. Differences and means by error are compared, and a value is attributed to each participant. Then each can negotiate with the group, which for this or that reason should touch something else. By vote the claim is granted or not. Previously, limits were set to the percentage negotiable with the group and determined the percentage of votes that approved a claim. It may be a low percentage. eg 30% if there is trust and camaraderie.
Original Spanish:
Primero aclarar que derecho puede tener la universidad. El saldo se reparte. Eso es facil. Ahora, cada invento se puede cuantificar por el alcance y numero de reivindicaciones (claims) . Una lista de los intervinientes indicando su participación en cada claim , sería un punto de partida. Esto valdría el 50% de la patente. El resto de trabajos, direccion, administración, investigacion. redacción, experimentos , completarían el otro 50 %. Luego se valora sobre 100 cada participación y calcula el porcentaje individual. Este puede ser el resultado combinado de diversas participaciones.
Asi se podría obtener un mapa más objetivo de la situacion. Se compara las diferencias y las medias por error, y se atribuye un valor a cada participante. Luego cada uno puede negociar con el grupo, que por tal o cual razón le deba tocar algo más. Por votación se concede o no el reclamo. Previamente se pone límites al porcentaje negociable con el grupo y determina el porcentaje de votos que aprueba un reclamo. Puede ser un porcentaje bajo. ej 30% si hay confianza y camaradería. Abrazos.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_3: Research has been done on questions like this.
The [Cake Cutting Algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_cake-cutting) is about fair distribution of a resource. Perhaps you can apply it here, or a modification of it.
In fact, the current (April 2020) issue of *Communications of the ACM* has a new article that also gives background on the problem: Aziz and Mackenzie, *A Bounded and Envy-Free Cake Cutting Algorithm*.
And, because of the current pandemic the [ACM Digital Library](https://www.acm.org/publications/digital-library) has been opened for free access for now, though it is a temporary action. It contains essentially everything published by the ACM. Recent things, at least.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: (Expanding a bit on username_3's answer)
*Short answer: Use some math to make everyone happy.*
This is actually a well-explained problem in economics for which there is a solution.
It is possible to mutually assess everyone's contribution, without anyone unfairly boosting their own contribution, so that the proceeds are distributed in a way that everyone is likely to be satisfied with. This is, as username_3 said, a type of cake-cutting algorithm.
**A Tool**
If you'd like to skip the theory and go straight to a solution, check out [spliddit.org/apps/credit](https://spliddit.org/apps/credit). They provide a web app for everyone to subjectively assess everyone else's contribution and computes the fair proportions. The theory behind it is pretty clever, and you will likely find that everyone finds the splitting to be satisfactory.
**A Theory**
If you're looking for a more principled answer (other than "try this tool"), here's the paper that describes the theory and method used by Spliddit in rigorous depth: [Impartial Division of a Dollar - Clippel, Moulin, Tideman](https://www.uibk.ac.at/economics/bbl/lit_se/papieress08/declippelmoulintideman2008.pdf)
The method satisfies two formalized criteria:
**Impartiality** - no one assesses or covertly influences the assessment of their own contribution
**Consensus** - the ultimate division is compatible with every individual's assessment of others' contributions
Good luck!
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_5: If any of the people involved have outstanding rights to the IP get a lawyer. That's not likely though.
If the patents were assigned to the university tech transfer organization and this is the kickback from them put it into a lab slush fund. Having money unencumbered by oversight will be useful to you. Use some of it to career boost the people who did the work.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_6: As others have said, a lot will depend on your legislation since it may prescribe a particular way of arriving at the fractions for each co-inventor.
>
> I thought about preparing a document, in which everybody writes down what they think they did, and how that part contributed to the invention
>
>
>
In [germany](/questions/tagged/germany "show questions tagged 'germany'") certain questions are asked and particular answers decide scores each of the co-inventors gets.
* This is not only how much "brilliant ideas"/work/other ressources each co-inventor put in, but also
* how much guidance they received (someone who solves a problem they identify on their own gets more "points" than someone who's told to solve a particular problem and maybe given a literature list/guidance how to approach a solution), and
* how this compares to the expectation according to their job.
The proverbial contrast is the R&D engineer whose job is to develop an instrument solving problem x vs. the janitor seeing high-tech problem x when cleaning the lab and developing the solution in their free time at home.
>
> But some people are disappointed because they consider that other people did much less and should receive less percentage.
>
>
>
The questions above won't completely solve the issue (even though in Germany even lists of scores for particular situations are prescribed), but they may help in the negotiations.
Speaking of negotiations, if you as PI have an interest (are co-inventor) as well, I'd think it proper to have a professional mediation here. At least if there are students involved you may have a conflict of interest if you have a duty to make sure the students are not exploited due to their dependence on you/the institute (that would be the case e.g. for a German professor and their Bachelor or Master student until graduation)
>
> In addition, I do not like this completely since I got all the funding for the projects, infrastructures and negotiate it hard with the companies, so I think I should deserve it a bit more, but I know that with this I will have problems in the group.
>
>
>
* The special stakeholder who gets credit for providing the infrastructure is usually the university rather than the PI as person - and the percentage may be fixed/non-negotiable.
Universities here in Germany have rules how that money is distributed between university, faculty and research group.
* As for the PI position from what I know of the German system, a group leader will usually get rather *less* unless in addition to providing guidance they put in substantial amounts of work (this is about the money the PI gets as person, not for their group). The reasoning behind that is that guiding R&D work is their job for which they are paid their salary. So a patentable invention sticks out of what is expected of them less than it sticks out of, say, a not-yet-graduated student Master student who isn't paid any wage for their thesis work.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm currently in my undergraduate junior year studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I'm hoping to apply for Top 10 US grad schools in mechanical engineering in about 18 months. In response to the worldwide COVID-19 health crisis, our institution has (as have most academic institutions) switched to online teaching and made many changes to the structure of our courses to accommodate the situation.
As part of these changes, the university has offered students the option to selectively change the grade reporting on their transcripts to CR/NCR (Credit/No Credit) at the end of this semester. Normally, my grades would be pretty good (hovering around ~3.9 GPA) and I wouldn't bother to report my grades as a CR instead of as a percentage, but this crisis has completely disoriented me and made it difficult to focus on my studies.
Furthermore, the university has allowed instructors to retroactively adjust the course breakdown/weighting away from the original syllabus--this means that tests/projects that were originally worth 15% of the grade might have been increased to upwards of 40% weighting. This has had a negative impact on my course grades as well, as I was hoping to make up for poor showings on some of these lower-weight deliverables with strong final exam performances. Instead, these final exams are going to be worth much less now.
In the aftermath of these changes, I'm contemplating using the CR/NCR option on some of my course grades, particular with any grade that ends up lower than my current GPA. However, I'm worried about how this will be interpreted in my grad school admissions in a couple years. In normal circumstances, I think changing a percentage grade into a CR/Pass grade would be a red flag that a student's performance in the class was less-than-stellar.
Given the COVID-19 crisis and its effects on academia as a whole, are admissions committees two years down the road likely to be understanding if I decide to take advantage of the CR option now? Should I make use of it and explain that this was "the coronavirus semester" in my application package, or am I dooming myself by converting my grades from percentage into CRs?<issue_comment>username_1: The situation is chaotic and it is difficult to make a prediction or give firm advice. Either path could be better than the other, depending on the judgments of others.
However, one prediction that I can make with confidence is that universities sending out grades will also be sending out explanations that extraordinary measures were taken in extraordinary times. Furthermore those receiving grades and such will understand that the situation was chaotic and that the ordinary procedures need to be modified.
If it were me, I'd probably opt for the grades rather than pass/fail. If necessary, I'd just explain that the general chaos affected my performance somewhat and the grades may not accurately reflect my potential. I'd suspect that letter writers would back that up. But that is partly because I'd have a history of excellent performance generally and not one that would be questioned in the absence of the current situation. (This is the hypothetical me speaking, not the real me.)
But the pass fail option can also be explained fairly easily that the risks were higher due to general disruption and you considered it the safer option as the rules were changing, making earlier assumptions invalid.
I expect that there will be more emphasis put on interviews and on letters of recommendation for a while until things settle down again. But that is just a guess.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: >
> Should I make use of it and explain that this was "the coronavirus semester" in my application package, or am I dooming myself by converting my grades from percentage into CRs?
>
>
>
You shouldn't have to explain that it was "the coronavirus semester" (though it probably doesn't hurt to mention it, I guess), but more importantly, you also aren't dooming yourself with your grade conversion. For God's sake, this is a *global pandemic*. Everyone is aware of it.
To add on to username_1's answer: I can tell you that at my school, a large US research university to which you're probably applying, I received a university-wide email affirming that admissions to our graduate and professional schools would be evaluated holistically and take into account the highly unusual situation in Spring 2020, and that departments would not be penalizing students for taking classes Pass / Fail. That's the right decision. If a school *was* going to dock you for it, that's probably not the ideal place for graduate school.
