id
stringlengths 1
7
| text
stringlengths 59
10.4M
| source
stringclasses 1
value | added
stringdate 2025-03-12 15:57:16
2025-03-21 13:25:00
| created
timestamp[s]date 2008-09-06 22:17:14
2024-12-31 23:58:17
| metadata
dict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
83248 | How often do funding agencies require funded authors to publish their work in open access venues?
Some funding agencies such as the Gates Foundation require funded authors to publish their work in open access venues.
Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify the percentage of funding agencies that require funded authors to publish their work in open access venues.
I am interested in any data that could share some light on that question, e.g. historical trends or weighting by funding agency size.
For example,
The RoMEO Journals database contains thousands of journals, labeled with their archiving policy (preprint/postprint/publisher's version):
One could imagine a similar database for funding agencies with paper access policies.
SHERPA, which produces RoMEO, also produces a database on funders' open access policies, called SHERPA/JULIET. There is a statistics page on the JULIET website.
According to this page, 26% of funders worldwide require publication in an open access venue, 30% encourage this, and 41% have no policy.
When it comes to archiving the publication in an open access repository, 68% of funders require this, 12% encourage, and 17% have no policy.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.711695 | 2017-01-14T17:34:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/83248",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
82125 | Is deferred enrollment normal or acceptable to graduate programs? What are the acceptable reasons for it?
I am an undergraduate student majoring in computer science. I am currently doing graduate (Master's) program application for top US universities.
However, just now I get a pretty nice research assistant internship which requires me to work for them for one year.
I think I might take a gap year between my undergraduate and graduate study for the internship. But if I am accepted by the university I want to go, can I ask for a defer enrollment? I know I can reapply the next year, but despite the new research experience, my professor might refuse to write me reference letter again , the things might change (more applicants, less slots) and I might not be accepted the next year(I am also wondering will turning down an admission affect my application for the same program the next year). So I am thinking if I can use the defer enrollment to "hold" the admission.
Is taking a research gap year an acceptable reason for defer enrollment? Or generally, what are the acceptable reasons to take a defer enrollment?
Many (but not all) graduate programs will let you defer enrollment for a semester or a year. At the institutions I am familiar with, they did not particularly care about the reason for the deferral; in fact, some of them did not even ask, except in the most general terms, why the student wanted to delay entering the program. People understand that students may have other obligations and things that they want to do, and taking on an internship would be a perfectly normal reason for a deferral.
To find you whether a particular program will let you defer acceptance for a year, you will have to contact the program. However, assuming they allow deferrals, what you are proposing does not sound like it should be a problem.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.711805 | 2016-12-24T05:10:35 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/82125",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
82163 | Other students report that a student faked illness and asked classmates about the final exam before taking a makeup. Is it academic dishonesty?
I am an instructor at an American university. A student of mine, Student H, claimed that he was very sick and had to miss the final exam. Based on my trusting students in general, I allowed Student H to take a make-up exam, which took place about 4 hours after the actual exam finished.
About two days later, soon after I submitted the final grades (student H got an A-), I received emails from a few students (in the same class and in other classes) accusing Student H of deliberately postponing the exam, and asking other students, who took the exam on time, about what was on the exam.
I am attaching the emails below (without revealing any names of the students). I know these students personally and I do not think they would conspire together to make up stories about this.
I responded to them asking them to approach students who were asked, or witnessed someone being asked, by Student H about the exam questions.
Nonetheless, please let me know if you think these emails below would already suffice to accuse Student H of academic dishonesty?
If no, what else do I need? Even if I cannot make a convincing case of academic dishonesty against Student H, should I at least request a change of his grade (to a much lower one)?
I feel many students are angry about Student H's behavior, so I must do something about this.
Thank you very much for helping.
Student 1
Anyway, I just want to say something unfair that I've seen in my
course. Professor, I couldn't understand you giving Student H makeup
tests for several times; he wasn't sick. I kinda expected him going to
take a make-up final, as he had done so far, and it really happened
again on the final. He wasn't sick as far as many students saw him
just a day before and also on the final, but intentionally making dry
coughs while he was with us.
I really wanted you to notice him making lame excuses for getting
make-up quizzes, the midterm, and the final, but you didn't. At least
he had some conscience, he should not ask someone about the
information for the midterm and the final, but he did. Unless he was
that sick so that it was really hard to take the final, it wouldn't be
a real problem. However, he always made excuses like being sick, and
get information from students who already took to get better scores on
tests. He didn't do such things to other professors, but he did in
this course because he knows you were one of our considerate
professors to us.
Many students were mad about it. I hope you deal with this problem
well to resolve students' resentment.
Student 2
Student H, our classmate, kept on making an excuse in order to take
exams late. If he was really sick, I could have understood it, but he
was not sick that much; it seems somehow manageable. I have three
evidences that his excuses were deceitful, and I will explain to you
by chronological order.
First of all, when Student H skipped the first midterm exam, it seemed
like he postponed the exam on purpose. No matter whether he was really
sick or not, he asked others what was on the midterm exam. He should
not have asked those to other students, and this is totally unfair as
well as he is being dishonest.
Second, Student H asked me to postpone the final exam together. I
cannot deny the fact that both of us were sick, due to the flu, but it
was still manageable for both of us -I was not even sure that he was
really sick or acting like he is sick. Since I did not see any point
of delaying the exam, I rejected his suggestion. Aside from this, he
even told me the process of postponding his final exam. He told me
that he did not receive any e-mail response from you, and he even told
me that he tried his best not to meet you in the hallway of the 4th
floor while doing the work-study program so that he can prove that he
is genuinly sick, while not. At this point, he is being dishonest
toward faculty members to postpone the exam.
Lastly, after postponding the exam, he asked other students about the
exam questions, and took the exam. I personally believe asking exam
questions to other students is also committing of an academic
dishonesty.
To summarize, as seen in the delay of two major exams without any
valid reasons, as well as asking exam questions, I believe it can be
enough evidences to prove that Student H committed the academic
dishonesty. Plus, I wish this issue stay between us -make me
anonymous, please.
Student 3
On December 19th, the day before the exam, Student H told me that he
postponed the exam time. He told me that he intentionally postponed it
not because of his sickness. What he intended was if he take the test
late, other students who took early in the morning would tell Student
H about the final. This is not my inference. This is what he told me
directly. I hoped no one would tell him what questions they had in
the final. However, unfortunately, I witnessed Student H talking with
someone who already took the final in the afternoon around 1:00 pm.
I am upset with Student H's behavior. He's behavior makes other
students' efforts come to nothing.
You gave him the same final exam as the rest of the class, even though he took it later???
What reasoning would a student give to only postpone a final exam 4 hours? There should be nothing else academically that would necessitate this.
More information is needed: What Is your position in a department? Do you have the authority to handle these incidents or are you say, a teaching assistant that teaches a course for a professor?
If the name you used for your user handle is your real name, I suggest changing it in order to to anonymize your identity. The combination of using your real name (if that's what you did) and quoting verbatim emails from three of your students, lightly edited to disguise their identities but retaining spelling mistakes and many other details characteristic of their writing, makes me rather uncomfortable and feels pretty inappropriate.
@Ramrod I am not OP, but a schedule conflict with a doctor's appointment would explain the 4-hour miss for me.
If the student is too ill to take an exam, then he or she shouldn't take it 4 hours later. You don't get fine again in only 4 hours. Either the student wasn't ill, or putting himself or herself in danger. Thus have such makeup exams a few days later, not only hours.
There is no way that a student can be "very sick" and be able to take the exam 4 hours later... if the student was really very sick you should have given him a few days "of leave" and give him a completely different exam afterwards.
@Bakuriu I tend to agree, but I misplaced my MD degree, can I borrow yours. We should take such things at face value even if they seem ridiculous. I would rather let 99 students cheat than stigmatize the 1 student with an embarrassing medical condition. Do you really want/need her to prove how bad her flow is.
From the emails, I gather this happened repeatedly with this student taking late exams during the term. Maybe you allow it once; but certainly for more than once, documentation should be required, and especially for the final. Check your school's policies, and follow the relevant procedure for a report or an investigation.
You don't need to reveal your department, and of course, if your username matches your real name, you should change it immediately. Please post a link to your university's academic integrity policy. Without that, we can only give you vague, general advice.
This question smells a little fishy to me. There's something about the uniformity of the content and style of the question and the emails.
Based on the grammar used in the student emails, I certainly hope the class was not for writing English.
@aparente001 Indeed the language of these three emails is very odd!... They sound too polished and not a way anyone would write to his professor on such an issue.
The more I think about it, the more suspect this question looks to me. "I am an instructor of some American university" -- hard to believe that an instructor at a university in the U.S. would describe him or herself this way, even allowing for English not being the person's first language.
The way this question is written, comes across too much like the old "I am prince/princess insert name here from Nigeria, I am contact you for much important fact"...........as in, as other have said, I cannot see an American professor at even the junior college level formulating a question in this format.
Most universities do not just take someone's word for being very sick. They normally ask them to provide reasonable evidences. I think you have too much faith in the humanity which would cause you trouble sooner or later
With the information in Student 2's e-mail as specific as it is, Student 2 is not anonymous. If Student H read this question they would certainly know who Student 2 was! If you've really made no other anonymization effort than hiding the names involved, you need to do more to protect your informants. Really, posting the verbatim text at all rather than just summarizing it is unnecessarily reckless.
Why saying it is an US university when the command of English and your user data points to another direction...We have all been students, and the complaints are only coming after your student got an A.
@BenMillwood Student 3 is not much better: “This is not my inference. This is what he told me directly.”
please let me know if you think these emails below would already suffice to accuse Student H as being academically dishonest?
If no, what else do I need? Even if I cannot make a convincing case of academic dishonesty of Student H, should I at least request a change of his grade (to a much lower one)?
Most American universities have dedicated units for handling cases of academic misconduct. Now, just like if you had strong suspicions and some evidence regarding a crime being committed the right thing to do would be to go to the police and tell them what you know, so it is true here that you have strong suspicions that the student has committed academic misconduct, and therefore you should inform the appropriate office on your campus in charge of handling such misconduct cases of what happened, and share with them the emails from the three students. It is not your job to decide whether the evidence is convincing enough -- let them worry about that. After all, universities have units to handle misconduct cases precisely so that experienced professionals can handle allegations of misconduct in a consistent manner and taking into account all relevant information; for example, for all you know, they might have information about the accused student that you don't know (perhaps they were accused of misconduct in the past or have a history of feigning illnesses to avoid exams).
To summarize, just tell them what you know and let them handle it. You do not need to present this as "accusing" the student of misconduct, simply say that you have information to suggest that they may have committed misconduct, and share the evidence you have.
they may also have information about the accusing students...
They may also say that not asking for a medical certificate has irretrievably messed up the whole situation and that there cannot be proof now that the student wasn't sick (the more so as one of the emails says the student was sick, just not that sick - which is obviously for a medical doctor to decide.
If there's evidence the student was inappropriately soliciting information about the content of the test, it shouldn't matter whether they were really sick.
@user34258: which is a claim even more difficult to prove than sickness. And again, there's only a student saying they believe this is forbidden - whether it is or not depends on the policy of the course/university (over here it is really unusual to forbid speaking about exam questions - some lecturers even encourage it as trying to solve exam questions is excellent excercise.)
Re: "It is not your job to decide whether the evidence is convincing enough -- let them worry about that." Unfortunately, that is not true at all (U.S.) colleges. Where I am, it is indeed up to the instructor to decide and request specific sanctions, gather evidence for it, and interview the student in question (the filing document has a specific yes/no box on whether student confessed when questioned to the violation). The burden of proof and decision-making is on the instructor where I'm at.
@cbeleitesunhappywithSX Exam questions should be fair game. But discussing them with a student who you know is going to take a makeup, which may contain the same questions, sounds like misconduct. Asking other students for information before you take a makeup is definitely misconduct.
@BrianDrake: I guess there's a substantial cultural difference between where we are. Over here, those who were sick typically take their exam together with those who do a reexamination. So "same question" is not a concern. Discussing the exam questions is perfectly fine as soon as the student leaves the exam room after handing in. Asking the same question(s) would be seen as carelessness on the examiner's side.
@cbeleitesunhappywithSX My comment needs to be read in the context of the question, which seems to suggest: (1) The makeup exam uses the same questions as the main exam. (2) The students know this. (3) The student in question tried to use this knowledge to cheat. If, and only if, the students believe (1) is true, then discussing exam questions is misconduct.
I was quite surprised to hear that you allowed
the student to take a make-up final exam
4 hours after the other students took the final exam
In my university,
there is a system for handling cases where a student misses
an examination or in-course assessment
which makes up 20% or more of the total course grade.
A student who is unable to attend an exam
is required to submit a mitigation request through an online system.
When the student claims that the reason for not attending was sickness,
then the student is required to submit evidence
(e.g., a medical certificate from a doctor).
Only after the system approves the student's mitigation request
is the student allowed to take a make-up exam.
Given the delay (about two weeks)
in processing various students' mitigation request,
the teaching team is forced to set a different exam from the original.
I am not sure if such a system exists in your university.
Nevertheless, if you had a more systematic process
for reviewing and approving these mitigation requests
(e.g., require students to submit evidence)
and set a different make-up exam,
that would perhaps have prevented this situation from happening.
I've given the same test later as a make-up several times. I make the students write out and sign a statement affirming that they did not seek out or receive any information about the exam before they take it. I don't suspect (based on their mistakes on the exam) that any of them cheated.
The administrative handling of makeup exams may be trending away? E.g., it was abolished at my institution a year ago.
There are several things wrong with the story. Those emails are hardly sufficient evidence to make a case. Could be one person writing 3 emails.You must report the matter or leave it be. I do not think you lowering his grades is a good idea. What will you lower them to? If you do report it then the identity of the 3 informants will have to be revealed. You say you trust your students but you do not trust H. You, better than anyone else, know whether H was capable of an A or not... It did not amaze you when he got that grade, so obviously it is possible.
Your students know you are a soft spot and so do you. Make-up exams have to be different. I would not want anyone to know that I had given a student the same exam later on and now I think he cheated. Learn from this mistake and move on. In your place, I would just forget the whole matter and profit from someone exposing my weakness. But I am not you, this is your decision to make.
You need to do the following, go and see your line manager. Take with you all the evidence, do not breath a word of this sort of thing to random strangers on the web.
I have had to deal with student cheating twice in my academic life, first as a postdoc and then as a lecturer. The first case was students who colluded wrongly while writing lab reports, an older postdoc advised me to mark the reports as if nothing was wrong. Then to take both reports to the person in charge of the lab course. I showed this person the evidence and allowed this person to choose what to do.
The second time I was more senior, I found two students had done a plagiarism (copy and paste) from Wikipedia. Before acting I went to see my head of department.
My advice is unless you know the policy of the university and what to do next for certainty, go and see your line manager. This will protect you from the possibility of acting out of line with the rest of your university.
The problem is that either way around this story will not end well, at least for someone.
If the emails are true and reasonable then the student accused will be punished.
If the emails are a smear campaign intended to tar the reputation of an innocent student then if it was another student who sent them then this student should be looking at getting a punishment.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.712057 | 2016-12-25T06:47:14 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/82163",
"authors": [
"Alpha Draconis",
"Bakuriu",
"Ben Millwood",
"BioGeo",
"Brian Drake",
"Dan Romik",
"Daniel Jour",
"Daniel R. Collins",
"JoshDM",
"NZKshatriya",
"Ramrod",
"Rui F Ribeiro",
"aparente001",
"cbeleites",
"emory",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/131672",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13200",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28310",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41843",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42654",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/43544",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44252",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44393",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/48776",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5596",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/58207",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/61592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62976",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63231",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"paw88789",
"polfosol",
"svavil",
"user168715"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
96696 | How to submit a manuscript in two parts?
I have a new manuscript to be published in an Elsevier engineering journal that has a maximum limit of 8000 words. I can't fit the content in this space. Fortunately, the manuscript can be easily split into two manuscripts, say A and B. The first will be concerned with assessing the potential of, say, wind energy in country X and the measurements carried out, while the second manuscript B will be focused on simulating wind energy systems. The first manuscript will be independent, but I'll have to refer to it in the second one (although, the second article will be understandable without reading the first manuscript). So, I have the following questions:
Should I split the manuscript, or submit it to another journal with flexible space limitations?
Is it a good idea to do that, based on your experience? (I have read a lot about this, but I want to know what the editors prefer and how they handle this situation)
Most importantly, how do I submit the two manuscripts (to the same journal): at the same time or consecutively?
Speak with the editor. If he likes the idea, he will help you, if he finds out about your scheme by himself, he will be annoyed.
The answer to this is "it depends." Some journals do not approve of "series" of papers, expecting that each submission stands on its own. Others will publish extended series of articles (one such series had at least ten entries). So the question of what to do depends on how appropriate the journal in which you want to publish is for the content you're writing about.
If the journal you're publishing in allows it, then there's no problem submitting two manuscripts at the same time, and that's probably the best way to do it, because the related nature of the two manuscripts is much easier to assess. Waiting to send in the second one doesn't help.
As far as the appropriateness is concerned, my first four papers were published as two pairs of manuscripts, so there's nothing wrong with doing so to keep the length of the individual manuscripts reasonable.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.713400 | 2017-09-30T07:13:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96696",
"authors": [
"Karl",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45983"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
96085 | Is it a good practice to end a mathematical equation with a comma or a period in a scientific article?
I have noticed from different published articles that mathematical equations may or may not be ended by a comma or a period (depending on their position in the text).
Which is the best practice?
Looks like a web search could have solved this.
Very, very relevant
@FedericoPoloni, and as far as I understand one of the goals of SE is that the primary result of a web search will lead to a SE Q&A that addresses the query in question.
@LamarLatrell That was not my understanding; I thought that if a web search leads to, say, a Wikipedia page or some trustworthy reference that directly answers the question, there is no need to duplicate that information with an SE question.
@DavidZ, It's possible I have incorrect information on the matter, but my first thoughts were what if someone edits that Wiki or the webpage dies? (the same reasons why link only answers are frowned upon). Also, it may not affect you but my recent experience of living and working in a country with internet censorship has highlighted how helpful it has been for information to have levels of redundancy.
@LamarLatrell If we want to continue this discussion, I suppose it would be best to do it in chat or to raise the issue on meta so everyone can contribute
@DavidZ, I agree - however, I'd suggest that a meta discussion regarding this topic has probably been repeated on most SE sites (?) - but as for how to find it? No idea... Also, as for how to start a chat, no idea there either (hence further polluting this comment stream with off-topic chat) - sorry all :)
@LamarLatrell Not a problem, I've created a chat room for us in case you'd like to continue the discussion.
@LamarLatrell SE is not here to duplicate information on Wikipedia or similar. SE is here to collate information and to provide personalised answers to specific, personal questions. If it can be answered with a google search, the OP should have done more research.
@Tim, https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/65704/discussion-between-david-z-and-lamar-latrell
Is it a good thing to keep sticking to such rules when it's not necessary? If our ancestors had done that, we would still be speaking some ancient language with extremely complex grammar where besides singular and plural forms for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs there also existed dual, trial, quadral and paucal forms.
@LamarLatrell In any case, there are already several SE pages which answer this question.
@FedericoPoloni, please read and contribute to the chat linked twice above.
One word: style guide for the publication. (I know that's more than one word but this is the academia SE, not the mathematics SE. ;-) ) I'm sure a search of math.stackexchange would find, if not this very question, one very similar.
Tautology 2.3.1 — A mathematical text is, before everything else, a text.
In-line formulas are punctuated as required by the grammar. For displayed formulas there are two conventions: punctuate as required by the grammar; or no punctuation. See if the journal specifies this in their style (most don't). Example
[Jahnke & Emde, Dover Publications]
I wouldn't take a German text as an example to back up your claim: different languages may have different conventions here, and German, in particular, notoriously has different rules than English for comma placement.
@FedericoPoloni You didn't notice that the text was bilingual?
@MrLister No, I didn't, but that makes it even weirder as an example. Mathematical conventions do not translate well among languages (case in point: that decimal comma). It's not like there is a shortage of mathematical texts in English that OP could have used instead...
@FedericoPoloni No, it doesn't make it weirder; on the contrary, it shows that formulas are simply part of the sentence structure, no matter the language.
@MrLister No, it shows that they were treated that way in this example of a bilingual text. There's no reason to assume the convention followed in English is the same as in German, and if they're not then the fact that this uses "," as a decimal separator suggests German conventions are being preferred over English. This is how I've always treated them, but nevertheless I agree with Federico that this is a very poor choice of example to illustrate that.
Also, seeing as there is no comma after following as one would expect in English ("In the following, n signifies. . .") I am even less confident of the value of this particular example.
The practice I'm familiar with is that equations are part of the text, and end with a period if they are the end of the sentence and with a comma or other punctuation mark if the sentence continues and calls for it.
Yes, that's a common approach. In other words, think of offset formulas as if they were part of the regular sentence structure. You will then know how to terminate them: with a period, if they end a sentence; and a comma, a semicolon, or nothing if the sentence continues in some way.
There shouldn't be a comma just because the sentence continues; there should only be a comma if one is required in that position in the sentence.
And, in some cases, there could be other punctuation ... colon, question mark, etc. Whatever is required by the grammar.
@GEdgar : I agree, if $3 = 3$!
Yes it is good practice. You should read the papers of people are well known to be excellent expositors like Serre and his students Atiyah and Grothendieck (who also had quite a few students). They all endorse commas and periods. Perhaps the best guide to mathematical writing is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQyFzzBHlo (Serre). Let me emphasize how authoritative Serre's opinion is: he is easily the most influential mathematician of the postwar period.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.713649 | 2017-09-16T12:34:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96085",
"authors": [
"Chris H",
"Count Iblis",
"David Richerby",
"David Z",
"Eric Towers",
"Federico Poloni",
"GEdgar",
"Lamar Latrell",
"Mick",
"Mr Lister",
"Per Alexandersson",
"Tim",
"Wojowu",
"Wolfgang Bangerth",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11523",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17479",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23580",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/236",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2794",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33494",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38586",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4484",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45336",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/68420",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75098",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/799",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"terdon"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
99024 | My university requires unrestricted access to my personal laptop. What should I do?
I am not sure that Academia is the right place to post this, as it would probably be better suited for Law.se.
I am a student in Italy. My university requires unrestricted access to my personal computer for an afternoon to install a certain software. I obviously have security concerns, so I have contacted the responsible for my course to know if I could be given the key to install such software personally. He has explicitly stated that there are no alternatives to the standard process of giving in my computer to the tech department for one afternoon.
On one side am reluctant to give unrestricted access to my computer for security reasons, as I have personal files stored on my machine; on the other side I need to have access to such software because it is required for a course in the future.
Is such a request even legal or a common request in academia? How can I avoid giving unrestricted access to my personal machine while still obtaining this software?
You could buy the software on your own. If they are gifting you a license they can probably attach conditions to that, but I agree it's really icky. Especially if the software is needed for your classes. What are their options for students who do not have a personal computer? Is this software available in the computer pool? You could use that instead.
You could trick them into operating on a virtual machine that is not easily recognisable as such and encrypt everything else for good measure (keeping a backup).
Ask to be present when the tech support installs the software and stare them down sternly.
Is this a request, or a "request"? That is, what happens if you don't comply. Will it just be a minor inconvenience since you cannot use the software on your own computer, or will it have more severe consequences?
@PieterNaaijkens We have in-class assignments which require the use of such software on our personal machines; missing a certain percentage of these assignments is an automatic fail. I would call It a request.
@TheWanderer thank you for the suggestion. I have asked if this is possible.
I can't imagine an institution that is willing to use IT peoples' time to install a software on every single student's computer. That sounds absolutely crazy.
Is it possible to borrow a university owned laptop or use a computer at the university? As @nengel said, what about students who don't have a personal computer (or not the right operating system, if the software is OS specific)?
@Mark this situation is not contemplated. Every person in my class has a personal laptop. The software is not OS specific.
As a side note, it might be genuinely impossible for the school to give you a key. If they have some sort of campus-wide academic license for the software, installation may require the licence administrator to log in to their account from your computer. Matlab is an example of this. (Speaking from my own experience, needing a specific person to come to my office to set it up. )
@InquisitiveLurker It may be, but I had a Matlab licence with my past institution and they surely did not require unrestricted access to my machine.
Make a complete backup, then remove all the users and create a new user. Let then install with that new user . Once complete then add back your other users from the backup...
@Wrzlprmft: I agree with your suggestion, but I am not sure remarks like "trick them" or "not easily recognisable" are appropriate here. We do not actually know they use the software installation as a pretext to carry out any malicious plan with the OP's computer. Instead, I'd consider it a legitimate idea to openly offer giving the university access to a restricted user account with a VM within which the IT people have sufficient rights to install stuff.
“I have contacted the responsible for my course”: do you mean the professor teaching the course? If not, I suggest asking the professor and explaining your privacy concerns, they may be more sympathetic and may be able to instruct the IT staff and the “responsible for the course” (assuming that’s someone less powerful such as a teaching assistant or staff member) to acccommodate your request, or at least propose a mechanism that will allow the IT staff to install the software without raising concerns about violating your privacy.
If no root password is required, installing in a separate user account may be sufficient (assuming that the system is reasonably safe and the technicians are not adversarial).
Another solution: get a second hard disc, install a basic OS (for example from a linux live cd) and let them install their software there. When you have your computer back, add your original disc(s) and set up a multiboot option.
@InquisitiveLurker: Matlab's not a good example. My campus has a universal Matlab license that did not require administrator assistance.
Encryption is your friend.
@InquisitiveLurker Matlab doesn't need that. We have a campus licence for Matlab for 30k+ students, and each one can install their copy through the Mathworks site.
I'm curious to know how it ended up.
@MassimoOrtolano The uni said it's not possible for me to be present during the installation. The uni does not offer this software on its machines and requires some assignments to be done specifically with this software. Long story short, I decided to not have the software installed and everybody is treating me as the weirdo because I won't give my computer in.
My university requires unrestricted access to my personal computer for an afternoon to install a certain software.
Your university has messed up. Are you really sure that it's the university requiring this? Maybe it's the isolated action of your professor, in agreement with their department IT (not the university one).
He has explicitly stated that there are no alternatives to the standard process of giving in my computer to the tech department for one afternoon.
I've never, ever seen an academic software licence requiring such a procedure.
On one side am reluctant to give unrestricted access to my computer for security reasons
You're rightly reluctant.
How can I avoid giving unrestricted access to my personal machine while still obtaining this software?
First, contact your course mates to start a collective action. I suggest you to write an email, signed by all students, to the dean supervising the courses of your field, the head of the department to which your professor belongs to, and, if there is one, the head of the IT university service. Copy the email to the rector too. Express clearly your concerns and state that is totally unacceptable to require students to give access to their personal computers. If your university insists on this position, ask them a copy of the licence agreement.
You'll have to look elsewhere for legal advice, but from an academic point of view this is extremely unusual.
Most academic software licenses make a distinction between software that is allowed to be installed on student's personal machines and software that is only allowed to be installed on university-owned machines. For student software the software distributor always has some mechanism in place to allow students to achieve that installation on their own.
As to why your university has instituted this policy we cannot guess.
1) Politely inform your technology department that you are not comfortable handing over your personal property and ask that you be allowed to perform the installation yourself. This is a reasonable request that should be accommodated. If they refuse, ask them to be specific as to why.
2) If nothing else, politely insist that you schedule a time so they can conduct the installation with you present. Most software installations take just a few minutes but at worst take an hour or two. Again, this is a reasonable request. If they refuse, ask them to be specific as to why.
If your concern is personal files that are currently on your machine, then moving them onto an external hard drive and back should address that. If the concern is whether the software will have access to personal files in the future, an option would be buying a computer just for this software. And as Flyto says, a vitual machine is another option, but if you're really paranoid, that's not as secure, as they will still have physical access to the entire machine.
If you are worried about the university accessing other parts of the machine (outside the virtual machine), then what else should you be worried about? They might (perhaps not intentionally) install malware on the machine. In that case, moving the files off the computer and then back again is not secure either (unless you can be sure of removing any such malware first).
This is indeed very odd. If you are sufficiently tech-savvy to do this, one option may be to set up a virtual machine that they can install the software onto. They can have root access to that, without needing permissions to browse your computer.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.714335 | 2017-11-16T10:09:37 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99024",
"authors": [
"Bob Brown",
"Brian Drake",
"Cape Code",
"Captain Emacs",
"Dan Romik",
"Disenchanted Lurker",
"Lonidard",
"Mark",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Pieter Naaijkens",
"Solar Mike",
"TheWanderer",
"Wrzlprmft",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11338",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/131672",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45857",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/57100",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69702",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/71814",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"nengel"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1464 | Why do some arXiv preprints have increased line spacing?
Some preprints on arXiv have 1.5- or double-spaced lines, making it less pleasant to read and more wasteful to print.
Is there a reason for it, except for the laziness/sloppiness?
(If drafts were >1-spaced, one need to change only one option.)
for most papers on arXiv, the latex source is accessible (via "other formats" button). You can recompile it as you wish..
I think the real underlying cause is just what Anonymous Mathematician said, that having a double-spaced version of a paper is more convenient for going through and making notes on a printed copy. But it's not just a phenomenon of the dark ages; many people still do this today during the revision process when a paper is being prepared for submission.
In fact, at least in physics (my field), the tradition of double-spacing is perpetuated by the fact that at least one of the major journal publishers' LaTeX class defaults to a preprint mode which sets the line spacing to double. It is possible to change this to single line spacing by passing a class option for the appropriate journal (pra, prb, prl, etc.), but many authors forget to do this - and somewhat understandably, I think, because their job is to do research, not to be proficient with LaTeX. I would imagine that a similar situation might arise with LaTeX classes used by other publishers and in other fields.
It's worth noting that arXiv recommends not submitting in double-spaced mode. But probably very few submitters have the patience to read through the instructions in their entirety.
I'd wondered why this seemed to be more common in physics, but I assumed it was just cultural, and I didn't know about the revtex preprint mode.
There's also the fact that normal revtex (say, PRA or PRL) prints in tiny script and packs a lot of information into the page, which is hard enough to read without having to make notes on a printed copy when refereeing.
I don't like it either. My understanding is that it's for historical reasons: in the dark ages, publishers asked for double-spaced manuscripts (produced on typewriters) because it would leave space for the typesetters to mark up the manuscript. Some authors got used to doing this and have continued the tradition to this day, despite the fact that publishers no longer care, and a few younger authors even imitate it. I think a lot of people find it a little annoying, but they typically don't care enough to complain to the authors, so it will take a while for this practice to die out.
P.S. It's not just the arXiv, but also journal submissions.
If the line spacing bothers you enough, you can often download the TeX source, modify the line spacing, then recompile. To do this, when you're viewing the page for the article, on the top left click on "Download: Other formats"
Those are not even such dark ages: 20 years ago, Physical Review would still make the correction to manuscripts in a double-spaced version and send you a scan of those corrections together with the page proofs (today, they send difflatex output).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.715090 | 2012-05-07T17:33:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1464",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Dan C",
"E.P.",
"Ran G.",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1069",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/124237",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/324",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/820",
"user151413"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
46684 | Are there any differences between Master's admissions and Ph.D admissions in the US?
I notice that the majority of admission questions on this site regarding admissions specifically refer to Ph.D admissions. That being the case, are Master's applicants evaluated any differently in regards to focus on research, grades, letters of recommendation, etc.? For instance, research potential is a big determining factor for Ph.D admissions I know, but the Ph.D is a research oriented degree. Is there the same focus on research potential for Master's students?
This is specifically focused on STEM fields, particularly the "E."
Are you interested in Masters with a research and thesis component, or just coursework? The criteria will likely vary a lot between these options.
I'm assuming a thesis, but I'm curious as to how much different a non-thesis option applicant would be decided as well.
The difference is huge, at least in my field, computer science. Master's programs are typically money-makers, with students paying full tuition. Some programs are purely coursework; others require Master's theses or projects.
In contrast, PhD programs accept many fewer students, none of whom pay tuition, instead receiving stipends paid for by fellowships, teaching assistantships, and research assistantships.
Because of the difference in the size of these programs and who pays whom, PhD programs are far more selective.
A masters in research applicant is usually assessed for very similar things to the PhD, all the things that you mention but to a lower level, the amount of experience and strength of the candidate is not required to be as high, the masters is much less of a commitment than a 4 year PhD for example and so the entry requirements aren't as stringent.
It is for this reason that some bachelor students who cannot obtain a PhD offer may do a masters first or why a thesis not good enough to gain a PhD may be awarded a masters instead.
A purely taught masters candidate would not be necessarily assessed on research potential, mainly grades and motivation instead (which could include desire to do future research).
In universities I've been at (in Sweden & Belgium), students apply for a masters at the department level or higher and all candidates are assessed collectively. PhD candidates are assessed by the individual professor who holds the grant that will pay the student.
A few important additional criteria used to assess PhD candidates include:
Is the candidate's background and interests suitable for this particular project?
Is the candidate likely to fit into the research group?
Is the candidate likely to last the distance?
Is the candidate likely to become independent?
How creative is the candidate?
How does the candidate approach problem solving?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.715385 | 2015-06-05T18:53:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46684",
"authors": [
"Dan Khan",
"Lilybeth Conde",
"Mangara",
"Olusegun Adebayo",
"PeteBlackerThe3rd",
"Sam",
"Spam",
"clearseplex",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128579",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128580",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128609",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128613",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128614",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128623",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128627",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128628",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128633",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128634",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21694",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8185",
"peerakit",
"user28375028",
"user570286",
"venue"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
97996 | Is it plagiarism if I use a text I wrote myself but put on the internet before?
I just rememebered a case when I was still in school: we had to write an essay about a specific topic and one guy put big parts of his essay on Wikipedia before handing it in. When the teacher checked for plagiarism she indeed found big parts of his text in the Wikipedia article and thus accused him of plagiarism.
How would that situation be with journal papers (or other "official" ways of publishing)?
Can I reuse part(s) of texts I wrote myself but that are available publicly/online like on Wikipedia, my Blog, university homepage, etc.?
(Maybe consider that pseudonyms are used on Wikipedia, Blogs, etc.)
I don't think this has a single answer. It will depend on specific journal policies.
I think this is an interesting question that depends on separating three concepts that sometimes get intertwined:
plagiarism
copyright
legality
Plagiarism refers to using something without properly indicating its source.
Copyright refers to having the right to use material elsewhere.
Legality refers to whether you're violating a law or committing a crime by doing something.
If you've posted something anywhere (and especially to an openly editable place like wikipedia or SE), then there's possible issues with reusing it on each of the fronts.
With respect to plagiarism, what matters is if the prior posting counts as "published" or "submitted" for the purposes of the item in question. (The former being the standard for journals and books; the latter being the standard for classes -- though I suspect most classes would care if you submitted something you already had published).
For copyright, you may not have the legal right to use something in its entirety even if you're the one who wrote it. This would depend on which copy rights your retained from your first publication. If it's SE, for instance, you're under Creative Commons. Wikipedia seems to have their own thing (I'm not a lawyer and can't entirely parse their policy).
Finally, none of this means that you're doing anything criminal, but if you were publishing for money, you could have liability if you violate the copyright.
Two confusing issues are that copyrights can speak as if they create citation obligations (they don't) and act as if their violation is a crime, but at least in the US its only a crime when done for profit.
Most Wikipedia text is licensed both under the GFDL and CC-BY-SA 3.0. There was a change in licence at one stage, hence the confusion.
Wikipedia's policy is that the user retains the copyright but agrees to licence their contributions under a non-exclusive CC-BY-SA licence. There should be no legal trouble there (but IAalsoNAL)
@dendodge This indeed, without explicitly handing over copyright (or implicitly under some jurisdictions as part of a paid contract) you can't lose copyright. Doesn't matter under what license you decide to publish your work, the copyright stays with you. I can license any text I write under a million different licenses and none of these licenses can limit me in what I can do. At least that's the case in my jurisdiction.
I think there is a fourth concept, "originality", and "plagiarism" is simply not a problem when you quote your own earlier work, because you are the author, exactly as claimed. Reuse/republication generally should be accompanied by citation of the earlier work, but it is not plagiarism of any sort. ("self-plagiarism" is not a type of plagiarism at all)
@BenVoigt while I'd tend to agree, self-plagiarism does appear to be an issue at least for undergraduates. Perhaps it's fair to say it's not an issue when we publish?
@DavidMulder, A license can be exclusive, and can limit you in any (legal) way. These are all legal agreements. What happens depends on the exact wording of the agreement and where it's being adjudicated. While it's certainly possible for you to license something under a million different licenses and most licenses which people commonly see are non-exclusive, you can definitely enter into an agreement which is an exclusive license, which prohibits you from any particular act normally associated with your "copy rights". Exclusivity is often a significant negotiating point for custom licenses.
@virmaior: It can be an issue, either in class or with publication, it's just not an issue of plagiarism. Violating an originality requirement can certainly be a problem, even when none of the three items you mentioned are violated.
With Wikipedia, it's simple: you grant them a non-exclusive CC-BY-SA license to your work, but you retain copyright. You're free to do whatever you want with the work elsewhere, so long as it doesn't involve granting exclusive rights.
@Makyen, are you a lawyer? You didn't say. IANAL, but what you're saying doesn't make sense if you didn't receive compensation for the exclusive license. In other words, I don't think you can lose copyright on something simply by writing a particular something into the license when you publish it, if you didn't receive compensation (i.e. "consideration" as in contract law) for it in any way.
@Wildcard, I'd planned on putting IANAL in there, but it appears I forgot. However, you should always assume that anyone on the internet is NAL, even if they say they are. Unless you're paying them in person, then it all should be considered just opinion. We're rapidly getting into corner/specific-cases where it's going to depend on the exact circumstances (including jurisdiction, wording, who wrote it, where/how you're publishing it, what the contract/license is for, etc., etc.). It could easily be argued that just publication (depending on the circumstances) is the consideration.
@Wildcard Releasing something under a licence surely never directly entails any kind of compensation/consideration? That would be laid out in a contract (which may or may not specify a licence)—and in a contract, signing off your copyright does not necessarily entail compensation beyond the publication itself. But if I write something and release it with a licence stating that it is in the public domain and no copyright applies to it, then I (who am also NAL) would think compensation is irrelevant to whether or not I retain my copyright.
Whenever you write something, you always retain full copyright, and you can do whatever you would like with your own work. The only case in which this is different is when you assign the work to someone else by a written agreement. Even as I'm writing this comment (which is licensed to SE under the CC license, I still own and have full copyright over this comment).
@Makyen An exclusive license is in my country at least a description of a contract + license, the license itself doesn't limit you. And considering you can't enter such a contract by simply inputting something online (though I am less well acquainted with those laws) it has nothing to do with "putting it on the internet". The thing to realize is that a license is the 'permission to use something granted to another party'. A legal contract is necessary between to parties to limit the copyright holder in some way.
@DavidMulder, "Contract" is a superset of "license". All licenses are contracts (once accepted; prior to acceptance, it's an offer of a contract). While I can understand distinguishing between them, to do so exactly would require us to define the term "license", specifically as to how it relates to "contract" as a subset. From your usage, I'm happy to agree that I was using "license" to mean something more broad than you were. How each party to the license/contract is affected by it depends on the terms of the license/contract (and how good their lawyers are :-( ).
Whenever you write something, you always retain full copyright, and you can do whatever you would like with your own work. Can you provide a reference for this claim and the jurisdiction in which you think it applies? (I ask because it would be handy and because for several things I've written, I believe I would need to ask their permission to reproduce it elsewhere).
@Wildcard, "compensation" can be anything. It does not need to be money, that is why it is called compensation.
Plagiarism essentially covers illicit appropriation of credit and its benefits (and possibly depriving the author of them; this particularly includes omission of the original author's credits).
In your case, what is described in the brackets is not relevant, as whoever "lifted" the text from the internet is the author themselves. The only problem can arise when credit is claimed twice: e.g. the work has been separately prepared for one journal article/exam and later is re-used for another for double credit.
I think it is not ideal to publish a piece of coursework solution before submitting it (for precisely the reason OP lists), but it is not plagiarism provided it has not been used to gain credit for original work anywhere else. Some teachers permit resubmission of work executed for a prior opportunity by the same author in the sense that it is the authors' work itself; in which case, also, it is not plagiarism, because the re-use has been deemed by the teacher to be legitimate.
TL;DR: For the purposes of the present question, plagiarism is the attempt to gain illicit credit for a task requiring original work by copying an existing text (from others or oneself).
You've described the potential issue using the correct terminology, so why confuse it with representation of someone else's work as your own by (incorrectly) calling both "plagiarism"?
@BenVoigt How would you call representing other people's work as your own? Or do you mean reuse of your own work? This is often called "self"-plagiarism which many consider a wrong term, unless you view it in light of appropriation of illicit credit appropriation, when the "plagiarism" term makes sense again. So, since this is the topic of the question, I was under the belief that concentrating on the pure "plagiarism" component in that particular sense (of illicit appropriation of credit) would make the response clearer and less cluttered. Or did you have something else in mind?
So-called "self-plagiarism" doesn't make sense even then. The problem is the lack of originality. Let's consider the case where a student submits, whether for course credit or publication, an entire reprint, with full meta-data, of his sole-author journal article. I think we can agree that the recipient is completely within his rights to refuse to give duplicate credit... but an accusation of plagiarism would never hold up. In the uncited case, can punishment be greater for hiding the lack of originality? Sure, but that's simply originality-related fraud, still not plagiarism.
@BenVoigt I did not invent the term self-plagiarism, in the sense of hiding lack of originality rather than stealing credit. There are many discussions about whether this is the right term. Whether I like it or not, this is the word I see commonly used for that. I do not consider a fight about the use of words for which there is a more-or-less general consensus time well spent. I am here to help the OP and therefore tried to explain the term in a perspective I saw that would co-opt the consensus use of the term in a way to enable OP to interpret it and decide what to do.
Self-plagiarism is a thing. I was unaware of this until a few years ago when I decided to return to school and complete my bachelors. The plagiarism guidelines from my school specifically called out using previously published (or submitted in the case of a class) work, even if the work is yours, as plagiarism. However, this didn't mean that you couldn't use your previous work. The solution was to quote and properly site your previous work as a reference. I expect that this would be acceptable in your case as well.
This. +1 OP needs to be clear on the assessment regulations OP's institution. In mine, submitting any previously written work for course requirements would be a case of academic misconduct. The work submitted must be written for purpose. As you point out, any previously published work can be used in the same way as any other resource: clearly demarcated, cited, attributed, etc.
There are four views on plagiarism here.
The first is the broad view. Here, plagiarism simply means taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. In that sense, this is not plagiarism.
In a formal academic context, there are three additional perspectives of which you should be aware.
The first is that plagiarism can further extend to failing to properly attribute a reference, even if you don't claim it as your own work. Using a statistic or a simple, "I read somewhere" without the corresponding citation can be seen as a form a plagiarism because, while you didn't try to pass the work off as your own, you still failed to cite the source and deprived them of due credit for their work. In this case, it does not matter that you are your own source, because without the citation the reader has no way to know this.
The second is that plagiarism can extend to re-using your own material on successive assignments. Personally, while I can understand this as a policy violation, especially for undergraduates, I don't feel this should be called plagiarism. Nevertheless, in academic context this is often called and treated as a plagiarism, because you failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment. From the instructor's point of view, in failing to cite yourself, they feel like you tried to deceive them by hiding that you did not do original work for this assignment. And even if you do cite yourself, what kind of paper just has one citation to another paper which it copies word for word? It is seen as academically dishonest, even it's not quite "pure" plagiarism, and speaks to personal integrity.
The final perspective on plagiarism is to falsify a source or research. This is similar to your situation in that if it were okay to put information on wikipedia yourself and then immediately cite it in your own paper, you would be able to create a circular source of authority, with no real citation or reference behind it. You cite Wikipedia, but wikipedia is just your own words. This might be credible in the real sense, but it breaks the proper attribution chain, making research down the road impossible to verify. Moreover, it's seen as an attempt to artificially inflate an argument by adding a meaningless citation, which is again about misplacing credit for the work.
Your last paragraph is called Citogenesis. https://xkcd.com/978/
I certainly hope "in academic context this is often called and treated as a plagiarism, because you failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment" is not true. I certainly marked many homework assignments with failing grades as a result of "failure in the practice of the objectives of the assignment", but I would never have thought to begin misconduct proceedings simply because a student turned in too many wrong answers. (I'm not disputing that some treat this as plagiarism, but the reasons appear to be e.g. those given by Captain Emacs in his answer)
I agree with Ben Voigt on point two. I think you might have mis-phrased what you intended to say, because you're currently saying that it's plagiarism because you "failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment". But that would mean getting an F (which is failing in the objectives of the assignment) is plagiarism .
Many publications insist that they be the first place where your work is published. It may not actually matter if it is plagiarism if it violate's the journal's policies on that count.
And, yes, as others pointed out, there is such a thing as self-plagiarism.
When it comes to plagiarism, context matters a lot. For instance, it matters if the overlap between your publication and the Wikipedia page is only one paragraph in a 100-page book, vs. whether it's 90% overlap.
I believe all that is necessary in your first case is to reference the original source on the internet. That should be enough for any publisher.
If you quote your source than it is not plagiarism, for example According to John Adam "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence". You can also paraphrase and site your source, plagiarism is the practice of using someone else writings or work and trying to say it's yours without giving them credit according to Dictionary.com. Also I would avoid any and all wiki's when writing papers;however, most credible wiki pages site sources at the bottom of the page, you can often find the original article that the information came from,allowing you to go right to the source. Using paraphrasing will often get you past a plagiarism checker, although teachers read so many papers that they often know when they have heard something before and expect you to site where the information came from.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.715733 | 2017-10-27T09:30:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/97996",
"authors": [
"Ben Voigt",
"Captain Emacs",
"David Mulder",
"Dɑvïd",
"Janus Bahs Jacquet",
"MJeffryes",
"Makyen",
"Mark",
"Mark Rosenblitt-Janssen",
"Muzer",
"Pacerier",
"Patrick M",
"Shane",
"Wildcard",
"Zizouz212",
"georgewatson",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11353",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13926",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14172",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17238",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19703",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19769",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21505",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22966",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31487",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38754",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39049",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45857",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46356",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53360",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/57221",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6562",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8705",
"virmaior"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
93521 | Could sending sexual messages online affect my academic career?
So, suppose you're a grad student in some academic program in the US; suppose furthermore you're employed by the university (as a teaching/research assistant, say), and you message total strangers on the internet, looking for a sexual encounter. Some of the messages may be sexually explicit/implicit.
Is it possible that, if some stranger could be offended by this, the university could act against you in some form were the stranger to contact them about it? Would the relationship of the stranger to the university matter, even if one did not know beforehand such relationship? For instance, would the situation change if the stranger is a student of the university?
Of course there is nothing illegal in the US about these actions, but universities sometimes have much stricter codes. In answering this question, please keep "large public university" in mind, not some christian college.
Thanks!
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not about Academia.
Sending an explicit message to a minor could be a felony in your jurisdiction. You could become a registered sex offender, making you essentially unemployable in any educational institution.
Shake Baby, how is it not about academia? It's potentially related to sexual misconduct and how universities treat their sexually liberal staff.
Jon Custer, of course, as it should be.
This is off-topic for academia, but may be you could reconsider whether such unprovoked explicit messages are actually wanted by your target audience, and whether that's a good strategy in any context.
I think this is on topic. Someone is wondering how their extracurricular behavior could affect their academic career.
I hope you're not sending sexual messages to people who are not on dating sites where such messages are on-topic. That would be creepy and could rightfully damage someone's careers.
@wrtsvkrfm : There might be legalities involved, but it's not a legal question.
There's a large chance that, especially if you're a new graduate student, you could potentially send a message to someone who may be in a class you're teaching (if you're a GTA). That could definitely cause some potential problems (more so if you were to end up meeting up with them). I'd say this question is mostly on topic, even if we make it "messages for dating which may or may not be sexually explicit", I think it's quite clear that faculty and GTAs have to be prudent in how the approach online dating or hook-up sites/apps in a way that is different than for, say, a banker.
As long as you send and receive these emails from home, on your privately purchased computer, using your personal email account, during non-work hours, and meet the people you contact off-campus, there is probably little the university can or would want to do -- this would seem to be your personal business. (Though it is not necessarily legal: sending complete strangers explicit messages could be considered harassment.)
But from the long list of "ifs" above, you probably already see where the rub is. Let's say, one of the people you contact doesn't appreciate the contact, finds out that you are a student at the university in department X under professor Y, and writes a blog post including all of this information. The local newspaper then picks it up after finding 3 other people who are also complaining. Suddenly, the university, department X, and professor Y are in the picture, and they're going to be interested in dissociating themselves from you. Now, if it turns out that you sent or read some of the emails from a work laptop at home, or from a work desktop during work hours, or on a work trip paid for by the university, or met some of your contacts in your office, or used your work email (a university-provided resource), then you're in trouble because all of these things suddenly expose you to university rules and regulations, as well as state law governing the conduct of employees.
The point is that if you're a regular grad student, your life is probably structured in a way that you can not consistently avoid all of the conflicts mentioned above, and that exposes you to being sanctioned by your university.
Thanks for your answer! It does seem that one needs to be extremely careful, or at least tone down the explicitness of the messages. Of course, doing such activities during work hours is wrong, if anything because it's not work.
And, if you hit on an undergraduate student for whom you are in any way responsible, such as being a TA, you will be gone so fast you won't even see the door go by.
Here's an excerpt from a randomly selected sexual misconduct policy (Indiana University):
Indiana University prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or gender in its educational programs and activities. Discrimination on the basis of sex or gender is also prohibited by federal laws, including Title VII and Title IX. This policy governs the University’s response to discrimination based on sex or gender, and all forms of sexual misconduct (which includes sexual harassment, sexual assault, other forms of sexual violence, dating violence, domestic violence, sexual exploitation and stalking. [...]
The University will provide a fair and impartial investigation and resolution for complaints and, where appropriate, issue sanctions and remedial measures. The severity of the corrective action, up to and including termination or expulsion of the offender, will depend on the circumstances of the particular case.
It seems to me that contacting a stranger with a possibly unwelcome explicit message would probably be viewed as sexual harassment.
I'd say it depends on the circumstances of the contact? Like, if it happened on a dating site, for instance, it would seem to me that one would have to see these things in a different light than if it were, say, through Facebook or an instant message platform?
Not to say that people on dating sites must necessarily welcome such explicit messages, but it does seem to me that to some extent, dating sites are places where such behavior, at least as an introduction, is generally tolerated and "normal".
@GradStudent - Is there some reason why you can't create an anonymous persona with no connection to your real name and your university email address, with no conceivable way to trace this type of internet activity back to your university life?
Well, I like having pictures of myself, so there's a lower bound on the amount of anonimity I'd have in such sites.
@GradStudent - Perhaps this will help motivate you to be less public about this: think of your future job hunting.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.717105 | 2017-07-22T00:44:17 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/93521",
"authors": [
"Bob Brown",
"Bryan Krause",
"Ellen Spertus",
"Jon Custer",
"Michael Hardy",
"Shake Baby",
"aparente001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35918",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46838",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7229",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/77474",
"somequestions",
"user0721090601"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
3430 | What are the roles and responsibilities of an adjunct faculty?
Is adjunct faculty's duty limited to teaching? Do they have any role in course design, grading, etc.?
What are the other responsibilities, as an adjunct faculty?
There's a wide range of people called adjunct faculty. For example, it may include working professionals in the field who serve as part-time faculty (this is common in law and architecture, and I've seen it with industrial researchers in computer science). Depending on the circumstances, this sort of adjunct may be treated much like the other faculty in the department, except for being part time. However, I assume you are talking about the most common use of the term "adjunct", at least in the US, namely low-paid, low-status faculty typically teaching part time on temporary contracts. (They may be working full time overall, but only part time at any given institution, so the universities can avoid paying benefits.)
For this sort of adjunct, it really depends on the details of the contract, and it may vary between universities, as well as depending on issues such as whether any of the courses are online. A typical arrangement will include some amount of course design (at least at the level of creating a syllabus), lecturing, grading, and office hours. Typically there is no committee work or other service and no research duties.
Reference is to temporary teaching positions, who are otherwise employed in the same or some other institute.
Being an adjunct faculty may provide the following benefits (and responsibilities):
Be a PI grants that require faculty status
Advise / mentor students and postdocs
Vote in departmental meetings
Participate in committees
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.717613 | 2012-09-26T08:26:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3430",
"authors": [
"Benedikt Bauer",
"Bghaak",
"GISHuman",
"Noble P. Abraham",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10038",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10039",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10040",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10041",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10064",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12576",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12577",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1580",
"rjmunro",
"sridhar pandurangiah",
"tewathia",
"user3216750"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
81056 | How much public funding do private universities in the United States receive, directly or indirectly?
I am trying to assess how much public funding private universities in the United States receive.
I found a study that partially answers the question:
Taxpayer Subsidies for Most Colleges and Universities Average Between $8,000 to More than $100,000 for Each Bachelor’s Degree, New Study Finds
(published in 2011):
Washington, D.C. – Taxpayer subsidies that cover the operating costs
of most colleges and universities ranges from around $8,000 to more
than $100,000 for each bachelor’s degree awarded, with most public
institutions averaging more than $60,000 per degree, according to an
analysis by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Nexus
Research and Policy Center (Nexus).
Among elite private universities, like Harvard and Yale, the average
taxpayer subsidy is $13,000 per student per year, while the annual
subsidy at the most selective public universities, like the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of California, Los
Angeles is more than $23,000 per student annually.
The financial figures reflect the amount of money colleges and
universities receive in direct government support and tax breaks. They
do not include loans and grants provided by state and federal
governments to help students meet tuition costs.
However, this leaves out how much public funding go into loans and grants provided by state and federal governments to help students meet tuition costs in the United States.
I got interested in that question reading U.S. to Forgive at Least $108 Billion in Student Debt in Coming Years (published on November 30, 2016).
It's not clear what programs are included in "direct government support and tax breaks" and what programs are included in "loans and grants provided by state and federal governments to help students meet tuition costs".
@ff524 Good point. I assume that "direct government support and tax breaks" exclude all student loans and grants. But I have rephrased the question so that it focuses on the total public funding, so that we avoid this boundary issue.
One significant question would be whether research grants are included in "direct government support". It would be misleading to divide that by number of bachelor's degrees, since such grants are not (primarily) intended to support undergraduate education.
It is worth noting that Nexus, a co-sponsor of that study, "...seeks to do research and promote policies that improve the proprietary education sector...", and that its current president was previously the president of the for-profit University of Phoenix. So it seems they may have a particular viewpoint about public, private non-profit, and for-profit institutions.
I am voting to close this as unclear, since it seems that your question is already answered by base subsidy + average student loan information.
@jakebeal: I don't understand: do you mean the question is unclear or that the question contains its answer?
@FranckDernoncourt Obviously, you don't think the question contains its answer, or else you wouldn't have asked it. I can't figure out, however, what you're looking for beyond $13K + ~$7.5K (~$30K average debt at graduation / ~4 years).
@jakebeal: It is unclear whether the $13K is the entire public funding excluding student loan help.
@FranckDernoncourt: Do you agree? If so, please retract your close vote. If not, please comment what is still unclear. As a side note, that's why I'm often hesitant to show my research when I ask questions on this website, as comments and close votes sometimes focus on what I have found so far instead of focusing on the original question.
Estimating indirect subsidies is a much more subtle question than it sounds like. There's no way to answer it without some economic modeling, and even if you do that, you'll get a debatable answer.
For example, consider tax deductions for charitable donations. To what extent should they be counted as a subsidy? (For scale, current-use giving and endowment distributions amounted to 40% of Harvard's budget last year, so how you account for this really matters.)
Imagine a well-off donor, with a marginal tax rate of 33%. If they donate $1000 and deduct this money from their taxable income, then the government loses $330 in tax revenue. Should we count the $330 as a government contribution?
One argument says yes. Imagine that the donor has chosen $1000 because that's how much they feel they can spare. If they had been charged the $330 tax, then they would have been able to spare only $670 if they wanted to end up keeping the same amount. This means the tax-deductible donation is really equivalent to a $670 donation from the donor plus a $330 subsidy from the government. Under this theory, a substantial fraction of charitable giving is really a government subsidy in disguise.
Another argument says no. Many donors, especially small-to-medium donors, don't make carefully optimized financial decisions based on the tax consequences. They probably chose $1000 because it sounded like a reasonable number, and would have made the same donation regardless of the tax situation. In that case, the $330 in reduced taxes ends up as a reward to the donor for being charitable, and it has nothing to do with the university's finances. To the extent a change in tax policy wouldn't change the donation rate, it's unfair to count the tax deduction as a subsidy.
Of course these aren't the only arguments one could make on this topic, but let's focus on these two. Now the question is which argument better describes charitable giving practices. The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between: donors are in fact influenced by tax deductions, but don't make all their decisions on this basis. To give a principled number for how great the effective subsidy is, you'll have to model this effect, and the answer may even vary between universities based on differences in their donor pools.
What makes this whole issue even more subject to debate is that politics comes into the picture. If you view the $330 as tax money that by default belongs to the government, then the whole $330 should obviously be counted as a subsidy. If you believe the government has no business taxing charities or donations to them, then none of it is a subsidy because the government never had any right to this money in the first place. Many people lie somewhere between these views, but some pile up at the extremes.
The net effect is that if you really want to figure out how much of an indirect governmental subsidy private universities get in the U.S., you'll first have to articulate your political position, and then do some economic modeling if politics hasn't settled everything yet. Whatever you decide, someone will tell you you're doing it all wrong. There is no answer all reasonable people must agree with.
According to http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/health/trump-budget-medical-science-huge-cuts/ (mirror) federal support to academic institutions for basic research in the United States amount to $35 billion annually:
It's unclear what would happen to the National Science Foundation. That agency gives out more than $7 billion annually in research grants, accounting for about 20% of federal support to academic institutions for basic research, but didn't get a mention in the budget.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017-03-27):
we rely on federal funding for 66% of our campus research support
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/03/ivy-league-colleges-collecting-more-than-41-billion-in-taxpayer-money-report-says.html (mirror):
According to a report compiled by the non-profit group Open the Books, America's Ivy League colleges’ payments and entitlements cost taxpayers more than $41 billion over a six-year period from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2015. This is equivalent to $120,000 per student in government aid or $6.93 billion per year.
More details regarding the report (mirror) they cite:
KEY FINDINGS:
Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000
in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per
undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9
billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
In monetary terms, the ‘government contracting’ business of the Ivy League ($25.27 billion – federal contracts and grants) exceeded their
educational mission ($22 billion in student tuition) FY2010-FY2015.
The eight colleges of the Ivy League received more money ($4.31 billion) – on average - annually from the federal government than
sixteen states: see report.
The Ivy League endowment funds (2015) exceeded $119 billion, which is equivalent to nearly $2 million per undergraduate student.
As a non-profit, educational institution, the Ivy League pays no tax on investment gains. Between FY2011-FY2015, the Ivy League schools
received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their
endowment funds. In FY2014, the tax-free subsidy on endowment gains
amounted to $3.4 billion, or nearly $60,000 per student.
With continued gifts at present rates, the $119 billion endowment fund provides free tuition to the entire student body in perpetuity.
Without new gifts, the endowment is equivalent to a full-ride
scholarship for all Ivy League undergraduate students for 51-years, or
until 2068.
In FY2014, the balance sheet for all Ivy League colleges showed $194,332,115,120 in accumulated gross assets. This is equivalent to
$3.35 million per undergraduate student.
The Ivy League employs 47 administrators who each earn more than $1 million per year. Two executives each earned $20 million between
2010-2014. Ivy League employees earned $62 billion in compensation.
In a five-year period (2010-2014) the Ivy League spent $17.8 million on lobbying, which included issues mostly related to their
endowment, federal contracting, immigration and student aid.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.717805 | 2016-12-04T21:56:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81056",
"authors": [
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Nate Eldredge",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"jakebeal"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
75685 | Percentage of total scholarly literature available in open access repositories by year of publication broken down by discipline
I am looking for the percentage of total scholarly literature available in open access repositories by year of publication broken down by discipline.
I am aware of the following figure, however it is old. Are there any more recent statistics?
Swan, Alma. Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access. UNESCO, 2012.
Presumably this is a [tag:reference-request]? Unless you are also interested in speculation.
@ff524 Good point, let's avoid that.
As far as I see, to answer this question based upon a more recent data set one has to create the needed data set in advance.
An overview article (open access version) published in 2013 is the most recent work I could find. Even an article from 2016 analyses only articles published between 2010 and 2012.
Unfortunately, neither the data set behind the shown picture nor the method used to create the data set is given in the report (see footnotes 63 and 64) but I found the corresponding pre-print.
The needed data set has to include all published articles, the publication year, the information of the access state on article level (gold/green) and a consistent classification.
One could start by using google scholar or the Thomson Reuters list to collect all published articles and repositories or a web trawler to find corresponding green open access versions. One could also use a data collector as BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). BASE offers browsing using the DDC which should help to identify the publications of the different disciplines, if one has no access to the Thomson Reuters list. Additionally, each article has an access state. The access state of an article can also be collected from oaDOI.
There are definitely several ways to get the needed information. Unfortunately, it seems that no one has done this work recently.
Ask the research team at Open University. Contact Petr Knoth. This is what he and his team are working on.
'It is now the world¹s largest collection of Open
Access research papers and we are working to popularise it as a dataset
for text-mining.'
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.718844 | 2016-08-23T16:08:59 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75685",
"authors": [
"Agnieszka Sękara",
"Barkah Ilhammulloh",
"Bray Mcds",
"Deo Math",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Sayandev Mukherjee",
"Yuqing Liu",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/212201",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/212202",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/212203",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/212204",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/214233",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/214234",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
74917 | What's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?
I understand why people mention the grant agency, but what's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?
Examples:
The authors acknowledge
the support of the U.S. Army Research Office under
grant number W911NF-10-1-0533
This work was supported
by the National Key Basic Research Program of
China via grant 2014CB340503
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science > machine learning, and English-speaking venues.
If you had 10+ grants, wouldn't it be relevant which one supported this paper?
Are you aware that many funders require it and you want to know why? If not the answer is the funder says so.
To make it easier to Google for research supported by a particular grant, of course.
Any answer or comment besides it is required by the funding agency is someone guessing or reputation fishing.
It makes it easier for pork-cutting Congressional staffers and others to identify what came out of what taxpayer-funded grant, and allows comparison between the grant application and its results.
The agencies that provide this funding often require such acknowledgement. NSF does. The format, more or less, is up to the agency. I don't know why they do it, but I believe they want readers to be able to find the programs that fund the work so that other potential applicant can find future versions of the program and possibly apply.
Edit: Look at Part J of NSF's grants guide for their format
Could it also be to aid internal lookup in case of correspondence/enquiries/FOI/subpoena/whatever? OK, they probably keep records of papers they've funded, so they could look it up that way if they're ever asked about the grant that funded a particular paper. But by the same argument nobody needs to quote "your ref" in correspondence, since the recipient can probably figure it out given enough time with their card-index ;-) Nevertheless, people can be quite keen for their own numbers and codes to be used where relevant!
@SteveJessop, definitely. It could also be required by the US Congress that the US agencies track the outputs of their funding.
@SteveJessop I think one issue is they don't know what papers they've funded, because the fund proposals rather than papers. Yes, you're supposed to tell them in reports, but they may want to check this, or people external to the grant agency may want to know.
@Kimball: "Yes, you're supposed to tell them in reports, but they may want to check this" - indeed - actually, I presume some sort of a verification function; researchers list papers based on a given grant in their report, and to make sure such researchers do not list the same papers for many different grants, the papers themselves also have to uniquely "link back" to the grant.
@Kimball, I'm not convinced that Program Officers or their IT systems have the time or ability to do much checking or verification. Maybe on a case-by-case basis, or when the reports are deemed insufficient. Also, there might be an interest by some reviewers to take a look at prior awards and their results when reviewing new grant proposals.
In general, it should be easy for taxpayers to see what they are paying for.
The funding agency is responsible for making sure that grant money was used according to the respective Call for Proposals and its terms and conditions. In case of public funding (e.g. government-funded) research the funding body reports to a higher authority, e.g. the government or a governmental department.
Publications are a key outcome of research. Besides the obligation to clear a manuscript before publication and having funding agency and/or grant number acknowledged, handing in a copy of the publication for them to file offers such proof of the projects results. Having the grant number on it simplifies the bookkeeping for the higher-ups that might not be subject matter experts.
Not questioning the conduct and honesty of scientists... but having the grant number explicitely on the manuscript further aids the avoiding of double / multiple funding as it clearly states under which grant the presented research was conducted.
"avoiding of double funding" - or at least of multiple funding from ridiculously many grants at a time. Double funding, i.e. partial funding by as few as two grants at a time, is not at all unusual. I have published various papers whose acknowledgments contained a statement like "This research was funded in part from grant ... and in part from grant ... .", usually in cases where the two first authors (who were most closely involved in the research and paper creation) were paid from two different grants.
@O.R.Mapper, you're right.
I understand why people mention the grant agency, but what's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?
As @BillBarth states, some funding agencies require that you list the grant number in the acknowledgment (or first-page footnote, etc.).
For example, from past experience with the US Department of Defense (DoD), several of my papers had to go through a public clearance process with the DoD. On a few occasions, I had sent my manuscripts to the DoD to be cleared, and those times that I did not include the grant number in my paper, I received instructions from the DoD that I had to include the grant number in the acknowledgments first, before they would clear my manuscript for public release, preventing me from submitting my paper for peer review.
It's a "bibliographical" issue. Agencies want people to know which agencies and which grants supported which papers, for the benefit of people applying in the future for grants.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.719091 | 2016-08-08T22:40:24 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/74917",
"authors": [
"BUSEM ÖZKILIÇ",
"Bill Barth",
"Ghanima",
"JeffE",
"Kimball",
"MARTIN ZHANG",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Steve Jessop",
"StrongBad",
"Teresa Ignaitis",
"Tom Church",
"Udeme Idem",
"Violeta Januseva",
"WBT",
"Xin Zhao",
"emory",
"gangrene",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11440",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209862",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209863",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209865",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209866",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209869",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209876",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/209922",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21166",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34352",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36320",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/563",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"user1717828",
"user209865"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1128 | Scientific hackathons or other intense voluntary bottom-up events
In programming there are many hackathons - intense voluntary one day-week events, where participants collaboratively attack problems. They may be proposed by a company, NGO, participants or a group; for qualification/profit, for fun or for a good cause (eg. http://www.rhok.org/).
The question is - are there any similar events in science?
If not, what can be done or why it cannot work?
(As a comment: as I observe, while scientist are open-minded for a discussion, they are conservative, when it comes to action; at least much more than some of the programmers.)
EDIT (much later):
There are such events, even if extremely rare, e.g.:
Ariel Waldman, Hacking science: the intersection of web geeks and science geeks, Scientific American (August 29, 2011)
So how can we continue to make science more disruptively accessible across all science disciplines, geographies, industries and skill-sets?
Enter Science Hack Day, a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other enthusiastic geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. A hack is a unique modification, an interesting mashup or a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve different types of problems across a variety of industries inside and outside of science, new concepts often emerge and can go on to influence science and adults’ relationship to science in unexpected ways.
I have found, having participated in a few fairly intensive workshops that were intended to produce a product after a short amount of time that this tends toward failure for a few reasons:
Most academics are interested in problems as well as the implementation of solutions. Hackatons are implementation factories, but its only a small subset of academics who will enjoy and/or be supported just to solve other people's problems.
Building on that, its hard to formulate a meaningful problem, do the background research, plan the research and perform it in a one or two week period. A hackathon benefits from having all but the last stage done before-hand. Generally I've found with those types of intensive workshops, you can get the concept and maybe the plan down, but there needs to be more work done when everyone goes home. A lot more work. Which leads to the final issue...
Long distance collaboration, especially with people with whom you have a fairly weak bond, and especially one without strong, lasting grant support, is really, really hard to do.
So they do happen, but the finished-product focused ones tend to have a longer timeframe, and the shorter ones tend to be trying to accomplish very specific things, like putting out a consensus statement or planning research to be done later.
+1 For problems vs implementation. However, my main emphasis is on bottom-up things, often not being a part of one's main projects.
In math we have various programs where a group of people get together to do focused work on a problem, usually at one of the mathematical institutes (I know of the SQuaREs program at AIM and the Research in Pairs program at Oberwolfach, and there are probably others). These are usually for 2-6 people, and the time frame is longer.
In industrial math, Oxford has a long tradition of running study groups. This vague-sounding name has a rather specific meaning. From the page just linked:
What is a study group?
Study groups bring together mathematicians from across the globe to
work on mathematical problems presented by industry in a week long
workshop.
How does a study group work?
The academics work in problem solving teams with the presenters to
tackle the problems raised, formulating their ideas using modelling,
analysis and computation. At the end of the study group the academics
present their findings and make suggestions of future work to be
carried out. A final report is written after the study group.
I attended this one. They are a lot of fun and have a track record of real impact.
I shall argue that iGEM falls under the category of a Hackathon. Having coached a team, I have grown the impression that the program essentially gathers a bunch of undergrads together, teaches them various problematic things about biology, and then for 10 weeks the students slash together a random assortment of solutions and call it a day.
Like EpiGrad, I have evolved to not favor this type of approach. Many times the students will take on a problem without recognizing that it is actually isn't a real problem. The result is a solution that tends to be very very narrowly constrained. Secondly, unlike a programming Hackathon, these sessions result in tons of hastily performed experiments with very few controls and lots of very difficult to reproduced data. Notably the Registry of Biological Parts is having a serious issue with the quality control of their "parts" since they all come from unsequenced plasmids that were shipped to the Registry to qualify for the deadline.
The positive is that it does get a lot of young students interested in science but it isn't a very productive way of doing science.
Thanks for bringing the example of iGEM (actually, some of my friends have taken part in it; while I had in mind sth 1-7days, it is relevant). I am not arguing that this should be the main way people do science. However, IMHO in I science there is way little bottom-up things (esp. for students, resulting in lost of motivation, burnout, dropping out and even depression). And then 10weeks with no "real results" (but learning techniques, teamwork, ...) may be effectively less time-consuming than months of work with lack of energy.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.719557 | 2012-04-15T13:07:02 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1128",
"authors": [
"Adam Bergmark",
"F'x",
"John James",
"Melodic",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Thomas Moulard",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2658",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2659",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2660",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2661",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2671",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3847",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"teenage mutant ninja turtle",
"user2643"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
26892 | Asking for a site visit as a master's applicant
I'm currently an undergraduate, and I will finish my bachelors this coming spring. I've been looking at graduate programs, including one physical chemistry masters program in the Amsterdam. I found out that I'm visiting Amsterdam in less than a week, and I am now wondering if it would be appropriate for me to ask the program contact person if I can visit the campus and maybe talk to a professor or two about their research and the program.
I'm concerned because it is short notice, and I haven't started any application with the school. But, I would like to know if the school is a good fit. I don't live in Europe so this is my only opportunity to visit the campus in the foreseeable future.
Would it be appropriate for me to ask if I could visit the college/institute? Also, should I mention a few projects that caught my eye and ask to meet the professors in charge? If so, how would be the best way for me to phrase it?
Thank you for the input.
Why not email the professor(s) directly? They won't bite!
Of course. Email profs or the departmental administrator. With the short notice, phoning the departmental main phone number may be better.
You (@RoboKaren & @Moriarty) bring up a valid point. With the way their website is setup, it's difficult to know which project belong to which prof, but working the specific research area coordinator may be more fruitful than some general contact person.
@Moriarty - Profs don't bite, but we can also be very bad about responding to non-critical emails at the beginning of the semester. :)
This is totally appropriate and a great idea.
Simply send an email to the contact person (who may have a title like "graduate coordinator" or "graduate chair").
My name is Edna Farblefester and I'm a junior at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. I am interested in applying to your program next year. I will be in Amsterdam next week and was wondering if I might be able to meet with you or some of your colleagues to learn more about the program and some of the faculty's research.
They should certainly say yes unless there are some extenuating circumstances. Graduate programs are always eager to recruit students, especially in a case like this where it costs them nothing. They probably do these sort of meetings all the time, so it should not be much of an inconvenience for them, even on short notice.
They may also offer to set up a campus tour, arrange a meeting with one or more current grad students (very useful), and provide some information about living in Amsterdam.
If there are one or two professors whose research particularly interests you, you could send similar emails to them directly. (Mention that you are already getting in touch with the contact person, otherwise they will probably suggest that you do so.)
One final note: your phrasing "asking for a site visit" suggested at first that you were going to ask them to pay for the costs of your trip, which would be sort of an unreasonable request (it would be for them to offer if they wanted). Of course, that isn't what you meant, but you might just want to check your phrasing when you write your email.
If you are going to be visiting the city anyways, there's nothing wrong with asking if you can visit the department. The worst-case scenario is that they will simply tell you, "no, it's not possible."
However, visiting the department and talking with staff and students there is often a good way to show your enthusiasm for applying to a particular program, and can help to set you apart from other applicants. I know that a student I supervised in research did something similar and ended up being admitted to the program (one of the few he was accepted to, in fact).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.720059 | 2014-08-07T10:25:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26892",
"authors": [
"Donkey Hotay",
"Dustin",
"Guesstimator",
"Jesse",
"Moriarty",
"Razvan Deaconescu",
"Richard",
"RoboKaren",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20445",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72226",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72227",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72228",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72253",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72254",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8562",
"user72228"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
27632 | Mentioning placement offer in a curriculum vitae?
I have been offered an engineering position from a reputed multinational corporation working broadly in Communications and Microprocessors. Meanwhile I am applying for a MS/PhD position in a different specialization but can still be broadly classified as Electrical Engineering.
Is it advisable to mention a Placement Offer in a curriculum vitae? If so, will it be relevant in the above case?
If you are working at the company while you are applying to schools, then it should definitely be mentioned. However, if you are choosing between the placement offer and graduate school (in other words, accepting the offer instead of graduate school), then I would leave it out. This is because this may give the appearance that you're not really serious about applying to graduate schools, which may lessen your odds of getting an interview or an offer.
If you feel it's absolutely essential to mention it, you should do so in your cover letter; however, for the most part, I would do so only if it became important for you to do so (because there's a deadline for accepting the offer, for instance).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.720370 | 2014-08-26T06:56:03 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27632",
"authors": [
"9spades",
"Kevin Plover",
"Ravi",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74470",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74471",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74472",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74478",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74479",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74480",
"sudoer",
"user74479",
"user_005"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
95485 | Five-year cutoff for postdocs?
I am currently a postdoc in a genomics lab, doing computational work. I will be completing three years in the lab, this fall (this in the US). I graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics in 2012 (US university) and during a postdoc year at an obscure lab somewhere in Europe (this was the only offer I could land), I decided to switch fields and move into computational biology. It took me about a year to figure out the background for the field and land another postdoc (which is where I am now). I have managed to publish one paper in a high impact journal at this lab and also picked up lots of bioinformatics techniques.
However, the lab is not a good fit for me. It's not really multi-disciplinary and does not use any of my physics skills. But by going to conferences and talking to other people, I have managed to figure out what kind of work I'd like to do in the broad field of computational biology. I've also taught myself the necessary analysis methods that would be helpful.
So here's my question: I am going to apply this fall for another postdoc in labs that are much more aligned with my interests and where I can be a better fit. (a) But some universities specifically state that the PhD should be within five years. (b) Others state that the total postdoc time (including previous experiences) should be five years. (c) And there are yet others which state that the total postdoc time at that particular university should be five years.
Cases (a) and (b) could hurt me. Are there other researchers here who've been in similar (or remotely similar) situations? How strict are these five-year cut-offs? I have now acquired a lot of skills and have a much better vision of where I'd like to take my research in computational biology. I am worried though that this five-year cutoff rule could hurt my research plans and career.