Upvotes: 1
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<issue_start>username_0: Let's say I've developed a model for some process X. Using my model I can investigate (a) the effect of changing a underlying assumption used in other literature; and (b) the effect of a different equation for calculating some part of X. The assumption and different equation are not at all related but my model is fundamentally the same. Given all this when I come to write a paper for each of my investigations my introduction and model sections of the papers will be *very* similar - likely with a small difference in the last few lines of each specifying what is different from the baseline case.
So my question is: **is this repetition across multiple journal papers acceptable?** Is it considered bad practice? Should my second paper reference my first due to plagiarism?<issue_comment>username_1: It will depend on a bunch of things.
Basically these papers are not "stand alone." They are elements of a series. The way to answer such questions is to put yourself in the place of your readers. Imagine you were a researcher from a related discipline, and you were encountering these papers for the first time. What level of duplication would make your life easy?
For example, if these are 5 page papers, and you have three pages of repeated intro material, that's a problem. If these are 50 page papers, three pages of repeated intro is probably not a problem.
For example, if the papers are in the same journal every time, you should be more inclined to simply cite a previous article for material you are considering repeating. If it's a different journal, you may want to avoid forcing your reader to hunt up that *other* journal to figure out what is going o n.
Maybe there's a way you can get some kind of consideration from a journal. If you are going to have several papers on the same topic in rapid succession, maybe you can get them published back-to-back. Or at least in the same volume so a reader will get them all at once. That way you could simply say "see the first paper" or something like that. It is certainly not unknown, though it is also not all the common either.
Another possible strategy is to publish a "state of the union" paper in a review journal, then reference that. When I was in grad school I wore out several volumes of Physics Reports that had review articles about my research subject. So much so that I eventually had to buy my own copies. Is there a similar journal in your field of research? You could put all your intro material and notation and introductory calculations in there and just cite it. Publishing a review article on a subject you are "pioneering" in can also be a good boost for your CV. And it will tend to get cited by a lot of people who are just getting their toes wet in a subject.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Similarity is not a problem in this case, but you absolutely have to cite the earlier papers in each of the later ones. Make sure that a reader of any of them can find the earlier ones.
It is better that you don't copy/paste between papers and you don't suggest that you will. But if the papers are related they need to show the relationships.
The introductory material you "repeat/paraphrase" is there for the convenience of the reader so they don't necessarily need to read all the early papers.
Just distinguish what is new and cite what is old and you will be fine.
Your last question is confusing. If you don't cite it could be self-plagiarizing. But it isn't ordinary plagiarism since the ideas are your own.
But if you build a significant model and it has various applications, it would be foolish to require that all implications appear in a single paper. The paper would be too long, for one thing, and some of the implications probably won't have been discovered by the time you have something worth reporting. So, what you are doing seems quite natural.
Upvotes: 2 [selected_answer]
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2020/03/30
| 1,277
| 5,440
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<issue_start>username_0: I wrote an email to my potential advisor, politely declining an offer for a PhD position. And he has replied saying that he's sad to hear that, and asking if there's anything he can do to convince me otherwise. How do I reply to this?<issue_comment>username_1: Well, he wanted to have you and is trying to find out whether there is any condition that he may change to convince you otherwise (e.g. pay, conditions or something else).
If there isn't way to convince you, then you can simply make clear that you made up your mind to pursue some other option, and, if you wish to be more specific, you could say what you decided: to change location/take up a PhD somewhere else/go to industry/become a stay-home father or just state that you have decided not to pursue a PhD at this time, whatever of these is the case.
**EDIT**
Of course, you should not invent a non-existing reason, but this should go without saying.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: First, tell no lies. Second, thank the professor for their vote of confidence in your ability. Be gracious.
If you are accepting a placement with another advisor or at another institution then say so. You need not provide any reasons justifying your decision. Simply be polite and state the bare minimum required to convey your situation.
If you have chosen not to pursue a degree at this time then say that. Again, you need not justify this decision. Just say that you are not pursuing this any further for the time being.
Brevity and courtesy are your allies here.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: I would just reply that you thank him for his interest but that it isn't possible to work together *at this time*. But suggest that you would be honored/happy to stay in contact for the future if your fields of interest intersect.
Over the long run you want to build up a set of contacts like this and you have an opportunity to start it. He might be a future source of advice on your research or your career. But such contacts need to be nurtured.
I would, however, hold off on such a reply until you have a firm and accepted position elsewhere.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_4: There is nothing out of the ordinary here - they made an offer, you declined, they inquire if there is anything they could do to change your mind (presumably you did not provide a concrete reason for declining, otherwise they would have probably made an offer that potentially changes this reasoning or, if that's not possible, wouldn't even have asked).
How to go forward is completely up to you: If you declined for a reason that can potentially be fixed (most importantly if another university made a better funded offer) you can let them know and see what happens - but you are also completely in your right to not tell them and just go forward with another option. In this case I recommend phrasing your answer politely but generically (e.g., "Other position was a better fit for my research interests.").
I would recommend the latter option particularly if your actual reason may be offending, such as because you went for a higher-status university or because you did not find the project exciting. If your reason is rather neutral but cannot realistically be changed (e.g., you would prefer to move to city / country A rather than B, your spouse likes the other place better, etc.), you can just let them know truthfully - no reasonable person should think less of you because of this.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_5: There are basically two scenario's here. The professor still has an open PhD position, and you're not going to take it. That means he'll have to find someone else. But why didn't you accept that position? Was that purely because of reasons that are particular to you? If so, tell the professor. That means he might have more luck with the next candidate.
But if the offer was structurally lacking in some respect, and the professor might be in a position to change that, then it's fair to let him know. It won't affect you, since you already declined. But you're helping both the professor and his future PhD student.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_6: In addition to the suggestions in other answers, you might consider suggesting some collaboration without and independently of being his Ph.D. candidate. Perhaps suggest a visit. If you're super-interested in what he's doing, maybe co-advisorship might be relevant. Of course - you might not be interested and then it's not relevant. I'm just saying that interaction/affiliation with a senior researcher is not a binary "nothing" vs "I'm with him" choice.
Another point is - maybe there *is* something he could do to convince you:
* He might be able to offer something you don't know is possible (e.g. in terms of payment, equipment, undergrads/M.Sc. students who could assist you, or other benefits I haven't thought of).
* You might be making an assumption that's invalid about your chosen position, which he could disavow you of. Now, this is trickier, because he's obviously biased, but it's not impossible. I mean, people do sometimes choose Ph.D. positions based on such assumptions.
So if you like him / his research group enough to be open to such arguments, perhaps don't dismiss this opportunity and offer, say, an audio chat to discuss this, in which you would be more forthcoming about how you made your decision and he will make his "pitch".
Upvotes: 0
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2020/03/30
| 1,096
| 4,344
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<issue_start>username_0: I'm writing the abstract of my bachelor’s thesis and need to refer to a German research project. The abbreviation of it refers to a German spelling – so I can’t write it out. The English translation wouldn’t explain the acronym and is super long.
Is it possible to use a footnote for this? Even though it is very uncommon? Or are there other possibilities?
I don't have strict rules to follow but generally APA as guidelines.
The exact abbreviation I refer to is *STEER* which stands for *Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur ERreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements.*
In English: *Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management.*<issue_comment>username_1: You could refer to the German research project by acronym without referring to the full name or you could omit the acronym entirely. The former is perhaps better when the acronym is well known; the latter when it isn't. Since you'll surely be providing the full name, acronym, and translation later, either should be fine.
I suggest that a footnote be avoided, because abstracts get decoupled and such a footnote will be lost.
Given that
>
> STEER: *Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur ERreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements* (Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management)
>
>
>
isn't particularly long, you could just include, assuming your abstract isn't limited by a word count.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: As far as I understand, there is no reason why you cannot include the original German with its translation in the abstract, better than in a footnote — which typically don't play well with abstracts.
I would write something like:
>
> In this thesis we refer to X work on the STEER (from its German acronym *Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur ERreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements*, Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management) project.
>
>
>
The only reason not to include it directly in the abstract would be not having enough characters available. In that case, I would do it like:
>
> In this thesis we refer to X work on the STEER (*Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur ERreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements*, Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management) project.
>
>
>
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: I agree with the writers of the other two answers that it is best to avoid using a footnote in the abstract, if possible. However, I do not think it is necessary to write out the full German name of the project in the abstract. An abstract is just a summary, and should be as concise as possible. I think it is best to use **only the acronym within the abstract**, and then write out the full version (in German, and with an English translation) in the body of the paper, when the project is first mentioned (likely somewhere in the introduction).
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_4: **There are no strict rules; you must try to balance clarity, length, and readability according to your own best judgement.** As others suggest, spelling it out in full is not dreadfully long:
>
> This thesis builds on the work of the STEER project (*Erhöhung der STEuerungskompetenz zur ERreichung der Ziele eines integrierten Wassermanagements*, Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management).
>
>
>
But if you feel this makes the abstract too long (e.g. if you must follow a strict word count/space restriction), or less readable, then there are many other alternatives, e.g.
>
> This thesis builds on the work of the STEER project on governance for water management.
>
>
>
with the full name and translation either given in a footnote, or not mentioned in the abstract at all — the reader who wants to know can flip ahead to the introduction or a later section. In the main text, something like this would be too concise (unless the STEER project is extremely well-known), but **in an abstract, conciseness and readability are high priorities; giving thorough details is a much lower priority in an abstract than in the body of a text.**
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/30
| 1,509
| 6,621
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently a freshman at an American university double majoring in CS and Econ. There is one professor in my university that I am looking to work with, as his main research focus is algorithmic game theory, something that for obvious reasons holds great interest to me.
However, I do recognize that it would be difficult for me to keep pace with his research, being highly theoretical in nature. However, I have written to him multiple time about meeting with me for a few minutes to talk about his research or to advise me about what next steps I may take to best prepare myself for that kind of research with no response. I even tracked him down once, after the 1st email, and asked him about this, where he told me to email him as he is busy. However, it has been months without any reply.
I'm at a loss for what to do; what further steps can I take?<issue_comment>username_1: I'll just guess that he doesn't think you are ready and that he doesn't have the patience to deal with you at your current state of development. But, just a guess, as I said. You might have better luck in a year when you have a few more courses under your belt and some "seasoning". If you close the intellectual distance a bit you might have a better chance.
But another option, that might work, is to work through a different professor who has a high opinion of you and might be willing to get you connected to the "big guy". A recommendation from a colleague holds some weight where an email does not.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: Well, faculty-student research is a two-way street, and for whatever reason, it certainly doesn't sound like this professor is showing a lot of interest in working with you. This is not necessarily anything about you or your abilities; he may just be busy with other things, or not very interested in working with undergraduates in general, or too disorganized to keep track of potential research students. But any of those would suggest that this is not someone that would be a good research supervisor for you at this time.
If you did start a research project with this professor, you'd be counting on him for actual supervision: advice on what to learn and what to work on, feedback on your progress and on your products (papers, code, etc), availability to meet to help get you unstuck when you are stuck on a problem, signing necessary university paperwork, collaboration in writing and submitting papers if you get that far, and so on. You can see from many questions on this site how frustrating a research experience can be if this sort of support is not forthcoming, and it will be especially important in your case since it's apparently your first time getting involved in research. And the fact that he is already so unresponsive to something as simple as "I'd like to talk about research opportunities" is reason for serious concern that he'd be similarly unresponsive when you really need his participation.
I would suggest that, at least for now, you move on and look for research opportunities with other faculty members - ideally, someone with a record of working successfully with undergraduates, and who shows clear interest in working with you. I think these are more important than a perfect fit of research interests.
You have plenty of time to consider approaching this professor again in a year or two. In the meantime, you might try to talk to other students he's supervised (either undergraduate or graduate) and find out how the experience was. This may give you some ideas about how to get his attention more effectively, or it may convince you that you don't want to work with him at all.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_3: One option is to take a class he teaches and do a fantastic job there, especially if it is a graduate-level one. Those classes often involve projects that deal with the actual research in the field. Very often those projects are open-ended and can potentially result in publications. I even suspect that some professors deliberately use their class projects to look for new students. If you can make yourself stand out from the crowd there, it is likely to open some doors for you. But since you are a freshman, make sure you are actually well-prepared to shine in such class before enrolling. Sometimes it is better to be patient and prepare well.
Another thing is to not get fixated on a particular sub-field. Research interests evolve over time, especially at an early stage. It is likely that in a couple of years you will be super hyped about doing something else. So enjoy your time at the university, learn as much as you can, and be open-minded about what you can do with your knowledge and intellectual abilities!
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_4: As an economist, my suggestion would be to move on and focus on course work, then come back to this idea later, or in graduate school.
First and foremost, **professors are often facing more students wanting to work with them than they have room for.** This is especially true if they are
* More senior
* In a trendy field
* Well known in their field
* In a department where not a lot of other faculty are in their field
* Teach graduate classes
As a freshman they don't know, **you haven't passed any of the gate keepers they likely use** to help filter the load of interested research assistants. This is going to make it very difficult for you to get your foot in the door, so to speak.
Another reason that an economics professor is highly unlikely to be interested in performing research with undergrads is that **undergraduate economics education really isn't much like graduate/professional economics research.** As just one example, you can achieve an undergraduate economics degree with just calculus 1, and sometimes not even that. You often can't even get into an economics PhD program without differential equations and real analysis, but at the bare minimum multivariable calculus (usually calc 3).
Even if you're somehow a shockingly experienced freshman, go back to the point that this professor doesn't know you, and is therefore judging you by what he knows of freshman in general.
So specifically, my suggestion would be to do the following:
1. **Take a class with that professor**
2. Do well in that class. Go to office hours. Make sure they know who you are.
3. Take more classes relevant to their field, particularly anything to do with research methods.
4. Try again as a junior or senior, when you've got your eye on grad school.
I applaud your enthusiasm for research though. Good luck.
Upvotes: 3
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2020/03/31
| 4,080
| 17,189
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<issue_start>username_0: My postdoctoral adviser has a colleague (another professor) who she collaborated with occasionally. This professor has data that I was interested in. Together with my advisor, the three of us started a project for which I did all the modeling.
We have not finished the project yet, but the 'other professor' announced today that he will be moving to another university in the next six months or so (I am not sure exactly when). He asked me if I could share with him a copy of the source code that I wrote for the modeling and analysis of the data. I feel uncomfortable about this, since I don't know if I will be included on manuscripts, new projects, etc. that will be coming out of the current unfinished project. I talked to my postdoctoral advisor, but she is not very helpful and actually suggested to 'just give him a copy of the [source code]'. I am not against sharing code, but I am just afraid this other professor will be using (a modified version of) my code and then not include me on a any manuscript that will be resulting from the code.<issue_comment>username_1: You seem uncomfortable sharing interim results with collaborators. That goes against the collaboration spirit and I implore you to share all results. In the future, don't start a collaboration with anyone who you aren't willing to share interim results with.
>
> I am just afraid this other professor will be using (a modified version of) my code and then not include me on a any manuscript that will be resulting from the code.
>
>
>
You are afraid this other professor will commit academic fraud, steal intellectual property, or both, seemingly without any basis for concern. Again, I implore you to share all results. (Although I think it is unnecessary, you could defend against this other professor by making interim results available online.)
---
Read the comments, they are excellent.
Upvotes: 6 <issue_comment>username_2: Clearly you do not know the other prof well enough to trust them.
In such cases, clarify authorship agreements ahead of time (authorship, number of papers; with lower priority, order of authors, but probably that should be left for later). If satisfactory, proceed to share. The danger lies always in implicit assumptions about who gets what type of attribution in which papers.
Much of that danger can be mitigated by an *open*, but *friendly* conversation on how the credit attribution is going to look.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_3: I've often collaborated with people at other institutions, and I would expect to always see all code which was used in any paper I was an author of.
If one of my collaborators refused to show me their code, my assumption would be there was something badly wrong with it. I would certainly refuse to publish any work with that person, as I would have no way of knowing my name wasn't being placed on a paper with serious issues.
Upvotes: 5 <issue_comment>username_4: I strongly suggest two things.
First is that you share the code. Absolutely. Even offer to extend it as required.
Second is that you arrange with the other two people that you will continue to collaborate on this, and future projects, as long as you live.
If you don't do these things and generally try to lock up what you do, your career will be sub-optimal. Perhaps not dead in the water, but less than it could be.
Knowledge isn't like gum-drops. We can share it and still keep it. In fact, sharing it makes it grow. If your reputation is one of stinginess then no one will want to share with you and the data (from that other person) wouldn't have been available to you to even begin to work with.
Having a circle of collaborators is a powerful thing that will carry you over the hard spots in your career path.
The only exception to this is if you had prior evidence that the other person is already known to plagiarize and to not give proper credit.
---
Personal note: Over my career I developed many continuing collaborative relationships with others at other universities and in other countries. We got a lot done together that it would have been hard or impossible to do alone.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_5: Given the nature of human beings, you are right to be skeptical. No one is going to look out for you except you. It comes down to ownership. Is the institution you are at now aware that this guy wants to take intellectual property paid for by their institution to a different institution? I would go up the ladder and make sure you get clearance from someone that it is okay to allow this person to take your work elsewhere. Colleges are in competition with one another despite what those in academia like to admit. You might find yourself in hot water if it turns out this guy goes somewhere else and publishes his work giving the new institution credit.
All of these answers suggesting you capitulate in the name of charity are hogwash. Follow your gut. Don't let people steal your success or try to guilt you out of it in the name of obedience or subservience to the collective.
Upvotes: -1 <issue_comment>username_6: >
> I talked to my postdoctoral advisor, but she is not very helpful and actually suggested to 'just give him a copy of the syntax'.
>
>
>
Your postdoctoral advisor is right: you collaborated on this work so you should be happy to share it.
Think about it this way: **a lot of academic software ends up being open source; what makes you treat this collaborator differently than you would a future researcher who wants to use your work?** The difference here is that you may not have published yet, but I wouldn't be afraid to just post the syntax online. You should not be worried about being scooped; your goal is to get people to be interested and aware of your work; if they go so far as to *use your code*, that's even better.