In physics itself, I know many post-docs who did more than two post-doctoral stints with a total time exceeding five years. I wonder how they managed to deal with this rule?
At least in the US, postdocs are hired by individual faculty members without consultation from others, so the guidelines are somewhat fungible, particularly if there's a compelling reason to hire you.
The one exception is for external (and some internal) fellowships—in such cases, the recency rules are pretty much absolute.
In other countries, though, the rules for what is or is not allowed are stricter, and it may not be possible to circumvent them without significant amounts of work on the part of all involved.
I strongly agree that these time limits are a horrible idea, especially when applied indiscriminately and across fields.
For fellowships and "postdoc status", you're often stuck--the rules are whatever they are. Some places are willing to make exceptions for people who have changed fields or spent time away from the lab (e.g., to have a child or work in industry). If either of these apply, that might be your best bet.
If not, you still might be able to take a postdoc-like job without the postdoc title. These positions are often labelled "Research Associate", "Associate Research Scientist", or "Staff Scientist." Informally, these often still get call postdocs.
My impression is that it's sometimes slightly harder to be hired into one of these jobs: the salary is often (slightly) higher and you won't be eligible for time-limited fellowships, but it's not impossible and I think it's fairly common for postdocs to be 'promoted' into this job when they age out.
"I strongly agree that these time limits are a horrible idea" - Note that part of the reason for these time limits is that post docs are still not 100% considered employees under certain legal situations as "employees-in-training"; their situation is a bit better than graduate students in research assistant positions. The other positions you mention that omit the "postdoc" designation force those people to be hired as true employees. Although this could disadvantage the employees if they are not hired as a result, the intent is the opposite, to protect employees from 'in training' labels.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.720499 | 2017-09-04T18:36:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95485",
"authors": [
"Bryan Krause",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
96245 | How do I handle a faculty colleague who reports what I said to the chair?
I am a new faculty and I have serious conflicts with my chair because she has taken two of my grant proposals (putting herself as the PI) and a conference research proposal and tools I developed for my study (she put a senior faculty and herself as the first and the second author before me).
There is another new assistant professor in my department: she is American, but originally from a country in the Middle East. She comes to my office for a closed-door conversation once a week before meeting with the chair. Then she asks a list of questions regarding my situation and about other colleagues. Also, she asks me when I am going to leave this position.
At the beginning, I thought that she was my friend, as she seemed she cared about me. However, I realized that she reported my words to the chair because, for example, the chair brought to me what I said only to her as an issue and I heard what she said to the chair—it was what she asked to me—when I walked near the chair's office.
So I began to ignore her and phone calls. Also I do not smile when she comes to my office anymore. Also I told her indirectly "stop". However, even still today she came to my office again and kept asking questions again.
How can I make her stop doing that, smoothly and without any conflicts?
Don't tell her anything you wouldn't want repeated to the chair?
My office is located next to the chair's office - so the chair knows she comes my office. If she is a really bad person, I think that she can create whatever she wants to get her advantages. What do you think? I stopped telling her already for a long times ago - however, she is still coming to my office to do the same things.
Why does it matter where your colleague is from?
Your conflicts with your department chair sound like a much bigger concern than with your colleague. As an assistant professor, she probably has little influence over your career and work environment, and as @ff524 said all you basically need to do is to ignore her and not share any private thoughts with her. But your chair sounds extremely unethical and abusive, and her behavior has a lot more potential to cause you real harm. Can you clarify therefore why your concern (as manifested in your question) is more about the younger colleague than about the chair?
to me is really clear... there is a person that wants him kicked out of department, I dont understand why is difficult to understand
Dan Romik - eventauly I decided to leave this school because of my situation - so I stopped interacting with my chair. I just feel annoyed too much by my colleague who does not stop.
I just needed to mention her background to understand her culture - from my culture, people usually feel guilty to deliver any words - because we teach and learn - only bad person does such a thing.
The background of the person is completely irrelevant, and the way you phrase it on your comment is far from appropriate (to say the least!) since you are (directly) hinting that the behavior is a byproduct of her background.
Also I told her indirectly "stop". -- Have you tried telling her directly to stop?
In general, I feel no confidentiality obligations to colleagues and I do not expect any from them. The only reason I could think of to have a closed door conversation is if I was respecting the quiet work environment of others - not for privacy.
While I acknowledge that dealing with department chairs and other senior professors can occasionally be fraught because of the power differential, at the end of the day, you are all adults. Talk about things.
Behavior such as "not smile", "not want to talk", "I thought she was my friend", "ignore her and her phone calls" is not how adults behave. Adults sit down and tell each other things like this:
I'm happy to talk about these things, but I would really like it if that doesn't get to the chair.
or
I know you're my chair, but these are my research ideas and I think that I should publish them under my name so I can build up a portfolio that can get me through the tenure process.
The point being that you should communicate about issues as adults do. If you have an issue with someone, talk to them, explain them what you don't like, and propose solutions. "Not smiling" is not a solution -- it's a kindergarten approach.
You should consider posting this at the workplace, as your situation is not specific within the domain of academia.
With this said, having a colleague who isn't necessarily discreet isn't the end of the world. It is a formerly unknown variable whom has revealed their true colors. At the end of the day, you decide the direction of where your research will go. Remain professional and cordial in your dealings, there is no need to be impolite towards your colleagues, instead approach the conversation and steer it in such a way where if you are asked compromising question, laugh and say sorry but you don't feel comfortable answering that. In time, prepare to set sail for other harbors if you don't think your current institution isn't a good place for you.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.720840 | 2017-09-20T02:33:45 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96245",
"authors": [
"Dan Romik",
"JeffE",
"PsySp",
"SSimon",
"confused",
"emory",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3849",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46816",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80089"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2137 | How to find ways to proofread English in papers
As a non-native speaker of English, it can often be hard to spot some of the errors that a native speaker would find. For a long time, I've been thinking about getting a native speaker to help me with proof-reading my texts (articles, theses, application, etc), but I don't quite know where to look. What are some good ways to get proofreading for your texts?
For example, are there any websites on the Internet where one can exchange proofreading services between different languages? (Say, if you help me proofread my text in language x, I'll help you with yours in language y.)
Collaborate with a colleague who is a native speaker?
Unfortunately, I have none.
Yes, Elsevier publishing group provides professional language services, like editing. You can find about it here
I also found this website which looks good, and it's cheaper and quicker, I think.
Wiley has also a language editing service. From my experience, they are a bit faster than Elsevier and automatically give you a certificate that the manuscript was edited. And you can by credits, so if your financing is getting to an end, you can pre-pay some service. Later, you can use your credits instead of direct payments.
Being a native speaker does not mean they are a good proof-reader. In fact, most are far from it.
Your spelling- and grammar-checkers should pick up most of the horrors, and the common 'tricks' of pushing the text to one side for a few days and reading from the end to the beginning will probably allow you to catch the rest yourself.
If your articles are for publication, the editor or sub-editors will tidy up the details if the text is basically sound. A thesis generally needs only to be clearly readable - nobody is going to pull you up for ending a sentence with a preposition or using 'that' instead of 'which'.
For your CV... try a professional CV writer, or one of the many CV templates available on-line. Go to the the university ones though, to avoid the scammers.
If your articles are for publication, the editor or sub-editors will tidy up the details if the text is basically sound Actually, many editors (at least for math journals) do very little copy editing.
this bring up an important point. Non native english speakers should not automatically assume english speakers know 'correct grammar'. Instead they may give clues to what 'sounds' correct or natural. As a native speaker, I admit to non native speakers teaching me alot about grammar that I took for granted in younger years.
Learning all the nuances of a second language can be overwhelming. Fortunately, when writing in a technical field, often the vocabulary needed for your paper is a tiny subset of the whole language. However, I recommend that when you get the chance you ask native speakers (or others who write clear, precise prose) to explain the motivation behind their decisions. One good resource that does this is The Grammar According to West.
There are professional translators who offer editing and proofreading of scientific articles.
Just google it (the good thing that they don't need to be nearby).
Once I tried such service and I was happy (and the reviewers as well). And even a bit surprised, as I had some doubts if such service can work for scientific texts, full of jargon and complex ideas.
Of course, to start with, the article needs to be decent enough - readable (even if with some grammatical errors). Otherwise you need someone to write it with you, not only correct.
Any reference to that service?
if you mention the services, that would be great
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.721385 | 2012-06-24T22:23:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2137",
"authors": [
"Armand",
"Artem Kaznatcheev",
"Dan C",
"Speldosa",
"anon",
"foobar",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1069",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12718",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/141",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1428",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19803",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6502",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6507",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6508",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/66",
"oks",
"user-2147482637",
"user2164702",
"user3624251"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1896 | How to get the most out of an internship (in industry)?
As a PhD student pursuing an academic career (but optionally a career in industry), what should I do do to get the most of a 10-week internship at a research lab?
Things I've thought of: talking with people (networking); attending talk/seminar (new ideas); giving a talk (get people to know you).
What other things can/should be done?
Industry or Academic research lab?
industry (does it matter?)
The opportunities and career paths at each are significantly different, so the people you should talk to at each are different as well.
First of all, good for you in getting the internship. Now that you're there, some suggestions for what to do, broadly and specifically:
Meet people with similar backgrounds to yourself. Find out what they do, what skills they value, what skills they wish they had.
If you're in a large company, talk to people in other parts of the business, see what they do. You may find positions in other parts of the company that interest you that you weren't even aware of.
If you're in a large company, talk to managers, see what they desire in people like you. They'll already be slightly impressed that you thought to talk to them. Learn what they do, what skills they like. It can help you guide your career later on.
Learn new skills & hone old ones. This is a good time to see which of your skills are marketable and which aren't. Get really good at the marketable ones.
Use the opportunity to reach out to people in similar positions at different companies and see what they're doing. If you don't know people at other companies, ask around; your new coworkers should have friends they can put you in phone/email contact with, and you can take it from there.
Above all, try to do a really good job. Internships can often lead to full-time employment, so you want to impress.
Let me add two important items to eykanal's great answer:
Do awesome research. If you want an academic career, you can't ever not do this. A good internship is not a vacation from research; it's an opportunity to broaden your research portfolio.
Cultivate references for your future job search. Find, work with, and impress people whose interests overlap yours and whose opinions are valued in the academic research community. These people may work at the company, or they may be visitors.
When it comes time to look for an academic job, your application will be significantly stronger if you have recommendation letters from and publications with people who don't work at your home institution. In fact, if your CV lists an internship, but you don't have a letter from or paper with someone at your hosting company, that gap will raise a (small) red flag with recruiting committees.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.721703 | 2012-06-05T12:35:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1896",
"authors": [
"Ran G.",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/324",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
9958 | Why do universities tolerate uploading papers on their websites?
Lots of professors provide their full papers published by scholarly journals on their personal website (in the university official domain). PDF files of their final papers published by different publishers are available online. However, this is against the copyright transfer agreement, and the authors have no right to distribute their papers publicly. In other words, the authors have the same right as well as others to distribute their own papers publicly, as this is the marketing right of the publisher.
This is clear violation of the US copyright law, like distributing cracked software programs or movies without copyright. Why the university officials do not take action over this copyright violation?
One may say that this is their personal website and they are legally responsible, but if someone distribute an illegal item on his/her personal website, the university will not allow this because it is part of the university domain.
I think universities ignore this because it seems to be less criminal, but why? as it is still illegal. So much the worse, it is even common in top universities where considering legal issues in different aspects is quite serious.
Even ignoring all the other arguments, why should the university take action proactively? It's the publisher's job to issue a DMCA takedown, under US law (where it applies).
As Yuichiro Fujiwara indicates below, it's not automatically copyright infringement. For some journals it is, for others, it isn't. Absolutes rarely hold up in academia!
Indeed, how do you know it's copyright infringement? There is such at hing as non-exclusive licensing: you can redistribute it, but so can I.
@Kaz when there are 200+ papers by different publishers, it is obvious that copyright issue has not been taken into account; otherwise, they should avoid at least a few papers in the list.
@All: it could also be a sign that e.g. the funding agencies and/or university require the researchers to make versions publicly available, and thus the journals were selected so that e.g. having at least preprint online (possibly x months after publication) is allowed.
@All: It isn't obvious at all. For instance, in mathematics, every publisher I know allows authors to post papers on their own websites.
I find very little resemblance between software I cracked (or movies I illegally downloaded) and a published article that I spent days or months to write.
Many researchers and universities aren't biggest friends of publishers and therefore may not give a ... ... about some of the limitations publishers try to lay upon them.
Why the university officials do not take action over this copyright violation?
Because they can't. There is no way to tell whether a given electronic preprint violates the publisher's copyright-transfer agreement or not. Different publishers place different restrictions on authors' rights to redistribute their papers. Some allow posting pre-edited versions; some allow posting the official camera-ready version; some allow neither; some only require an exclusive publication license and leave copyright in the author's hands. These restrictions change over time, and may depend on whether the author paid an open access fee to the publisher. The only way to determine whether an electronic (p)reprint is posted illegally is to read the actual copyright-transfer/publication contract. But this contract is directly between the authors and the publishers; universities have no record of these agreements.
Because they don't have to. At least within the US, university web sites generally fall under the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires copyright holder to request removal of the specific items to which they claim copyright.
Because the publishers don't care. Scary legal language notwithstanding, academic publishers in many fields have zero interest in pursuing legal action against individual researchers for posting copies of their own papers in violation of copyright transfer agreements. (I have heard this said specifically about ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and Springer, by people with connections inside each of those organizations.)
Because it's not in their best interest. Both universities and the public benefit materially from the public availability of research by their faculty, students, postdocs, and other researchers. Universities have no incentive—aside from a potential legal threat that they know will never materialize—to proactively censor that research. Many universities, and more recently many governments, have adopted open-access policies that either encourage or require their members to amend publication agreements and make their work publicly available.
Because researchers would revolt. Even if academic publishers started sending DMCA notices to universities, and even if universities required their members to take down copies of their papers, in violation of research community expectations, the people whose research is being censored would simply take their business elsewhere. Those publishers would receive fewer papers, and those universities would receive fewer graduate school and faculty applicants.
At least for SIAM, the copyright transfer agreement explicitly allows authors to post the final, camera-ready proof to the author's personal website (but not other public repositories).
Are you sure those "lots of professors" you're talking about are infringing copyright holder's right? Because of the way you put it, your "question" sounded to me as if you were claiming that posting your own paper on your personal website was always copyright infringement no matter what, which is not true.
For example, here's an excerpt from Terms and conditions associated with the American Physical Society Transfer of Copyright Agreement:
The author(s)... ...shall have the following rights (the “Author Rights”):
...
*3. The right to use all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, on the author(s)’ web home page or employer’s website and to make copies of all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, for the author(s)’ and/or the employer’s use for educational or research purposes.
So, you can upload the final, published version of your paper published in, say, Physical Review Letters on your personal website. It's perfectly legal from any perspective.
Of course, not all journals have the exact same policy, so what kind of right you have as the author can vary greatly from publisher to publisher and maybe from journal to journal as well. For instance, unlike APS, IEEE allows authors to upload the final, published versions only if they chose the open access option by paying a fee. (Note that this doesn't mean IEEE forbids any online distribution of your results on your own. For example, you can still post your final accepted manuscript on your personal website without paying the fee. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory even encourages authors to upload your manuscript to arXiv when submitting to the journal.)
I'm not familiar with other publishers' policies, but as far as I know, many mathematics journals allow authors to upload final accepted manuscripts on their personal websites.
Could you substantiate your claim by providing links to the many examples you're sure are the kind of copyright infringement you're talking about? Maybe this is peculiar to my field, but I don't remember many instances of such copyright infringement and am having very hard time believing this is prevalent.
Also, assuming there are actually many such ilegal cases, what makes you think that universities ignore this problem for the reason that it looks less criminal? I don't see why this explanation is the most plausible.
IEEE doesn't allow uploading the final, publisher-prepared version, but it does allow uploading a version prepared by the author. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/ieeecopyrightform.pdf (Paragraph 6 of the section about retained rights).
@silvado: Please read what I wrote. My sentence you seem to be referring to ends with "only if they chose the open access option by paying a fee" and the link to the publisher's website explaining this. Here's what they say: OA authors are assured that they are free to post the final, published version of their articles on their personal Web sites, their employers' sites, or their funding agency's sites. Here's an example of open access articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2013.2247461 I'm not sure if every IEEE journal has this option though.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant to highlight that they allow uploading the author's version even without paying the OA fee.
Oh, I see. I edited my post to emphasize it.
It is legal for a copyright holder to do whatever the holder wants to do with the work. The issue at hand is just who owns the copyright. Copyright can be owned by multiple parties, and some of those parties can sign away all or part of their rights. Doing so does not limit the rights of the remaining parties. The authors of an article may sign away their rights, but they generally do not have the authority to sign away any copyright that belongs to their employer. In the US, and perhaps elsewhere, work you perform for your employer is also copyright to your employer. In fact, depending on the terms of your contract, you may have already completely transferred copyright of any work you perform as part of your employment (and academic research likely applies) to your employer. Thus, publishers may be asking you to sign away something that is not yours.
I am assuming that by top universities, you mean institutions like MIT. MIT encourages employees to fight total transfer of copyright by amending the copyright transfer agreement. The gist of the amendment is that MIT contends that the authors' copyright to the material is nonexclusive - it also belongs to MIT. Thus it cannot be completely signed away by the authors to publishing companies. MIT will extend its privileges back to the authors regardless of what the publisher intends. Thus:
The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s
academic and professional activities.
and
Once the Article has been published by Publisher, the Author shall also have all the non-
exclusive rights necessary to make, or to authorize others to make, the final published version of the Article available in digital form over the Internet, including but not limited to a website under the control of the Author or the Author’s employer or through
any digital repository, such as MIT’s DSpace.
and
The Author further retains all non-exclusive rights necessary to grant to the Author’s employing institution the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make copies of the work in electronic, digital or in print form in connection with teaching, digital repositories, conference presentations, lectures, other
scholarly works, and all academic and professional activities conducted at the Author’s employing institution.
Since these rights are non-exclusive, they don't prevent the publisher from providing high quality print and online versions of the article to their subscribers. They also do not prevent the authors and MIT from making the article publicly available in a noncommercial way.
While MIT has taken steps to explicitly assert its rights to do so, many institutions likely have such rights implicitly (for example, they may be stated in employee contracts) and see no need to limit or infringe upon their own rights.
Actually, one may hold the copyright, but also be bound by contractual agreements. E.g., I retain the copyright to not only my pre-publication [sic: it's on-line...] version of a monograph, but also the copyright to the eventual conventionally-published version (re-typeset, etc), by the non-profit Cambridge Univ Press. But/and part of the deal is that I give up royalties on e-books (!?) in order to have no delay in putting my on-line version on-line, etc. In particular, keeping the copyright does not prevent one from contractual obligations...
You are describing the US arrangment. In the UK though to be able to participate in the research excellence framework, thus in future funding for the university, all research must be made open access. Most if not all UK universities have their own open repositories where one will publish pre-prints if the journal or academic repository a piece of work was published in was not open access.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.721958 | 2013-05-13T08:44:42 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9958",
"authors": [
"Casper Leon Nielsen",
"Federico Poloni",
"Googlebot",
"Jeff",
"Kaz",
"Kiran Gandhi",
"Mark",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Stan Rogers",
"Yuichiro Fujiwara",
"aeismail",
"cbeleites",
"dimbul",
"hristo hristo",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1301",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24560",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24561",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24562",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24566",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24567",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24581",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24586",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31954",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3890",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3900",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/406",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"paul garrett",
"rubslopes",
"silvado",
"stack",
"ypercubeᵀᴹ"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5195 | What are the disadvantages of opening the source of your own science tools
I am currently finishing my PhD thesis and, as a great deal of the job was to create tools and protocoles, I am considering putting the different scripts I wrote on open source directories (such as SourceForge or GitHub).
The advantage I see for opening them is:
They will be available for everyone and can be reused by the scientific
community
They could be improved (and corrected) by others
It ensure my authorship for the different scripts (I can prove I put them there)
However, I was wondering if there is any drawback of doing so (for
future publication, version maintenance, and so on).
I have to precise that not all the work was published yet. My field is biological science.
See also: Why don't research papers that mention custom software release the source code? at programmers.SE.
A bit related: What are risks or disadvantages in uploading to figshare or related services?.
Take a look at Top Ten Reasons to Not Share Your Code
(and why you should anyway).
The issues I have personally encountered working on this - my source code is a mixture of open source and closed source projects, depending on many factors:
You have to maintain your code. This might not be something some people care about, but for me, I dislike the idea of putting out code that doesn't run at least relatively smoothly. Which means while the custom workflow where data bounces between a Python script, a C++ program and then an R script for analysis might work for me, produce good and reproducible results and generally carry science forward, it sure as hell isn't going to see the light of day. Things need to be put into functions in case people end up using your code like a library, general messiness cleaned up, etc. That's...well...it's work.
Documentation. As with the above, I really dislike the idea of releasing something without documentation.
Lack of feedback mechanism/opportunity cost. This one is a big one for me because they are what make 1 & 2 so difficult - it's really hard to tell if someone is using my code. It feels a bit like shouting into an empty room, it has little to no impact on my career, and certainly people aren't using it to the extent that it would appear as a line-item on my CV. So I put in a lot of work that could have gone to another paper etc. purely for ideological reasons.
Sanitizing code. Releasing code into the open and not putting in things that might get you scooped means going over your code to not put in a glowing neon sign that says "Future Directions Here". You can't really have a code base that is the combination of three projects, one being written, one being tinkered with and one really only in the musing stage and open source that code without taking a risk.
Beyond that, for me, is the potential presence of private health data. So my "released" code needs to be scrubbed of any reference to anything that might be confidential, and along those same lines, now needs dummy data that will work and is validated to go along with the code because the data the code was actually written for cannot just get dumped on GitHub or whatever.
All of this is because you asked for cons. Despite this, I try to put up as much of my stuff as is possible.
Surely 1 and 2 are desirable even you are not releasing the code. Otherwise you will come back to the code a few months later with no idea how to run it.
@FaheemMitha It's a matter of degree. What's necessary for me to know what I was thinking, and for someone else to is pretty different. Similarly, I don't so much care about pretty, platform agnostic code when it's just me.
Maybe you could use C.R.A.P.L. when releasing your code @Fomite
Some disadvantages could be:
People may expect you to maintain the code. If you don't maintain it, the code may be rendered useless at some point.
You might feel forced to document the code. This is actually an advantage, but many people would not realise that ;)
You might have to work on cleaning up the code. Exactly the same point as above applies, if you ever want to re-use your code this is actually an advantage.
If people start using your code (this is not impossible), they could e-mail you and start asking questions. This takes your time. On the other hand, it also provides you the opportunity to be co-author (so hey! don't document, so people are forced to ask your help ;-)
More points are raised in the very similar question that was asked at Programmers.SE less than a month ago:
Why don't research papers that mention custom software release the source code?
I agree with cheeseman for the point 2-4. For me that points might fall into the benefit of opening the code.
I agree with both cheeseman and William. I just meant they might be perceived as disadvantages, whereas in reality, being forced to write proper code is actually an advantage (as I said in the answer)
My experience is that you do have to maintain the software, and people do ask support questions. But hey, that means: my software is successful (and if the support questions are too complex, I point them to the fact that I run a consulting business so they could buy my professional help ;-) )
Here are some objections I've heard. It's up to you to decide how relevant it is to you. This post isn't to say that I endorse all or any of them: it's just to list some of the potential disadvantages.
You might be giving away your most promising source of future funding: the exploiting and extending of those tools and protocols.
The tools and protocols are potentially your future career. You've put an awful lot of work into them. Only now, can you start getting value out of them. Giving them away, means giving away all your hard work, for others to leap ahead of you, and free-load off your development work.
You will get the aggro of users demanding more documentation, and the constant nagging of questions. And because they got the tools and protocols for free, their expectations may be even higher, and they'll feel even more entitled to more of your time, than if they'd paid for it.
Weird, I know, but from experience, many users have lower expectations of paid tools than of free tools, because with paid tools, there are well-defined boundaries of what the user gets for their money. As learnt from experience, and from behavioural economics experiments, people tend to value something more, if they've paid for it.
On the other hand, if there are papers describing those tools, you might get more citations if people use and/or extend your tools.
I can add that in practice, usually nobody is interested in my code ;)
As I commented here, it is hard to imagine someone else taking the hairball that is typical scientific research code and extending it, or even using it, without authorial assistance
(+-0) I completely agree that code and protocols are important for the future career (+1). But I beg to disagree strongly with the conclusion that you are giving away a source of future funding (-1). This can only happen if the PhD student is the owner of all the code in question, which is very often not the case. Please see my detailed answer.
Too long for a comment:
@EnergyNumbers wrote:
You might be giving away your most promising source of future funding: the exploiting and extending of those tools and protocols.
Assuming that opening the source is accompanied by a corresponding license, making the code publicly available under a FOSS license may actually do the exact opposite:
It might ensure that you can exploit and extend those tools even after you leave your current institution, thus securing a promising advantage for future funding/employment negotiations.
As a PhD student employed for doing the corresponding research by some university or research institute, you usually do not own the code you wrote. Instead, your employer has the copyright (depending on your legislation, you still may have the authorship rights, but the economic rights are your employer's).
Other people may have been involved in the development, so they have intellectual rights to the code as well.
In this situation, a FOSS license can give legal certainty that you can go on using and developing the code after you leave your current university (which is not unlikely to happen after a PhD is finished).
Of course, the license must be granted by the holders of the copyright (university, co-authors' universities, etc.). This will not happen unless you
a) bring the matter to the attention of your university (supervisor, IP office, etc.)
b) you convince them that the FOSS license is good for them as well*
However going for such a FOSS license is IMHO advantageous for both you and your university:
for you, because you can throw this piece of software into negotiations for your next job and go on using it.
for your current university, as they have a much better chance that the code is maintained so they can go on using it. It is a huge difference between e.g. people in your current group using your code and your group finding someone else to take over the maintenance of the code.
I wrote might: because you'd have this advantage without FOSS license if you are the actual copyright holder of the code.
That would be the case, if you were not paid for doing the research (but e.g. only for being teaching assistant), or you were paid by a scholarship and didn't sign a contract that transfers the copyright of the work you do during you PhD to your university, you actually own your code. So you already have all rights to deal with your code in future as you like, and granting a FOSS license to the public doesn't change this.
* In my experience, IP offices tend to see $$ as soon as you start telling them that you developed a software, but have no idea about the costs of selling the software (infrastucture and ensuring maintenance) that you can in practice avoid with FOSS licenses.
How can you grant a licence over the university's software? If you were able to grant any licence, you could just grant yourself perpetual irrevocable rights.
@EnergyNumbers: good point. I clarified that of course the university has to grant the license, but in practice the PhD student is the one who makes them do this.
"In this situation, a FOSS license can give legal certainty that you can go on using and developing the code after you leave your current university (which is not unlikely to happen after a PhD is finished)." The "not unlikely to happen" refers to leaving the university, I presume?
@FaheemMitha: yes
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.722947 | 2012-11-08T09:18:33 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5195",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Aniruddha",
"Badger Boy",
"Coldblackice",
"Dave Clarke",
"David Ketcheson",
"Dilum Aluthge",
"Fabel",
"Faheem Mitha",
"Fomite",
"Martin Buber",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Tejas Shetty",
"Tim Siwula",
"Wiliam",
"cbeleites",
"erh8",
"gerrit",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13345",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13347",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13371",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13396",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13403",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/285",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34585",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34657",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34671",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/481",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69862",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"user92953"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1085 | Software/App for electronic research notebooks
I want to keep a research notebook for my computational "experiments". Basically, I should at least be able to write text and attach images like plots. Other nice features to have would be
linking to past experiments/pages
latex equations
uploading papers, or other urls
being able to transfer data
dating and version control
open-source tool
I am already familiar with trello and tiddlywiki. Trello is good for attaching stuff and organising tasks, but I need a notebook where I attach a plot, write stuff around it, attach another below it. It doesn't have a paper or canvas. Tiddlywiki is a little painful for attaching pics and equations, the file bloats, it seems I am keeping a blog.
What is a good, free electronic notebook tool for research/lab work?
I just saw http://springpadit.com, but I don't know how good it is. Anybody used it?
Hello, highBandWidth: Welcome to Academia.SE. As a moderator, I have to agree with Nunoxic that the question is similar to the Nonlinear Note Taking. Please indicate in which sense the question is different, or it may be better to merge or close the question.
If anything, this question is better than the nonlinear note taking one as it is more detailed with specific desired requirements. Please keep it open.
@aeismail, the reason I asked this question was that Nonlinear Note Taking is too focused on trees and mind-map structures. Lab notebooks (the physical kind used in wet-labs etc.) are not really the same as mind maps.
@highBandWidth: Okay. Thanks for the clarification. I can agree with that assessment.
A little bit of necroposting (adding a comment as I don't have any reputation on academia site). After huge research of available tools and even after deciding to create my own software, which could satisfy me, I've found zimWiki, which has almost everything you want and I wanted too. It allows inheritance of pages, linking, attaching items (including tex, graphviz and other plugins), stores pages as Markdown txt file with folder of included files, so you can easily use it with git to have version control, or to share it any page.
People really like https://obsidian.md/ I haven't gotten into it yet, but it seemed promising
For the last month, I have been using Gitit for this purpose. That link goes to a live demo where you can try it out. It satisfies all your requirements:
It's a wiki, so you can easily make links between pages.
It's built on pandoc, which understands TeX and uses MathJax to render it (it technically renders a subset of TeX, but it's a pretty substantial subset)
It's actually a Git repository, so you can upload anything you want to it. Or just put your figures out on the web (via figshare or a public Dropbox link) and link to them.
Same as 3.
Again, it's Git.
It is open source: https://github.com/jgm/gitit
As a bonus, you can put it out publicly on the web if you want (or just run it locally on your machine). I run it on an internal server at my University and my students and post-docs use it to. Thus it's a convenient way to share information as well.
Is there a guide on how to publish my gitit wiki on the web? Or at least, how can I backup my gitit wiki on the cloud instead of storing everything on my local machine?
@Heisenberg You can back it up on any site that hosts git repositories (e.g. Github, Bitbucket).
I just figured out that the wikidata folder is just a regular git folder. Do you know if there is a guide regarding hosting gitit online? The README mentions Apache hosting but I'm not sure how to set one up.
For uploading papers and annotating them, I use mendeley.
To organize my citations, I use citeulike which is nifty for it bibtex entry generation. I also use Jabref locally on my computer to manage my papers.
I am into numerical simulations as well and I generally add my results to latex documents (figures and all) as I eventually need it in a latex format for my dissertation! Plus this way, I save time!
Have you tried google notebook? I haven't used it in at least 3 years so I don't quite know how good it is now.
Good luck!
Google notebook is down: Google recently stopped development on Notebook, which means it's no longer open to sign-ups by new users or being improved.
Org-mode
I use Org-mode to organize and track my research. It is an Emacs major
mode that seems to hit most of your requirements. The .org files are
plain text which should guard against bloat and lets you access them anywhere, even when you do not
have Emacs or Org-mode available.
linking to past experiments/pages
Org-mode has linking capability to any type of file, as well as to
specific locations in a document.
latex equations
Org-mode has support not only for LaTeX equations but for a number of
programming languages via org-babel. You can include the code blocks
inside your .org file.
uploading papers, or other URLs.
Because it is only a text file, this sort of behavior can be
accomplished through the linking mechanism. The links
can be to other documents/papers on your machine or URLs. Visiting a
URL in Org-mode will open your browser to the requested link.
being able to transfer data.
I am unsure what you are looking for here. Org-mode has a nice
built-in table editor with automatic column width adjustment and some
spreadsheet behavior. If you do not want the actual data in the .org
file, you can always link to do the data. If you are looking to import
data into the file directly, Org-mode has a function org-table-import that
will parse TAB or whitespace separated data into an Org table.
dating and version control
I use Org-mode to track my time spent on various research items. You
can set the headings in Org-mode to behave like multi-state TODO lists
and assign time to them. Most headings start as TODO, switch to
STARTED when I clock in on them, and then I can update them to DONE
when I am finished. It can also generate reports based on your tracked time. For example, I use a built-in report for the last week to help generate weekly research updates.
I handle my version control and distribution
through Dropbox, but since the files are plain text any version
control system you are comfortable with should work fine.
open-source tool
Org-mode is open source.
Org-mode also can be set to display inline images, so even though the
actual .org file stays in plain text for VCS, when you open the file
in Org-mode you can view the images, and comment on them accordingly.
While the .org files themselves are plain text, Org-mode has a number
of export options, including LaTeX, PDF, HTML, DocBook, OpenDocument
and others. So if you want to turn your research notebook into
something more visually appealing than a plain text file, there are
many options. I would recommend this paper for a good description of what Org-mode can do in a research environment.
The downside is that it is a mode for Emacs. If you are not already
using Emacs it has a steep learning curve and can require extensive
customization to get things running exactly the way you want.
Org-mode and AUCTeX (the Emacs LaTeX mode) are the reasons I spent the
time to learn to work with Emacs and I have not been disappointed.
However, if you are looking to get something up and running quickly
(and are not already familiar with Emacs) it may not be your best
option.
Check out GitHub hosted blogs using what's called "jekyll":
-http://jekyllrb.com/
-https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll (see the wiki tab for example sites)
-Easy way to start: use jekyll bootstrap or octopress
Jekyll is just a bunch of code that makes it easy to have stuff that you have on blogs/lab notebooks: tags, pagination, etc.
Some cool things are that its free, open source, versioned, handles images/papers/etc, can integrate comments (I use Disqus).
It does require a bit of a learning curve over other blog platforms, but its well worth it.
The good thing about jekyll is that you can add files and they can go into version control along with your text/notes. The bad(?) thing is that unlike a lab notebook, you can't drag and drop images and visually mark/annotate stuff.
I personally use VoodooPad, which is basically a personal wiki, in conjunction with LaTeXiT for latex equations. I've found it to work very well; you can store many things in it, including papers. It's all text-based so you can back up using Git or whatever you like. They have a free version. Not open source.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Evernote. They claim you can put anything at all in it, and from what I've seen, that's true. Backup to Evernote cloud. Free, not open source.
It sounds like you're looking for something like http://figshare.com
It's part of Digital Science, which is part of the same family of companies as Nature Publishing, but I know the guy who runs it and I think he's really sharp & going about things the right way.
figshare seems a like a place to host individual files, whether images, pdfs or datasets. Do people actually use it to keep daily records and the like?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.723893 | 2012-04-10T18:20:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1085",
"authors": [
"David Ketcheson",
"Heisenberg",
"Mitchell Porter",
"Piotr Migdal",
"ProdoElmit",
"aeismail",
"camzor00",
"endolith",
"highBandWidth",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11636",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19663",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2763",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/61317",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/634",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2734 | What is a "full-time teaching faculty" (and does advising count)?
Ed Tufte offers a discount to his seminars for "full-time teaching faculty" (as well as full-time students).
Does "full-time teaching" exclude full-time faculty who spend part time doing research? Does advising count as teaching?
Update
I contacted the organizer and they clarified that "full-time teaching" excludes most "research" faculty; it is intended for faculty whose primary job is to teach, not research faculty who also teach.
You'd have to ask him to know for sure, but I would expect "full-time teaching faculty" to refer to full-time faculty whose duties include a substantial amount of teaching. It would exclude adjunct professors and other part-time faculty, and would also exclude faculty who never or rarely teach. I expect that very few college or university faculty positions literally involve teaching "full-time".
I don't think there is a single definition. The website refers to
Full-time students not currently working, and full-time teaching
faculty only
I think in this case, it means people who do not have jobs outside the university, but it may exclude people who have a portion of their salary paid by grants (e.g., post docs). The best thing to do is to ask.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.724566 | 2012-08-02T15:29:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2734",
"authors": [
"Edd Barrett",
"Mykola",
"Potential Jerkface",
"Raphaël VO",
"Sarfraz Ahmed",
"Thelma Isaiah",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10515",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6838",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6839",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6840",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6843",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6845"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
3004 | What should a progress report contain?
What are the key components of a progress report? There are no official guidelines from the funding agency; all I have is a set of project objectives listed in the original proposal and a target length: three pages.
I am at the stage of putting together a draft for the PI, and I would like to due my due-diligence (get some basic guidelines here) before asking the PI for further input.
Here are some of my questions:
What sections should it include?
Are there any essential "key concepts" to include?
Is it acceptable to cut and paste from the proposal?
Should I include figures and graphs from unpublished findings?
How would the writing style compare / contrast to a proposal? To a research paper?
Finally, is there a good resource that provides a comprehensive (if brief) overview of writing progress reports? I have a few books on scientific writing, but none specifically adress progress reports.
Have you asked your PI for copies of old progress reports. The answers you get here will be "correct", but they may not be what your PI is looking for.
Good engineering practice suggests:
An executive overview: a couple of sentences (3 lines) which states either "The objectives for the period have been reached." or "The objectives have not been reached, because ..."; then "No obstacle in the way to the next objectives." Or "Possible obstacle are ....; contingency plan is ....".
A summary: what were the objectives for the period; then for each objective what has been done towards that objective. A little reuse of figures/graphs here is acceptable.
a main results section, as space allows: here you select one or two "main achievements" from the previous reporting period, and you give more details about that, with possibly references to external reports / draft papers / additional materials that the report reviewer can go analyse if they are interested.
an optional obstacles & contingency section: if the executive summary lists problems, here you details what these problems are (either the obstacles in the previous period, or the foreseen obstacles in the next period, or both). Also detail your planned contingency actions.
a report of effort spent: here you detail where your budget (and man-hours of work) was allocated to each objective/task.
Also, don't make it too long. It's extremely important that the reviewers of your project can get an overall impression of the progress in a very short time. (they will typically have many projects to evaluate in a short time)
I would also add: deviations from the work plan and explain why these deviations were made. Also note any planned future deviations. These are generally approved if reasonable, and it's best to make them explicit.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.724696 | 2012-08-27T22:46:52 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3004",
"authors": [
"Dave Clarke",
"Josh",
"Kaushik Gopalan",
"SameOldNick",
"Simon",
"StrongBad",
"chanp",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7574",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7575",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7576",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7578",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7584",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
635 | How to handle not having my PhD advisor as a reference?
I received my PhD in 2009 and my adviser will not provide a good recommendation for me. This is mostly because we have fundamentally different approaches to science, and in retrospect I see that I could have avoided a breakdown in our relationship if I had been more deferential.
At this point, I leave his name off of my list of references, but I suspect that a diligent potential employer might call him anyway. I would be willing to discuss any concerns that were brought up in such a call - indeed I think that doing so will help me to find a good fit in a new position - but I do not know if I should, or how to state this fact in my job applications.
I am currently finishing my post doc, and one recommendation has been to take another post-doc so that I at least have two supportive references from postdoc advisers - and that the additional publications will place less weight on recommendations. Still, others have told me that not having a good reference from my adviser is a kiss of death.
How can I most effectively handle this situation?
Long term, what is your career goal? Are you aiming for a tenure-track academic position, considering industry?
@Amy I am mostly interested in doing research in industry, a government agency / national lab, or an NGO.
Do note that industry positions are much less likely to contact your references, for a number of reasons. This is more of a problem for your academic future than your industry one.
@CharlesMorisset one senior scientist on my committee has served as a valuable reference, but my current work is outside within the scope of his expertise.
@eykanal "Do note that industry positions are much less likely to contact your references" - that has not been true in my experience, at all
@Amy - This has very much been my experience, but I'm fairly inexperienced here. This is something which interests me a lot... would you mind discussing this in chat?
Is there another committee member who you did have a good relationship with? A recommendation from him or her could help a lot.
I've personally seen a few careers survive this exact problem (caveat: I don't necessarily see the ones that don't), but it isn't easy.
The best way to surmount this problem is to be referred into a job in an industry/government/NGO lab - and have someone within the organization pulling for you. If you're doing an academic post-doc right now, that's fine, but you need to start connecting to people who work in the kinds of places you want to work. If you do another post-doc, do one for a company or a government lab. If you've got someone who can pull you into the fold at a company or lab, you've got no issue at all.
Here's my advice if you are sending out cold-call applications:
The issue won't come up in the application stage (don't mention anything negative about your experience in your cover letter, or your application will get trashed). The trick will be how to handle yourself during the interview stage.
You say here:
"in retrospect I see that I could have avoided a breakdown in our
relationship if I had been more deferential."
You're going to need a much better story than that. Because you are going to have to explain it at some point (probably when someone asks why you haven't listed your old PI as a reference), and that line will throw up red flags about your ability to handle being managed. You'll have to be prepared to talk about it in some detail, but focus everything on what you learned from it. How do you handle conflict better now? Have recent examples ready of your excellent interpersonal skills.
Avoid talking about this problem for more than a few minutes in an interview, but don't hide the fact that you've have this issue in the past. Employers will call your references, and chances are good that it will come up. Even if one of your references mentions it with you in the best possible light, if it's the first time the employer has heard of it they will feel like you've withheld information. While companies will generally not call someone you haven't listed as a reference, they will get in touch with everyone they know who may have also worked for your old boss, gotten a degree from your old department, collaborated with your old group. This may be an issue if your field of study is small. If you've changed your research focus somewhat since then, this is less likely to happen.
You can overcome this, but BE PREPARED. And once you get your first non-postdoc job, it'll all be downhill from there.
thank you for this is a very useful answer and encouragement. For the record, I never would consider using the quoted phrase in an interview. Here I used it to briefly paint the nature of our relationship. Indeed, I agree with many of my advisers observations, although we interpret these observations differently (e.g., either as a strength or a weakness). My current work demonstrates the strengths of my approach (without necessarily dismissing, and often embracing, his approach).
Re-reading it, my reaction to how you phrased your question does sound rather harsh. But believe me, it's only because I have heard people say truly ridiculous things in interviews that aren't too far off this! I think if you can tell a story like "Hey, he was wrong about a lot of stuff, but I've learned since then he WAS right about this one thing..." that's a good spin.
I don't understand why people don't expose their jerk advisor in public! I am going through a similar situation right now and I am going to expose him. It is our job to save hardworking PhD aspirants from these academic black-holes.
Here in Germany, this wouldn't be a problem, as the PhD adviser is normally excluded from providing references for hiring processes in academia, since it's assumed the advisor would support the student.
However, while there is reason to be concerned about your advisor not giving you a good letter of recommendation, all is not lost. Since this is not your previous position (you're coming from a postdoc), the PhD advisor's weight will not be as significant. It's still important, and you better have a very good "elevator speech" explanation why he might not support you. But the fact that you have a postdoctoral advisor means that you do have some credentials; if he can write a strong letter in support, it might further give credence to the idea that your there was just dysfunction between you and your PhD advisor.
"Here in Germany, this wouldn't be a problem, as the PhD adviser is normally excluded from the decision-making process in academia, since it's assumed the advisor would support the student" is wrong. Especially in the German academical system, it is exactly the opposite of what you stated.
@GennaroTedesco: A Doktorvater or Doktormutter cannot normally be used as a reference for a faculty hiring situation in Germany.
Well, that seems to be in discordance to most cases I have seen. Where have you taken such information from? :o
From the hiring processes I've participated in, both as the candidate and as a member of the committee itself.
There are some good answers here. I would like to add that this happened to me also. For a long time, I was also apprehensive and worried about prospective employers noticing that I don't list my advisor as reference, how to defend myself in interviews etc. but then I realized the best solution is to be upfront about it. When you are hiding something, people think you are guilty vs. when you are upfront about it - people tend to sympathize, plus most importantly you have no fear.
Falling out with your supervisor is bad, but it's not insurmountable so long as there are other people who like your work and will recommend you. Remember: even if your former supervisor is the leader of their field, there will always be some people that disagree with them!
In the UK you can only list two references anyway, so your postdoctoral supervisor and another committee member other than your supervisor would probably be fine.
The main issue is actually the interview. You need to be sure you have a good understanding of where any of your professional relationships have broken down and how you would address similar situations in the future. This may be too scary, but one good person to discuss this with and get ideas from is your former supervisor! Even if you know you will never use them as a reference, both of you will be in the same field for much of your remaining careers, so it's worth burying the hatchet if possible and finding a new, more adult relationship. Students often think their supervisors feel more strongly about them than they do, since students have only one supervisor and obsess about that relationship, but supervisors have many students and other responsibilities and basically just need everything to go as smoothly as possible.
If communication really is no longer possible, it still isn't necessarily the end of your career, but if communication is possible that would be my advice.
Great advise! That was my first idea too. Are all the bridges really burnt?
I don't think any of my own bridges are burned, but I wasn't writing about me, I guess I'm not sure what your question is? I did switch supervisors during my PhD though.
I also had a falling out with my PhD supervisor but managed to secure a good postdoctoral position in spite of it (I'm told the letter of reference provided by my PhD supervisor was "very concise", but I was lucky that my skillset was rare and urgently needed by the group I joined).
When applying for positions at the end of my postdoc, I did not use my PhD supervisor as a referee, but instead used my postdoctoral advisor and two other senior academics with whom I had worked during my postdoc. My postdoctotal supervisor said that it might look odd not to have my PhD supervisor as a referee, but in fact, it wasn't a problem. It did help that my postdoc work was very collaborative, so there were several people who knew me and my work very well and were prepared to speak well of me. If your postdoc has been shoter (mine was a 3 year position) or if you have not been able to develop collaborations with other academics during your postdoc, it may well be that another postdoctoral position would help. If your PhD supervisor is well known and well regarded, it might also count against you if you did not get on (in my case, my PhD supervisor was obscure and was thought odd by most of those who knew him). Regardless of all these considerations, if I were you, I would apply to both faculty positions and attractive postdoctoral positions, and see how you go in practise.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.725304 | 2012-03-07T16:21:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/635",
"authors": [
"Abe",
"Amy",
"Chris C",
"Ellen Spertus",
"J Labadin",
"Joanna Bryson",
"Julie Terral",
"Live",
"Peter Boothe",
"aeismail",
"amiry jd",
"eykanal",
"gented",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10373",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1446",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1448",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1454",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1469",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1472",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1473",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1629",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/167",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/207871",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/207971",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/344",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36339",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"ikashnitsky",
"mbq",
"mbx",
"teenage ninja turtle",
"usr032456543"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
116458 | How can I provide a great external evaluaton of a faculty member's promotion and tenure case?
I recently received an email asking if I would be willing to evaluate a colleague's application for promotion and tenure. We are both at R1 universities in the US. According to the guidelines, I am qualified to serve as an external evaluator even though I am neither tenured nor in a tenure-track position. However, this means that I have limited familiarity with the process.
I am inclined to accept and support the case, but would like to know:
What is typically involved in such a review? How much reading and writing? Can I expect to do this in a single day?
What makes a great (great = valuable to the committee) evaluation?
Before spending the time on the review, you might want to make sure your colleague's institution is aware of the nature of your position. There is often a requirement that external evaluators already have at least the rank for which the candidate is being considered (and have tenure for tenure cases). It's possible that their asking you represents an oversight, and they'll throw out your letter once they realize that you are not tenure-track.
@MarkMeckes I've also heard that some places ask for a junior letter, usually from someone the candidate has mentored. But definitely check.
@MarkMeckes thanks for pointing that out - I'll check with the dept head. A quick review of the institution's guidelines indicates that evaluations can be from scientists with equal or higher rank or equivalent experience; I received a promotion last year that could be interpreted as equivalent to tenure.
"Equivalent to tenure" is open to interpretation, especially at an R1. It would be best to check with the person who asked you, whether the candidate or otherwise. Did the candidate mentor you? That might make a difference in an answer.
@Buffy the candidate did not mentor me. I've updated the question to indicate that I am qualified to serve as an evaluator - the suggestion to check is good and I will do so, but for the purposes of this forum I think that it will be useful to have an answer to this question since it is difficult to find guidance on Google.
For context: I’m in math. Take this advice with a grain of salt if you’re in a discipline with different norms.
A good (meaning useful) letter is typically around 2-3 pages long, although I have seen letters as short as 1 page (not very useful) and as long as 5 pages (useful, but not in proportion to its length and tedious to read).
At least 85-90% of the letter’s length will be devoted to discussing the candidate’s research. It’s appropriate to comment briefly about other aspects of their work such as teaching, service, organizational work, outreach etc, to the extent that you feel such feedback would be helpful, or to the extent you were explicitly asked to discuss those things. Unless you were explicitly asked about them, it’s also appropriate not to discuss anything other than research.
For letters I have written, I would estimate that I spent around 4-8 hours in total doing the review. That time is spread out over several days, which I feel is important to make sure the review is thoughtful and I have time to weigh my words carefully and make sure I am willing to commit to the end result. I am usually familiar with only a part of the candidate’s work, so I spend a good amount of time getting up to speed on their full body of work and trying to estimate its significance. But I think it probably wouldn’t make sense for me to agree to do a review if I felt like I needed more than a day’s work to get to a point where I can meaningfully comment on the significance of their work.
In the letter I usually include both some general comments and at least a few paragraphs on each of 2-3 specific results and papers I am more intimately familiar with. My suggestion is to aim for a good balance between the general and the specific - the people reading the letter need a bit of both.
It’s okay to use some technical language, but don’t overdo it - many of the readers will not be experts in the specific area the candidate is working on. For the benefit of those non-experts, it’s helpful to include language that manages to convey how important and influential the candidate’s work has been without getting into a technical discussion. To some extent you can achieve this by relying on “sociological” data such as how prestigious and well-regarded the journals the candidate publishes in (or conferences they lecture at, etc) are, but try not to put too much emphasis on such things or you will risk coming across as a shallow person who only cares about prestige, and your feedback may be discounted. (Also, as JeffE said in a comment, such sociological indicators of prestige can often be estimated by non-experts directly, so your discussing them is potentially not as helpful as a more expert/technical commentary. But to a limited extent, I think it is appropriate and potentially helpful to comment on prestige.)
Good luck! Writing this sort of letter is a big responsibility, but also a very valuable service. It speaks well of your reputation that you were asked to do it.
"risk coming across as a shallow person who only cares about prestige" The person reading the letter might care a lot about prestige - increasing prestige might be their job.
@AnonymousPhysicist “increasing prestige might be their job” No, no one has the job of increasing prestige. Perhaps you mean that their job is to increase the level of excellence of their department, which of course would lead to increased prestige, but that would be a side effect not the main goal. Anyway, I’m not sure I understand your point here. The person reading the letter could be any number of things (evil, stupid, misguided etc) but that’s not something that should concern OP, and doesn’t affect any of the suggestions I made in my answer.
There are typically three things evaluated for tenure: Research, Teaching, and Service. The importance of each depends on the institution, but at an R1 you can guess that Research as evidenced by quality publication is by far the most important. At small colleges it would likely be Teaching first, but not necessarily. But no candidate can afford to not have some evidence in each of the three areas. For some, a book (or three) might be evidence of Service, or of Teaching. Only a seminal book would probably count much in the research area.
In many ways the quality of a publication record is best measured by how much the individual has influenced other researchers in the field in question. How often have they been cited, for example, or how much work has been done to extend the work of this candidate. In other words, how central is this person to the current work of the field. For a mid-career academic, writing a lot of papers may be necessary, but not sufficient.
The kind of person who the institution really wants to tenure is the kind of person who they really don't want to lose. For an R1, think of the following in addition to the publication record. Does the candidate properly mentor grad students? Does he/she hold advanced seminars or run labs? Does he/she bring in exceptional visitors to lecture or talk? What have the advisees of this person gone on to accomplish? Does the person mentor junior faculty effectively?
In some fields, such as CS, in which conferences are important, is the candidate regularly represented? Does he/she participate in conference committees? That can be evidence of service, but also of having a central place in the research community.
At some institutions, grant funding outweighs a lot of other things. One wants to say "outweighs everything" but that seems a bit cynical. But if a prof can draw enough grant money to fund grad students it will be hard for the institution to let them go.
Another factor, not usually formally weighed in, is how collegial is the person. Is the other faculty happy to share the coffee room with them? Note that it is the more senior members of the faculty who are going to be making the decision at most places.
At many universities the candidate creates a dossier for examination by the tenure committee. The dossier may be used to a greater or lesser extent to guide the discussions. But the candidate gets to make their personal "case" for tenure. If you have an idea what they want to communicate and accomplish in the dossier, it might be helpful to both support that but also to supplement it. Sometimes it is hard for a person to say good things about themselves and others can do so more easily. I once mentored a candidate who couldn't bring himself to point out how great he was.
Some places will even formalize the mentoring process for a candidate. Ideally this starts a couple of years before the tenure decision when the person still has a chance to enhance their record in appropriate ways. I've mentored other people (for promotion, not tenure) who refused all advice and didn't advance.
The time to do such a recommendation can vary widely depending on how well you know the candidate and his/her position in the field. If you have a lot of personal knowledge and work in the same field it might go quickly, but I doubt that a day is sufficient. I would want a week, actually, but might do better in some situations. I put an important recommendation together (for an award, not tenure) in a few days. Part of that was just thinking about presentation, so wasn't full time work, but the ideas needed a bit of time to settle and mature.
It can also vary depending on just how important your recommendation is. If it is expected that your support is vital, then it naturally takes more work if you want to be helpful. But if you are just a minor commentator and others will bear the major weight, then it can be quicker.
But, I wouldn't do it unless I actually wanted to do it. Just repeating things you can easily find (Google) will be less than helpful. If you have no personal knowledge, you aren't the right person.
This answer is missing the most significant bit. Especially at R1 institutions, promotions and tenure committees want an expert evaluation of the quality (depth, novelty, visibility, relevance, impact, etc.) of the candidate's research.
Not merely the amount of research, and not merely the prestige of the research venues —both of which the committee can judge for themselves—but the quality of the work itself—which is best judged by experts in the field. This expert research evaluation is the main purpose of tenure letters.
I agree with JeffE. I don't think this sufficiently addresses the question.
@Buffy In addition to the comments above, I was also hoping to hear something about the level of commitment and content: How much time will it take? How many publications will I need to read? How much googling? How much text would I write?
@Abe, I can't judge the time commitment as I don't know how well you know the candidate's record. A day sounds very optimistic. Gather the data, think about the issues, think about what you want to say, write it, review it.
@Abe, That depends on a lot of things. Who asked you to do this? The candidate or another? Are you a major commenter or a supplemental one? It sounds like you don't know the candidate's record very well and you need to know enough to be honest. Again, it is a judgement call. The less you know, the more you need to know. I think the most important thing is that you have an understanding of the place of the candidate in the research spectrum. If you have no idea of that you might need to do a lot of work. What you know is better than what you've heard, of course.
@Abe, your questions seem to imply that this was imposed on you and is a burden. If so, you may not be the right person to do it.
@Buffy answers to your questions ... dept. chair asked me; I am one of 6-8 external evaluators; I know the candidates work and use it in my own. The reason I would like details about the amount of work is so that I can evaluate the commitment before I agree to it. It seems that it could be an opportunity to contribute and learn similar to reviewing a paper or serving on a grant review panel. I just feel that I need to understand what is required to produce a quality review before accepting the invitation.
@Buffy ps Was my interest in quantifying the time commitment that came across as being a burden? Even then, how would seeing this as a burden (as opposed to service) indicate that I am not the right person to do it?
I suggest that you comment only on things you actually know about. If the candidate's work was important to your own say that and give some specificity to it - which work, how helpful. Don't try to comment on things you don't know first hand. If you see it as a burden rather than an opportunity then you aren't as likely do to a good enough job of it. It was the third comment in this (too long) stream that made it sound to me like you thought it just a job.
@Buffy I am a little confused by several of your questions to Abe. Does the candidate ever request their own P&T letters? I thought requesting letters was always the job of the chair of the P&T committee. Also, how is he supposed to know if he is a major or supplemental commenter?
@Dawn, It is possible for people to seek support on their own in some places. I tried to give a comprehensive answer for the process as a whole, not just for R1, given that these questions and answers are supposed to be general enough that a future visitor with slightly different concerns can benefit from them. I don't imply that he will know his position in the hierarchy of reviewers but might, and might be able to infer it from various clues. Sorry that my answer was so badly received.
@Dawn, I will guess that in a lot of places (most?), while the invitation to comment comes from the chair, the candidate provides a list of suggested reviewers to the tenure committee or department head. This is to avoid the problem of random commenters with no connection to the candidate's work. So, the candidate is in a position to know, even if the invitation, formally, came from another.
My understanding is that there is almost always two lists, one from the candidate and one from the apartment. The P and T committee would take some from each list to request the letters. Perhaps that is not the case in all places. The candidate would not know who has been asked and their relative importance to the committee.
@Buffy thanks for your updates - your answer now better addresses my question.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.726233 | 2018-09-05T18:45:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/116458",
"authors": [
"Abe",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"Buffy",
"Dan Romik",
"Dawn",
"JeffE",
"Mark Meckes",
"Thomas Steinke",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/344",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44249",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75368"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
262 | Beginning PhD in related field without subject area expertise, will that be a problem?
I just finished an undergraduate degree in psychology, with a focus in biological sciences and pre-medicine courses. In looking at my options for graduate school, I've taken an interest in biomedical engineering; tissue engineering, medical devices, medical imaging, etc. My biology is pretty solid, but I'm not much of an engineer, aside from a few math courses. My question is, are students entering a PhD program typically very well-versed in the field, or is there a lot of "learning on the job"?
While shan23's answer is good, it is also somewhat incomplete. There are a few things to watch out for when you're coming in to a field from another department:
You will need to keep in mind the qualifying procedures for your new department. Will they expect you to pass exams in undergraduate coursework in the new discipline? If so, then you'll need to do a lot more "catch-up" work early on to make up for the potential shortfall.
Unless the new area is an interdisciplinary one—such as biomedical engineering—they're probably going to want to see some track record in the area. You're going to find it a lot easier to move into biomedical engineering from mechanical engineering than from economics.
You may find it helpful to try to find a position as a lab assistant or something similar to this in the new field before you try to start the graduate coursework. However, this is by no means required. (But it would help to prove the "dedication" aspect, which is what you'd need to convince a graduate school admissions committee about in order to have a successful application).
+1 for the idea in your second point. In BioEngineering, many students are able to successfully enter the field from a very wide range of backgrounds (comp sci, math, neurosci, bio, others), because it's such a diverse field. Students entering less interdisciplinary fields would have much more difficulty.
I had asked the same question related to CS in TCS.SE (found here) - from that, I'm summarizing the answers I got w.r.t your field:
Before grad school is a very early stage to change fields. Many people shift then. It's acceptable and expected. In your application, explain your changing fields (so the readers understand why the letter writers are not from psychology, why you took lots of biology courses, etc)
If you have research experience (especially if there's some angle towards biological subjects in them), it still counts for you, even if it's in a different field
If you have good grades, it still counts for you, even if they are for courses from a different field.
Admissions committees are generally looking for "strong" students where "strong" is largely defined via prior research experience. i.e. they especially want to know if you've had the experience of doing research, were successful at it and have a good idea if this is something you really want. The letters are important as experienced researchers' evaluation of your research ability and potential and grades give some indication of overall academic aptitude. Thus, if you have strong letters from your supervisors, it still counts for you, even if they are from a different field (strong = from a professor who knows you well and has great things to say about you).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.727288 | 2012-02-19T18:18:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/262",
"authors": [
"Mark Hahnel",
"Nikita Evseev",
"Tom Church",
"eykanal",
"fragilewindows",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/561",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/562",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/563",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/564",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/575",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/583",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"jlehtoma",
"user562"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
260 | Advisor asking me to work on research not covered by my grant
I have a rather difficult quandary. I'm a first-year student, and I joined my lab group to work on a clinical psychiatry/neuroscience grant. I've been making slow progress towards familiarizing myself with the grant. However, my advisor (actually, one of my two-advisors... they both run the lab together) has been having me work on a separate project of his, completely unrelated to my work. From what I can tell, this project would take a few months to work out, and the result would be my co-authoring on a small paper with another graduate student in the lab.
My worry is, I receive a stipend from the university every month, and that stipend is paid for my the psych/neurosci grant. By working on the second project, I have the feeling that I'm "stealing" from the first grant. I was told by my advisor that this sort of time-sharing between grants is normal within the research world. My question is, is that true? If it is a problem, how should I deal with this?
@CharlesMorisset - re:interest, I'm not really, but do you think it matters? And with the "few months", I'm not that good at gauging time, but I'd imagine that this project plus coursework will keep me busy full-time. I'm not sure, though.
Time sharing between grants is extremely common - I've often been asked to work on projects unrelated to what I am formally being funded for.
As @CharlesMorisset mentioned, many grants are now written with a sufficiently robust idea of where they're going, how they'll get there and that they'll work that a considerable part of the research is already done. Additionally, since grants need fairly strong preliminary results sections these days, one is essentially forced to use current funding to do the research for "future" projects.
So I wouldn't feel bad about it for the reason you've mentioned. I would consider asking your advisor "why this project?" Do they just need a warm body to do the work? Would they like to give you a shot at an early, modest publication? Is there a particular skill they are hoping you'll develop working on this project?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.727562 | 2012-02-19T17:47:14 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/260",
"authors": [
"MVB",
"Raph",
"Usagi",
"Zds",
"drxzcl",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/552",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/553",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/554",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/560",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/599",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
78262 | Is autism more prevalent amongst students in well-ranked universities?
I read on
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview (mirror):
And if we were able to eliminate autism and make everyone neuro-normal, I bet a whole slew of MIT kids would not be the way they are.
Is autism more prevalent amongst students in well-ranked universities (vs. all universities)?
That's probably a very hard question to answer, if for no other reason than those statistics are likely hard to come by. You'd have to look for some sort of national survey of universities' "Services for Students with Disabilities" offices. Maybe there's some form of reporting that is part of the Americans with Disabilities Act?
(I understand why the tags "health issues" and "disability" were added, though I wouldn't call it this way)
I agree that this may be a very difficult question to answer. With that said, surely the issue is going to be much less high vs. low ranked universities, and more about subject areas. I'd strongly suspect that students in the sciences are more like to have autism than those in the arts and humanities. Where an institution, as a whole, has a particular prevalence of autism it may say more about the balance of arts/humanities vs. science in their composition than about their prestige (of course prestige may in turn correlate with that composition)
For several reasons (including lack of diagnosis) it is a question hard to answer. However, there are several mental illnesses (eg. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder) that seem to be more common to professionals, and there are a lot of studies on the correlation between intelligence and autism, too.
There is research to suggest that the general belief (or stereotype) is accurate relative to subject area - specifically, some (but not all) areas of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) have a greater amount of autism prevalence than would be expected by pure chance. There is no research I can find that considers rank of University comparatively, but there is research that compares the prevalence of autism spectrum signs/symptoms/behaviors/classifications between various fields.
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Participation Among College Students with an Autism Spectrum Disorder
Findings suggest that students with an ASD had the highest STEM
participation rates although their college enrollment rate was the
third lowest among 11 disability categories and students in the
general population. Disproportionate postsecondary enrollment and STEM
participation by gender, family income, and mental functioning skills
were found for young adults with an ASD.
Selected quotes:
Young adults with an ASD had a higher proportion of majoring in STEM
related fields (34.31 %) than any other disability groups. The
difference was significant for seven out of the 10 pair-wise
comparisons. When we broke down the STEM related fields into computer
science, engineering, math, and science, we found that the high STEM
participation rates among young adults with an ASD was mainly driven
by a high concentration in science or computer science majors. Young
adults with an ASD were significantly more likely to major in science
(12.12 %) than their peers with LD (4.72 %), SLI (4.71 %), ID (5.40
%), HI (4.80 %), OI (1.45 %), OHI (4.55 %), TBI, or MD.1 These young
adults with an ASD were also significantly more likely to major in
computer science (16.22 %) than those with LD (4.06 %), SLI (5.90 %),
or OHI (5.19 %). However, the high prevalence in STEM majors for young
adults with an ASD was not found in non-STEM majors, such as health
science (7.64 %) or social sciences (9.52 %)...
When focusing on STEM majors, the odds of STEM majoring were 13 times
higher among males with an ASD than females...
These results provide the first national picture of postsecondary
enrollment and STEM participation for young adults with an ASD as well
as their peers in 10 other disability categories. Our analyses suggest
that young adults with an ASD who attend college are most likely to
pursue STEM majors. However, they also have one of the lowest overall
college enrollment rates...
Despite a previous lack of national evidence, the idea that people
with autism might be predisposed to choosing and succeeding in
STEM-related majors and jobs has gained a footing in popular press
stories and among advocacy groups (Moore 2006; Morton 2001; Ross 2006;
Safer 2012). Our findings confirm that individuals with an ASD are
more likely than the general population and other disabilities groups
to gravitate toward STEM. The STEM major rate (34.31 %) for young
adults with an ASD was not only higher than their peers in all 10
other disability categories, but also higher than the 22.80 % of
students in the general population that declared a major in
STEM-related fields in postsecondary education (Chen and Weko 2009).
In addition, this study found that young adults with an ASD in STEM
fields were more likely than the general population to concentrate in
science [12.12 vs. 8.3 % (Chen and Weko 2009)] and computer science
[16.22 vs. 6.6 % (Chen and Weko 2009)].
Note that this indicates that people on the autism spectrum are more likely to choose certain fields, such as computer science and engineering, than is the general population - but people on the autism spectrum are also less likely to enter college at all compared to the general population.
This study links to many related studies, but only notes one other similar study in a single United Kingdom university that showed a correlation between autism and mathematical skill. All studies in total still make it impossible to compare higher and lower ranked institutions.
Finally, note that the mention of MIT is notable not simply because it's high ranked and famous - but because it is famous for a specific set of technological developments, related to AI (the topic of much of the interview in the OP), as well as engineering and computer science generally.
You can go about this in a rather sideways manner, however, from this one note from the above study:
Young adults with an ASD were less likely to enroll in a 2-year
community college (27.66 %) or a 4-year college (14.95 %) than all
other disability groups except intellectual disabilities (ID) or
multiple disabilities (MD) (Table 3).
This shows that autism is less prevalent at unranked/low-ranked institutions period, so you could roughly infer that those with ASD who choose to go to college at all do so primarily at institutions which are more likely to be ranked (or ranked relatively highly). This is a rather weak argument, but it's about all we seem to have to go on.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.727768 | 2016-10-14T00:52:00 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/78262",
"authors": [
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Greg",
"Ian_Fin",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14755",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36315",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/58418",
"tonysdg"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
77656 | How much would it cost to remove pay-walls?
Is there any research/study/survey/... that tried to estimate how much it would cost to remove paper pay-walls so that all existing research papers are made publicly available free of charge?
E.g. France paid Elsevier 172 million EUR (mirror) so that 476 universities and medical center can have legal access to 2000 journals for five years. I wonder how much it would cost to buy the access to all papers so that anyone can access then.
If the question is unclear, you're welcome to comment on what is unclear.
made publicly available Please clarify who is the public? Your own country? Europe? U.S.? Developing countries? Undeveloped countries? How about Regions? (Hong Kong is not a country, it's a special region) The whole world? Vote to close as unclear.
@scaaahu public = all citizens, either in a given country or all countries.
Have you looked into SCOAP3? That covered (most of) one field but it should be possible to extrapolate
For an upper Limit just add up the market value of all the publishers... Then you make it all open access to everyone, and everywhere
@Andrew Thanks, this is the kind of initiatives I was looking for. However, from my vague understanding of What is SCOAP3?, SCOAP3 only focuses on paying publication fees when researchers submit new papers? i.e., it doesn't try to buy the right to make publicly available papers are paywalled?
Although an interesting subject I vote to close, not because it's unclear, but rather because the subject is apparently opinion based and a factual answer will be unlikely, unless a high executive from a publisher decides to gives us a ballpark figure.
@FranckDernoncourt as this question is closed here (in my personal opinion for no good reasons), you might consider reposting it on OpenScience where it will most probably be perfectly welcome and on-topic to obtain additional answers.
@scaaahu Is the question still unclear to you?
It's still unclear. You said either in a given country or all countries.
@scaaahu Either is fine, but preferably all countries.
It's clearly not your question, but I cannot help underlining that France paid once for the researchers to write the papers, and a second time to buy their papers from a private company...
@anderstood Unfortunately this is what most countries do to some extent, although more indirectly: through funding from public agencies, tax rebates, etc. The French taxpayers shouldn't be the only ones to be pissed.
It's an interesting thought. Presumably, if you looked at the market capitalisation of some of the major commercial journal publishers, you could get a sense of how much it would cost to purchase both ownership of the intellectual property in such articles, journals, infrastructure and many other things.
I did a quick google and it suggested that the market capitalisation of Elsevier (for example http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/REL:LN) was 35 billion British Pounds (although I'm no expert in reading this stuff, and there seems like there is a lot of aggregation of companies into larger structures). My main point is that there is presumably a market value associated with the vast majority of the commercial publishing literature. It would be interesting to get an estimate of what this is (e.g., is it a half trillion US dollars or perhaps its much less, I'm not sure).
The main point is that it would be theoretically possible for governments to buy such companies or alternatively acquire the rights at commercial rates.
It would however be very expensive.
Alternatively, governments could change intellectual property law in relation to scientific journals or some category of material. There are a variety of ways that this could be done. A simple option would just be to mandate that articles in scientific journals need to be made accessible on a suitable repository (e.g., like pubmed) perhaps after some embargo period.
In general, a lot of this raises a number of broader legal issues. For example, it may be considered poor legal precedent to change the law after the fact. I.e., journals invested in publications on the assumption that their intellectual property would be protected and these rights are then unilaterally taken away by government. In some legal contexts, this may give rise to the publishers having rights for financial compensation.
The alternative strategy is to focus more on ways going forward that the published literature can be more accessible to the general public. For example, this can be seen in various conditions placed on grants that the publications need to be open.
Zero. The government of the nation you live in can pass a bill that mandates that all (existing and future) published research papers are made publicly available and redistributable.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Note that comments can only be migrated once; further comments cannot be moved to chat and may be deleted.
And how much would it cost to convince the government of my country to pass such a bill?
@JeffE Based on the current decision making: maybe you could win it over with a well-placed tweet.
I think that your example does not reflect the question. I didn't read the entire contract but it seems to me that France has just paid in advance the publisher's fees for five years for all the universities.
Probably they got a large discount, with respect to what they would have had to pay without such a large contract, but the order of magnitude is roughly the same.
For instance, in Italy all the university libraries are public, which means that any citizen can enter and read books and journals. Sometimes ago, I looked at the annual budgets of a few university libraries, and depending on the size of the university they ranged from a few hundred thousand euros to several million euros. Unfortunately there was no information on the expense breakdown between journals, books and databases, but I think it's reasonable to consider around 50 k€ for a major, possibly greedy, publisher (years ago I heard that IEEE journals where around 30 k€).
Hence, if you consider 50 k€ for roughly 500 universities and centers for five years you obtain 125 M€, which is of the order of magnitude of what France has paid.
Therefore, according to your example,
How much would it cost to remove pay-walls?
It costs as much as the total fees.
In other words, if you want to pay Elsevier a one-time subscription rather than many smaller ones, they are going to ask you for the same amount of money that they make now. Their business expenses are not going to change, so they need the same amount of money to keep their business going as it runs now.
50 k€ for how many journals? I agree that the example is a limited version of the question, which I tried to specify by mentioning "France paid Elsevier 172 million EUR so that 476 universities and medical center can have legal access to 2000 journals for five years."
@FranckDernoncourt Usually publishers sell the whole package of their published journals: it's a way to sell also the less read ones.
@MassimoOrtolano Thanks, so in the example it means a University has to pay 50 k€ to obtain access to 2000 journals for one year?
@FranckDernoncourt Yes, roughly. As you can see from the obtained total, I might have a bit underestimated that amount.
Is there any research/study/survey/... that tried to estimate how much it would cost to remove paper pay-walls so that all existing research papers are made publicly available free of charge?
I am not aware of any such study. The cost however, could be pretty minimal if the governments of a couple of key countries (e.g., US, UK, Germany, etc) decided to make it happen. If laws were passed to outlaw restrictive licenses on research publications, this would effectively remove pay walls.
A few years back, the NIH mandated that all publications resulting from NIH funded work be made freely available after an embargo period. While the NIH is still willing to provide funding for publication and open access fees, if they stopped, people would be forced to publish in free (both as in beer and as in freedom) places. Similarly, there is discussion that in the future in the UK the REF will only count open access publications. Again the research councils provide funding for publication and open access fees, but if they stopped, people would publish in free places.
Note that the government of the UK seems to think that "gold" OA is a bad idea after all. http://www.nature.com/news/uk-open-access-movement-sways-towards-low-cost-repositories-1.14953
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.728387 | 2016-10-01T16:29:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/77656",
"authors": [
"Andrew is gone",
"Awakawaka",
"Cape Code",
"Crex_crex",
"Delphic Mjunior",
"Dilaton",
"Federico Poloni",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"JeffE",
"Marta Maj",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"NITESH kumar Singh",
"Nobody",
"Qianhui",
"Repmat",
"Shree Topps",
"Spammer",
"Yohandsome",
"anderstood",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14198",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218387",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218389",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218400",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218406",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218582",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218591",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218658",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/218662",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24157",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27825",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37070",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5674",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5904",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"irina voronova",
"posdef",
"skymningen"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
79434 | Getting notified when an article I cited in one of my papers gets retracted
Is there any way to get notified (e.g., by email) when an article I cited in one of my papers gets retracted?
Perhaps you could set up a Google Alert or set up a similar event handler at http://www.changedetection.com/.
I have tried both of these services. Once in a while they both catch the same thing, but for the most part they complement each other.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.729048 | 2016-11-05T18:17:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/79434",
"authors": [],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
97068 | Why did journal subscription prices increase by 25% between 2013 and 2017? (vs. 5% for US inflation)
I read on https://journals.ebsco.com/products-services/explore-content :
Why did journal subscription prices increase by 25% between 2013 and 2017?
That's much more than the US inflation (~5.1% between 2013 and 2017 (mirror)):
(source of the image: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ (mirror))
Three words: because they can.
^^^ Journals have an effective monopoly on intellectual dissemination. Authors want to publish in the "best" journal in their field and publishers will bundle 99 non-best journals in with the best journal to sell to libraries, which have no choice but to purchase the bundle.
Sci-hub. They lost so much money due to sci-hub, they just had to increase their prices.
@Mark Is it true? Probably, most of their revenues come from institutional subscriptions, and I doubt that these have been significantly affected by sci-hub.
@MassimoOrtolano I don't think so, but they said so. "Elsevier gave the court a list of 100 articles illicitly made available by Sci-Hub and LibGen, and asked for a permanent injunction and damages totalling $15 million" (https://www.nature.com/news/us-court-grants-elsevier-millions-in-damages-from-sci-hub-1.22196). But then, many people who use sci-hub do so because it's easier than going through their institutional subscription. Hence my view that they didn't lose anything.
On a more serious note: are there any numbers on the differences in earnings through open-access and (classic) paywall papers? The former gives a one-time big financial boost, the latter relies on "small" fees every time someone wants to access the paper (and cannot get it through institutional subscriptions).
@Mark: Elsevier presumably said so because it sounds better than "because we can get away with it".
Why shouldn't they? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOjTNuuEVw
@Mark Let's ask: Earnings generated by open-access papers vs. (classic) paywalled papers
Did you read the 2018 Serials Price Projection Report on the same page where you found this graph? That says quite a bit about increasing journal prices.
The direct answer is "because they can". Demand for journals is pretty inelastic - increasing the price doesn't cause much of a fall in demand. Can you imagine your university not subscribing to a journal like The Lancet or Science?
Behind that answer however is a storm of interlinked factors. Here're some of them:
Publishers are under pressure from their shareholders to show revenue and income growth. This is no different from university administrators pressuring their faculty to show research output growth, university ranking growth, and so on.
The total number of academic papers being published worldwide is increasing quickly. To shareholders this sounds like an excellent opportunity for growth! But not all these papers can be published in top journals, so a lot of them end up in not-so-good journals.