Academia is a lot different than industry where one is always worried about company secrets and intellectual property. In academia, we care about **attribution,** not ownership. Since the person who really had this idea (wrote down the code) is you, you should be recognized and the code should be attributed to you. But that's different from saying that you own the idea and no one gets to use it, which is contrary to the spirit of research, particularly when this professor is involved in the same project as you.
---
By the way, when you share the code, if it makes you feel better you can ask them about how they plan to use it. You can also put a record that the code was yours (e.g. publishing it online right away). These are ways to cover yourself in the event of academic misconduct, and to keep yourself in the loop. As you are the one who wrote the code, just as they have a right to see it, you have a right to know how they are planning to use it going forward.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_7: Once there was an invention, by British amateur chemist and hairdresser, of intumescent material claimed to be able to withstand and insulate from extreme heat, named Starlite. Starlite was proven to be able to withstand attack by a laser beam that could produce a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius. It would also prevent a blowtorch from damaging a human hand.
But Starlite's composition was a closely guarded secret. The inventor allowed various organisations such as the Atomic Weapons Establishment and ICI to conduct tests on samples, but he was scared and did not permit them to retain samples for fear of reverse engineering.
He maintained that his invention was worth billions. But as he died in 2011 he took the secret recipe to the grave. Still today there has been no commercialisation of Starlite, and the formulation of the material has not been released to the public.
So there was this incredible material and a selfish scientist, whose egocentrism made him value the greater good of humanity much less than his own bussiness. And there is your code and you, but it is almost certain that you vastly overestimate the greatness and usefulness of your own code and it is not going to make any Starlite-like potential breakthrough in rocket science. So you should share the code without a second thought, as collaboration is essential in academia. And if you can't drop your big ego, maybe academia just isn't a place for you.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_8: Now, I would not be so quick to judgement as many here. I can understand the sentiment, and indeed code-sharing is an important, foundational part of most software developers as a vague community.
HOWEVER, I've experienced some issues where out-of-faculty instructors did off with some code for commercial purposes. I wouldn't say it's very common, or that you need to be highly paranoid about this, *but* there's a very simple solution to your problem.
**Just publish your code on GitHub with an Apache 2.0 license.
Then send them the link.**
Tada.
You have credit, you have access, your future contributions live somewhere with citation. It'll be fine. If you really want you can even make the repo private unless something foul goes afoot.
Upvotes: 4 <issue_comment>username_9: if it quacks like a **duck**... you got a bad feeling obviously already from the get go, so what is the reason for that? Obviously you went through the trouble of posting on this forum/board, so that tells me it means more than "no big deal". Attach a disclaimer citing *Intellectual Property Copyright* [date you created version 1] and include it in as a comment header of the source. Post it in a repository if you want and then collaborate as you originally intended to. **GNU Not Unix**...heh. Libertarian way, it is good to share, so far as that it does not impede upon the rights of an individual, including yourself. You have every right to be concerned, but you also agreed to work as a team. So do both, and next time trust your gut, in the end it is all you got.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_10: I see three productive suggestions in other comments and answers here so far:
1. Post your code on github (maybe shared only with collaborators until publication).
2. Add a license.
3. Have a specific conversation about authorship.
***You should do all of these.***
On the other hand, I also see suggestions you should not take, so I'll throw in these extra suggestions for what you should do instead:
4. *At every moment*, treat everyone as reasonable and level-headed. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Your goal is to resolve any dispute, rather than escalate hostilities, so don't start off with legalistic talk of how you could prove things in a court of law.
5. Continue making yourself valuable to the project.
---
I publish pretty much all of my code openly on github, even while I'm still working and haven't yet published. But I have to say that if the goal is to get authorship on resulting papers, this alone can be counterproductive. In my experience, many researchers will actually perceive making software open source as encouragement to use your software *without* bringing you in as an author, because they believe you're satisfied with a simple citation. Of course they'll cite you properly, but you won't be an author on their paper. I consider this a net benefit, but it's not what the OP seems to be looking for. Github is very helpful for collaborating, and likely to be great for your career, but it's not enough to achieve the goal of authorship.
Similarly, most licenses put no particular *academic* obligation on the user. As others have pointed out, there are plenty of good reasons to use a license. But authorship is not one of them. See [this question](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7473) for some good points on this topic. Not having a license at all is certainly a bad idea. So I encourage you to license and post your code.
But if you want to be an author, there's really no substitute for having an actual conversation about it. Your advisor should be willing to discuss this specifically with you, and with the other prof. You could broach the topic first with your advisor as a discussion about what sorts of work merit authorship on papers — which could help guide your academic plans anyway. Your advisor will have a broader perspective about this topic generally, as well as specific insight into just how much work you've done. It may turn out that your advisor realizes that you've done a great deal of work, and just assumes that you'd get authorship — so your goal is just to get explicit reassurance of this fact. Or it may turn out that what you think is a great deal of work isn't actually that significant, and you would be better served by spending your time on other projects (I only say this because your question is not clear; I really don't know).
Most of all, this work is almost certainly not of the variety that you need to entertain daydreams about this ending up "in a court of law", or requiring "juriprudence-tested" [*sic*] evidence, as one comment suggested. If this is patentable software, you should talk to your institution's IP office. Otherwise, this just isn't going to be such a big deal. Lawyers will not be getting involved. The very most dramatic scenario I can imagine involves some ombudsman or editor looking into this, and they'll take you at your word that the git commit dates on github (which could be faked, in principle) are honest — because they'll come into this assuming that any disagreements are at least honest disagreements, and that no parties will be fabricating evidence.
In the same way, you should go into these conversations [assuming good faith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith). It's important not to go in "guns blazing", and ready to escalate what could have been a friendly and productive exchange into a fight. Remember that the other prof is only leaving your institution, not defecting in a war. You can stay friends and collaborators, which will be to your benefit. Be prepared to assert yourself, but *at every point in the dialog* take the position that you're just seeking clarification and trying to settle minor details amicably. If you bring up the fact that you could prove your contribution to objective third parties — when there's almost certainly no need for such a thing — you could be shooting yourself in the foot, because you're suggesting that this is a hostile situation, which could induce the other prof (and maybe even your own advisor) to just drop the project as more trouble than it's worth.
I think it would be entirely reasonable to let your advisor know that this is causing you some anxiety, and even say to her what you said in a comment above: "I have seen it happen where people are involved early on in the process and contribute substantially, but then, a year or so later, they are not on the paper draft." This is a reasonable concern, and you have a right to ask for clarity. But the other prof has a right to be treated like a reasonable and ethical person.
Finally, after sharing the code with the other prof, it can be helpful if you try to engage, rather than just crossing your fingers that you eventually get an email informing you that you're an author. Ask questions, and offer to do some additional analyses. Start talking about the paper(s) that you're expecting to come out of this, and generally try to maintain the collaboration as an active one. If you make yourself valuable, people will be clamoring to have you as an author.
Upvotes: 6 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_11: If the prof can use your code without using you, then either the code is simple, or he will soon understand that he needs you.
I suggest to not fear the code. Fear the idea what is behind it.
Note, the prof has far more to lose by a plagium accusation than the time of re-implementing the code, but not this is the case for the idea behind it.
A prof wanting your code is not a danger, he is a chance. If he is going to another university... would you like to go with him? Would you like to join him a decade later?
Think also about the LoRs you will might to get from him in the future.
So, don't fear the code. Watch the papers of the prof - and have a good contact with him. He can become extremely useful for you in the future.
The likely cause of the reaction of the postdoc advisor is that he sees the same, but he can not say it to you - and he will retire from where you are now.
P.s. If the prof hears back that you have this problem, yes that will become a danger.
P.s.2. As other answer says, open-sourcing the code could make it an excellent reference for you in the future.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_12: Don't hide your assets under a bushel. You want to establish a career where you are valued for your expertise, knowledge, and insight. To do that you need to establish a reputation, and the best way to establish a reputation is to be generous in sharing your knowledge. The more you give away, the more people will come to you wanting your services. By contrast, if you establish a reputation for being unhelpful and reluctant to contribute to the community, the less people will want to work with you.
Upvotes: 1
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2020/03/31
| 1,095
| 4,660
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<issue_start>username_0: Currently when a lot of traditionally taught courses are converted to online and remote education - what does science say about the effectiveness of that compared to the traditional classroom situation?
I am taking a language course and just had my first online (MS Teams) session and thought it was horrible (much more distractions sitting at home, no live interaction with the person next to me and so on).
I assume there has been a lot of research on this subject made before (and that even more will be done after corona) and am looking for "rule of thumb"-answers, just to get an idea in which direction the results are pointing<issue_comment>username_1: It seems that the consensus over the last two years is that online teaching is inferior to face to face, *for many students*. But the change has changed the balance a bit between different groups of students. For me, the change would have been highly negative (were I still a student) as I like to ask a lot of questions. That is harder to do remotely. But some students would rather study on their own and the provided materials are adequate for their need.
Some things are clearly harder. Exam proctoring, for example, has become difficult to impossible. Changing the nature of student evaluation is probably necessary, but the time frame has been too short for that to be developed and tested.
Giving individual feedback to students has become harder also. I used to be able to write short notes on student's paper assignments. But exchanging paper has become difficult to impossible and electronic equivalents are, at best, awkward.