Most of the papers in these not-so-good journals are actually very seldom used. For example take the Elsevier journal Wave Motion. It's got an impact factor of 1.575, which is pretty medium. I picked a random paper, "An elastodynamic computational time-reversal method for shape reconstruction of traction-free scatterers", Vol 72, page 23-40, July 2017. Then I went to Web of Science, found the paper, and checked the usage statistics. Guess how many times it's been used in the past 180 days - three times (!).
Since the usage is so low, libraries are incentivized not to subscribe (and remember, this is a solidly middle-of-the-road journal - imagine what it's like for the bottom-tier ones). But if libraries don't subscribe, the journal makes a loss. What is the publisher to do?
Let's take the obvious thing to do, and one commonly argued for, which is to close the journal. If publishers did this en masse, there'd suddenly be no more journals except the few top-tier ones. Remember that the papers published in these not-so-good journals aren't necessarily bad - they're usually just rather boring, low-novelty papers: the backbone of science. Without the journals, these papers would never be published.
Another thing about these not-so-good journals is that they're crucial to researchers from developing countries. It's true that these researchers might be slightly less capable than those in developed countries, but it's also probable that they simply have fewer resources. If one is not able to access the Large Hadron Collider, one is also not likely to make breakthroughs in particle physics. Hence one ends up with boring, low-novelty papers that won't make it to top journals.
On top of all that, let's add the fact that some academics think that they write papers, they edit journals, they serve as reviewers, they deserve to be paid for it. I'm not saying that they're wrong, but you can see the tension this belief causes.
And then there's open access. Most forms of OA ties the revenue to the number of papers published (there are other models, but those journals are loss-making and only stay afloat because of an external source of funding). This means there's an immediate conflict of interest for the publisher, which is why there's predatory OA publishing, and in turn is why there's a backlash against OA. Also consider what it's like from the publisher's and library's points of view.
Publisher. If you convert a journal to OA, you're giving up subscription revenue. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Further, many academics prefer to publish in subscription journals even if they have access to OA funding, since if they publish OA they have to jump through some administrative hoops. There're also lots of academics in developing countries that simply cannot pay for OA. There's no guarantee that your 100-papers/year journal will still be 100-papers/year after you convert to OA. Do you dare? Remember your job is on the line (see comment above about shareholders).
Library. OA costs money. You need to free up funds somewhere to fund OA. In theory you should be able to use subscription money to pay for OA, but in practice, you're either subscribed to a journal or not. You can't just pay $3000 less for a subscription and use that for OA for a single article. The only way is to unsubscribe, which effectively removes access to every paper in the journal.
Finally, let's not forget that publishing is a notoriously poorly-paid job, and the publisher also has to keep its employees happy.
tl; dr: it's a difficult world out there. If you have a solution, you'd be in contention to win the Nobel Prize in Publishing.
@NajibIdrissi I visited my university's press a few months ago. We touched a bit on profits - turns out their net margin was -50%, and they only remain afloat because of funding from the university.
Certainly nothing we should be discussing in comments. I won't say any more, other than if you have a better model to handle academic publishing, you can try starting your own journal or publisher. As for net margin of commercial publishers, Wiley, Elsevier, etc are publicly held companies. You can check their annual reports.
If you can write a supplemental answer filling in the blanks in mine, I'd be interested to see it.
@NajibIdrissi : "This whole answer […] assumes a capitalistic way of publishing" Indeed, but I guess it still answers the question properly, as the alternatives I know of to this way of publishing do not use subscription (free access through on-line archives, typically), and hence do not play any role in the increase of the subscription prices.
@NajibIdrissi I don't think Allure is saying that your criticism is invalid, he's saying that it can't be developed in comments, and I agree with him. I agree with your remark that journals published for free can play a role in the price of subscriptions, I was short-sighted, but I still believe that it is a minor role compared to the role played by greed.
Since OA ties the revenue to the number of papers published, not always. There are lots of so-called "Diamond OA" journals that don't charge authors or readers.
@DavidRoberts not really, relatively speaking there are very few such diamond OA journals. Since they don't charge authors and readers, they need external funding. They also don't offer typical publisher services such as copyediting (of course, the authors from first-world countries indulging in these diamond OA journals don't think they need it, but there are a lot of authors from non-English countries that do) and marketing. Finally these diamond OA journals don't scale well - see comments by Paul Ginsparg and Dan Kulp here: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201602/arxiv.cfm
@Allure "very few such diamond OA journals" - not according to DOAJ A 2013 study found that only 28% of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) required payment by the authors; however, this figure was higher in journals with a scientific or medical focus (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in journals publishing in the arts and humanities (0% and 4% respectively) (from WP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_journal#No-fee_open_access_journals and citation is given as https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fasi.22972) and there are more recent figures than this
@Allure if you are thinking about volume of papers, then of course, that's slightly different. For detailed analysis I refer you to http://www.lulu.com/au/en/shop/walt-crawford/gold-open-access-journals-2011-2015/ebook/product-22758863.html (that's a free e-book) and data available here: https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html
@DavidRoberts Thanks for link. That's news to me, but I'm skeptical of the results. Eleven of the first twelve journals' website in the raw data did not load for me, and the sole one that did was not in English and did not look like a journal's website. Random attempts later in the dataset also led to a lot of dead links, and I only hit three journals' website. One was diamond OA but subsidized by a society, one charged 350,000 IDR, and one actually charged a subscription but called the journal "open access".
I'm mostly unconvinced I'm afraid. Diamond OA, if it's ever successful on a large scale, must simply shift the costs somewhere else. It might be a society, a publisher using its other activities to fund the diamond OA journal, or a university, but someone is paying for it. The people managing the journal must still put food on the table after all. It seems probable that the ultimate payer is still authors (in the form of membership fees to societies), universities, etc. Also we're way outside the scope of the comments section. If you want to discuss this somewhere else, I'm in.
@Allure I don't disagree about the cost of publishing and the scalability of Diamond OA. Just wanted to correct the idea that OA publishing = author pays, and give a sense of the scale of how many journals don't fit that mould. The main specialist journal in my subfield is Diamond OA and has been so for over 20 years. It's well regarded, so it's not a new concept for me. I think we had better not chat too much, either. :-)
A fair objection. I'll see how I can edit the answer.
If we read the question not as "why is there an increase in price" but rather "why is the increase in prices occurring now?", is this answer basically saying "since there are more people wanting to publish, there is an increase in demand? Regardless of how the supply curve looks, it seems possible to me that the increase in demand is so much so as to increase prices a lot, but this would be stronger if the supply curve were also inelastic...
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.729172 | 2017-10-08T19:09:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/97068",
"authors": [
"Allure",
"Ambicion",
"Anonymous",
"Clément",
"David Roberts",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Kimball",
"Mark",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"RoboKaren",
"alphacapture",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/111976",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11565",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19627",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6222",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/84834",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8881"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
107748 | To what extent does the wealth, connections and alumni donation of a parent help their children be accepted into a college in the US?
Is there any research/study/survey/dataset that looked at to what extent the wealth, connections and alumni donation of a parent help their children be accepted into a college in the United States?
(E.g., a notorious case: John F. Kennedy's Harvard application)
@NateEldredge Thanks, I am interested in both undergrad and graduate.
I would say they are so different that there should be two separate questions for undergrad and graduate admissions. The undergrad one might get closed, though.
@NajibIdrissi The question is not "loaded", since the extent could be 0.
@NajibIdrissi I see. Of course the study could take care of confounding factors.
I don’t see this as off topic. It’s about how universities work. Would there be a better place to ask this question?
Thanks for the interesting link. This is a bit off-topic, but I find Kennedy’s explanation of why he wishes to go to Harvard perfectly articulate and logical, and much more honest than the loads of BS prospective students are required to come up with these days. Perhaps JFK did get in thanks to his family connections, but this excerpt from his application shows no evidence that he was undeserving, nor do I see anything that’s “mediocre” about his writing, despite what the blog author says.
@NateEldredge This is not a student asking how to be admitted to an undergraduate degree. It's a question related to a general aspect of the US university system, and it can be quite on-topic here. Please, as discussed several times on meta, let's not fall into the trap of considering off-topic anything that contains the word undergraduate in it.
This is an important question for understanding the system of American higher education. (I do not read it as being an off-topic request for "How do I improve chances of admission to college?" especially since changing a family's wealth is a much more difficult course of action than, say, paying for tutoring.)
There has been some quantitative study of "legacy admissions," with Hurwitz (2011) estimating that the odds of admission are multiplied by 3 for students with a parent who attended the school, after controlling for other factors. (For instance, legacy students in his data tend to have higher SAT scores than non-legacy students.)
He explains that favoring students whose parents attended has benefits similar to favoring those who apply early or sports stars:
Highly selective colleges face the challenge of maximizing the academic profile of their student bodies, with the understanding that sacrificing some academic talent now will enable the college to preserve or improve its selectivity in the future. In other words, from the college's perspective, an exclusive focus on academics in the admissions process is not sustainable. ... Other tradeoffs might include relaxing admissions standards for early decision applicants to decrease acceptance rates and increase yield rates, and consequently to appear more selective (Jensen & Wu, 2010). Or they might involve admitting academically lackluster star athletes to maintain the successful sports teams that encourage alumni giving (Holmes, 2009; Meer & Rosen, 2009). Relatives of alumni (legacies) offer enthusiasm and familiarity to colleges, and the special treatment awarded to them in the admissions process helps to preserve generational ties that also are intended to motivate financial generosity. (from section 2.1)
His data do not include parents' giving rates, but they compare the same student's admissions across multiple colleges, showing an advantage at a parent's alma mater.
For some historical background, in a legal review of legacy admissions, Lamb (1992) explains how legacy admissions policies came about. Harvard and Yale kept out most public school students with a Latin requirement through the end of the 19th century, and only had to deal with selective admissions upon dropping that requirement. Their (at least somewhat) meritocratic process that followed let in "too many" Jewish and Catholic applicants. Columbia started asking for family information (religious affiliation, father's name and place of birth) in 1919, and other elite schools followed. In 1926, Harvard announced it was taking things like "personality" into account in admissions and started requiring photographs with applications; they used the photos and the discretion to make it harder for Jews, Catholics, and (likely) black students to gain admission, while increasing the proportion of legacy students. (p. 494)
So, the example of John F. Kennedy's 1935 Harvard application is an interesting one. He had famous parentage and family background at Harvard (and by WWII 1/4 of Harvard students were legacies, according to Lamb p. 495). In his case, his Catholicism was probably not held against him.
Lamb also reviews data from a Department of Education Office of Civil Rights inquiry into Harvard admissions. Circa 1992, the Harvard admissions process benefited legacies, and gave additional weight to children of alumni who served on the "Schools and Scholarship Committee" (p. 502), which is apparently a group of alumni interviewers. (My guess would be those who give time are more likely to also give money, but I do not know that donations would change the odds of being accepted as an alumni interviewer.)
In the graduate realm, my guess would be that graduate programs that charge admission (especially for professional training) are much more likely to have legacy preferences than academic programs. However, in subjective processes where a department is hoping to get a good yield of applicants or hire a faculty member who will choose them, I'm sure that there is some benefit in being able to say in an interview, "It's great to be back at this university! My parents met here..."
As a backdrop to this question, there is a longstanding literature that admission into selective colleges, attendance at any college, and graduation rates from college, depend strongly on family socioeconomic status, including level of parent education and family income.
For instance, Duncan, Kalil, and Ziol-Guest (2017) find:
Across 31 cohorts, we find that increases in the income gap between high- and low-income children account for approximately three-quarters of the increasing gap in completed schooling, one-half of the gap in college attendance, and one-fifth of the gap in college graduation.
Controlling for family structure does not explain much of the difference they find, but some of it is related to maternal age; the "maternal age gap" between higher-income and lower-income families increased over the time period they're looking at. (It is not clear whether maternal age is causal or a marker of other family differences.)
Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, and Yagan (2017) look at intergenerational mobility by parent wealth, finding that children from rich families are much more likely to attend college--and fancier colleges--than their poorer counterparts.
Family connections and legacy admissions will not shape these overall enrollment statistics, because the kind of students whose families have that pull are very unlikely to be on the margin of not attending any college.
Instead, sociologist Annette Lareau's idea of "concerted cultivation" is probably much more relevant. Middle- and upper-class parents know the pathways for success and train their children into the attitudes and behaviors that prepare them for success in this society. The example aeismail gives of volunteering to work in a lab runs along these lines.
@FranckDernoncourt After your JFK edit, I added a historical update. Up to 1/4 of JFK's class would have been fellow legacy students, and there is some evidence that (in the early 1990s) Harvard weighed different alumni parents differently.
I want to offer some commentary on the graduate situation, and why it's so hard to find comparable results to the level of research available for undergraduate admissions.
It’s going to be very hard to find studies of graduate admissions in the US, because admissions are handled at the departmental level, so data sets are smaller, and because financial need and socioeconomic status are not something asked for or measured in graduate applications. Thus, they’d need to be “add-ons” in a study.
While I can’t say they’d have no impact, graduate admissions by necessity tend to be more meritocratic than undergraduate admissions. Admitting someone who is clearly not competent for graduate studies makes the department look bad, and can act as a drag on future recruitment efforts. That said, if the candidate is otherwise qualified, a history of donations to the department from the candidate’s family certainly wouldn’t go overlooked.
Another possibly overlooked aspect of a family’s socioeconomic status that can indirectly impact things is that their financial security enables opportunities that someone who is not similarly advantaged might not have. For instance, someone who comes from a well-to-do family could offer to volunteer in a lab for credit, while someone who needs to “pay their own way” or help support their family may have to do something outside of research during the summers, thereby being at a disadvantage by virtue of having a smaller research profile.
I added a paragraph about that. Basically it’s going to be hard to find studies because grad admissions don’t ask about financial need or socioeconomic status.
@MassimoOrtolano: That's fine. My goal is still to point out that there isn't going to be the same level of data available at the graduate level for various structural reasons that simply do not exist at the undergraduate level.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.730055 | 2018-04-07T17:00:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/107748",
"authors": [
"Dan Romik",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Thomas Steinke",
"aeismail",
"cactus_pardner",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44249",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/88197"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
96746 | Can instructors fail honest students when tests are too hard because most students are cheating?
I am in Nursing school. I can prove that 80-90% of students have cheated every semester. They pass test banks around in email, text or Instant Messenger. Every semester I've come forward (5 instructors) but nothing major has happened. In 3 semesters of nursing school the faculty has never condemned nor said a word about using test banks. This semester I tried to warn instructors before the first exam, but they didn't listen. Now a few of us simply can't pass the exam because we're not cheating. The exams are that hard.
Test banks from previous semesters were being passed down from the semester ahead of us. I looked back at these test banks after the exam and found 21 questions just in one chapter. That's when I emailed them the test banks that were being passed around. It's a fine example of how academic dishonesty cheats everyone including the ones being honest.
Every semester Instructor makes the exams harder and harder because "statistically" the instructor data shows statistically "These are good/not too hard questions". But I have the documentation to show WHY people are able to pass. Had I used these test banks I would be passing. Honesty is earning a few of us a 60.00% on each exam.
What can I do? I warned them; they didn't listen. I plan on filing a complaint and a grade grievance. My question is: can an instructor fail students who are being honest? When there is clear proof of compromised exams and academic dishonesty throughout the class. Is it our fault they can't catch it? Is it our fault they have no idea what a hard question really is? Can instructors really fail people for being honest and choosing not participate?
Where I come from, it is taken as given that students are aware of previous exams and grading schemes are adapted to this. Just that this isn’t considered cheating. If this is not the case at your institution, this is indeed a problem, but it can only be reasonably solved by officially recognising and allowing that everybody is aware of previous exams.
I agree with the previous comments: could you please explain why you feel that using the test banks from previous semester's exams are cheating given that "the faculty has never condemned nor said a word about using test banks" and that the faculty change the questions every semester?
I agree that the policy seems to be that using previous years' tests to study is allowed. However, if this is the case, the faculty should say something and make sure that all students have equal access to previous tests. It is the unequal distribution of these tests that is a problem!
Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/42841/is-it-ethical-to-use-past-years-final-exams-that-the-professor-hasnt-explicitl
Not sure if it is a real duplicate. This is asking retrospectively. That was prospective.
I agree that the policy seems to be that using previous years' tests to study is allowed. However, if this is the case, the faculty should say something and make sure that all students have equal access to previous tests. The fact that some students are unaware that using previous tests to study is permitted is a problem, as is the unequal distribution of tests. I could easily see a student who was marginalized from the group for some reason (sex, race, nationality, etc) not getting these unofficial emails, and then it would be an issue of discrimination.
I would recommend the faculty post the previous year's tests to the website to make sure everyone has equal access and is aware that these are permitted study aids.
As a student, I would push for a clear statement in class on whether or not these aids were permitted. If faculty refuse to make a statement or take any action I would recommend speaking to your academic advisor about the issue.
I will add that this also happened to me as an undergraduate. When I complained to the teacher that some people were getting tests from older friends, he told me "you need to get better friends." I didn't understand that he was telling me that using previous years' tests was considered proper in his course, and went on to get a mediocre grade. As a first- gen student I didn't understand the norms!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.730883 | 2017-10-01T18:13:16 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96746",
"authors": [
"Dawn",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Wrzlprmft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
103595 | How do new tax rules apply to a Ph.D. student receiving a fellowship?
I read that some revamping had happened in the recent times with respect to the tax policies in the US. Say,I get an admission for Ph.D. for Engineering at New York University with a fellowship which offers $2600 stipend per month. How much will be the tax I have to pay OR what is the 'real' stipend I will get?
Edit: I am an international student planning for Ph.D.
The local tax office may be a good place to start...
The major policy change for grad students was relate to tuition reimbursement and did not go into affect.
@SolarMike: The US doesn't really have those. (They exist, for some values of "local", but in most cases they're not a practical way to get assistance.)
It will depend on many things: your country of origin, your visa, the funding source...
Unfortunately (as you know) tax laws in the US are pretty complex, and you're in a relatively unique situation as an international student with a fellowship. Many universities have a page on their website that discussed tax issues, and I noticed that NYU has one as well.
You'll notice near the bottom of the page that your taxes also depend on the tax treaty that the US has with your home country, and there also might be technicalities related to whether the school classifies your pay as a fellowship or assistantship for tax purposes. For example, according to my university, my funding is through a "research fellowship," but because I'm expected to work a certain number of hours per week in my advisor's lab, the tax forms classify it as an assistantship.
It is a good idea to reach out to someone at your university to ask this question. They may not be able to help you, but the worst that will happen is they'll ignore your email or say "Sorry, I can't help." I would start with people in the payroll department or (if there is one) the office for international student admissions or support. Sometimes students (or potential students) are shy about asking for help, but they shouldn't be. People like to help other people, and the people you'd be reaching out to are literally employed to help people in your situation (among other things).
When I ask people in the business office, finance office, etc. for help, I usually explain what my question is and then end the email with something like "I wasn't entirely sure who to ask for help, but thought you would be a good person to start with--can you help me figure this out, or recommend someone else for me to reach out to? Thanks so much for your help!" That way, even if I'm "bothering" them with something that's outside their responsibilities, they usually point me in the right direction for who to ask next.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.731225 | 2018-02-10T10:11:43 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103595",
"authors": [
"Herman Toothrot",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Solar Mike",
"StrongBad",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4050",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
103699 | How can I politely request that an authority figure respected protocol?
I am in a postgraduate program, part of which is to do an internship at an organization or school recommended by the program, mostly by observing a class or by shadowing a professor at his job.
There is a requirement of a two-week internship. After that the school or organization is supposed to sign a form that the student has, in fact, fulfilled their internship obligation.
I have already started my internship in one of the locations but I have only gone twice. I am supposed to go at least eight more times.
I am in weekly contact with the person I'm "shadowing", about the day and time of my internship.
Problem:
This program is, as it turned out, a cash cow for the specific University and some of the faculty. There are way too many students and not enough places to intern so I assume this is why some professors/schools are willing to say that the student has completed their ten-day internship requirement even if they haven't. The director of the program knows about it and is aware or even encourages that it be done this way.
During the last communication I had with the professor I'm shadowing, she asked me to bring the form so that "you finish up slowly".
I have a feeling she'll say something like "There is a huge waiting list..." and that I can't do the ten days but she'll sign the form anyway.
If this happens, I would like to stand my ground and ask that I do the full ten days as required, even if it means doing it at random days and times or stretching it until I'm done with the program itself.
My main argument is that I am there to learn and I can't learn much by doing a three-day internship. I'm sure she knows but I still want to be able to kindly demand that she respected protocol so that I gain as much experience as I can in the field. I'm paying them anyway. They aren't paying me.
How can I best achieve my goal, if she insists on the waiting list and tries to rush me?
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
I think there is a really nice question about over enrolled activities and Professors signing off on things you didn't do and not having access to the things you want, but it is buried in there and needs some pruning/editing to help us understand the question.
@StrongBad How can I improve it?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.731470 | 2018-02-10T15:16:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103699",
"authors": [
"StrongBad",
"Tycho's Nose",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82929",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
17201 | How do schools typically handle a request for short-term leave from a student?
A student at my college will graduate soon and go to the US to study full-time, on a visa. His family however, are planning an important event sometime in the middle of the semester, and they hope that he can return to his home country for two weeks, then return to the US to finish the semester.
During that semester, he will only be taking courses and will not be receiving any grants.
Do colleges typically have a policy prohibiting such arrangements? Are professors generally willing to accommodate such requests, e.g. adjusting deadlines for homework?
I am afraid this is off-topic here, as it seems to be about undergraduate studies.
@CharlesMorisset I may misunderstand, but it certainly does not seem like that to me.
Colleges do not prohibit such events because colleges can't prohibit such events. On the contrary, colleges have policies explicitly permitting absences for certain specific reasons: travel on university business (including athletics), documented medical emergencies, deaths in the family. There is typically a special grade of "Incomplete" awarded if the material missed is critical, such as a final exam; the student takes the final soon upon returning and the grade is adjusted accordingly.
As for what the professors will do, this is highly variable. Some will be accommodating and will extend deadlines, others will mark missed work with zero, while a few might even kick the student out of the course.
Luckily, there is a simple solution for this student. While enrolling for classes, at the very beginning of the term, he should speak to the professors involved and explain the situation. If any professor is particularly hostile, then he should take a different course instead. In extremely unlucky circumstances, a specific course will be essential to take that term (and no later), and the professor will be very hostile. In this case it might end up that the student takes longer to graduate.
The answer will highly vary according to the institute, or even according to the professor because some institutes leave the professor to decide.
What the student should do is to e-mail or meet with the professors who will be teaching in his/her chosen courses, and inform them that he/she will be a away for two weeks, give the professors the actual dates of departure and return.
Usually, deadline can be moved and sometimes even exam can be rescheduled. But it's mostly about how flexible the professors are willing to be. If the professors wouldn't accommodate, then the student should not take that course.
Also, the student should make arrangement about getting the lecture slides or notes that he/she will be missing, and perhaps ask for the lecturers' permission to let a friend of the student's to record the lecture, if possible.
Just remember all of these communications should be done preferably before the semester starts. Never just disappear for two weeks and then come back to negotiate for accomodation.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.731950 | 2014-02-20T12:44:05 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17201",
"authors": [
"Francisco",
"Ganik Biz",
"Hans Christian Isak Mørch Holm",
"Ketu",
"Lesley.Oakey",
"Michi Salazar",
"Wojtek MTA",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46377",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46378",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46379",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46381",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46382",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46389",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/46391",
"kernelcache",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
10459 | Is it legal/ethical to use data grabbed from a Stack Exchange site in a paper?
For example, I download all the content of Academia@SE, later analysis it in a data mining paper, and submit the paper in the end. Is it OK to do so? Do I have to ask the permission from the administrator of the website? And does he or she have rights to forbid my academic use? Thank you.
Maybe you should site it; better safe than sorry
@sidht Yes I will surely cite it.
To clarify: your question was originally titled "Is it legal/ethical to use data grabbed from a certain website in a paper?", and @Piotr edited it to "a Stack Exchange site". Are you interested in the situation for SE sites specifically? Or do you want to know about general sites, with SE just being an example?
@ziyuang Excuse me for an overzealous edit. However, title of the question didn't match the content. So I second Nate with question (as SE may be not a typical example).
Your University may have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviews how you conduct experiments. This board may be known by various names (Ethics Committee, Experiment Review Board, Human Subjects Research, etc.) but they are generally the ones that you would go to to consult about whether what you are doing is within the scope of ethical behavior and good treatment of human subjects data.
As StackOverflow and associated StackExchange repository data is available under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (as @piotr_migdal linked above) and is publicly available, your IRB will probably tell you, "It's fine" and not require review. However, it depends on the IRB and the institution and the nature of the data.
There are entire research disciplines built on scraping web sites, software repositories, and social media, so don't feel bad for doing it.
+1 for IRB approval. It's fairly easy to make the "seatbelt study" argument and say that something posted to a site like StackExchange is intended to be publicly viewable. But it never hurts to have IRB approval, and your university may indeed require it (mine does for all research - I have an IRB approval form for a purely simulation study around here somewhere).
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If you are seriously concerned about this issue, you should consult one; your institution probably has intellectual property lawyers on staff.
There is a general principle that "you can't copyright facts". Wherever you get your data set, you probably can legally publish any analysis of that data, without requiring anyone's permission. However, you may not be able to legally reproduce the data itself.
Of course, by standard academic ethics, you must properly cite and attribute the source of the data. And if you can't guarantee that the data will remain accessible, it could affect the reproducibility of your results and hence the quality of your paper.
SE license all user content under CC SA, so here there is no problem with copyright.
@PiotrMigdal: Before your edit to the question's title, I read it as asking about data from Internet sources in general, not just SE.
For me it was not clear as well, just I matched title to the content. But an answer by @Shion interprets it as SE-specific. And anyway, I wrote a comment, it is not a downvote.
I believe you can do it with StackOverflow data, as long as you cite/attribute it properly. This article affirms it. However, I do not know whether this can be extended to the rest of StackExchange. A question to the mods or to the support team might help you clarify.
Thank you. So for other internet sites, do you mean I need to ask beforehand anyway, because there are no such licenses usually?
This depends on the privacy policy of the particular website. There are ways to get around it. You can email the mods of the websites in question and if you are a credible researcher, often they will give you permission to use their data, often in a de-identified dataset format.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.732256 | 2013-06-05T03:26:52 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10459",
"authors": [
"Fomite",
"Lemon",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Shion",
"Ziyuan",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1429",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26416",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2789",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7349",
"jj01"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5176 | Outsourcing your research to Kaggle for co-authorship or other non monetary options
Some parts of our research fall out of our expertise. We thought about creating a Kaggle challenge just for this part. But we lack fund resources for the reward, so we could not offer any money. We are thinking now about offering co-authorship in a paper, do you think this would work? Otherwise, which other things would you offer as reward in Kaggle apart from money?
Have you thought about asking questions on related stack exchange sites to see if anybody has any clue about that problem?
I will do that if in three days I do not get any answer here, but I had to start somewhere and I chose this nice place!
You may well be able to offer other incentives (which is why I'm not submitting this as an answer), but coauthorship is tricky, since it is highly constrained: everyone who makes an important intellectual contribution must be a coauthor, and nobody else can be. For example, several other teams may submit ideas like the winner's (maybe with just a little less impressive write-ups or results); then they would all have to be offered coauthorship. In the other direction, if nobody's results are useful, then nobody can become a coauthor, even if they put a lot of time and effort into the contest.
@AnonymousMathematician I don't know how the authorship should work in this case but you are right that it's not something that can be simply traded. However, usually solutions very and when writing a paper I don't need to put in co-authors all people with similar approach - I need to acknowledge them, perhaps in form of citations. And IMHO it gives a natural framework when you choose your co-authors out of the solutions you want to use and only cite other solutions that make sense but you don't apply them directly.
I agree that if someone proposes a solution you don't use, then that doesn't necessarily require coauthorship, but the dividing line between use and non-use is tricky when the solutions are similar. Basically, I'd separate coauthorship from winning the contest, and then invite as a coauthor whoever makes sense (probably the winner and possibly other contestants with the same critical idea).
@AnonymousMathematician AFAIK solutions on Kaggle are not mathematical proof-style. There is a lot of one's own idea, a lot of technical fine-tuning; not just 0-1 or a few main ideas for the proof. Moreover, before actually asking participants, you see only a numerical result. So there is no risk of an unintentional plagiarism. And also one can set a threshold below which no authorship is proposed (personally I wouldn't promise any co-authorship but if the result accuracy is satisfying - asked the winner(s) for co-authorship).
It's true that fitting the Kaggle competition framework is a bit of a constraint, but if you understand that framework and see how your problem fits into it, I'd suggest you e-mail [email protected] with a description of the data & problem (and ideally sample data), even if you don't have funding. We can see what comes of it!
(Disclaimer: I work for Kaggle.)
This sounds to me like the textbook definition of a potential collaboration opportunity. I would speak with researchers in the computer science, machine learning, mathematics, and/or statistics departments and try to establish a long-term collaborative relationship. I would also speak with other faculty in your department to see how they handle this problem, which they likely have as well. It may be as simple as paying a grad or reasonably bright undergrad a few bucks an hour to crunch numbers. (Actually, you shouldn't take for granted that the grad student is reasonably bright... but I digress.)
This will be beneficial in both the short- and long-term, in a number of ways. In the short term, you'll hopefully get to analyze your data and generate a publication. In the long term, it's very likely that you'll need such expertise again, and you'll have the resources available for the analysis. Additionally, you'll find that having someone with analytics expertise on hand when devising whatever study you plan on doing can be immeasurably useful, as they will help you determine what measurements need to be taken and what data needs to be collected to ensure that you can get the most out of your dataset.
Some competitions have "Kudos" (or "Jobs", or "Knowledge") as a prize, see Kaggle competitions sorted from the smallest prizes. I don't how it does work with proposing a competition (maybe it is not free).
I guess if the problem itself fits in the Kaggle framework (which is a pretty strong constraint), and you can try it for free (I don't know if it is the case), then why not. Especially as even two "Kudos" competitions attract 50 and 153 teams, respectively. Just it is on you to make it as attractive as possible.
Of course, intellectual contribution requires a co-authorship. But if I had the right expertise, I would run for it :).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.732594 | 2012-11-07T00:16:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5176",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Dvmphd",
"Jeff",
"Keval",
"Nobody",
"Open the way",
"Piotr Migdal",
"candle",
"gillonba",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13281",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13282",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13285",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13301",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13302",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13581",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/284",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"user2437470",
"user3440240"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1752 | Why don't colleges and departments teach social skills?
After all, to do research with a professor, a student has to have good social skills. So why not have classes that teach social etiquette and social skills? It seems that many courses in college are "book courses." Yet, when students graduate, what really matters is how they present themselves and their social skills.
A very simple answer to this question is resources. Who exactly is going to teach this course, and what resources are you going to reallocate it in order to offer it?
Moreover, who is qualified to offer such a course? (Or is it just a series of soft-skill workshops?)
Additionally, how does one demonstrate mastery of these skills? Although there are some commonalities across disciplines, good social skills involve being adaptable to a plethora of personalities and groups with their own diverse norms. Perhaps it is a skill that is best mastered through experience rather than structured lecturing.
Perhaps because basic etiquette and social skills are something to be learned before one pursues an advanced degree?
@PeteL.Clark I disagree. For me, as for many other nerds, scientific and technical skills were easier to learn than social ones. Saying 'hey, wait before learning adv. maths and do sth with your social skills' is both disrespectful and wasteful.
A lot of the so-called social skills can be learned through lectures on sales and customer relationship. At least it worked well for me.
@PiotrMigdal: I agree with you. It is an assumption that such social skills are naturally learned as a part of the students' education. This is not necessarily so... It's not that social skills are necessarily harder to learn, but that we develop a notion that they are less important than scientific knowledge. Thus, we regard it as secondary to academic knowledge until the point when we start to become professionals. Then, it's not just what you know, but who you know that will land you the tenure-track position.
@SylvainPeyronnet: That's a really great idea! Where do you get such a training? I presume through side jobs in the service industry? Or in a business school?
@Piotr: All human beings need social skills and have manifold opportunities to learn and practice them throughout their lives. Speaking of social skills: when responding directly to someone else, please don't make something up and put it in quotation marks. As it happens, I am a mathematician and have been studying mathematics for most of my conscious life. And, as a human being, I have been interacting with other human beings for my entire life: these things happen at the same time. My point is that teaching "social etiquette and social skills" in the university is way too late.
@PeteL.Clark: If it's too late to teach it in the university—and I agree that it probably is—then your question now becomes more perplexing. Again, who teaches this course, and when?
@aeismail: I think there are some things best learned outside of the context of classrooms and courses. The social skills I have come from interacting with and learning from various people: parents, significant others, neighbors, friends, enemies, schoolyard bullies, colleagues, barbers, cab drivers, baristas....
Let me also say that, as an academic mathematician, I know that some students in STEM fields are not the most socially advanced or well-adjusted people around. (But by the way most college students are callow and self-centered compared to their later, more fully adult selves. It is a lifelong process!) The question is whether this is problematic. I would say that in most cases I know of, it isn't: as a professor, I don't choose the coolest or even the least awkward students to work with.
There are some people who are so socially challenged as to make me not want to work with them: severe body odor, pathological dishonesty, psychopathy...these are all deal-breakers. But come on: these problems are not going to be fixed by having students take the right courses, are they??
@Paul "through side jobs in the service industry": exactly, before I became part of the academy ;)
@PeteL.Clark I do agree that social skills are important (they certainly go well beyond social etiquette). Nonetheless, I don't agree with premise that the university is too late. I would have benefited, among many others (for me it is easier to learn maths "in the natural way", than to learn social skills). Excuse me for the quotation marks (however, your exact words are just above, so there is no place for confusion, what were your words on what was a hyperbole).
Not all things that you must learn can also be taught. Experience is often the best teacher.
@Piotr: I'm not saying that people's social development should be complete by the time they enter university. (In fact, I said the opposite...) Definitely one learns a lot of social skills as a university student: it is, for most people, their first chance to build their own lives largely independent of parental supervision. I'm saying that much social learning must, and does, take place well before the university level. (And I am surprised to be saying this: it seems absolutely incontestable.) I am also saying that social learning is not best accomplished through coursework.
@Piotr: Also, I am not a fan of the rhetorical device in which you take what someone says, modify it / make it significantly more extreme, and then condemn this modified position, e.g. by calling it "disrespectful and wasteful". From a logical perspective you haven't added much -- you're condemning something that no one has said -- but there are some unpleasant insinuations which could get in the way of calm, friendly discourse.
I have to object to the premise of the question — Yet, when students graduate, what really matters is how they present themselves and their social skills. I have seen students with horrible social skills land good jobs, based entirely on their academic and research records. I have also seen weak students passed over for good jobs despite impeccable people skills. Yes, social skills are incredibly important, but characterizing them as "what really matters" is a bit of a stretch.
@JeffE: indeed, if you have moderately below average social skills but are talented, competent and professional, then I think academia is a good career for you! (Not you in particular, of course...)
@PeteL.Clark: Is it that obvious? :-) But I didn't mean only academic jobs. The spectrum of social skills is just as varied in the Real World as it is in academia.
This question is perfect for this SE new site: undergraduates if you find it useful you can follow it and help us in spreading the word about it.
I heard that there where some (highly wanted) trials in Potsdam (maybe somewhere else):
Soft Skills Colloquium, Hasso Plattner Institut, Potsdam
Computer geeks learn to flirt (Reuters):
Even the most quirky of computer nerds can learn to flirt with finesse thanks to a new "flirting course" being offered to budding IT engineers at Potsdam University south of Berlin.
The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection.
To name the (alleged) reasons, why university courses in social skills are so rare:
many social skills can't be easily fitted into a course scheme,
there is a common belief (with which I strongly disagree) that there is no such need (as its to late (not necessary) or people will learn it automatically (a wishful thinking)),
there may be a huge difference in initial social skill levels (from one where no course is needed to one, when a course won't change things),
teaching social skills may be difficult, as many things are very culturally- and context-dependent.
Personally, I regret that there were no social skills courses at my university (so I had to learn from books, mostly - undergraduate psychology). For me, as for many other STEM students, it was (relatively) easier to learn technical material "in the natural way", than social skills.
However, social skills (as any other skills), are the best to be honed in practice (at least after). There are many opportunities, e.g.:
teamwork on any project (scientific or "just for fun"),
running a students' chapter or club,
organizing trips, excursions, movie nights, parties, ...,
organizing a students' conference.
During one's university life as an undergraduate, there are many opportunities to improve one's social skills and confidence as an adult. These range from the various sporting and political clubs students can join, through volunteer activities students can participate in, through coaching activities (of more junior students or even high school), all the way to activities like having a few drinks in the uni bar (soda, for US students). During the summer, one can participate in spring break-style activities or get an internship at a law firm.
All of these activities, I dare say, help shape a student into a person. There's no assessment, no assignments, no grades, but such is the school of hard knocks.
At our university (the Netherlands) students are actively involved in group projects and as a part of the preparation to these projects they get some training on how to give talks, how to negotiate, how to organize/chair meetings, etc.
My only point was to show that not all colleges do not. The academic landscape is diverse enough also in this respect.
I would call these "professional skills" rather than "social skills", and I think it's a useful distinction to make.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.733028 | 2012-05-27T18:19:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1752",
"authors": [
"Alexander Serebrenik",
"Daniele B",
"DayTimeCoder",
"JeffE",
"LarsH",
"Paul",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Quentin Geissmann",
"Suresh",
"Sylvain Peyronnet",
"Umur Kontacı",
"aeismail",
"balkian",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/43",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4326",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4367",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4370",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4372",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4373",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4374",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4575",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/882",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/931",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"user1197891"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
3261 | Is it a bad idea to take a leave of absence to finish a degree?
In general, is it better to complete a graduate degree first before deciding to work? Or is it also advisable to take a leave of absence and work while finish your graduate degree later?
It is difficult to finish a degree and work at the same time. This is especially the case if you have to write a (PhD) thesis. There are a number of obstacles. Firstly, you will have to work on the thesis during the evenings and weekends, which is both tiring and can induce RSI. Secondly, you will have no life and this is depressing. Thirdly, both your work and your PhD thesis will suffer. Fourthly, the time taken to complete the thesis could drag out 6 months or even 1 year, before you get close to finishing it. Under these circumstances, many people simply do not finish their thesis.
It's not impossible, though. I know of a few people who have completed their theses after taking on another job. It requires a lot of discipline.
If you have the luxury of taking a leave of absence from work to study, then I'd advise taking it. Get the degree out of the way in as short a time as possible.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.733838 | 2012-09-18T14:42:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3261",
"authors": [
"Gravity M",
"HdM",
"Mohammed SETTI",
"Robin Green",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9361",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9362",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9363",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9405",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9441",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9442",
"ninten",
"user2379888",
"v010dya"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1039 | Being harassed by a department chair
How do you cope when a department chair is all out to cause you problems? Especially when he is doing it for personal reasons that I have no control over (e.g. gender, skin color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, accent, etc). My chair hates me, so he harasses me with bad teaching loads, too many preps, assigning me one class at 8am on one campus and another class at 8pm on a separate campus three hours away, making me teach every day when others teach only twice a week, denying me funding to go to conferences, not permitting me to go on a sabbatical, etc etc etc. He is highly unethical. I suspect he discards good teaching ratings I get and pencils in bad teaching ratings but I have no way to prove it. He makes up untrue anonymous complaints from anonymous students and anonymous complaints from anonymous faculty / staff. When a particular person is not hired and everyone wanted to hire that person, he whispers to everyone that I am the one who voted against hiring. He tries to turn everyone against me. When anything even remotely goes wrong, he blames me.
He has the Dean in his pocket. He is also the chair of the faculty senate, childhood friends with the university president, brother-in-law of the provost. He is not the research type - he has one of those Ed.D. degrees and is a career administrator who has been the department chair for 17 years now. When I was hired, he was on medical leave, so he had no say in my hiring decision. He is also the only person in the department who does not teach or do research related to the department. He is a politician - former mayor of a small city - so much more astute and politically shrewd than I can ever be. He is dishonest, a blatant cheat and a frequent liar, so sitting down with him definitely never helped. He has superb contacts within the town and in state politics. Short of finding a new job, is there anything I can do? I cannot leave this university for personal reasons relating to the two-body problem, family whose help I need to take care of a severely handicapped child and other personal reasons.
Don't walk. Run.
How about moving to a different department?
Why the vote to close?
I recommend the book Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia by Emily Toth, whether or not you are female. It's great. There's a second book that is presumably as good, but I haven't read it.
Gather evidence, enlist allies, get ready to connfront him!
There is an awful lot of identifying information in this post. A truncated version appeared here a few days ago, which identifies the field. Tread carefully.
What are you doing now?
I agree with JeffE that leaving is the best solution, but it may not be an option. One key question is whether you have tenure: if not, you're presumably doomed (if the chair's behavior is as bad as you fear) and you will need to find another job anyway.
Assuming you have reasonable job security, I'd sit down with the chair and ask what he envisions. Don't complain, argue, or try to present your side. Instead, you could start by acknowledging that the two of you have unfortunately gotten off to a rough start in your working relationship, and that because of his stature and leadership role it's important for you to earn his respect, so you'd like his advice on how to improve the situation. Your goal is to learn, not to debate. Don't explicitly agree to any facts that aren't true, but you don't have to fact check everything he says, and you shouldn't dispute his perspective or opinions in this conversation.
One possibility is that he is an insecure jerk who wants you to submit to his power and authority. If you do so, and let him boss you around a little without complaining, then he may treat you somewhat better. [This is assuming he can't treat you any worse than he already is. If you fear things could get worse, then be careful, but your question suggests you don't have a lot to lose.]
Another possibility is that he just doesn't want you around, and there's simply nothing you can do to get on his good side. In that case, maybe he could help you transfer to another related department, for example. Of course, you can't even bring this up unless you have some job security, since otherwise you have no leverage at all. And it's important to do it in a face-saving way. There's no way it will happen if it looks like he is getting rid of a problem employee (the administration and the other department will not accept that as a valid reason for such a transfer), and obviously he won't cooperate if the stated reason is getting you out from the control of an irresponsible chair. Instead, you'd have to give it a positive spin: helping your career by giving you a chance to develop in a slightly different research direction, building ties between departments and fostering interdisciplinary connections, etc. It may be galling, but you need to set this up in a way that makes it look like your chair is doing something valuable for the university by helping to arrange it. If you can get your chair enthusiastic about this, and if there's another plausible department, then the chair's influence within the university might really help you. And don't be too restrictive in ruling out possible departments: there might not be any appropriate match, but I know of a couple of cases in which people have successfully resolved personality conflicts by moving to departments that were a bit further afield than one might expect (engineering vs. science, for example). If you've got tenure, then the university has a powerful incentive to fix this conflict, even if it means letting you sit in an odd department.
Leaving the university is radically different from switching departments, and you should not ask the chair for help in doing that. Within the university, your chair's standing with the administration will play a major role in what opportunities are available. Outside the university, your chair probably can't help you very much, but could certainly hurt you, so it's not worth the risk.
The worst case scenario is that your chair hates you and wants to hurt your career, regardless of which department you are in. In that case, there's nothing you can do if your chair has the full support of the administration, and you'll have to either leave the university or wait for the chair to retire. However, you shouldn't give up all hope until you've exhausted options like submitting or transferring.
Just to add to the other excellent comments: while I have no personal experience that might be of value in your situation, I think that there is one thing you MUST do on a continuing basis regardless of everything else.
Document every instance where you feel this person is abusing their authority in relation to you. Accumulate as much evidence you can on each case, and build up a case file. Even if you don't go on the offensive, you'll need this if the chair starts trying direct confrontation and provocation (instead of the passive aggressive bullying that's going on right now)
Agreed. Also store your records off-campus.
If you are dealing with a bully who is insecure and threatened by you, direct negotiation will only result in your being manipulated further. Read the available on-line literature on adult bullying.
Making friends with other powerful people (e.g. superordinates of your boss) is effective, eventually you might become someone that the bully wants "on side" and their overt behaviour will just flip like a light switch. If you can document all your claims e.g. some members of a department having twice the teaching load for no clear, publicly-stated policy reason, you may have legal recourse & be able to get a more level playing field to try to prove your academic merit on (have you talked to HR?) But if things are as "sewn up" as you say, and there is no help from HR or another campus organisation, then the best thing is to change job.
Do you have any suggestions for reading about adult bullying? I don't know much about this but would like to learn more. Thanks!
I'm afraid I just did Google & Google scholar searches on it when I had a younger colleague draw my attention to a situation that I realised, while extreme, was far too familiar. The only papers I found worth putting in my citation index were on school-age bullying, but the gist of the Psychology Today etc. articles on adults were enough to help me help my colleague(s). It seems to be an under-researched area, which is ironic since understanding it would probably benefit the childhood problem as well.
@AnonymousMathematician: an online blog here
I've found the book "It's all your fault! 12 tips for managing people who blame others for everything" by Bill Eddy incredibly helpful. It can be bought for next to nothing on Kindle and it brought me great insight and understanding. http://www.amazon.com/Its-All-Your-Fault-Everything/dp/0981509037
If the harassment really is for reasons of "e.g. gender, skin color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, accent, etc," then the federal government could get involved. See the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website (http://www.eeoc.gov/) for more information.
Not a full answer, but a suggestion: Consider meeting with the college's ombudsperson (if they have one), affirmative action officer, EEOC officer, etc.
This is a very interesting question, and I am surprised that there's no more about "bullying" in the SO academia community (I hope this will change fast).
As anonymous and new user, I can share some experience:
1) If someone (higher in grade) bullies or harasses you, it's sad to say, but that means that you are not seen as doing a valuable contribution to the department. Not a "maybe", not a "perhaps": that is just what it is. This assumption could be right or wrong, but any dean/chair/professor wants to have a supportive (adoring?) team. So either you adapt to the system, or you will make your life very miserable: make your contributions very clear, boast about your workload or find another place. Bullies like strong (and loud) voices.
2) Do not confront the bullying person: it's anyway an unfair battle, since they're managers and higher-ranked anyway.
3) Be blatantly open with what you do, aka "blow your own trumpet": when you start doing it, others reply as well, and you start realising that your "case" is no worse or better than somebody else's.
MISTAKES TO BE AVOIDED:
I think that the worst mistake to be done in these cases is moaning about the issue, or using "allies" to make the case, or asking the unions to do something about it. Moaning won't solve your case, but just make your stomach more acid; internal allies will not either: having allies and support is generally a good thing, but I realised that I was just "using" them to reinforce my assumptions and beliefs (ending up in a infinite loop of self-commiseration); unions will just use a pre-defined strategy that will be well known in advance by the bully.
REMEDIES:
Since you do not want to change your affiliation (but sadly this is the only real way to solve the issue, I am afraid), my take on the issue is to be honest with yourself, and ask whether your workload could be worse, or if you could make a request to avoid some teaching times by using some reasonable excuses, and in general stopping being negative about the person. The latter is tough but again, if you're being (overtly or secretly) negative, the bully will make your life even worse.
RESOURCES:
An excellent blog on the matter, and an "external" voice to talk to (yes! they talk and listen to you, also privately...) but in the UK: http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.co.uk/
me? i left the institution
I have to strongly disagree with this answer. The initial point is correct—if you are being abused, you are not valued. But the proper response to abuse is not to "get used to it"; this is a merely a recipe for continued abuse. Allies are a must in this situation, just as they are in any other stressful, emotionally charged situation. Trying to tough it out alone is dangerous and usually unnecessary. But it is important to find allies who are well-informed and brutally honest—the last thing you need is an echo chamber.
The last sentence is especially disturbing. Yes, it's healthy to be positive and forgiving, but not because negativity will make the bully think less of of their victim.
dear @JeffE, what to say? I have been through it, and before that, I shared your opinions. I fought. Hard. Found allies who were brutally honest, but who were also scared to take the next step forward with me (a formal complaint). Tried to overcome the system, met the oppressor many times in his "cave", filed formal complaints. In order not to sink others I fled
I think you did the right thing, by finding allies, by fighting hard, and by leaving. None of that is easy.
I got through this type of situation through a combination of institutional and personal means.
I was subject to mobbing by a group of faculty members in a particular field of British lit (pre-1800). When one of them became chair, and I stepped down as graduate program director, they piled on. One filed a specious grievance against me. When that failed after a year of harassment (during which I lost my mother), the new chair scheduled me to teach 3-4 new preps every single term. After four years of this, and after 3 separate administrative complaints that went through my chair and were stopped by the dean, I filed a grievance after my chair finally got grounds to file a negative performance review because she had overloaded me for years. The grievance was part of a peer review process; my peers found for me five to one. Next, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and got 1 year off. During that period, my chair got promoted (!!!) and was gone. Problem solved, on top of which I had grounds to file EEOC complaints for gender, age, and disability discrimination. I'm back this term. So far so good, with a chair that doesn't seem to have the stomach for all of this.
We are so vulnerable--and until our good work is trashed, we don't realize how vulnerable we are.
Fight the good fight when you can, and back off and lay low when you can. There's nothing to be lost by it, either in terms of your job or in terms of your self respect.
Downvoted because this is simply one example situation. The answer cannot be applied to general situations.
You didn't mention if you had a union or not. If you do, go to the union's grievance officer. Bring all the evidence. Have a conference with the chair and the union rep. It doesn't have to be hostile. The focus can be how you can be on par with other faculty members. Most grievance reps are good at building consensus. It will put the chair on notice that his decision making isn't to be arbitrary and capricious.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.734027 | 2012-04-07T04:47:05 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1039",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Caffeinated",
"Charles Staats",
"ElCid",
"Ellen Spertus",
"JRN",
"JeffE",
"Joanna Bryson",
"Ka Wa Yip",
"Kieran",
"L Platts",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1520",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15949",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/39",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/621",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/64",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74893",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7609",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7695",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9117",
"kbshimmyo",
"padawan",
"tombull89"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
19762 | Having students scribe lectures
When I'm teaching an advanced graduate class where the source material is drawn primarily from current research papers, there isn't a canonical text per se, and a typical lecture, while loosely structured, also involves discussion that might help clarify the papers.
In such a setting, asking students to scribe lectures serves a useful purpose. Students hopefully remember the material better after writing it down, and are forced to be more precise. And classroom discussion can be captured for posterity.
But I don't think I've found a way to implement this effectively. My current mechanics include:
students are assigned as scribes between a week in advance, and on the day of the lecture
I provide a latex style file, and also an example or two of prior scribe notes.
students are expected to produce a first draft within a few days of the lecture (lectures are once a week), and the hope is that a good version of the notes is on the website a week after the lecture.
these are "seminar" classes: they are 1-credit, and the only work the student needs to do to earn a grade is one or more scribes and (sometimes) one lecture.
What happens is that the initial draft is usually abysmal, and it either takes me a really long time to wrestle the document into shape with the student, or I give up and do it myself, which also takes a lot of time.
Are there useful practices that can improve this workflow ? Is my timeline unrealistic ?
p.s To avoid confusion, when I say scribe (which is common
parlance in my area) I don't mean a literal recording of minutes but a
synthesis of material that if well done becomes something resembling
lecture notes.
I guess it might depend on what is "abysmal" about the drafts? Formatting, general writing quality, typos, incomplete, poor understanding of topics, etc? Each of these might require different steps to address (and in principle some of them may be tied back to the lectures themselves).
Formatting is a problem (but minor). The biggest problem is writing quality and basic structuring of the material as a "lecture" as opposed to 'minutes of a meeting'.
You must mean transcribe which, in my dictionary, means, "to write out from speech." The verb scribe means to cut (as in carpentry) to score (as in metalwork) or to engrave (as in, to inscribe upon). Or perhaps you just mean taken written notes?
Ah. I've used 'scribe' colloquially for a long time. But I stand corrected.
@BenjaminMakoHill "Scribe" as a verb also means to write; a scribe was somebody who copied documents back in the days before printing. As a verb, it's somewhat archaic in general but it quite common in academia for meaning that Suresh uses.
"Scribe" is the correct idiomatic verb/noun/adjective, at least within theoretical computer science. "Transcribe" suggests that the writer is merely copying the lecturer's words verbatim. Good scribe notes are not merely transcriptions.
I hadn't seen it before either, but it does seem like "scribe" is used as a transitive verb in this way in certain parts of academia. So far as I know this is a recent and somewhat jargony usage. (E.g. it seems to mean "to type" rather than literally "to write".) I think it would be fine to use the term in the question but would be good to define it: we get in trouble when we assume we know each other's jargon.
(I do think this usage has caused some minor confusion here: I am confident that Suresh does not mean literal word-for-word transcription, as some answerers have understandably thought. He means the practice of designated students typing (probably texing) nice lecture notes, a practice which is now relatively common.)
@PeteL.Clark yes that's what I mean. Thanks !
I'm not sure that a transcription is overly useful. Is your goal to converge to something like lecture notes or a textbook, or just to have minutes of the lectures?
Do you have the option to use the topics in a seminar first and staple together the seminar papers to form some approximation of lecture notes?
@Raphael something between fleshed out lecture notes and minutes, but much closer to lecture notes. In regards to your second point, the papers themselves are research papers, and are not optimized for readability :).
@Suresh Exactly. Reading, digesting and re-explaining research papers is what we make students do in seminars; their products should have "close to lecture notes"-quality.
Then I don't think I understand your point.
A suggestion (depending on the size of the class) - each student proof reads/improves notes one week, takes them the next. You start the ball rolling by providing draft-quality notes of the first lecture to all students so they know what they're aiming for.
You have the following goals:
(I) Every student will transcribe at least one lecture.
(II) The transcribed lecture notes will be of a sufficient quality to be useful to the other students, and ideally to be posted somewhere for others to access.
(III) You don't want to spend an unreasonable time writing or correcting the notes yourself.
In my opinion these are three worthy goals and any one of them is attainable, but as a set they are probably incompatible with each other. So you may want to choose (not necessarily once and for all, but depending on the course) which of these worthy goals is the worthiest and prepare to sacrifice one or both of the others. In more detail:
If you prioritize (I), then the emphasis is placed on creating a learning experience for the students. If you do this you will find that the variation in the quality of the note-taking will be amazing. I have seen this in students' written notes over the years. Yesterday a student left his notebook in my office. I flipped through it today to try to figure out who it was. It is one step above chicken scratch: for instance, he is writing on lined paper but his mathematical expressions and equations only stay within the lines about half the time: he can have a "written slope" which is only slightly larger than -1. (This helped me identify the student, who does not have his name written down anywhere. I noticed his characteristic negative slope when he was writing on the board in my office yesterday.) On the other hand, in my graduate course I have glanced at several students' handwritten notes at the end of the lecture and marvelled at how much better they look than my own handwritten pre-lecture notes and what is on the blackboard at the end of the leecture. At one point years ago I gave in a borderline undergrad/graduate level class what I thought was one of my best lectures of all time and at the end realized that I hadn't prepared any lecture notes and sadly reflected on the fact that it would be lost forever. Then I remembered that I had one student in the course who took great lecture notes, and I asked her for her lecture notes for this purpose. I think that what she gave me was an improvement on my delivered lecture, and using her notes I got my favorite part of what amounts to a textbook on number theory: you can see the lecture notes here. (Yes, I touched it up a bit afterwards, but not by that much.) You can also see that I thanked this student at the end of my notes.
All of the students mentioned above are "A students". I personally do feel that the gender difference between the students is playing a role here. This is not a scientific observation and I certainly mean no offense to anyone, but in my experience the difference in note-taking care between male and female students is, on average, dramatic.
Anyway, if you prioritize (I) and (III) you're going to get such uneven samples as to make it a pretty jarring experience for anyone to try to follow the entire course by reading the notes. Having the notes be texed adds other levels and brings other skills into play. Some people will naturally go back and spend time prettying up their tex files; others won't. (I started out as the latter and very slowly over the course of thousands of pages of notes am heading towards the former. But for someone who has thousands of pages of texed mathematics on his webpage, my texing skills are distressingly middling.)
Thus if you prioritize (II), then I think you need to seek out the students who will do the best job. This works against (I), and you need to look for extra compensation. I agree with the other answers that providing good latexed notes is something that may be worth paying for.
If you really prioritize (II) then at a certain point you will decide to type the lecture notes yourself. This is what I do in most classes I teach. At this point I have a bit of a reputation as a guy who has lots of typed lecture notes. When I begin a graduate course now, I often tell students explicitly that I will not be typing lecture notes as the course progresses, because that is very time-consuming. But then, at some point in the semester I usually break down and reveal to the students where my heretofore secret lecture notes can be found. I actually just did that yesterday in my graduate class this semester....with less than one week of class left.
Typing your own notes totally destroys (III): to get something that looks good you have to work significantly harder during the semester than you otherwise would need to do in order to deliver exactly the same lecture and you need to put more time into it after the semester is over. On the other hand, I have found this practice to be extremely valuable to both my learning and my career: I have gotten a lot of wonderful professional interactions out of it. Thus I would say that the real drawback is that it defeats (I).
To summarize a very long answer: I think you need to decide whether the point of this is the process or the end result. You either provide a learning experience for all the students or you provide decent-to-high quality lecture notes, or you provide both but don't get it done until after the end of the course. I don't see how to do everything at once.
To add to this from a student/scribe perspective: I think (I) is the condition that should be left out. It might be a good way for the lecturer to evaluate the students' performance, but it conflicts with each of (II) and (III) and creates bad incentives. (I tend to sit in certain classes merely to get an idea what they're about, possibly catch connections to subjects I am working on, and just to have an hour and a half of work time without an easy way to distract myself with reddit. Requiring everyone to scribe would scare me out of them.)
I also think a week is too little for a set of scribe notes to "mature", and MIT OpenCourseWare notes would heavily gain in quality if they would be maintained beyond the end of the respective classes.
@darij: Presumably some of the classes that you take or once took had actual, formal requirements. Presumably you avoided some other classes because the actual, formal requirements did not appeal to you (I took no laboratory science courses after high school). These are the standard rules of the game. I think most students would agree that scribing lectures is not the most odious of actual, formal requirements: if you do that instead of a midterm exam or a couple of problem sets, is it so bad?
I don't recall attending a class with formal requirements since I finished high school. Some privilege and luck was involved in this (in Munich, where I was an undergrad, classes probably do have formal requirements now that they switched to bachelor/master, and at MIT undergrad classes have requirements). But that's not the main issue here. Having to scribe is a greater burden to us "course vagabonds" because failure is exposed (bad scribe notes appear in google searches for one's name) and because one is inconveniencing the lecturer (who has to "fix" the abysmal scribe notes) ...
... and fellow students (who might rely on scribe notes for their own learning). In contrast, my psets and exams remain between me and the lecturer or TA. I am not arguing against work requirement in general; I, in fact, wish for more (graded and returned) problem sets. I am just saying that making scribe notes a passing requirement turns away students who don't already feel safe that they will pass; and I don't think this is a good thing. (To end with an anecdote, I did pass a class by virtue of making scribe notes, despite having done barely any homework. I realize I am arguing ...
... against what could be understood as my own model. But I think it is totally fine if students can opt in to making notes and then get some credit for it. This being voluntary, they will usually feel more responsible for the content of those notes and deliver better quality. What I don't like is forcing this on everyone in the hall.)
BTW as for "I have a bit of a reputation as a guy who has lots of typed lecture notes"... I think you have more than "a bit" of this reputation; you are the first person that would come into my mind if anyone would ask me for an introduction into commutative algebra.
My experience with transcription:
Our university uses a lecture capture system (Camtasia Relay) that creates a video file with the instructor's screen plus the audio of the instructor's lecturing. We recently hired students to take the software's "best guess" captioning for a single course and create good closed captions.
To our amazement, every 50 minutes of lecture took roughly EIGHT HOURS to transcribe.
So my main answer is yes, your timeline is likely too tight.
You may want to look into some sort of lecture capture system.
My socratic teacher self also thinks that students creating their own summary of the discussion is likely more helpful to deep learning than receiving a transcript.
Or have students create a wiki or google doc for each seminar with the main figures (codes? equations?) provided for them to discuss. A different student could be in charge of each day's wiki setup and upload the appropriate discussion points and edit the final product and report to you on class participation.
As commented above, Suresh is not looking for a word-for-word transcription (and "transcribe" was not really the right verb; it has since been changed). Rather, he means a set of polished lecture notes containing the details from the lecture in technical prose, something like these. So they are not expected to record every word, but rather to digest the information, fill in details, etc. It will still be time consuming!
Thanks for clarifying. I'm in my own little cocoon and didn't realize that my word choice could cause confusion :)
Despite the semantics related to the question this answer is a good guide - you might cut the time by 50% for a digested set of notes - if they're good at the material and slow at typing. If the material is a complete mystery but they can type, treating it as dictation might be quicker. It's not an easy task.
I originally wrote this answer back in 2014. I'm updating it for 2018, since I now have a bunch more experience.
I have had students scribe for me in graduate classes many times. You can read their work on the course webpages: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I have also twice taught honors classes where I assigned students to prove a lot of results in class and assigned them to write up notes on the day's work. You can read the more recent version here (1, 2); I also did this a previous time but no longer have a digital copy of those notes. Some advice:
Keep the assignment manageable. For a graduate student, I think writing up one 50 minute lecture is a reasonable task. If I were doing longer lectures, I'd probably break the responsibility in half. For undergrads, a group of 2 or 3 working together to cover 50-80 minutes of classwork is reasonable.
To make the assignment more manageable and the notes more uniform for my grad students, I made a big LaTeX template with all the macros I thought they might want.
For my undergrads, at first I required them to use LaTeX, working together on Overleaf, but I found I was spending a lot of time answering LaTeX questions, so I switched to telling them they could use any medium they wanted. You should probably decide whether it is worth spending your time teaching undergrads to use LaTeX. A downside of letting them use any medium is that there wasn't a good way for me to edit those notes.
Impose a tight deadline. My deadline now is to have the notes done 24 hours after the class, before people forget what happened.
To make the tight deadline fair, let students choose what date they want to work on several weeks in advance. Ideally, warn about dates which will be unusually diagram heavy.
I scribe the first lecture myself, to illustrate to the students what I was looking for. I post the TeX source of the notes along with the PDF, so that students could copy techniques from each other.
For my grad classes, I edit the notes, both to remove typos and to add additional comments on material which I had not covered well. This was probably 30 or 60 minutes of work per lecture, but when the turn-around cycle was tight, I felt that the time doubled as helpful preparation for the next lecture by reminding me what I said rather than what I meant to say. It would be better if I edited the undergrad notes as well, although I currently am not because so many of them are handwritten or in Word.
I frequently say things in lecture like "I don't know the precise answer to your question, but it is something like ... and I'll put the details in the course notes", and I in other ways encourage people to treat the notes as a reference.
Some things I haven't figured out a good way to do yet
Incorporate this into the course grade. For grad students, I just don't; I instead praise good work informally, in public and private. For undergrads, I had a small portion of the grade which was my feeling about how well they did on class participation and note taking, but I will freely admit it was very subjective.
Teach students to use LaTeX better, or to write better. It is pretty easy to fix their work, but I never feel that I have time or energy to tell them how to improve it next time.
Thanks. There are many good ideas in this, including using a breakpoint and double scribing, as well as giving students more notice and more information about what they'd be scribing.
(most of the links have stopped working sadly)
+1 for "I made a big LaTeX template with all the macros I thought they might want." :-)
As a student, I would send out a Google Doc to each member of my class. We would all collaboratively take notes together. This was, of course, chaotic and messy but it worked very well. The anxiety about 'missing something while writing down something else' was alleviated with more eyes and ears on the subject. When the lecture already had or could have followed a written structure, (say a review sheet or an agenda for the day) we would base the document off this, which worked even better as people would focus on one topic or bullet point and make sure that was finished and fleshed out as the rest of the class raced on.
However, this does mean giving your students an additional task. Sometimes, as has been noted, active note taking and learning don't go well together. However, student lead, collaborative note taking is another option, if maybe not the best one.
Pay a student who's not taking the class, and preferably has already taken it, to capture the lecture and discussion. That person will be able to focus objectively on what's happening.
Alternatively videotape or do an audio recording that the scribe can use.
Ask everyone in the class to provide their notes to the scribe.
The scribe will be focused on trying to capture questions, answers, comments, etc. which means he or she may find it difficult to acquire a deep understanding of the material. The scribe also may find it difficult to participate in class because they're too busy writing down/typing everyone else's questions and comments.
I've performed as a 'scribe' as a graduate student--I was a TA and sat in the class to help deepen my understanding of the material and to know what the students were being taught. I was then able to expand on (and correct some equations) the material during lab sessions. I had to pay close attention, but having previously studied the material made it a lot easier.
I've also taken minutes for a subcommittee that I'm on occasionally. I find it tremendously difficult to switch focus between trying to capture everything important and actually participating through providing information or asking questions.
I like the idea of audio/videotaping, or in more general not having to rely on real-time note taking.
FWIW, there is free software that can capture audio, video from a computer and/or a camera. For blackboard lectures, it's also possible to set up a high-res camera that takes periodic shots of the board.
I have taught a similarly structured graduate course, and seen a similar wide variation in quality of the notes. I did assign scribes at the beginning of the class, and allowed them to swap as long as everyone ended up scribing at some point. I feel like this helped in matching students to topics they were particularly keen on.
For the future, I've considered having all the notes be in a wiki. There would still be a "main" scribe for each topic, but everybody (including me) could contribute to any page. They would be assessed on their overall contribution, which is trackable from the wiki history. The assessment structure is pretty much pass/fail anyway, so I'm not sure it makes much of a difference, but I like the idea of rewarding students for helping each other. Also, it means it's OK for each wiki page to start out as very rough notes, potentially from many hands: it can be progressively rewritten. This avoids the problem where the original scribe gets stuck at an early stage - if they missed something, or misunderstood something, then they can get help on it, but still be able to make a meaningful contribution to the end product.
This may not be suitable for you if you have a lot of mathematics or diagrams (depending on choice of wiki software), or if you would prefer things to be in LaTeX for other reasons.
I like this idea. And with things like sharelatex it's even possible to do collaborative latex editing.
You say it is an advanced course, so you may have met some of the students before in beginners courses, projects, etc.
Pick one or two competent and reliable students and pay them to write lecture notes¹. Repeat in subsequent iterations with the purpose of incremental refinement.
You can sell the idea to them by noting that
they'd get paid for work they'd have to do in some form, anyway,
they'd learn more because they'd have to do it a bit more precisely than for
their own jot paper and would get feedback from other students (and you),
they'd have external motivation to do said work (counter-procrastination) and
they'd have the chance to make a good impression with you.
I think lecture notes should be different from transcripts, but ymmv.
students are expected to produce a first draft within a few days of the lecture (lectures are once a week), and the hope is that a good version of the notes is on the website a week after the lecture.
The timing seems a bit strict. If the students have a lot of projects going on they may not (want to/be able to) make time for this. Maybe this is one of the reasons you are getting abysmal first drafts.
Yes. the constraint is that it's useful to have notes from the previous lecture in time for the new one. I should clarify that the students in these classes are usually 2-3rd year Ph.D students or even more seniors, so they don't have the same class load as (say) UGs or intro grad students.
@Suresh but clearly, PhD Students can be busy as well? Paper deadlines etc ...
It could help to assign the scribes further in advance, say, at the start of the semester. Then they know in advance when they will be scribing and can try to clear their schedules accordingly. But it seems to me that timing is probably not the main problem.
@NateEldredge Given the number of students who seem to do every assignment on the night before the deadline, regardless of when it was set, it's not clear that scheduling in advance will help anything at all!
You might find a "delta-scribing" process more effective. To prepare, provide (enough copies of) a rough outline of the material to be covered in that lecture, ideally in the order to be covered, with a blank box next to each bullet point, and space somewhere (perhaps on a different sheet of paper).
Now the goal of the transcription team is to record the actual order of points presented. The order presented is recorded in the blank box, usually by a number. The space is used to record as much of the additional words needed for the lecture, including particularly cogent phrases describing the material, as well as subpoints of discussion. This may save just enough work on the part of the team that all the additional ("delta") salient points brought up in lecture can be covered.
If the lecture is actually more of a free-flowing discussion with many people introducing new points, it might be good to have each two-person team operate so that one transcribes the points the other person presents. Perhaps a brief discussion as how to best transcribe the point might be in order, so that there is a "secretarial consensus" of sorts.
At the University I am a student at (Undergraduate in Liberal Arts), we have mandated discussion sections for courses over a certain number of students. In one of these discussion sections, we have two people each week (who signed themselves up ahead of time) give a short presentation/summary of all of the readings for the week and a recap of the lectures.
I think that (depending on the format of your class) having your students themselves present to the class their findings might motivate them to do a better job at taking notes.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.735244 | 2014-04-24T15:13:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19762",
"authors": [
"Adam Pine",
"Chris H",
"David Richerby",
"Ishmeet Singh",
"JeffE",
"MathsWizard",
"Mico",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Ramesh Kumar",
"Raphael",
"SriniShine",
"Suresh",
"TifaTifa",
"anon",
"darij grinberg",
"gdlmx",
"gtwebb",
"hhoomn",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20825",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53965",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53973",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54006",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54007",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54020",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54034",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54044",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54046",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54109",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5640",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5962",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8494",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/88286",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"mafu",
"mako",
"user54006",
"xLeitix"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
58662 | Data sets of questions asked in conferences
I am looking for data sets of questions asked in academic conferences. Ideally, it should contain a timestamped transcript as well as some reference to the talk (e.g. the paper it was presenting), but a simple list of questions would be already of interest to me.
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science (natural language processing and machine learning), and English-speaking venues.
@ThejusMahajan 1. Reference requests are on-topic 2. The question will help people like me.
I've never heard of any such data being gathered. Presumably, if questions at a conference were going to be recorded and transcribed, and the data made available for use in research, the participants would all have to give informed consent, and I've never heard of a conference asking for such consent.
I recall having seen very old conference proceedings reporting questions and replies, but nothing in recent times, so I don't think they are typically collected.
No conference I ever attended did record questions
@vonbrand http://videolectures.net/ . Maybe someone took care of the ASR.
Such a data set probably does not exist, due to human subjects considerations. While conference speakers are often asked to consent to possible recording of their talks, conference attendees are not generally asked for such consent. Sometimes questioners do get recorded anyway, in those rare talks that actually are recorded, but they have certainly not provided any explicit consent for becoming experimental subjects.
Now, some researcher and their IRB might well be able to work out a way to build a data set from the decidedly biased sample of publicly available talks that happen to include questions. Doing so and then executing that project, however, is likely to be a rather large research and coding effort and with that much work the authors would certainly end up wanting to publish papers on it.
In short: if your literature search isn't turning it up already, then it doesn't exist.
http://videolectures.net/ does manage to record some conference talks. Also, there is no IRB in Europe, so it may be easier in some countries.
@FranckDernoncourt I believe that many other countries have strong requirements for assurance of ethics in research as well: see the HHS International Compilation of Human Research Standards
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.737379 | 2015-11-22T16:48:25 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/58662",
"authors": [
"Danaish Rathore",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Mitom TV Trực Tiếp Bóng Đá",
"Nano.O.",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Prof.DA62",
"Snow Lion",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/161569",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/161570",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/161571",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/161585",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169104",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"jakebeal",
"vonbrand"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
61203 | Dataset of grad admission acceptance rate based on undergrad school
I am looking for datasets that would list the acceptance rates of graduate school applicants based on their undergrad schools. I.e. X % of students from undergraduate school Y applying to graduate school Z are admitted. Ideally, the dataset should also indicate the number of applicants.
I am mostly interested in graduate schools based in the United States, and computer science departments.
I am reasonably confident that an open dataset like this doesn't exist. First, because graduate admissions is a secretive process in the US, and second, because the combination of "attended Y and applied to Z" would be considered PII and shouldn't be released for privacy reasons. If you explain why you want this data (e.g., are you trying to measure elitism in graduate school admissions?) it might help someone guide you to another kind of dataset that might suit the same purpose.
@ff524 Purpose: curiosity. These statistics are aggregates, so there should not any PII issue (uneducated guess). One can of course exclude cases where a very low number of students from Y applied to Z, if needs be: the percentage wouldn't be much meaningful anyway.
At least in my department, to avoid releasing PII you would have to exclude almost all the data. For most undergrad schools, the number of students applying is nowhere near the number you would need in order to avoid privacy implications. In some cases, even if the number is large, those schools would still need to be excluded because releasing it would enable others to guess whether someone they already know attended Y and applied to Z was accepted or rejected.
@ff524 What number does one need in order to avoid privacy implications in the US? I'd guess one could skip years, or perturb the data in some other ways (e.g. random noise). Otherwise data may come from applicants themselves, e.g. http://thegradcafe.com/ (which claims to have "374390 grad school admission results in the database".)
The gradcafe data is so biased (sampling bias, reporting bias), I wouldn't consider it anywhere close to a reliable indicator of "grad admission acceptance rate based on undergrad school."
@ff524 Hence my question.
Yes to all of the above although I do know that at least in the case of undergraduate admissions some schools might keep lists of high-performing high schools from which they are more (or less) likely to admit students. But agreed, the data set in which OP is interested certainly does not exist.
The specific dataset you seek is likely unavailable because of concerns about personal identifying information and the confidentiality of the process. The number of applicants from small colleges or to small CS programs in any given year is in many cases too low for effective anonymity.
Many good undergrad programs will tell you about where their graduates went in terms that they are comfortable with, e.g. "x% went to grad school;" some will even list exactly which graduates went where - usually with the permission of both the graduate and the department head. I don't think anybody's gathered this into a single dataset.
However, certain aspects of your curiosity may be satisfied by graphs and compiled data from a step later down the line, about which universities hire grads from which other universities for their CS faculty. That kind of information can be found here (compiled by Jeff Huang and his students at Brown University, analyzed by Jürgen Pfeffer at Carnegie Mellon):
(source: pfeffer.at)
Thanks, how about large colleges/CS programs, and perturbing the data (e.g., random noise or skip years)?
The key issue is lack of motivation/incentives to gather such a data set: for what purpose would it be used? There are so few large colleges/CS programs that limiting to those wouldn't tell you much, and analyzing random noise is not likely to be helpful in answering a motivating question. Data could be aggregated over years (skipping doesn't reduce the PII specificity issue) at the cost of current/predictive value (programs change over time). Data collection should be motivated by a specific question, so as to guide decision-making between the trade-offs involved.
This is exactly the link that came to mind when I read the question, but I was having trouble recalling where I read it. Thanks for posting it! I also recall something like a network analysis of "longest connection length", with the general idea that "for top institutions, it really is a small world" - that at top institutions they had 1-link long connections to everywhere, while at smaller institutions it might take 4+ links to get some other department. The one's I'm thinking of don't answer the OPs questions either though, I'm afraid.
This is interesting data. It's different from what the OP requested in two ways: besides for being about a different stage (as acknowledged), it only includes successful applicants, not rejected applicants. i.e. assuming these 51 school are the only schools in existence, you can use it to say "N% of hires at Z come from Y" or "M% of Y graduates who get positions end up at Z." But you can't say "N% of applicants to Z from Y are hired," which would be analogous to what OP wanted for grad admissions ("X % of students from undergraduate school Y applying to graduate school Z are admitted").
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.737632 | 2016-01-06T19:00:21 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/61203",
"authors": [
"Aman Goel",
"Bioinus Healthcare",
"BrianH",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"JFB",
"Joseph Muldoon",
"Raydot",
"Stack.Math",
"Theo",
"WBT",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13535",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169887",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169888",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169889",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169891",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169896",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/169902",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36320",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
62766 | Dataset of retraction fines per publisher
I read in the Nature comment Reproducibility: A tragedy of errors authored by David B. Allison, Andrew W. Brown, Brandon J. George& Kathryn A. Kaiser and published today
Science relies essentially but complacently on self-correction, yet scientific publishing raises severe disincentives against such correction. One publisher states that it will charge the author who initiates withdrawal of a published paper US$10,000.