But the biggest factor is probably that it is new for everyone. It isn't that we have two highly developed "modes" of course delivery that everyone understands so that we just flip a switch to go from one to the other. Everyone is struggling, instructors included.
But, we are unlikely to go back to the original system as economic factors start to intrude. If it is cheaper to deliver online, since a lot of the cost gets pushed to students, then those responsible for institutional costs will start to find that advantageous.
At the moment (early 2022) we are still struggling. A number of news stories recently suggest that students are unhappy, both with online teaching and with being forced to meet in person in uncertain times.
Upvotes: 1 <issue_comment>username_2: Pass rates for MOOCs (high enrollment online courses) are usually [less than 10%](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Ebner-3/publication/306127713_MOOCs_completion_rates_and_possible_methods_to_improve_retention-A_literature_review/links/57bb349c08aefea8f0f44ce9/MOOCs-completion-rates-and-possible-methods-to-improve-retention-A-literature-review.pdf). This was well known before the pandemic. The best MOOCs have lower pass rates than mediocre in-person classes.
Online courses have objectively inferior effectiveness. There is no reason to think that cannot be changed.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_3: I don't believe there is much research done on this, though some research definitely has "concluded" that the MOOCs courses were unsuccessful.
My own take on the matter is this, and it is backed by some personal experience and student feedback:
* When done with sufficient care, online learning is **way more effective**, pedagogically, than traditional lecture-centered face-to-face learning. Students can go back and forth in their own preferred pace to understand thoroughly what the lecturer says.
* It is a fact that many (20%?) students (and people) simply cannot grasp notions and arguments from *live* lectures. While they can grasp it if they have control over the speed and can freeze the lecture.
* Online lectures tend to be better structured, because the focus is on mere educational communication, and so teachers must work harder on the content, and cannot rely on spontaneous interaction with students.
* Interaction with students is in fact better many times: you have a chat, and students can ask questions in a clear way, and not live in front of the whole cohort. This gives many students much better interaction with the lecturer.
The only BIG *disadvantage* of online lectures I see, is not the lectures themselves, pedagogically, but the **psychology** of sitting at home isolated from spontaneous interaction with peers and staff. This **psychosocial** deficiency detracts severely from the teaching experience, and students motivation and hence students engagement, and is probably the reason why online learning only programs are not sufficient and cannot replace entirely face-to-face teaching.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/03/31
| 2,110
| 8,706
|
<issue_start>username_0: I earned my B.A. in the U.S. but felt unprepared to go right into a PhD program due to the (extremely) limited math courses offered at my undergrad institution so I went into a masters program. I ended up doing really well (3.9GPA) and gained a lot of confidence and expanded my knowledge. A couple years later I decided I wanted to apply to programs for my PhD. I ended up selecting a foreign university where it is assumed you already possess a masters degree, which originally I though was great since it saved me a couple years of additional schooling that I though would be redundant. Now that I am about 6 months in however I am seriously questioning the quality of the master's program I was part of. It seems that others in the program are much more advanced than I am and I seem to struggle with everything, which is a brand new experience for me. I spend hours and hours spinning my wheels reading and trying to understand papers, feeling like I just don't know the background I need to. I feel as though after 6 months I have learned nothing and have wasted a lot of time on things that ultimately never became clear before I had to move on to the next task. I have somewhat discussed these concerns with my advisor but they seem confident that everything is fine.
I also find that now that I am here the project I am part of is much more applied than I had anticipated and I am unsure about if this will evolve to more closely match my interests over time or if this is just another indication of a poor match.
I am not sure what to do. Is this a normal experience? If it truly is not a fit for me at my current level of knowledge, what are my options?
Any advice is appreciated.
---
EDIT: I have not discussed this as bluntly with my advisor as I am speaking about it here, primarily because it is just over the last couple weeks that it has become much more problematic. I do intend to speak to them about this more explicitly at our next meeting.<issue_comment>username_1: What you have learned, I hope not too late, is that the undergraduate program in many places (Europe...) is very different from that in the US. The undergrad program in the US is a generalist degree, not one of high specialization as it is other places. Your description of your own undergraduate program may be unfair, for the US, but programs just don't compare in the degree of specialization.
But what you can do is find someone on the local faculty that you trust and ask them for advice on finding a successful path. Review what you have studied (and know well) and get advice on what steps you can take to fill in any gaps. You will need not just the advice of some local faculty but their support as well. You don't want to get left behind and then ignored by the faculty.
But all is not lost. Mathematics is a very balkanized field. You can be an expert in some small area while having little insight into other areas. One problem will be the likely need to pass some comprehensive exams to earn a doctorate, but even those cover only a few areas. And if you can be successful in the short term in a subfield, then you will be able to broaden your knowledge later as you please.
Mathematics is broad, but most mathematicians are quite narrow.
---
Personal note: I had good insight into Real Analysis and General Topology. I struggled with many parts of Algebra and even Algebraic Topology.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: The fact that your adviser thinks you're doing fine, in particular, suggests to me that you may be dealing with some impostor syndrome.
I think when most of us start out in PhD programs, we feel like everyone around us is doing much better. Like *they* all belong here, but we don't. This is usually accompanied with a feeling of "I had better keep my head down and stay quiet, so no one notices I don't belong here and kicks me out."
You don't say much about your conversation with your adviser. Hopefully it was an honest conversation about why you're concerned. As long as it was, consider trusting that they know what normal looks like. You might also want to talk with some of your classmates more - you may be surprised to find that the ones who seem to be endlessly more successful than you are feeling identically.
PhD work is usually a whole new level of difficult, so it's not necessarily a warning sign that you feel like you have to study for hours to get anywhere.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: **I agree that you may be suffering from [Imposter syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome).** That is, reading your post I see no evidence that you aren't prepared, and in fact, I see several pieces of evidence that you *are* prepared. Despite your accomplishments, you are underconfident and do not realize that many of your peers are going through the same struggles as you are; you see these as failures when they are perfectly normal even for someone with a high level of preparation.
>
> I went into a masters program. I ended up doing really well (3.9GPA) and gained a lot of confidence and expanded my knowledge.
>
>
>
This is a good sign that you are a strong candidate, and well-fit for a PhD.
>
> I ended up selecting a foreign university
>
>
>
Not only did you select it, the admissions committee selected you. Admissions committees are usually very good at what they do, and they will not admit a candidate who they believe is underprepared. They are aware of your background, including the master's program you went through, and they believe you are an ideal candidate for their program.
>
> Now that I am about 6 months in however I am seriously questioning the quality of the master's program I was part of.
>
>
>
Different programs do vary in what material they cover, but the *far* more important factor in a PhD is not your specific set of knowledge, but your ability to learn, your ability to deal with unfamiliar material, and your motivation, creativity, and insight. It is possible your master's program didn't cover some things that others' covered; but it is also possible you are imagining at least part of it. Regardless, you shouldn't be surprised if it takes a lot of difficult work to learn all the new material!
>
> I spend hours and hours spinning my wheels reading and trying to understand papers, feeling like I just don't know the background I need to.
>
>
>
This is what doing a PhD is like for everyone. The reality of academic life is that you often are thrust into new areas that you have no experience in; you have to learn to swim over and over again, every time you take a new class, every time you start working on a new research problem. Contrary to what you think, this doesn't sound like a red flag that you are underprepared.
>
> I have somewhat discussed these concerns with my advisor but they seem confident that everything is fine.
>
>
>
This is the biggest sign (to me) that you have imposter syndrome: your advisor is still confident in your progress, but you aren't. Your advisor has seen a lot of students and they should be able to tell better than you about the situation.
>
> I also find that now that I am here the project I am part of is much more applied than I had anticipated and I am unsure about if this will evolve to more closely match my interests over time or if this is just another indication of a poor match.
>
>
>
I am not sure how this could be an indication of poor match. You should talk to your advisor about this, though; your interests are important. See if you can figure out what aspects of the project you would be more interested in pursuing (maybe the less applied aspects). Recognize that it is common for people who join a new program, working on learning new ideas, to feel that everything is unfamiliar and to have a negative reaction to that.
>
> I am not sure what to do. Is this a normal experience?
>
>
>
Yes, it is normal: I have heard the same things from many very strong students.
>
> If it truly is not a fit for me at my current level of knowledge, what are my options?
>
>
>
You have been admitted, your advisor is confident you are doing well, and you have a strong background, so reconsider why you think it is not a fit. If there are things you are not prepared for, then you should consider taking the time to slow down, relax, and learn those things. It may take some time; don't worry.
Also, take some time for yourself. Make sure to look for a social group that you can find a sense of belonging in; it makes a world of difference. Consider seeing a therapist to discuss your fears of not belonging and not being ready.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
|
2020/03/31
| 837
| 3,818
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently working on an engineering problem for which I have developed a new and quite effective solution. My research field is electronics (if that matters).
The problem is quite complex as it revolves about using a single circuit configuration for multiple voltage ranges (conversion of ac voltage to high dc voltage). State-of-the-art circuits offer unacceptable performance for input voltage range A and reasonable performance for input voltage range B.