(This Nature comment uses the term withdrawal in lieu of retraction)
Is there any dataset that lists retraction fines per publisher?
What is "withdrawal of a published paper"? Do you mean retraction? Usually withdrawal refers to withdrawing a paper before it is published. What kind of withdrawal are you referring to in your question?
@ff524 Thanks, good point, yes retraction. (I believe this Nature comment use withdrawal in lieu of retraction)
It is very unlikely somebody went to the aggravation of finding out... and it could very well change drastically over time, be different e.g. for a special topic issue, ...
@vonbrand I'm sure this is the kind of data http://retractionwatch.com/ would be interested to compile, amongst other organizations and researchers.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.738205 | 2016-02-04T04:44:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/62766",
"authors": [
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"La Dg",
"SUDHAKAR K",
"Sandeep Bagri",
"The Mike Hostilo Law Firm",
"Venkat Amith",
"Wiktor Krzeszewski",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174742",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174743",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174744",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174745",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174747",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174748",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/174749",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"mnobrecastro",
"user922900",
"vonbrand"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
64102 | What is the impact of using complex words on the paper acceptance probability?
Oppenheimer, Daniel M. "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly." Applied Cognitive Psychology 20, no. 2 (2006): 139-156. looked at the impact of using complex words on the graduate admission probability.
Is there any research/study/survey that looked at the impact of using complex words on the paper acceptance probability?
I am most interested in the field of computer science, and English-speaking venues.
Is there any dataset of submitted papers, labeled with editor decision (accept, reject, revision)? that would be a fun dataset to play with.
@ff524 yes such a dataset would be interesting, I'm looking for that as well: Does any publication venue make rejected papers available for download?
I don't know of any study like this, but I'd be surprised if there was a correlation. Sometime a complex word is a precise word, and therefore it adds clarity to the narrative. Other times, a complex word is nothing but a fancy word that obfuscates meaning. Above all, authors should strive to communicate clearly. Hopefully, referees judge papers based on the quality of the research and the clear understandability of the presented findings, and wouldn't be easily influenced by the injection of highfalutin synonyms.
@ff524, fun yes. Available, hopefully not, at the very least for privacy reasons.
@vonbrand what's the privacy issue?
May I add that we should write to our audience. I have no data either, but writing for a low level journal in a specific discipline would entail use of obscure vocabulary "of necessity." Writing the same narrative for a higher level journal with broader reach would necessitate more accessible vocabulary. Another interesting confound if that dataset is ever discovered.
@FranckDernoncourt If nothing else, at least some journals/conferences explicitly say that submissions (accepted or rejected) will be kept in strict confidence. So it goes to "reasonable expectation of privacy". Ethically it would also be highly dubious to release personally-identifiable data without the informed consent of the people who've submitted research data. It would also be an issue of copyright in many cases, as copyright transfers/licenses aren't given for rejected papers. A journal/conference could always change their conditions of submission to allow this in the future, of course.
Related (off site): Research papers containing abstracts that are shorter and consist of more commonly used words accumulate citations more successfully.
I agree with @J.R. that complex words sometimes add clarity and sometimes are merely pompous or serve to obfuscate. I would add that referees should be able to tell the difference and might therefore be influenced either positively or negatively by such words. Personally, I get annoyed by overly pompous prose. I don't think it would cause me to reject a paper outright, but it might make me more sensitive to other faults in the paper.
@ff524, a contradictory study. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205
Similar question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65666/which-is-better-a-paper-with-pedantic-vocabularies-or-a-paper-easy-to-read/65668#65668
I cannot reply directly to your question on complex words, but it appears that complex (long) titles are associated with fewer citations (see Deng). So, you might extrapolate that complex words are going to decrease the likelihood of citations and, further extrapolating, possibly also of acceptance.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.738384 | 2016-02-26T21:57:25 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64102",
"authors": [
"Andreas Blass",
"Anonymous Physicist",
"BrianH",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"J.R.",
"Pamela Turner",
"Unlocked",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14899",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/179693",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/179694",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/179695",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/179698",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"jomimc",
"koyira tumato",
"mightypile",
"vonbrand"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
65519 | How random is the graduate admission process in the United States?
I wonder how random the graduate admission process is in the United States. I am mostly interested in the fields of computer science, and PhD programs (i.e., not Master programs).
One way to quantify it would be following a similar methodology as in this study (mirror), which showed that half the papers appearing at NIPS would be rejected if the review process were rerun. Of course it may not be flawless, but might give some decent approximations.
I am looking for referenced numbers, not guesses.
As candidates tend to to apply at multiple schools of the same level (5-10 I'd say at least), and the same people tend to get in or not in, it's probably not very random: a very specific student profile is preferred somewhat consistently across professors at different schools. This seems very similar to the quoted experiment; but I doubt you'll find actual numbers from some such experiment.
@gnometorule Good point, yes the experiment could be on student side (probably easier to get the data there).
I guess this is very similar to many conferences where the number of papers that can be accepted is much smaller than the number of submitted papers: the outstanding papers usually make it, the crappy papers are weeded out pretty reliably, and for all the good-but-not-outstanding papers in between the choice is influenced by a multitude of factors (and becomes somewhat random).
In general, the sheer number of applications reviewed by admissions committee members in some departments will inevitably lead to decision fatigue.
@ff524 I recall having read some similar studies, but I don't recall such a high variation. Impressive.
@CrepusculeWithNellie Yes that's what I'd expect too.
There is without a doubt some randomness in the process, but I find your question impossible to answer. In the question, you implicitly assume that the "quality" of an application is a well-defined concept that could be used to replicate an experiment.
But this isn't the case. The only way you could do this is by submitting N "equally good" applications to the same graduate programs in the same year, and expect the same outcome for all. But this is clearly not a workable concept. Rather, different graduate programs may look for different candidates (for example because they have different areas of strength), and possibly may want to balance areas in successive years. In other words, the "quality" of an application is a concept that can only be measured against the current needs of individual graduate programs. You can't repeat the experiment at a different place or different time and expect the same outcome.
Actually, people do that type of experiment when researching discrimination in hiring and other markets. In addition, this is not an answer.
It's true that one can make these sorts of experiments in a controlled setting using test subjects. What I wanted to point out is that to do it in the real world, using actual graduate school admissions committees is going to be exceptionally complicated and unreliable. One can say that this doesn't answer the original question, but it may shed light on why there is not likely going to be a lot of factual data.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.738959 | 2016-03-21T16:37:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65519",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Physicist",
"CrepusculeWithNellie",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Wolfgang Bangerth",
"ff524",
"gnometorule",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
46610 | US grad school rankings based on graduate students' satisfaction
Is there any US grad school ranking based on graduate students' satisfaction? (satisfaction while in grad school of after graduation)
If department-specific I am mostly interested in computer science departments.
There might be a big difference between "being happy" while in grad school, and "becoming happy" subsequently, and with some hindsight and maturity.
I generally take measures like "graduate students' satisfaction" with great caution. On the one hand, it is a very subjective measure, which in itself is not a problem, but which becomes problematic because few, if any, graduate students can compare between two, let alone more institutions, while at the same time being strongly influenced by people at their own institution. On the other hand, it is a very wide measure, which in turn can lead to students cling to arbitrary, but verifiable criteria, to judge in a reproducable way (that, however, may be rather disconnected from their ...
... actual satisfaction).
I think this is an excellent question (although I anticipate the answer is "no"). While graduate students' happiness with their institution is certainly a subtle issue, it is definitely a problem if the majority of a department's students wish they were not in that department! And gauging student satisfaction is one of the main reasons to visit a prospective graduate school. (If you visit a department and the current students advise you to run away, you should probably listen to them.)
Furthermore, I have some rather satisfied friends doing PhDs that seem to suffer from Stockholm syndrome. "My supervisor is very nice, I only have to sacrifice my first born to her".
You are likely to find there is no such ranking, and if it existed you should probably throw it away without looking at the results - for a rather simple reason! There exists no standard assessment of graduate student satisfaction that is widely applied (I think not even in relatively small regional areas, counties, states, etc), and there is a good chance it could vary wildly according to what time of year you applied it to students. Also, existing published results are not actual research and are biased advertising pretending to be serious academic inquiry.
Published Satisfaction Results Are Extremely Biased
Whenever you see analysis of satisfaction results and such, note how they are remarkably positive slanted? That's because this isn't so much research as it is advertising. I'm going to get a little soap-boxy now, because this bothers me. Take for example the MIT survey and it's results. Note the questions like this:
Overall, how would you rate the quality of...
Your academic experience at MIT?
Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good,
Excellent
Do you notice something funny with that scale? Of 5 choices, 3 are positive, one is neutral (fair), and one is negative. That perks my ears up, because a normal bi-polar Likert-style scale like this is "Very Poor, Poor, Neutral [Average/Undecided/etc], Good, Very Good". Why would they choose an unbalanced, biased scale like this which would be utterly unacceptable in any legitimate field of psychological assessment and research? The item, as posed, is designed to elicit positive responses.
Further, the vast majority of items are asked positively as in "how satisfied" compared to "how dissatisfied" - in general serious psychological assessments should ask in both positive and negative ways to attempt to remove a positive-selection suggestion for the measure as a whole. That is, if the measure is designed to get at how people really think and feel, rather than being an exercise in "tell us how great we are so we can tell people how great you said we are".
If this were peer-reviewed research to be published in a reputable journal, it should be rejected. I suspect all institutions run similar games, so
I don't mean to pick on any one institution in particular - but I hope this helps to illustrate how little stock you should put in such reports. It's not science, it's not even good polling - you are reading an advertisement from the institution designed to make you want to buy the product they are selling.
Interpreting People Is Hard
As a matter of psychological assessment, how the question is worded and it's context and framing within the measure itself can strictly dominate how the question is answered, thus the need to compare tests that have been proven comparable. Due to advances in our understanding of people's ability to judge their own satisfaction or happiness, we now know also that how such a question is asked will change how a person evaluates the question. Asking someone "Overall, how satisfied are you with..." will tend to elicit answers from the autobiographical "remembering self", which is based upon a reliably biased self-conscious memory system. On the other hand asking "Lately (or over the last few months), how satisfied are you with..." - or even just generally asking about feelings, emotions, or 'happiness' - will actually elicit answers from the "experiencing self", and will instead be biased based upon things like emotional state and very recent experiences and sensations.
If the questions are worded to call upon the remembering self, with questions like "overall...", based upon the literature I would expect institutions with economically affluent student bodies to show much higher satisfaction ratings than institutions with a less wealthy student base - even if the less wealthy institution were actually a much better place or at least no worse. Wealthy is positively correlated with this kind of satisfaction, and there is no limit - the more wealth, the greater the satisfaction overall. So a measure of graduate student satisfaction would actually be a proxy test for "where the rich kids go".
On the other hand if the question calls upon the experiencing self, I would expect wealth to have a much smaller correlation generally with the largest effect being seen by students living below the poverty line. So campuses who ensure - through admissions or financial aid - that students don't live below the poverty line would do better than others, regardless of academic quality generally.
Daniel Kahneman gave a nice TED talk about this subject, if you are interested in a nice overview of the topic.
The MIT results are a good example of this - the MIT results show that 88% of students were at least somewhat satisfied with the graduate school, while 81% were at least satisfied with life outside the institution. In other words, people rarely say "gee my life sure does suck in general, but MIT is great!" The two questions are likely to be so strongly correlated that they are actually asking the same ultimate question and respondents may be literally incapable of attributing their general satisfaction to any specific source. "When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."
What's worse, this problem would extend to both currently enrolled students and follow ups after graduate school. A useful study of such rating would have to get more than just the answer to satisfaction, and would have to also collect other student information and attempt to control for other known factors (marriage, having children and what age those children are, health, etc) before we could even usefully interpret what a statement like "88% of students say they are satisfied with us" means - is that good, or terrible, or meaningless? We just don't know.
MIT's results alone help to point out how odd the responses are, when you think about them - at least, they are odd if you think that people's answer to such questions would be overtly sensible and comparable. 78% said their academics were "very good or excellent" (not the same scale as satisfaction, note), 56% said the same of student life, yet 88% claimed to be satisfied with MIT - so 1 in 5 say "academics are blah", and nearly half say "student life is ehhh", but 88% say "yeah MIT is great". Well, that just seems odd. And 81% say they they are satisfied with their personal life, yet 35% were not satisfied with their ability to combine the needs of academic and family life - life inside and outside the institution is asked to be a reflection of the institution, but combining both is requesting the respondent to criticize themselves. That's an interesting reflection on the measure itself, and makes the results even harder to interpret.
Some Interesting Actual Research
Graduate student satisfaction is not without some serious research, however. The largest attempt at seriously talking with graduate students and getting their opinions and feelings seems to be the PhD Survey. It managed to get responses from other 4000 students from some 27+ institutions, with a rather high response rate (over 40% at least) on a 20 page survey. It probably has the capacity to be used to make some comparisons between institutions, potentially, but the N of such comparisons will drop remarkably and would require access to the underlying data - and appears to not be published.
The study is so interesting though that I think just trying to rank institutions would be a sad use of such interesting insights, and even at least making comparisons between institutions would still be hard for the previously mentioned readings.
That caveat aside, I highly recommend the reports from the linked site - they make a fascinating read for anyone considering - or enrolled in - a PhD program.
Bottom line (TLDR;)
Even if people were honestly reporting unbiased findings - and they generally aren't - and people's responses could be interpreted in a clear and sensible fashion - and they can't - you wouldn't be able to interpret the results in a useful way or be able to compare different institutions.
A 3rd party poll with peer-reviewed published results using an appropriate measure would be potentially really interesting - but sadly I don't think that exists today. But if it did I would love to read it!
Some interesting research does exist about graduate student satisfaction and program effectiveness, but I have not found any that attempts to rank institutions, and I would propose it might very well be because we don't know what to rank them on! As shown in the PhD Survey, graduate programs tend to be focused on preparing participants for jobs they are unlikely to hold and not preparing them for jobs they will have - yet the unemployment rate is low and other studies show clearly that average income is still well above bachelor degree holders generally.
The studies that are done also highlight the fact that each department - or at least major degree field - has some very different experiences. While one field might have 17% of graduates working in tenure track jobs, for instance, another has nearly half of graduates in such jobs; in some fields a minority (30-something percent) of participants are interested in tenure-track faculty jobs, while in others more than 80% are so interested.
As such it would be potentially possible to compare individual departments or degree fields across institutions, but making such comparisons among institutions would likely result in highly deceiving results that one should not attempt to interpret naively.
Thanks I'm indeed ideally looking for a 3rd party poll with peer-reviewed published results using an appropriate measure. I'm fully aware that the MIT example I pointed to is mostly a publicity stunt.
@FranckDernoncourt I'm glad :) With that said, I have found some research that might interest you, though so far I've found nothing that considers ranking Universities.
I have updated my answer with some interesting research on PhD program surveys (next to last section).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.739273 | 2015-06-04T19:53:14 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46610",
"authors": [
"Afnan Asrar",
"Andals",
"BrianH",
"DANY TROFIN",
"Davidmh",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Jeff",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Onome Sotu",
"Renan Gemignani",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1171",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128361",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128362",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128363",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128364",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128369",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128528",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/128588",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"kgeter",
"paul garrett",
"sarah khalid"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
10155 | Should unreadability or sloppiness of students' work be reflected in their evaluation?
When evaluating and grading students' work in technical fields (like computer science or mathematics), I often face ones that are really messy, sometimes even unreadable (I mean structure, not - handwriting). It's not clear at all what part belongs to what or what is the final result. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out if there is a good result buried somewhere in the mess, I'm tempted to just fail such a work as unreadable.
While these (I'd say) formal aspect don't reflect the ability of the student to solve the problem, it strongly reflects his/her ability to present the solution. And in their future professions, it won't be much good that they can solve problems, if they're not able to present the solution to someone else. Or for example grant agencies simply reject proposals that fail even slightly given formal criteria.
My questions are:
Should the evaluation include evaluation of readability, proper structure etc. for example in a textual form (without impacting the final grade perhaps), something like "The solution is completely unreadable." or for a larger work "The solution lacks a proper structure - there is no introduction or conclusion of what have been accomplished." etc.?
Should such deficiencies be also reflected in the grade? If so, how much? Would it be acceptable to even fail a work just because it's completely unreadable?
Are you talking about hand writing or organisational presentation?
@JackAidley I'm talking about written works - both hand-written (like homeworks or exams) and typed (like semestral projects).
Yes, please! Do what you can to stop the deluge of people who believe being simply being technically competent is all that is required in the real world. Communication is often more important.
I would be careful of penalising students for poor hand writing because of the number of people with specific disabilities that affect ability to write neatly. Where it's a matter of organising work, of course you should.
As somebody with really poor handwriting... I request if you're going to grade on neatness, only do so if typing is allowed. My poor handwriting does not affect my performance in the workplace because there is really no such thing as hand written communication; it is all typed or verbal, at least where I work. Note: That said, even with poor handwriting, organization of an answer has nothing to do with handwriting ability and there are other ways of making your answer clear.
@PetrPudlák Can they give your their reports (so you can red-ink it or give some pointers on the structure) before the final submission?
@MikeS By unreadability I didn't mean poor handwriting, I was concerned about things like giving no explanation for derivations of their result, no organization of an answer (like different parts of an answer scattered chaotically around a sheet of paper), etc.
@PiotrMigdal Yes, I encourage that.
just return the work to them and tell them you can't read it. offer them an opportunity to clean it up.
Should such deficiencies be also reflected in the grade? — This is already answered by the first question. If a student can submit deficient work without affecting their grade, that student can correctly conclude that the deficiency doesn't matter.
I don't know if your institution has a flag to mark students as dyslexic, but if it does you should check it. It's one of those dyslexic tendencies that people don't understand and you could make a big difference to someones education by giving the right kind of feedback.
My professor in college had a policy - misformatted code = 50% off.. Perhaps that was a little on the harsh side..
@PetrPudlák in case of chaotic answering during exams (or other time-critical task) - people are sometimes thought to jump from question to question during exam to avoid getting stack on first one (or answering just one question perfectly and not having time for rest) and even if one reserve space to avoid it it is easy to miscalculate (this doesn't apply to homeworks though).
Have you told your students you expect them to turn in work that is readable and coherent? If so then absolutely. If not then it seems like it is a good time to express this, give then express this expectation now, and give the student a very limited window to correct his deficiencies.
For the Computer Science side, are you talking theory (writing papers) or practical application (writing programs)? Or both? (Really, I'd say the same, but my reasons apply primarily to the practical application side, which is what I have experience with)
@Izkata I'm talking about theory. But you're right, the same applies to code as well. I think I'd be even stricter with badly documented code.
@PetrPudlák You profile says your location is Czech. Is it the case that your students are required to write their works in English which is not their native language?
@scaaahu No, they're writing in their native language.
I think the most important part of your post is in your comment
Or for example grant agencies simply reject proposals that fail even slightly given formal criteria.
If a student isn't corrected for sloppy work while in school, when will he or she improve? The question really boils down to
How best can we as instructors give guidance to students so that they will succeed in the future?
Evaluations in an educational setting can serve many purposes, but fundamentally they should be used as a tool to help students succeed. Obviously, you have to be careful because a poor grade on a transcript can have long-term ramifications, but ignoring sloppy or unreadable work by trying to see through it is doing a disservice to the student on a particularly key issue: communication of an idea is as important as the idea itself.
To answer your questions:
1. Should the evaluation include evaluation of readability, proper structure etc...?
Absolutely. To ignore this would be bad pedagogy. Determining how to relate this to the student without causing a misunderstanding about the idea itself is the difficult part. Encouragement or direction to seek out writing help is a good idea, as is having students re-write or re-submit work that is sloppy. Hopefully the work improves throughout the course; being picky at the beginning of a course can set a good standard for the rest of the course.
2. Should such deficiencies be also reflected in the grade? If so, how much? Would it be acceptable to even fail a work just because it's completely unreadable?
The answer to this ties directly back into the first question. I would suggest letting students re-write or submit material without penalty (or with minimal penalty) early on in a course, with the understanding that they must improve by the end. If your only assessment is a final project, consider allowing a re-write with an incomplete grade. But, if that is your policy, I'd strongly suggest providing a time for draft review well before the final project is due in order to minimize the need for this route. As always, I would also spell out in a syllabus your policy and the fact that presentation is a part of the course, and I would also discuss this on the first day of class (with examples of past work that is sloppy!).
You've posed a hard question, but an extremely important one. I probably suggest rejecting 30% of the papers I review for conferences simply because they are unreadable. Most of the time I don't even get to the idea behind the work before I realize that it doesn't matter what the idea is because it is too poorly written (and this ends up in the review). I want more papers that are well presented, because I'm certain some of the papers I give poor reviews to because of this problem have great ideas behind them! Teachers that encourage students to improve their writing and presentation are necessary for this to occur.
As a side note, on my undergraduate course the single best lesson from writing technical reports from experiments was not its scientific value, but how to make it clear, readable and conclusive. And they were rarely accepted on the first submission - they were rather returned with a lot of red ink.
I would suggest letting students re-write or submit material without penalty (or with minimal penalty) early on in a course — This is a great idea if you have few students or infrequent assignments. For a 200-student course with weekly narrative homework, not so much.
While I do agree with Peter Jansson's answer that we should make it completely clear to students what they need to do to have their work understood, I feel differently about the impacting on assessment.
In industry, the ability to write readable (which means maintainable) code is critical. The ability to write a really cool, super efficient block of logic which nobody can understand is simply producing a ticking time bomb which will explode as soon as someone else goes to edit it. Students need to know that you are not just being a 'stuffly old prof' but rather that there are certain expectations from the profession and they must live up to them. Coding is not just about making a solution - it's about making a solution which will not explode 12-18 months later.
On the academic side, I also have students who have similar problems where they do not care much about being careful in their writing. I generally handle them like this:
If I can understand it, but it is difficult, then I will mark them based on the overall quality of their work. If it is difficult to understand then the quality of their work is not great. Even if they are far smarter than me, they should be able to write in such a way that they can be understood.
If I cannot understand it, then I simply fail them. They are responsible for showing me that they understand and if they do not do that, then I must fail them - this is my responsibility.
So, yes, educate them. However, I would not let poor quality slide.
I try to remind my students of the story of the family. Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way. The students are usually lost at first, then I explain to them that for the family to be happy they must get 100 things right. But, get anyone of them wrong and the family is unhappy. If they want to be happy then they must get it all right.
Proper presentation of results is a vitally important part of modern research. It's also a necessary skill for any field of work into which an academically trained individual will enter after graduation.
If one does not learn how to exchange information with other people and organizations, the results can be catastrophic. Edward Tufte's Visual Information uses the Challenger explosion as a case study in exactly what can go wrong when communication skills are ignored at a fundamental level. The launch was not aborted because the engineers just provided a bunch of disorganized data to management, who couldn't parse it out to understand that it was too cold to launch.
So, as much as possible, presentation and organization of material should be considered when assigning grades. Now there are situations when it would be unfair to penalize: for example, in the context of a timed exam, where students may feel rushed and may not be writing neatly. (However, I also feel that this is a largely contrived circumstance, which doesn't reflect true understanding in many important ways.) In any situation where they have had time to independently prepare their work and submit it, then presentation and writing style should definitely be taken into account.
However, at the same time, unless the class is a writing class, then it's unfair to fail or strongly penalize a student who has turned in work that would otherwise be satisfactory, but was not put together well. Personally, when I am grading project reports, I "control" for this by making a decision on what the grade for the technical content of the project. I then give a bonus "partial" grade level for a well-organized and well-written report, and similarly deduct a "partial" grade if it's substandard. So, for instance a report that would have gotten a B+ could become either an A- or a B.
However, at the same time, unless the class is a writing class, then it's unfair to fail or strongly penalize a student who has turned in work that would otherwise be satisfactory, but was not put together well. — Strongly disagree. The point of class work is not just to solve problems, but to effectively communicate those solutions to another human being. Every class is a writing class.
Every class is a writing class: Many of my students are writing in a foreign language. I will not fail them for poor grammar and typos.
In my experience, the students that have the most trouble with writing are actually writing in their first language. And the biggest problem isn't "poor grammar and typos", but inconsistency (complete lack of grammar) and total disorganization. If I can't understand precisely what a student means, I can't give them credit, and (unlike many of my teaching colleagues, perhaps including you) I adamantly refuse to read their mind.
If the writing is so bad as to be incomprehensible, that's not the same thing. I guess I've been fortunate enough not to really have to deal with that—at least not in the classroom. (But if they can't write at all, how did they get admitted to the university in the first place?)
Ideally, no. The main problem when evaluating is expressed by a saying in my native language "muddy writing, muddy thinking". Essentially, if you cannot decipher what is written, either because it is sloppy writing or poorly expressed, then one faces problems when grading. Students often complain about grading where they sense they are misinterpreted etc. This is when we cannot understand what they are writing. Often, I believe, we also give people the benefit of the doubt and grade more leniently than what the verbatim answer would state. This is, of course, never picked up by a student. Hence a catch 22.
What can we do? The problem lies in the examination.
First, we can provide clear guidelines about clarity of language and writing. This should be pointed out long before the exam, in fact early in their education. A study of Swedish students showed that they learn two ways of writing in pre-university levels. In languages, focus is on grammar, spelling and language but not content; whereas in other subjects focus is on content and not language. When they arrive at the university they do not realize that both are important; we need to tell them.
Second, we can chose other means of examination where those with poor hand-writing can do better. Examples can be many: from essays through take homes to verbal and of course highly depending on the course, contents, level etc. Examples of the means of grading is to have external graders (more resources!) or to do as one of my teachers did; ask students to request everyone writes the exam with the pencil, and then after the exam use a pen to add corrections to their own exame as the teacher went through the exam. The exam was then collected and graded by the teacher. I mention this as an example, fully realizing it would not work in every situation.
So the answer for me is no, but our assessment is always tainted by many factors whether we want it or not. To reduce the element of subjectivity is what we would be looking for.
When I set marking rubrics for my students' work, I usually include two main areas: Clarity and Contribution.
Clarity specifically addresses whether the student has communicated their ideas (or answered the questions) in a clear and unambiguous manner. As such, poor presentation or (really) bad grammar impacts this portion of the mark.
I generally don't detract from the student mark for speeling errurs [sic]; even though I am a native English speaker, I am an Australian working in the US and am frequently in a quandary over whether to use Australian or American spelling.
My present students are generally from non-English speaking backgrounds, and I find their clarity generally very good, even though their turns of phrase sometimes seem awkward to me. I give feedback on this awkwardness but, unless it impacts the clarity of their presentation, I don't dock marks for it.
Contribution is used to address the correctness or fitness for purpose of the work.
I also add a further C, Collaboration, if the work is a group project.
To directly answer your questions: Yes, and Yes.
As a side-issue: Because many of my students are non-native English speakers, I also tend to allow double-submission of assignments. The students may submit their assignments twice before the due date.
I give an undertaking that I will do my best to give early feedback on an early submission (because I am an adjunct, I make it clear that "early" means the submission has to happen before a weekend before the due date). The students can then take my feedback and implement it on their new submission. I find this improves the quality of the presentation (clarity), but not so much on the contribution (unless they were really, really out of line on the first submission).
Unless the students do a complete re-write, the second marking is usually just a "delta" / "diff" on the first.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
You as an instructor may see hundreds upon hundreds of papers a term. The students do not have that same luxury for comparison. If penmanship and other elements of style are important to you as an instructor, then as a student, I suggest you express your standards and expectations up front, even if it seems that is something I should know and do coming into your class.
I expect no less from an employer as an employee.
Note the degree of impact for presentation on the syllabus, even if there is no plus points for exemplary, and only negative points awarded for substandard.
Provide a sanitized modicum of 'bad', 'passable', and 'exemplary' presentation for comparison.
Encourage them to seek clarification or special consideration up front, as opposed to seeking remedy to penalties after the fact. They may have certain existing conditions which precludes them from generally meeting those standards. Or more commonly, they may not have been exposed or acclimated to the technical writing style you are accustomed to in that particular field..
Absolutely -- if you do ANYTHING differently than what is commonly expected, you must say so. (There's a lot of things that you should say regardless of whether it's common or not.) This goes for style and/or penmanship.
I particularly like the answer that suggested having rubrics to identify criteria such as clarity.
When it comes to a situation where work is completely unreadable, I apply the pedagogical pattern known as Grade it again, Sam. Very often, the student who submits unreadable work is simply not making an effort. When I refuse the work using this pattern and give the student a second chance to improve readability, the second work is always better and subsequent works are usually also better.
I totally agree!
As a current student of computer science (master level) I can say that commenting on the readability of work from students, providing pointers and even taking it into account when grading is of great importance. It will benefit the student a lot in the long run.
At my university, many professors point out bad readability and incoherent structure, although mostly on project/paper type assignments and less on weekly homework assignments.
However, it is considered important in all cases. I'm now writing my thesis and have written two research papers as part of research projects (for publication) and the comments I got on structure and readability greatly improved my writing.
Also, I see from fellow students that they write solutions without providing reasoning and without introducing the topic and the problem they are solving. I believe this is very bad style (for group work this has unfortunately led to me rewriting the group documents many times simply to improve the structure). However, students don't often see a problem because it gets accepted by the teacher.
An important note though is that I think grammar and spelling should be of significantly less importance. For instance, the Chinese students in our class often forget the word "the" in writing (all documents are written in English for my master). Although this affects readability and is often pointed out by teachers, it is generally not considered an error significant enough to deduct points.
The line between decreased readability due to grammar/spelling and actual incomprehensibility is hard to determine, and should be determined on a case by case basis. Still it is important that students also learn this.
In short, definitely help students in improving their structure and on communicating their ideas and force students to do so by making it affect the grade! It will only help them like it helped me!
EDIT: As a side note, handwritten solutions are generally not accepted where I study, but if YOU are requesting handwritten solutions, it would be unfair to deduct points for bad handwriting. Some people just don't have a nice handwriting, an unfortunate result of the modern computer era. If students CAN but don't have to hand in handwritten solutions, then it should affect the grade as it is the students choice to write instead of type (if it significantly affects the readability of course).
What is your evaluation measuring? Are you grading a 2nd grade math test, or are you evaluating a doctoral thesis on neuroscience?
If it's the former, then no; sloppiness and structure take a backseat to getting the subject matter correct. The reason is your focus should be on evaluating the crucial element of the subject being evaluated. At early levels of development, there must be some leniency given to presentation in order to focus on the fundamentals.
Of course, there is a reasonable limit to how sloppy or unreadable something can be before the evaluation ceases to be useful. Intentionally sloppy responses relying on confusion in the hopes of gaining partial credit don't deserve any credit at all.
If you're evaluating a student in a near-professional setting, e.g. university and higher, then it makes sense to consider presentation as part of the grade. Well structured, carefully written responses should get more credit than sloppy and careless ones. Presentation becomes important because in the "real world" people evaluate you based on the whole package. Nobody is going to buy a bottle of Tylenol with a hand-scribbled, barely legible label. Likewise, even superficial details should be considered important in high level evaluations.
I was a sloppy student through primary school and even most of high school. Many teachers simply refused to grade some papers that were unacceptably sloppy, and others graded what they could within reason. None of those teachers who refused to grade a paper stick out in my mind, nor did their insistence on neatness change my behavior. I excelled in the subjects where my understanding of the core materials mattered most, and did not focus my attention on subjects where presentation was considered more important than the concepts being taught.
Overall, I graduated in the top 5% of my high school and went on to a good college. By the time I got my masters degree, my value of structure and presentation has improved sufficiently that I can survive in a professional environment. Becoming a professional, I believe, is the goal of "teaching" organizational skills.
I don't see a reason to ignore sloppiness on a 2nd grade math test. It's much easier for the student to correct those habits early on than later. And it frees teachers from the avoidable drudgery of slogging through slop, to focus on the deeper things and deliver a better education.
I am not a teacher, but I am in my second year of my associates working toward my bachelors. My opinion is that yes you should, it will only hurt them later in life. In high school I passed my classes with C or a C+, now in college I am getting As and Bs. The reason is not that I am magically smarter, it is that I apply myself at least twice as hard.
There is so much information out there to learn anything, APA or MLA, and sites like Grammar Girl and reference generators. I think spelling should and grammar should be graded hard, maybe not at the first of the semester.
If they are bad at first, correct them and give them places to go for examples of the correct way(s) to do it. If by mid-term they have not figured it out then grade them hard. All work should flow; if it does not, let them know now because in their career they will not get a nice correction and time to fix it. I work my butt off in school and feel as if I get graded hard, but it is when the teacher gives good feedback that I learn and make the change. So giving them a grade lower than an A needs an explanation of what they need to fix.
This is why we are seeing on job descriptions -Bachelors from a reputable University- teachers need to be hard so that the student walks away with a real education not just a piece of paper that cost them thousands of dollars.
When you discuss formatting constraints of the grant application process, you're getting close to a solution, I think. There are really two components here; one of these is structural/formatting criteria, and the other is clarity. When you're in a situation where structural requirements and great care are part of the lesson you're teaching, I find it best to refuse to grade work until it has been presented in the proper format, and apply whatever late-work structure you normally use.
This teaches the lesson that formatting is not optional fluff, but is instead a precondition to being taken seriously. That said, if you're going to follow this method, your instructions on format should themselves be crystal clear and unambiguous. Ask a competent peer to follow your formatting instructions and see if they can arrive at the right format.
The second question about messiness is more troublesome, and to some extent your response should depend on where you're situated within the broader track your students will follow, and what constitutes messy/sloppy. I think your response should be two-pronged:
I wouldn't advocate failing students outright for unreadable work, but let them know you can't grade the assignment until you can understand it, and ask them to discuss their work with you one-on-one. Like above, allow your late-work policy to degrade the value of their work if they don't come address it swiftly. I ran into a few students who had a sense of what academic writing should sound like, with the result that they were completely incomprehensible when trying to parrot a voice they had no real command of. But they were able to explain it in person. This method allows you to show how imperative clear communication is--it's a precondition to being graded--and avoid invalidating what may have otherwise been good work. The ultimate penalty is based on how quickly the students resolve the problems with their work.
Include some metric of style/quality/organization on your rubric. While I understand the inclination to see writing as something students should already know how to do--and that you probably don't see yourself as an instructor of writing--I think rubrics should always always always reflect the qualities you actually expect of good work in your field. Your rubric telegraphs your own priorities, and if you don't communicate clarity and style as a concern, it shouldn't come as a surprise when students think it doesn't matter.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.740123 | 2013-05-22T08:12:37 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10155",
"authors": [
"Chad",
"Ivaylo Toskov",
"Izkata",
"Jack Aidley",
"JeffE",
"JonaSc",
"LarsH",
"Linda Micheal",
"Long Thai",
"Lucas",
"Maja Piechotka",
"Miguel Angulo Martínez",
"MikeS",
"Nobody",
"Petr",
"Piotr Migdal",
"RFJ.Haans",
"Rain",
"Ram",
"Rianne Fijten",
"Robert Fan",
"Stephen",
"SuperSpy",
"aeismail",
"enderland",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1196",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1531",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25072",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25073",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25074",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25078",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25079",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25080",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25083",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25091",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25104",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25105",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25119",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25137",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25150",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25206",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25219",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/327",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32794",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4332",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/436",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4373",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5614",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5845",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5928",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7169",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7176",
"jvriesem",
"mbork",
"nathan hayfield",
"nwp",
"rbqis",
"thecommexokid",
"user48763",
"vvn"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
20133 | How much is submission acceptance to high-profile conferences influenced by internal politics?
I was speaking with several professors in my department about submission to high-profile conferences like CHI in human-computer interaction. Most of the professors were of the opinion that acceptance in most of these high-profile conferences (typical acceptance rate of less than 20%) is heavily influenced by politics: even though you may have comparatively good research, the editors will most likely be more favored toward accepting papers published by Microsoft Research or Google Research or from other high-profile universities where they have close relationship with the faculty and researchers.
The professors advised me against spending time and resources on publishing to these conferences and instead concentrate on second-tier journals (like those published by Springer) for better return on investment for my efforts.
I assume in good faith that most of the editors may not reject papers without reading them, but does anybody concur with the opinion of professors at my department?
CHI uses a relaxed form of double-blind reviewing. Of course that doesn't make insider bias impossible, but it does at least encourage reviewers to read the actual submissions.
It is an often-heard prejudice in CS that many of the top conferences are relatively closed "boys clubs". Indeed, if one just looks over accepted papers for multiple years, one typically ends up seeing the same affiliations over and over again, strengthening this impression.
However, this could be due to a number of (good or bad) reasons:
Papers from professors / labs that are well-known in the field may simply be of much higher technical quality, making it quite natural that they also get accepted much more often.
Professors / labs that are well-known in the field generally know how to write papers for this specific conference. They know what the TPC values, and how to present their results in a way that is appreciated in the field. As these professors are typically in the TPC themselves, they know what kind of papers usually get accepted and which are rejected.
Professors / labs that are well-known in the field often have a better grasp on the existing state of the art in the field, making it easier for them to identify what is good and novel. In my experience, "outsiders" have a tendency to overestimate the novelty of their contributions significantly. Further, well-known labs know what problems are currently en vogue in the community.
It is of course also perceivable that papers from well-known professors / labs are just not judged as critically. For instance, a reader may very well think that a paper is not applying a given technique correctly, but as the paper comes from the group that invented this technique, he gives them the benefit of doubt and assumes that they will know the technique better than him. He would probably not extend the same favorable thinking to an outsider.
Finally, for some topics, it is just easier for some labs to do good research than others. A common example are the web search tracks at the WWW conference. These tracks typically require the validation of new algorithms on real data, to which mostly only industry labs from Yahoo! etc. and their close collaborators have access.
Note that none of these reasons is really politics. Indeed, I would argue that all of the reasons above are significantly more likely than a paper getting rejected for the reasons you cited.