My solution offers reasonable performance for voltage range A but the performance for voltage range B is slightly worse than state-of-the-art.
Since the problem can be broken to two individual parts (low voltage range and high voltage range), I plan to publish the first part on its own (e.g., novel high voltage step-up converter). However, I am debating how to publish the second part that on its own does not offer better performance than state-of-the-art. I have spent half a year developing, evaluating, and optimizing the circuit and I believe the engineering society would benefit from this work.
I am thinking along the lines of "Analysis and optimization of ...".<issue_comment>username_1: Perhaps it would result in a paper that is too long to publish, but you might consider, at least, putting the two results into the same paper and giving an analysis of each case.
Show how and why it works for one range, but, in a later section, show why it fails to work for the other.
The overall suggestion here is that the analysis of the result and the possible insight it might bring to the general case is more important than each result individually. That is the perspective of a mathematician, anyway. The insight of the analysis/proof is more important than the theorem itself.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: >
> However, I am debating how to publish the second part that on its own does not offer better performance than state-of-the-art. I have spent half a year developing, evaluating, and optimizing the circuit and **I believe the engineering society would benefit from this work.**
>
>
>
(emphasis added)
Why do you believe the engineering society would benefit from it? What does it offer over the existing approaches? If you can answer that question then you know how you should proceed with writing a paper for this second part.
You seem set on defeating the state-of-the-art performance by a particular metric, but this is not the only way to publish. You can pick your own metric to evaluate; you can even say that you do not perform as well, but your approach is novel because of X, Y, and Z. Perhaps you are the first to apply a certain technique in this domain, and you show that the technique is promising because it achieves almost as good performance as the state of the art. Or perhaps you can argue the the problem you are solving is more difficult or more general.
There are lots of ways to pitch a research contribution, not necessarily just based on evaluating the performance of your method. The success of publishing the work will depend on how well you can convince others that the work is interesting.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Why split the result into two papers since they are obviously quite closely related? It seems like salami-slicing and makes both papers weaker than they would otherwise be together. If it would be overlong to pack both voltage ranges into a single paper, you might consider putting the "worse than state of the art" range in the Supplemental Material, stating that the design gives acceptable performance in range B (since you say the results are only slightly below state-of-the-art) with the added benefit of a wider operating range. Getting a single paper out of 6 months work is already pretty good!
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/04/01
| 1,316
| 5,585
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am currently out of academia but I would like to return to university and start as a
postdoc.
It is more than 5 years ago when I finished my PhD in mathematics (algebraic geometry)
at a very weak British university. Despite my efforts, I was not able to find a postdoc
position. From the beginning of my PhD, I did not like my research. Furthermore, the area
my PhD thesis belongs to is quite isolated. I made one publication in a journal which
is rather at a medium level.
Now I have a very interesting research topic I can work on together with another
professor, but in a completely different field. It lies in the area of mathematical
physics. I must add that there is no financial support for this project, so
I have to invest a lot of my personal time into it. My questions are:
Does it make sense to start working on my research topic and later at some point
(for example, when I have enough results with one publication) start to apply for a
postdoc position?
Is it reallistic to get a postdoc position a few years after the PhD but with a research
topic different from the PhD thesis?
I am concerned because of the folllowing things: my main concern is my age. I am nearly
40 years old. There are universities which take this issue into consideration although
officially they would never admit it. In particular, German universities do so. Secondly,
my PhD degree from a weak university does not favor an application for postdoc positions
not to mention a permanent position. Thirdly, I expect that universities will reject
postdocs who have such a big gap in their CV.
Here is some background: I did my undergraduate degree in Germany with an excellent grade.
Unfortunately, I could not find a PhD position in Germany, so I applied to some British
universities. At that time, I did not know that the British university system is
completely different from the German one. So it happened, that I arrived at a weak
university. I was not able to leave it because I could not get any recommendation letters
to start new applications. Although my PhD advisor knew that I do not fit into this
university he did not warn me. Moreover, he was telling me a lot of lies to make me stay
there. It was unbearable. I would have left this university if I could.
After my PhD, he did not help me to find a postdoc position. The only thing that he
did was telling me that there are no postdoc positions and that students who graduated
from strong universities like Cambridge have better chances on the academic market.
This was very frustrating.
I applied to many universities, even outside Europe but not a single application was
successful. Even my applications for different kinds of fellowships failed. It was very
difficult (and still is) for me to figure out what are the important things for a
succesfull application for someone who is in my situation.
Any advice is welcome.<issue_comment>username_1: Perhaps it would result in a paper that is too long to publish, but you might consider, at least, putting the two results into the same paper and giving an analysis of each case.
Show how and why it works for one range, but, in a later section, show why it fails to work for the other.
The overall suggestion here is that the analysis of the result and the possible insight it might bring to the general case is more important than each result individually. That is the perspective of a mathematician, anyway. The insight of the analysis/proof is more important than the theorem itself.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: >
> However, I am debating how to publish the second part that on its own does not offer better performance than state-of-the-art. I have spent half a year developing, evaluating, and optimizing the circuit and **I believe the engineering society would benefit from this work.**
>
>
>
(emphasis added)
Why do you believe the engineering society would benefit from it? What does it offer over the existing approaches? If you can answer that question then you know how you should proceed with writing a paper for this second part.
You seem set on defeating the state-of-the-art performance by a particular metric, but this is not the only way to publish. You can pick your own metric to evaluate; you can even say that you do not perform as well, but your approach is novel because of X, Y, and Z. Perhaps you are the first to apply a certain technique in this domain, and you show that the technique is promising because it achieves almost as good performance as the state of the art. Or perhaps you can argue the the problem you are solving is more difficult or more general.
There are lots of ways to pitch a research contribution, not necessarily just based on evaluating the performance of your method. The success of publishing the work will depend on how well you can convince others that the work is interesting.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: Why split the result into two papers since they are obviously quite closely related? It seems like salami-slicing and makes both papers weaker than they would otherwise be together. If it would be overlong to pack both voltage ranges into a single paper, you might consider putting the "worse than state of the art" range in the Supplemental Material, stating that the design gives acceptable performance in range B (since you say the results are only slightly below state-of-the-art) with the added benefit of a wider operating range. Getting a single paper out of 6 months work is already pretty good!
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/04/01
| 812
| 3,536
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am currently an undergraduate student, and looking to apply to grad schools in the future. In response to COVID-19, my school is offering the ability between choosing the letter grade earned to appear on the transcript, or a pass if you earned over a C, for each individual class.
I'm wondering if choosing the pass option for one of my classes would reflect poorly on grad school applications. The class in question is a not a major or graduation requirement, and it is 4 credits, so taking a B or lower would hurt my GPA.
Thank you!<issue_comment>username_1: >
> The class in question is a not a major or graduation requirement
>
>
>
Assuming you want to go to graduate school in a topic closely related to your major, taking one unrelated course pass/fail will not matter under normal circumstances. It will matter even less because everybody knows students are being encouraged to take classes pass/fail during the pandemic.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: If you're planning to apply to graduate school in the next year or two and already have any ideas of prospective advisors you'd like to work with, I'd recommend reaching out to them by email to introduce yourself, tell them why you'd like to work with them, and ask whether they have any idea yet about how they will weight this when considering applicants. This has a few advantage:
1. Depending on the field and program you're entering, acceptance into graduate programs can be much more a matter of an individual professor deciding to take you on as their student than any formal institutional views.
2. As such, you should absolutely be getting in touch with potential advisors before applying anyway--many professors don't even consider students who haven't reached out in advance before submitting an application.
3. It's never too early to get in touch, and showing that you're considering this well in advance and are eager enough to work with someone that you're reaching out to them now will reflect well and increase the chances that they'll consider your application more favorably (assuming it's solid) once you do apply.
If you don't know who you'd like to work with but have any ideas about schools you're interested in, you can also email their graduate advisor or dean of grad studies or whatever the person in that role is called there (although again, depending on the field and your career goals, you might want to pay more attention to individual advisors than schools).
With all the above as a disclaimer that the impacts of a P/NP grade will be highly variable and depend on individual schools and advisors... I'll also just say that many, MANY schools are now switching to P/NP options, so you will be far from alone in having a P or two on your transcript from this semester. I have a feeling most professors won't have much choice but to allow for this unless they want to discount pretty much all their applicants for the next few years. Also, to be blunt, an advisor/program that penalizes you for struggling or choosing your mental health over your grades this semester is probably an advisor/program to avoid. Especially if you're saying that a B would bring your GPA down, you can do better than that.
Finally, I don't know your school's specific policy, but many are allowing you to switch from letter grades to P/NP right up until the end of the semester. So you might be able to wait and reevaluate your options after seeing how your grade is doing closer to the deadline. Good luck!
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/04/01
| 1,071
| 4,877
|
<issue_start>username_0: I am a graduate student in statistics at a Canadian University and I have a desktop computer in my office which has software installed that I have used for my research. The software is proprietary and the license is for a local machine so I can not access it remotely (via ssh or otherwise).
Due to the current situation with COVID-19, I am working from home. I am able to conduct most of my research using open source software (such as python and R) however I would also like to use some of the software which I had access to on my desktop in order to complete my research since I had code that was working on the proprietary software. I would save a substantial amount of time by running existing code compared to rewriting it in another language.
Unfortunately I can not access the software on my desktop remotely due to licensing issues and I do not want to visit the university since the government has asked us to practice social distancing and the University has also requested that only essential personnel be present in the interest of the safety of the general public.
Therefore I was wondering whether there were any scholarships or bursaries available specifically for students who would like to use scientific software for their research (in Canada or in North America in general)?
I understand that research and education requires sacrifice and I might end up asking my supervisor to help me out with buying a license and I also understand that a lot of software is available at a discounted price for students (however the student price is still non-trivial). Before I try these options however I was wondering whether the community might be aware of some resources for scholarships or bursaries specifically for software that I could apply for?
Moderators, if this is off-topic, please direct me to the relevant stack exchange so I can post my question there.<issue_comment>username_1: >
> The class in question is a not a major or graduation requirement
>
>
>
Assuming you want to go to graduate school in a topic closely related to your major, taking one unrelated course pass/fail will not matter under normal circumstances. It will matter even less because everybody knows students are being encouraged to take classes pass/fail during the pandemic.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: If you're planning to apply to graduate school in the next year or two and already have any ideas of prospective advisors you'd like to work with, I'd recommend reaching out to them by email to introduce yourself, tell them why you'd like to work with them, and ask whether they have any idea yet about how they will weight this when considering applicants. This has a few advantage:
1. Depending on the field and program you're entering, acceptance into graduate programs can be much more a matter of an individual professor deciding to take you on as their student than any formal institutional views.
2. As such, you should absolutely be getting in touch with potential advisors before applying anyway--many professors don't even consider students who haven't reached out in advance before submitting an application.
3. It's never too early to get in touch, and showing that you're considering this well in advance and are eager enough to work with someone that you're reaching out to them now will reflect well and increase the chances that they'll consider your application more favorably (assuming it's solid) once you do apply.
If you don't know who you'd like to work with but have any ideas about schools you're interested in, you can also email their graduate advisor or dean of grad studies or whatever the person in that role is called there (although again, depending on the field and your career goals, you might want to pay more attention to individual advisors than schools).
With all the above as a disclaimer that the impacts of a P/NP grade will be highly variable and depend on individual schools and advisors... I'll also just say that many, MANY schools are now switching to P/NP options, so you will be far from alone in having a P or two on your transcript from this semester. I have a feeling most professors won't have much choice but to allow for this unless they want to discount pretty much all their applicants for the next few years. Also, to be blunt, an advisor/program that penalizes you for struggling or choosing your mental health over your grades this semester is probably an advisor/program to avoid. Especially if you're saying that a B would bring your GPA down, you can do better than that.
Finally, I don't know your school's specific policy, but many are allowing you to switch from letter grades to P/NP right up until the end of the semester. So you might be able to wait and reevaluate your options after seeing how your grade is doing closer to the deadline. Good luck!
Upvotes: 0
|
2020/04/01
| 539
| 2,250
|
<issue_start>username_0: Several years ago an academic publisher I worked for were setting up a new journal. We approached the prospective editor-in-chief, lined up some plans for the first issues, signed a contract, and paid him the first installment of his honorarium. Then he ceased being contactable. We knew he's still alive & active because he was writing papers, supervising students and attending conferences, but he didn't answer our emails and phone calls.
If we had chosen to pursue the matter then, should we have taken it up with his department/university/research institute, or with the police?
If it matters, the prospective editor-in-chief is from India.<issue_comment>username_1: What do you hope to achieve by contacting his current institution, which does not have any skin in this dispute? As you describe it, this person is doing well at his current place of employment so it seems unlikely admin there would get involved.
Somehow, I cannot imagine that the police would treat this with significant priority now.
A better alternative might be to work through the publisher. I presume this publisher may have formal or informal communication channels with other publishers, and thus might be able to organize some sort of pressure campaign through collective action (*v.g* ban on publication of papers by this person, or this person is not allowed on editorial boards of journals, etc).
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer...
This sounds like a contract dispute: whether the editor has discharged his side of the agreement. As such it is likely to be a civil matter rather than a criminal one. I very much doubt the police will be interested in pursuing anything. In general terms, the legal recourse would be to sue the editor in the civil courts. I suspect that the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits.
Could you report it to the editor's university? Yes. However, it isn't clear what this would achieve. As @username_1 says, they (apparently) have no involvement in the dispute so far. From their perspective it will be your word against the editor's; even if they wanted to resolve the dispute, it is not clear how they would go about doing so.
Upvotes: 5 [selected_answer]
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2020/04/02
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<issue_start>username_0: My friend who is a senior lecturer says it is wrong to submit a paper with acknowledgements and you should add them once the paper is accepted, not to interfere with the review process. Is this correct?<issue_comment>username_1: >
> Is it fine to submit a paper with acknowledgements in it?
>
>
>
There are two possibilities:
* If the review is double-blind, then **no** -- you should remove the acknowledgements section prior to submission. This is because usually, this section would reveal something about the author's identities. See [here](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9476/add-acknowledgments-and-self-citations-to-paper-only-after-the-blind-review?noredirect=1&lq=1) for why it is OK to not acknowledge grants/funding at this stage.
* If the review is not double-blind, then **it doesn't really matter.** However, personally I would wait until after review to add acknowledgements, because one of the people I would always thank is the reviewers. It would be strange to submit the paper to review with
>
> we thank the reviewers for their helpful comments
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>
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when they have not actually written those comments yet! If worried about space limitations (as in the thread [here](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49231/at-what-stage-should-acknowledgements-be-inserted-into-the-paper-if-review-is-no)), then you can write the acknowledgements, but comment them out prior to submission.
>
> My friend who is a senior lecturer says it is wrong to submit a paper with acknowledgements and you should add them once the paper is accepted, not to interfere with the review process. Is this correct?
>
>
>
Overall, I agree this is correct. But it is not a serious matter, and different people may have different ideas about this.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]<issue_comment>username_2: Read the author's guidelines of the journal. I know this may be different for different fields but I have seen journals specifically instruct that you have to mention funding source at the end of the paper, in the acknowledgment section. So, it's better you check the guidelines first. If the journal is double-blind, it will instruct accordingly.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_3: >
> Is it fine to submit a paper with acknowledgements in it?
>
>
>
Your acknowledgements may signal favor/support/etc. from those acknowledged, which could influence reviewers. Any such influence is avoided by omitting acknowledgements until after review.
Even when acknowledgements have no such influence, some reviewers may perceive their inclusion as an attempt to bias the reviewing process, which works against you.
That's perhaps why *a senior lecturer says it is wrong to submit a paper with acknowledgements*.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/04/02
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<issue_start>username_0: To prepare the lecture material. I use the book, my own slides, but I also take a few slides from MIT or other top universities open courses.
What is the best way to give credit?
I must provide source information on each slide?
Or Is it better to enlist all the resources/citations in the first/final slide?<issue_comment>username_1: >
> What is the best way to give credit?
>
>
>
Apply the same rules you'd use for slides presented at an academic event. Personally, I'd include source information in a footnote on each slide.
Upvotes: 0 <issue_comment>username_2: Do you include the slides verbatim (e.g., by copying a pdf or image into your slides), or do you just base your slides on those other slides in the same way in which you might base them on a textbook?
In the first case, I think that a note on that slide (on the first slide, if you copy several slides in a row) is mandatory – probably not only a reference, but a copyright notice.
In the second case, I'd include the reference in a bibliography section, like for other journal papers or textbooks that you base your slides on. If I can avoid it, I prefer not to clutter every slide with details that are irrelevant for understanding the content.
Upvotes: 2
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2020/04/02
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<issue_start>username_0: So, I have applied to a Research Assistantship based Master's at a Canadian University. I have offers pending from other universities and would like to ask the professor if I am being considered. This is the email I wrote:
>
> I hope you are safe and doing great.
>
>
> Currently, I have received a few offers from other institutions. Their acceptance deadlines are beyond April and expect the first round of admission results of (*your University*) will be announced soon. I am taking courses on Power Electronics, Sensors and Motors (offered on Coursera). I found the interactive online learning quite helpful and once again thank you for suggesting me the courses a few months ago.
>
>
> Just checking in to see how you are doing and what admissions timeline I can expect.""""
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>
>
Is this an appropriate email?<issue_comment>username_1: The email is perfectly appropriate and not offensive. However it is a bit confusing and the clarity can be improved.
Specifically, your email does not **clearly highlight the question your asking** and it is **easy to ignore or misunderstand the purpose (why you are writing)** because there is a lot of other stuff in it. That other stuff is definitely good to include (I think the professor may like to hear it!), but your question gets lost in all the other text, especially on a quick glance.
Here is some advice on how to make your question stand out more clearly:
1. **Put your question as early as possible in the email.**
2. **Make sure that there is a question mark after your question.** This actually makes a bigger difference than you might think.
Therefore, below is my suggested edit to your email.
>
> I hope you are safe and doing great.
>
>
> I am checking in to ask: do you think I might still be considered for admission to your group? What is the expected timeline?
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>
> I ask because I have received a few offers from other institutions. Their acceptance deadlines are beyond April and expect the first round of admission results of (*your University*) will be announced soon.
>
>
> Also, I found the interactive online learning quite helpful and once again thank you for suggesting me the courses a few months ago! I am taking courses on Power Electronics, Sensors and Motors (offered on Coursera by University of Colorado Boulder).
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>
> Best regards,
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> [your name]
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>
>
---
By the way, your post here has the same problem as your email :) You wanted to ask, "Is this an appropriate email?" but your question was hidden because there was no question mark. I edited your post to make it stand out more -- do you see how it makes a difference? When glancing at your post, now I can clearly see your question.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: Given that you prefer an offer from them to all others, I suggest the following.
First, the opening and closing remarks are a bit trite unless you know this person already. You aren't writing to a friend, so keep it professional. I sometimes use "Stay safe" as a closing salutation now days, but nothing else.
But the important point is to leave out most of the detail.
>
> I'm juggling some other offers now, but would very much prefer to accept one from you and would accept it if offered before I need to make a final decision. I wonder if I could have some decision from you by June 1. Also, thank you for the advice on things to do now. I'm following up on those and find them helpful.
>
>
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That is really all you need. The date you give should be the drop-dead date for the other decisions.
Upvotes: 3 [selected_answer]
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2020/04/02
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<issue_start>username_0: I am currently a master student working in robotics. In my research project, I have been building up a systematic framework for my research problem. I have collected a dataset in the process and experiment with it using some advanced algorithms I have proposed. And the paper 1 I have written address in detail how those advanced algorithms are defined and come in handy, while addressing the framework in less detail (more details are focused on the algorithms, making the scope of paper really large already. Only a simple logic procedure of the framework is briefly discussed). The first paper's already submitted in a computer science conference & is under review.
Then after some experiments, I have realized that, the systematic framework I have applied in Paper 1 can be a more generic framework, applying to different scenarios for different application purposes. In this case, the experiment I have in Paper 1 with the advanced algorithms can be seen as a complex extension to this generic framework & the advanced algorithms I have used for paper 1 experiments can be adapted or even simplified to better suit the framework. I have written another Paper 2 discussing this generality aspect of the framework, with the simplified yet slightly different experimental setting as a case study for the framework. A portion of the dataset originally proposed with Paper 1 is used. I have also discussed in depth how the generic framework can be applied for a completely different scenario, but I did not have the case study for it at the moment.
Also, while paper 1's still under review, I have submitted an ArXiv preprint. All similarities in paper 2 compared to paper 1 are properly cited, noted and discussed if necessary, when writing paper 2.
So the question is, is it OK to have this paper 2 submitted to another conference (an automation conference vs. the previous cs one) for review? Is paper 2 considered to be an "unethical salami slicing"?
Thank you!<issue_comment>username_1: I'll guess that you are fine submitting the second paper, but I haven't seen them both.
But you can do a *thought experiment* and come to a better understanding and decision for yourself.
Imagine that the second paper has an author or list of authors not containing yourself: that it was written by others. What would your reaction be if you were a reviewer of that second paper. Does this paper stand on its own or is it a trivial extension/variation of the first paper? If an honest review suggest that this is sufficiently *novel* or distinguishable from the first then it is fine to publish - assuming quality, of course.
There are lots of things in research that depend on the same basis, such as a model created for one purpose with implications elsewhere. At one extreme, when CERN runs a giant experiment on the collider if there were only one paper produced it would need to be thousands of pages long to include even the implications noticed at the time. You aren't at that scale, of course, but your framework is sufficiently complex that it would be hard or impossible to completely explore it in a single paper of reasonable length. And the variations possible also imply that the different aspects should be meaningful to different subsets of the scientific community.
And, of course, the actual reviewers of the second paper will make a judgement.
Upvotes: 2 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Is it unethical writing two papers addressing two aspects of the same research project
>
>
>
Not necessarily. However, the following would be unethical:
* Submitting two papers with any overlapping material *without one citing the other and explaining the parts that overlap* (giving credit to where the idea was originally proposed)
* Submitting essentially the same idea to two different venues *at the same time* (farming to see if one of them gets accepted)
* Submitting two papers with exactly the same idea, *but making it sound like they are two different ideas*
Basically the rule of thumb here is: **be honest.** It is fine to split an idea across multiple papers; my advisor has suggested doing this a few times, and it's worked out well. But if you are doing anything to mislead the reviewers, then you have a problem of misconduct.
>
> I have realized that, the systematic framework I have applied in Paper 1 can be a more generic framework, applying to different scenarios for different application purposes...I have written another Paper 2 discussing this generality aspect of the framework, with the simplified yet slightly different experimental setting as a case study for the framework.
>
>
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Congratulations on this realization!
This sounds like a significant advancement over your Paper 1, and it constitutes research progress. So there is no ethical issue with writing the second paper.
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> Also, while paper 1's still under review, I have submitted an ArXiv preprint. All similarities in paper 2 compared to paper 1 are properly cited, noted and discussed if necessary, when writing paper 2.
>
>
>
Great! It sounds like you have already taken the right steps here.
>
> So the question is, is it OK to have this paper 2 submitted to another conference (an automation conference vs. the previous cs one) for review? Is paper 2 considered to be an "unethical salami slicing"?
>
>
>
It is OK, since you have cited paper 1 and made it clear this builds on it. Now, it is up to the reviewers to decide whether it is too much overlap to be novel. You may find that the reviewers love the idea, or maybe they will say it's not clear to them how it is an advancement over paper 1. Either way, it is perfectly ethical to submit and see what they think, assuming you have been honest and professional.
---
**For comparison, here are some examples of ethical behavior** (roughly taken from experience):
* We have a new idea, which we write up in Paper A and submit as an invited contribution. At the same time, we are working on an application that uses the idea from A, and in order to make the paper self-contained we need to explain some things about that idea. We write Paper B which applies the idea, **and we put Paper A on arXiv and cite it in Paper B.** Paper B has a section on the new idea and explains clearly that this idea was originally proposed in Paper A.
* We have a paper which is too long and needs better motivation, so we decide to split it into two papers instead as part of the paper is not really helping the reviewers like it anyway. We write Paper A which basically contains the bulk of the original paper minus one section which studies a particular theoretical aspect. Then we write Paper B which studies the theoretical aspect. **We rephrase Paper B to only contain the parts that were specific to that aspect, and remove parts related to Paper A, so that the papers no longer have any overlap.**
Upvotes: 4
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2020/04/02
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<issue_start>username_0: Twice now, I've read a paper written by a prominent researcher and some other "younger" researchers, e.g. instead of being superstars they're merely professors, I guess. In the text, he is referred to as the "senior author", e.g. in sentences that read like "In [4], the senior proved this result which is relevant to us because..."
I was a bit shocked, to be honest, essentially because I had never seen something like this in (pure) mathematics. In my mind there was always the implicit assumption that all others contributed approximately equally to the paper, which explained the alphabetical ordering of authors in (almost) all papers.
How common is this? Have you seen this before, and if so, how often?<issue_comment>username_1: I'll guess that this is pretty uncommon, but the situation itself is a bit uncommon. Perhaps it is just that the senior professor is mentor to all of the others and they want to honor the person. It may well be that one person produces a key result that the others then explore, develop, and they put it all together.
I did something similar (maybe even more rare) in my doctoral work. For one of the key theorems, the thesis and later publication, contains a proof by my advisor. I had an alternate proof, but his was more interesting and had potential for new insights into the field. My proof was more pedestrian. So, while I was actually sole author, his proof is contained in the paper and credited there to him.
But, I think you are correct. In pure math, a paper with several authors has a basic assumption that all contributed in such a way that it is impossible to rank who contributed "more" than others and so authors are listed alphabetically. Even if one person has an idea "first", others can be key to the exploration and development of the idea. Even "small" insights can have a big effect. It saves a tremendous amount of grief. I've been told that in applied math, different standards apply.
But honoring special contributions is also fine when it happens.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_2: >
> Is it common to make seniority distinctions between coauthors of a paper in math?
>
>
>
This is uncommon. However it seems less unusual to refer to something one of the authors did, e.g.:
>
> In a previous result [2] by one of the authors, it is shown that ...
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or:
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> This builds on prior work of the first author [3], namely, ...
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As <NAME> says in the comments, I would assume that this is just a way to refer to one of the authors, similar to the above statements. That is, this is **not** a way to imply that they are more important, or contributed more to the paper. (If anything I would assume the senior author contributed a little less :) ) It may be a small gesture of respect, formality, or acknowledgement to the mentor of the work, but nothing more.
>
> In my mind there was always the implicit assumption that all others contributed approximately equally to the paper
>
>
>
Yes, this is indeed the implicit assumption. Moreover, referring to an author as the "senior" author does not really contradict this.
Upvotes: 3 <issue_comment>username_3: It seems rather unusual, and I consider it bad style to use a descriptor that readers will not be able to figure out unless they consult the list of references. (With "first author" you can at least get a reminder by looking at the running header.) It is, of course, possible that the first author is indeed the senior author, and in the context of the journal that might be an acceptable synonym.
Upvotes: 2
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