I assume in good faith that most of the editors may not reject papers without reading them
I would say, at a top conference such as CHI, you can rely on your paper at least getting reviewed thoroughly, yes.
but does anybody concur with opinion of professors at my department?
Well, given all the reasons above, it is indeed quite likely that your paper will be rejected. By definition, if a conference has a <20% acceptance rate, rejection is always a real possibility (clearly, it happens to most submissions). However, I am wondering why it would be better to not even try if you think your work is good enough for CHI. If the paper gets rejected there, you can still re-submit to a lower-tier venue, and you receive a number of hopefully helpful reviews. The only disadvantage I see is that it prolongs the publication process by half a year, but if you see any chance of the paper begin accepted at the top-tier venue, I think this should be worth it.
I agree; the attitude expressed by the professors seems overly defeatist. Whatever happened to the "college try"?
One final aspect that is not mentioned here is the issue of scoping for a conference. Reviewers tend to give extra points for things that they are interested in (which makes sense). However, this causes a feedback loop where conferences tend to get more and more restrictive in scoping. In an interdisciplinary conference that I'm involved with, it's a constant battle to keep a variety of research areas well-represented, because if the balance of reviewer interests goes too far in one direction, good research on the other sides gets marginalized (e.g., excellent papers relegated to posters).
Good answer. End of the day, some places are simply resource rich.
They have talented and experienced people, easy access to data and funds, and a supportive environment. If you don't belong to these places, it makes it harder or your idea must be truly outstanding or outshine those from big league players.
For what it's worth, none of the reasons listed here seem overly "bad" to me. Even #4, which is slightly quesitonable at first sight, is based upon the assumption that "the group that invented [a] technique (...) will know the technique better than [the reviewer]" - and that assumption, for better or worse, is probably simply true.
Having served on the CHI program committee, many other program committees, and having been program chair of a couple of other HCI conferences, I think your professors are overly cynical.
First, as JeffE pointed out, CHI (and many other conferences) use blind or semi-blind reviewing, so at least the reviewers do not know whose paper they are reviewing.
Second, I have never been in a PC meeting where the identities of the authors was a point of discussion. Of course that doesn't mean that the associate chair (AC) for the paper was not influenced by who the authors were, but it would certainly imply that there is no institutionalized bias for or against particular authors or institutions.
I would definitely not worry about your papers being rejected without being reviewed; in fact, when you submit you will get the reviews so you know why your paper was or was not accepted.
While I think this is all true, to play devil's advocate, I would say that anyone who knows a field well can often infer which group (if not which authors) wrote a given paper. There are just certain research topics or strategic advantages (e.g., proprietary data sets) that groups are known for. I agree that I haven't seen this impact decisions though: nobody cares who the group or researcher is.
I completely agree with almost everything xLeitix wrote, except the conclusion. One thing that was not addressed is why your professors told you not to submit to CHI. It's possible that they're giving their honest opinions, or that they themselves had a bad record submitting there.
But it's also possible that they are telling you that your work is not good enough for CHI, but in a gentle manner. Also, they are familiar with where you are in your career track and may believe that losing time and effort on a failed CHI attempt is not good for you. Both of these require perspective that you cannot have on yourself.
Consequently, I would suggest that you take the advice you were given.
But if your professors think your work isn't good enough for CHI, they should say so directly. Being "gentle" is not actually doing you any kindness. You deserve an unvarnished appraisal of your work. Demand it.
This kind of advice is often given to people, but in my view it's fundamentally misguided.
It's true to some extent that many of the top conferences have a particular way of doing things, and that people in the community associated with a conference will often have more experience with that way of doing things and find it easier to get papers accepted there. However, it's untrue that the communities associated with particular conferences are a closed shop: it's entirely possible to adapt your way of doing things to what you know different conferences expect, and that will improve your acceptance rate at those conferences. Moreover, it's absolutely worth your while to do this, because publishing at the top conferences massively improves your chances of having a successful academic career (not to mention that it puts you in contact with a large number of good researchers in your field).
In that sense, the people who are suggesting that you eschew the top conferences and simply send your work to second-tier venues are doing you a serious disservice, because they're basically ensuring that you're not even on the pitch where you could compete with your peers (indeed, the heavy focus that top groups put on publishing at top conferences tends to mean that they are underwhelmed by people who don't compete). If you're good and you put in sufficient effort, you can definitely play at the right level, whereas counting yourself out of the game before you've even tried to succeed is deeply unwise in my view.
TL;DR The people giving you this advice are leading you astray in my view. It's not wise to spend your time and energy submitting papers to venues that many researchers will view as being less than top-flight, when you could be refining your papers to make sure that they get into the top venues.
More generally, people unfortunately tend to give similar advice about all kinds of things, not just academic conferences. A classic example would be applying to university, or applying for top jobs. The general form of such advice tends to be:
This venue is biased against you specifically, or against people like you (whatever that means) in general.
This venue wouldn't suit you if you were accepted -- you'd enjoy it way less than a lower-tier venue.
This venue isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway -- they just have a high opinion of themselves.
There are certainly situations in which people might be a bit biased, or in which you wouldn't enjoy some place, or in which the place isn't as good as it thinks it is, but these things are by no means universally true. If people tell you "don't apply to X because I have specific, verifiable evidence of Y", then that may be one thing (check the "verifiable evidence"), but if they tell you not to apply to top venues in general, then you need to seriously question that.
Another good answer. My only gripe here is that there is a whole world (so to speak) of conferences between the high-profile conferences with acceptance rates around 20% mentioned by the OP and "venues that many researchers will immediately discount". Not going for the flagships does not automatically mean turning to the "conference-equivalent of predatory journals".
@O.R.Mapper: Yes, true, I wasn't trying to imply that it meant that (I've edited it accordingly). Nevertheless, many jobs do mention publications at specific top conferences explicitly, and publishing at second-tier (though non-predatory) conferences will definitely help you less for those kind of jobs.
I agree with xLeitix's answer and would like to elaborate on how some high-profile researchers manage to constantly appear at certain high-profile conferences.
I'd say the method to reliably appear on a given conference are resources and focus:
First, to professor X, conference A is not simply another conference. It is their subfield's "flagship" conference, their "home" meeting. They will and can put a lot of effort into making sure they get published there. Thus, they do not just submit one paper. They make sure they have at least a short paper about each of their hottest ideas to submit. With ten or more submissions, a few acceptances are likely even at a low acceptance rate.
Related to that, note that the conference topic is probably not just X's personal hobby. More likely, they have an entire research group specialized on the conference's core topic at their disposal. X is probably already involved with half a dozen projects with different members of their group at any time, all of which are thematically suitable for conference A.
Lastly, there is simply a strong overlap between X's topics of expertise and A's topics. Even if X does, somehow, not manage to publish in A, they will actively participate nonetheless (thereby adding to the impression that their name appears all the time with respect to A):
They may be among A's chairs.
They might chair one or more sessions at A.
They might be invited to give a keynote talk at A.
They might offer a workshop co-located with A. Note that even without anything questionable going on, this could lead to a certain additional bias towards contributions by X's group: While less frequently so for workshops at very large conferences, workshops often rely extensively on word-of-mouth marketing. As a consequence, people in X's direct vicinity are most likely to know about the workshop and its precise focus.
As a well-known member of the audience whose work is being built upon by other submissions to A, they might be mentioned in some of the talks. This can happen in totally informal remarks: "Last year, Alice, who is sitting over there, presented technique Y and asked Z, so I have been looking into Z."
And even if all of these fail, X will still attend A and attract enough attention during coffee breaks to reinforce the memory: X was actively part of A again.
Politic is everywhere, of course, especially in situations where the resource giving out to people is limited. Bear in mind, taking a look at the program committee before submitting! And please don't stick to one conference! Even some well-known professors get rejection at some conferences, let alone others.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.742326 | 2014-05-01T23:21:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20133",
"authors": [
"Anuradha",
"Avo",
"Bro",
"J.R.",
"JeffE",
"Namey",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Ralph Bacolod",
"Stuart Golodetz",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54973",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54974",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54975",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54991",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/54999",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/55031",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/55047",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7930",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9320",
"nessa.gp",
"samy",
"steve"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
21616 | How to ask PhD advisor to work remotely on thesis for extensive periods?
I am in a PhD program in a top US institution but my SO,family,friends are somewhere else. I am considering a thesis that would require minimal/no field or lab work. This would be a big compromise as I was hoping to do intensive field work but there is no funding for field work. I thought that a compromise would be that I can work on it remotely. I haven't mentioned yet to my advisor that I am home sick as we don't really connect on a personal level, but we have a good connection on a research level.
How do I approach my advisor saying that I would like to work remotely for 6 months out of the year? I have worked remotely before and it has always worked but I don't know how this type of setup is seen at a top tier US institution.
How do I approach my advisor about this issue?
Both answers are equally satisfying and helpful, I wish I could pick both.
I would break this down into two parts. First, discuss your circumstances with your advisor and explain that you want to spend more time "at home", and ask how he feels about you working remotely. Go into the discussion with a concrete proposal for how the practicalities might work: how will you do your work? Do you have access to the resources you'll need? How will you stay in touch with your advisor/colleagues/the research community? Take on board any reservations your advisor might have; don't go into the discussion with too fixed an idea of what the "right" outcome is. Agree to review the arrangements once they've been tested for a while.
Once you have agreement in principle, then you can hash out the dates. I would try and start with relatively short stretches of remote working - a couple of weeks - to allow any teething problems/concerns (on either side) to be resolved. I suspect everyone will be happier if you can spend your six months away in short chunks, rather than in one big block. Also, recognise that your advisor may have reasons to want you present for certain occasions/portions of the year - involve him in your planning.
I think you should aim for a shorter period at first, to show that it doesn't affect your productivity. My wife and I aim to both work remotely 25% of our time, to address the two-body problem. If each of us works remotely for two weeks every two months, that aim is fulfilled. A colleague of mine just returned from a 10-week remote work trip.
Six months, however, is very long to work remotely in one go. It is of course more expensive to work remotely in shorter segments, but if your advisor doesn't know yet whether it will work out, six months is too long. Explain that you are ultimately interested in working remotely up to half of the time. Propose to work remotely for 3-4 weeks first. Be available at any normal local time for your supervisor, even if that might mean inconvenient times on your end. After the remote work trip, return and evaluate how it went. Then propose to plan a longer remote-work trip, perhaps 10 weeks, and return again. If all goes well after a couple of 10-week blocks, you could bring up the idea for an extended six-month period.
The worst that can happen is that they say no, and you may have to find a different way. Perhaps they don't agree with 6 months in one block, but are fine with 3 2-month blocks spread over a year. It will cost more money, but it is safer in many ways too.
Good luck.
thanks, that sounds more reasonable, I think bringing up the 6 months right away it's too much. I think I should start by saying that I would like to extend my stay during the breaks.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.743529 | 2014-05-28T23:33:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21616",
"authors": [
"Herman Toothrot",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4050"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5487 | Generating a connection of researchers graph out of DBLP
I'd like to know the connection of researchers. Similar to the connection of LinkedIn. In the field of computer science, the DBLP database seems to be useful. Does anyone know a tool to generate a FoaF graph out of DBLP data and a FoaF (Friend of a Friend) graph rendering tool?
There are many possibilities to generate a graph. E.g. parse it with Python and then use http://gephi.org to visualize it or e.g. in http://flowingdata.com/2012/08/02/how-to-make-an-interactive-network-visualization/. However, most likely you won't be able to visualize all at once, but rather - e.g. a graph for a given person.
Currently, I'm looking for a ready-to-run-solution instead of coding it for myself :)
If there is a need, I can write one :). See https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange/wiki and I want to play a bit with D3.js. But... not this week.
Microsoft Academic Search can do it too. Search for the first author, klick on it's name (orange background), click "Geanology Graph", Click "Co-author Graph", enter the name of the other person on the right and press enter.
Microsoft Academic Research can do something similar for you, you just need to have Sliverlight plugin installed in your browser. Search for the first author, click on it's name (orange background), click "Geanology Graph", Click "Co-author Graph", enter the name of the other person on the right and press enter.
Did the graph visualization move someplace else?
A bachelor thesis of interest for you:
Remo Lemma, Ebony - Visualizing the DBLP Database. University of Lugano, 2010
url : http://www.inf.usi.ch/faculty/lanza/Downloads/Lemm2010a.pdf
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.743842 | 2012-11-27T11:34:37 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5487",
"authors": [
"Alec Jacobson",
"Cagt",
"Joel Hernandez",
"Piotr Migdal",
"atmaere",
"grasingerm",
"hdp",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14191",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14192",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14193",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14194",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14195",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14196",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14202",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14246",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4186",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/90669",
"joseph_k",
"kavin",
"koppor",
"user14195",
"user3543612"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
7965 | How should I go about making CV as an undergraduate?
I'm just an undergraduate math student, and I need to make a CV for a research application. However, from the CVs that I have already seen I have nowhere near enough to fill probably half of a page. I mean I can really only put my education history which is 3 schools. What else should I put?
Highly related: Why is an academic CV not the place to sell?
Before starting research, An undergraduate student really only has a résumé. A curriculum vitae is generally intended for someone who is intending to pursue a career in research, and has a somewhat "standardized" format (although there are still many variations).
But as a young student just beginning to do research, I would recommend that you focus on listing skills that you have that would make you appealing to someone interested in hiring you. If you have more than the standard training for someone at your level in university (more courses, have already done research projects, etc.), then you should list that information. Similarly, if you have special skills (programming languages, familiarity with specific techniques or tools, etc.), then those should also be listed.
Any jobs that you've held that might also prepare you for such an experience would also be of interest.
In Europe, 'CV' doesn't have this connotation and is used in the same sense that Americans use résumé.
CVs and resumes vary greatly by field and level of experience. A CV of an undergraduate applying to graduate school is very different than the CV of a associate professor applying to become a full professor. I would suggest talking to your classmates and the career services at your university.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.744022 | 2013-02-12T22:54:21 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7965",
"authors": [
"Ooker",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14341",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5824",
"jwg"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
9694 | Good, neutral source for ISBN linking? (on citing books)
In my bibliography, I want to link the ISBN number to an actual website. My question is: which website is recommended to be used? Is there some 'neutral' source that I can expect to be still functioning in 5 years and that will return reliable results?
IBSN numbers are apparently provided by the International ISBN Agency, so this would clearly be the best source. Turns out, however, that they do not offer an ISBN lookup! I am currently considering two options:
Google Books: http://www.google.comco.uk/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=isbn:0060930314&num=10
ISBNSearch.org: http://www.isbnsearch.org/isbn/0060930314
Both appear to have their commercial interest, but they appear to be reliable enough. I would prefer Google. Or is there any other more recommended website?
You could use worldcat.org, it is built and maintained collectively by the participating libraries around the world (see Wikipedia article).
They offer ISBN search, e.g. www.worldcat.org/search?q=isbn:0060930314
It's worth mentioning that they offer permalinks, e.g. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1419841.
Google Books is a great website and there’s nothing wrong with using it for your purpose. But if you don’t want to be dependent on Google you could use the following sites:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSources&isbn=0060930314
The downside for Wikipedia is that it doesn’t show the book title and one has to search another time for the book. But it’s ad free and certainly still online in five years.
But I’d suggest OpenLibrary: http://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=0060930314
Non-profit, ad free, part of the Internet Archive. Also high possibility of availability in five years.
Thanks. I see that OpenLibrary lists two results though... that doesn't look right, does it?
http://www.bookfinder.com/ has been around for a long time and they claim they never charge a markup from search results, so although not neutral as such maybe useful?
There is also http://www.openisbn.com/ which says
OPENISBN is a personal project dedicated to provide its users ISBN search services and ISBN data, introduction, book reviews, book preview, free ebooks and book price comparison for your specific book.
Possibly something that will not be around for decades, but it sounds at least very neutral.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.744196 | 2013-04-28T08:55:25 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9694",
"authors": [
"Alexander",
"Basilevs",
"C. S.",
"DavidO",
"Fox",
"NICHOLAS MARK AMOS",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Ronnie Chatterjee",
"Sam Ramezanli",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23807",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23808",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23809",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23810",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23811",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23812",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23813",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24326",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24640",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24641",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47686",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6949",
"louiebh",
"nope",
"please delete me",
"raspiguy",
"sfstewman"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
8128 | "Looking for a postdoc" ad inside a conference talk?
I got my PhD one year ago; I am looking for a position (e.g., postdoc).
I am going to a fairly attended conference, and was pondering about how to make audience aware that I am on the market.
An explicit, dedicated slide (maybe at the end)?
A verbal statement?
A caption on my T-shirt? :)
Would you find any of this appropriate?
What would you advice me to do?
EDIT
In case you think it's not a good idea, I'd be interested in knowing why.
Otherwise, I'd be interested in any additional implementation advice (how to formulate that, or whatever comes to mind).
We can't hire you if we don't know who you are.
@JeffE Do you mean that apart from the I am available, there should be a slide containing biographical or personal information of some sorts?
I've even heard advisors mentioning that their students are on the market ("... this other case was solved by my student Mr. X, who, by the way, is on the market right now ..."), so I wouldn't worry too much about it "not being a good idea".
Don't be shy about advertising. As you and Dave suggest, place it at the end, but you don't need to be very subtle about it. I've seen a number of talks where people advertise the fact that they're on the market, and everyone understands the need to do this. Presumably you're worried about it seeming desperate, but it isn't.
Au contraire, a little self-depricating humor could get a laugh, break the ice, and get a conversation going.
I would add to the end of your conclusion a simple statement:
By the way, I'm looking for a postdoc position.
I've seen it done before, and I don't think people minded.
A T-shirt could be a fun way of broaching the topic when talking to people.
Be personal (if possible). Try to research the person or people that may be interested in you and approach them directly.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.744425 | 2013-02-21T15:21:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8128",
"authors": [
"Ellison Chan",
"JeffE",
"Jesse Rosalia",
"Konerak",
"Moses Aprico",
"Nicklas Kevin Frank",
"Paula Cartagena Atará",
"Rexcirus",
"Willie Wong",
"benny.bennett",
"gerrit",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19630",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19631",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19632",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19633",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19634",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19635",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19636",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19660",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19662",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4542",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94",
"user2904536",
"user3845067"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
10107 | When should a student attempt unsupervised research?
I just finished my masters and am currently working as a research assistant before starting a PhD in applied mathematics. I was doing some preliminary work for a possible project and derived some minor results which I find interesting, but in the end, we decided not to go ahead with the project.
I still find the minor results interesting and thought of digging a little bit deeper by myself. However, since the group is no longer interested in this, I would have to do this by myself, unsupervised. Is this a very bad thing? Or a good learning experience?
I had a bad experience doing unsupervised research (wasted a lot of time for no results). However, I know that as a PhD student, I must eventually publish first-authored papers. How do I know when to make the switch?
You can work with your advisor and get a first-authored paper.
It is a common thread - see "Go rogue too soon/too late" in 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D. and Going Rogue at The Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt from the first:
The advisor-advisee dynamic needs to shift over the course of a degree.
Early on, the advisor should be hands on, doling out specific topics and helping to craft early papers.
Toward the end, the student should know more than the advisor about her topic. Once the inversion happens, she needs to "go rogue" and start choosing the topics to investigate and initiating the paper write-ups. She needs to do so even if her advisor is insisting she do something else.
The trick is getting the timing right.
Going rogue before the student knows how to choose good topics and write well will end in wasted paper submissions and a grumpy advisor.
On the other hand, continuing to act only when ordered to act past a certain point will strain an advisor that expects to start seeing a "return" on an investment of time and hard-won grant money.
Advisors expect near-terminal Ph.D. students to be proto-professors with intimate knowledge of the challenges in their field. They should be capable of selecting and attacking research problems of appropriate size and scope.
Personally, I have a lot of experience with unsupervised research (yes, usually wasted a lot of time for no results), starting from high school.
Sure, doing advisor's project is much safer (as, in some sense, (s)he is responsible for the big picture, references, judging which result is good enough) and allows to forget about doubts (for good or bad) and concentrate on work.
However, what I've discovered after 1.5 of my PhD (mostly "going rogue") is that there are two important things:
asking experts (or peers), and
day-to-day collaboration.
Sure, you can have an expert and a collaborator in the same person of your advisor, but as long as you are not afraid of talking to other people and have some knowledge in the topic, it shouldn't be hard to ask experts appropriate questions.
When it comes to collaboration - it may be trickier (but not if you locally have people with an interest overlap).
On contrary, working alone for months on a theoretical problem, with little feedback, may be very hard (both technically and psychologically). I've learnt it the hard way. It is not a problem for one research line, but it is when all research is done alone (may be inefficient and depressive, perhaps unless you are in a deep love with it).
My former Ph.D. advisor's philosophy is that a student should become a teacher of their supervisor. He seems to give the green light when the student
explains their own research problem clearly,
shows a clear sign of familiarity with all relevant work,
puts their work in context,
gives a convincing argument about why it's important and interesting,
looks they can make it, and, somewhat more importantly,
chose a topic that isn't too unfashionable to the extent that devoting their time during their Ph.D. student phase to that kind of topic is a career suicide.
I wrote my first paper when I was a second year grad student, and my first joint paper with my former Ph.D. supervisor is after I got my degree. My friend who got his Ph.D. from the same advisor at the same time as me was also like this, and he's doing pretty well in academia. So probably all that matters when it comes to starting your own math research is if you're ready for it. And if you're ready, I don't think your advisor can talk you out of it anyway. At least, randome guys on the internet like us surely can't.
So, I'd say if you're being honest to yourself and still confident that you know about your research topic better than your advisor, and if you can get him interested in your research, it should be fine.
It is not necessarily a bad thing to forge ahead on your own and it will certainly be a learning experience. It is definitely a good thing to try this, because it will demonstrate and help reinforce that you are an independent researcher, something which you need to be at the end of your PhD studies.
But this is not without some risk.
Part of the role of the supervision that would otherwise be provided is to improve your skills as a researcher and writer of scientific texts. Without this guidance, your skills at the end of your PhD may not be as good as they could be. You may have gaps in your knowledge that would need to be filled. The presentation of scientific material in your writing may end up being suboptimal, because you won't have someone to proposed better ways of writing. And worse still, your ideas may not end up being the best they could be, because you won't have someone questioning them and your assumptions, ultimately forcing you to produce better versions of your ideas.
I've seen it before. Some highly independent students I've seen in action fail to follow recognised mathematical conventions, produce new notations for existing concepts, miss key references and lack understanding of key concepts that would help improve their work, and so on.
Independence is a good trait, but try to take advantage of opportunities to receive guidance from your supervisor(s) while you can.
The risk Dave describes comes more from not working with your advisor than from working on something without your advisor. See the difference? You can (perhaps even should) work independently on X while working with your advisor on Y.
I don't think your description of highly independent students is extremely accurate. What you wrote seems to me describes myopic students who don't learn others' work by reading papers and attending conferences/seminars. Being independent doesn't mean you don't listen to others or ask for advice. In my obnoxiously arrogant opinion, it simply means you decide. You should take into account every piece of information you can get, including what your advisor says.
@YuichiroFujiwara: You are right. It is a description of some highly independent students, not all of them. I reworded a little.
Basically, the only restrictions are issues related to funding. If your funding is intended for you to work on a specific topic, then your primary efforts should be given to the designated topic. However, you can, if so motivated, pursue the research topic independently. In mathematics, this might not be such a huge issue, as the infrastructural demands are not so large (except for some applied math projects). However, in other disciplines, where this "unsupervised research" may require experimental supplies and other resources, this is a much bigger issue. In the latter case, you must obtain approval from the PI whose equipment, material, and other resources you will be using!
If your time is "unrestricted," in the sense that it is not tied to any particular project or program, then you should talk with your supervisor to see if you can use some of your "normal" time to devote to the "side" project. If you can, great; if you can't, then again, this needs to be "on the side"—beyond your main project.
As for the question of doing "first-authored" research, well, that transition process, in many respects, is the goal of the PhD! If you are to be a successful researcher, then during your doctoral studies you will learn how to do research independently, and eventually unsupervised. (Moreover, you will hopefully also have the chance to learn how to supervise others!)
Think of research as a learning paradigm, whenever you learn something new spend time asking yourself how you would develop it if what you just learned was the state of the art, and what interesting directions would be. As you learn more about the topic you can see whether you were right. This makes learning to do research a constant part of your life rather than something you are learning to do when you start your thesis or dissertation.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.744640 | 2013-05-20T17:19:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10107",
"authors": [
"AK47",
"Akshay Takkar",
"Arturo don Juan",
"Dave Clarke",
"El Zo",
"JeffE",
"Kyle_S-C",
"Nilesh Surve",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Praveen",
"Shalabh",
"SiSaSoSu",
"Vrikon",
"Yuichiro Fujiwara",
"almost3086",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24947",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24948",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24949",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24951",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24952",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24953",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24954",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24955",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24956",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24957",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24961",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24966",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24977",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24979",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24982",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25034",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7075",
"legoman451",
"ryanpattison",
"shiveagit",
"user108539",
"user3712482"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
14010 | How do you cite a Github repository?
I am working on a honours thesis and have developed a Fortran library that I would like to cite in it.
In some places they suggest to quote the documentation of the project but this is something I plan to do in the future and isn't done yet. The only documentation I have right now is the README file and the code itself.
What would be an acceptable way of directing a reader to my work on Github?
(bonus) Is there a BibTeX way to do it?
I think energynumbers answer is correct in terms of what is "correct" in academic literature. However, if the immediate issue is "I need to let a reader of the thesis/dissertation that I'm working on right now see the software", then (low-tech as it seems) you could consider including the source code in an appendix. How practical this is may depend on its length... Or ask your supervisor whether they're happy for you to provide a github link and what the format should be. Also, welcome to Stackexchange :-)
@SimonWaldman: 7K lines of code spread over multiple modules is definitively not something I can include in an appendix. My colleague did include his MATLAB code in his thesis but I found it to be a terrible way to share code as you cannot reuse it easily (copying it in matlab would ignore the tabbing, etc.).
@charlespwd ha, fair enough. And I agree that it's a terrible way to share code. But if this is for an examinable thesis rather than a published paper, I think the correct answer is "whatever your supervisor is happy with" ;-)
See also this discussion: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2013-October/001048.html
^ There are so many great points I think they are worth compiling into an answer, much better than all current ones!
Take a look at this: [https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science]. This might answer at least a part of your question.
What should the year be? The most recent commit? The first commit? The repo's creation date on Github...also if it was moved there from another site?
GitHub has now added built-in citation support (https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1420122675813441540). Simply add a CITATION.cff file (
https://citation-file-format.github.io/) to your repo and a citation widget will be added to the sidebar:
Here's a handy cff file generator: https://citation-file-format.github.io/cff-initializer-javascript/#/
I would go with:
P.W.D. Charles, Project Title, (2013), GitHub repository, https://github.com/charlespwd/project-title
Or a bit different, depending on your citation style. Just is is crucial to include: author, title (if style includes it), year and link.
Of course if you do have a publication related to this piece of code (even if only by fact it is your first publication basing on this code), don't forget to cite is as well! (In the current academic system it is all that counts.)
And respective BibTeX entry:
@misc{Charles2013,
author = {Charles, P.W.D.},
title = {Project Title},
year = {2013},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/charlespwd/project-title}},
commit = {4f57d6a0e4c030202a07a60bc1bb1ed1544bf679}
}
Beware, this above are improvisations (especially the BibTeX entry), not standards.
Even for more established and citable things there are not set standards, see e.g.:
How to cite a sequence from The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS)? - MathOverflow
See also:
How to cite sourcecode from an svn repository - TeX.SE
How to cite software in LaTeX - SuperUser.SE
EDIT:
See also how to assign DOI to a particular commit in your repository.
Maybe we can agree on something like this for a standard. I don't see why traditional journals are better than GitHub repositories to publish papers. In this case I'd upload the LaTeX sources to the repository and provide a link to the PDF. I'm seriously thinking about doing this, there is even some review process, and reviewers can open issues in the repository :-m This would be free for authors and provide open access, promote collaboration, etc.
If the repo owner doesn't make their full name known, would you suggest using their GitHub user name instead?
No. I would search his real name for that username elsewhere.
Some github users do not use their real name and make it very difficult to find it.
Why not use url={https://github.com/charlespwd/project-title}
What's the year in the case that I'm not referring to a specific commit but to the repo in general?
@Trylks - realize your comment is from 2013, but the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) does all of their review on github. See https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/4368 for instance.
Now they become somehow citable by providing DOI references. That was on their 14th of May news:
https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science
GitHub now offers citation as a service, at least with Zenodo. This guide instructs how to connect your accounts and get a DOI with your work:
https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
I ran into this as well but it does not help to cite someone else's repository.
The underlying question seems to be how to get citable software.
There is a traditional method for doing this.
You write a methodology paper describing the software, how it was built, what it does. You can provide the source code as supplementary information.
And then you cite that paper, in future papers where you apply the software.
I think that as a scientific society, it is crucial to develop a way of citing other things than journal publication (e.g. code, data). Otherwise science will never move into the 21st century.
@PiotrMigdal I agree and I hope there will be better ways to cite non-journal knowledge. However this is what there is now.
@Trylks I know. So mine is a comment, not a downvote or anything. Anyway, the question is what to do when there is no accompanying journal entry (BTW: as of now I have the same problem).
I hope though that you don't imply that we get rid of peer review in the 21st century? The good thing with this answer is that if a linked code repository and data are connected with a paper, then it was part of the review process. While when I'm citing just somebody's stuff somewhere on the web, it could be anything really.Not saying peer review is perfect,but that we really need to integrate it with the more modern interconnected work styles.
What I've seen most often is a footnote with the URL you want to provide, in this case the URL of your GitHub repository. This will point people even better because it will be in the same page, and sure it will not count for bibliographic statistics and your h-index, but it wasn't going to count anyway, at least not yet.
Figshare provides a way to import a GitHub release and assigns a doi to it. I haven't tried this yet but it seems to be a good middle path between a software paper and citing just the repository.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.745740 | 2013-11-11T14:35:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14010",
"authors": [
"Caleb Stanford",
"Dohn Joe",
"DshX",
"Dylan MacKenzie",
"Erkin Alp Güney",
"EsP",
"Flyto",
"Gosse Minnema",
"K.-Michael Aye",
"Kramer",
"Mic",
"NewNameStat",
"Nkuna Alenasa",
"Ortega",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Ted Santo Jr.",
"Trylks",
"Vivek Shankar",
"charlespwd",
"dremodaris",
"goofyui",
"halloleo",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/110944",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/119280",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/123984",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13195",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/133037",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/144474",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15329",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/190352",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36136",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36137",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36138",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36143",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36149",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36150",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36152",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36153",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36155",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36167",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/57391",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/57400",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/67026",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7368",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7571",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7883",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8394",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9398",
"jkr",
"qwr",
"stefanbschneider",
"user2023370",
"user36143"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
48651 | When did it become commonplace for data set providers to ask users to cite their paper(s)?
Nowadays data set providers typically ask data set users to cite their paper(s) introducing the data set. When did this practice become commonplace?
(Given what I read on this page, I feel the need to emphasize that I do not intend to open a debate around the usefulness of such citations.)
Since when has it become common to write papers based on someone else's data set?
@keshlam Since people share data sets?
In that case, my answer would be the same. If someone has made a major contribution to your paper, you owe them recognition... and you owe your readers the ability to trace the data back, in case there was something unusual about it. Credit or citation would seem the obvious ways to do that. I'm not sure why you believe this wouldn't have been done in the past; i'd think it was simply "best practice".
@keshlam I am curious.
Your question is quite unclear; can you please ask more explicitly what you are looking for? Are you asking since when datasets should be cited? Are you asking since when dataset authors asked explicitly for being cited? By "citing datasets", do you specifically ask about referring to papers that describe the datasets, or about providing any kind of attribution for datasets? If referring to papers, are you asking about dataset authors pointing out a particular paper that, in their opinion, is most preferrable to represent the dataset, or about citing any of the papers that mention the dataset?
@O.R.Mapper I am asking since when data set providers ask users to cite their paper(s) introducing the data set, i.e. one or several particular papers that, in the data set provider's opinion, is most preferrable to represent the dataset.
One reason people seem to react differently to this question than you expected is that any sentence beginning with "Since when..." is usually interpreted in a somewhat confrontational way (compared to the neutral phrasing JeffE edited into the question).
@TobiasKildetoft Good point, thanks, question edited, feel free to edit further.
Much better now. It is now clear that this is a question about timing rather of best practices.
Question to the OP: Is the emphasis in your question on the "issue" that the authors of a data set ask a certain paper to be cited instead of the dataset itself? Or is rather that you are interested in from when onwards they ask for to get any type of citation at all?
@DCTLib I am interested in from when onwards they ask for to get any type of citation at all.
I don't see a logical distinction in citing used algorithms vis-a-vis data sets. Both seem perfectly natural to get cited. Both are an integral part in the results you are reporting in a paper and hence should be attributed.
You're probably thinking in terms of machine learning papers, where typically a new method has to be benchmarked on a large variety of data sets. While it may seem like overkill to cite each and every data set that was used, lets not forget that whoever provided that data also put in effort and deserves credit for it. Again, this isn't that much different from citing the competing algorithms you are comparing against.
(Academic) software packages should also get cited, or at least mentioned, when they are used. This isn't really a new thing, for example the old 4-clause BSD license essentially demanded the same thing.
"I don't see a logical distinction in citing used algorithms vis-a-vis data sets. Both seem perfectly natural to get cited." - and yet, software is often not cited. This paper, for instance, contains frequent mentions of Microsoft Word, and yet the bibliography totally lacks a reference to something like "Microsoft Corp. Microsoft Word. ." This is analogous to just mentioning the name of a dataset, rather than actually citing it as a bibliographic reference.
@O.R.Mapper I know that happens often, but both are bad practice in my opinion.
I fully agree. It is just that this answer (and also some of the comments on the question) make it sound like we had to explain to the OP why datasets (and software, and similar) should be cited (which may or may not be necessary to explain), while the explicitly asked question, when dataset providers started to exlicitly suggest particular papers on the dataset for citation, is not really answered.
@O.R.Mapper as far as I know there is no when, it was always the right thing to do. I think that's why the comments and my answer are what they are.
Again, the question as it is written is not when it became the right thing to do, but when it became common practice to explicitly write something like "If you use this dataset, please cite paper XYZ." on the website from where the dataset can be obtained, rather than relying on the authors to do the right thing. Did the very first authors publishing datasets already do so? Or were they rather completely happy with providing this novel service to the community by providing a dataset, whereas the idea that you could actively ask for a citation thereof evolved only at a later time?
Since Fisher's Iris data set had an accompanying paper I guess it has always been quite common to get cited for data. I reckon Iris is one of the first heavily reused data sets. Even if it wasn't explicitly asked in the past, source attribution has always been important in academic writing.
As we seem to interpret the question rather differently, I have asked the OP for clarification in a comment.
Yes I am curious to know around when data set providers started asking explicitly to get cited.
Shortly:y after someone was rude enough to use data they should have credited without doing so, I presume. If you want to know when it became common in a particular field, I invite you to do a study of the literature and report back to us... or figure out what field might have already conducted such a study and do a literature search therein.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.746338 | 2015-07-11T20:00:24 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48651",
"authors": [
"Abdessamad139",
"Abeer Mahmoud",
"Ashish Sadhwani",
"DCTLib",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Leticia Corrêa",
"Marc Claesen",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Paul Ghobril",
"Tobias Kildetoft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134723",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134724",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134806",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134863",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134939",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134955",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/134956",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7173",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"keshlam",
"kleber",
"truthseeker",
"user134863"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
54765 | What to do with students coming to office hours asking to check their homework?
As a teaching assistant (TA), how to handle the situation where a student comes to office hours asking to check their homework? I.e. the student hands in their solution to the homework and ask the TA to check for any mistake. Assume homeworks are worth somewhere between 20% and 50% of the grade.
If country-specific, I am interested in the United States. If field specific, I am interested in computer science, linguistics, neuroscience and maths.
Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/16422/9934
Excuse me, but how exactly is "a student seeking out available resources to improve the quality of their work and understanding of the subject matter" EVER a bad thing? What on earth could a TA be there for, if not for exactly such a task as checking/reviewing homework assignments with students? The least significant part of a TA's job is proctoring and grading. The most significant part is providing peer-review and guidance.
@dwoz I've never said it's a bad thing.
@dwoz a lot of technically advanced people are put in TA roles with the expectation that they're just going to immediately know all the "people stuff" that goes with it. I'm not (at all!) suggesting Franck is socially inept, just that any time you're managing people you really need training, even if you're already good with people. And my experience has been there is literally 0 budget for the kind of training they need, despite the fact they're managing the next generation of engineers and researchers. Since he'll never get that training, he's asking for help with the things he needs it for.
@corsiKa Actually I did have some great training from my department, just always glad to get more feedback :-)
Wow, that's fortunate, and refreshing. Consider yourself lucky!
@corsiKa, I understand the premise here. I am in an academic university situation. I'll try to add a more "nuanced" answer below.
@FranckDernoncourt your question reads as "those pesky students, always interrupting my work with their requests to look at their homework and questions about it, why can't they just go away".
@jwenting this certainly isn't my intent. Which sentence make the question look non-neutral?
you help them because you're a TA. i guess i don't understand the question ?
@sgroves Might seem unfair to other students, amongst other things.
@FranckDernoncourt it might seem that way, but it's not unfair. Other students can ask you too. That's what you're there for ...
I don't know what "comes to office hours" means?
@LightnessRacesinOrbit Some schools require professors and TAs to maintain (and post) a set of regular times when they will be in their office and available to respond to student questions (as opposed to working on research, committee work, or preparing for class). Those times are called "Office Hours", and students are invited to come during those times if they have questions.
@dmckee: I see. I would call it "come to the office, during 'office hours'".
@LightnessRacesinOrbit It might be an American English thing? It's similar to how we say we're "going to the movie" instead of "going to the movie theater to see the movie". We encourage students to "come to office hours".
@CoreyHarris: Could be. Like how you also [frustratingly] say silly nonsense things like "I'm waiting on a train" when in fact you're waiting for a train, on a train station platform ;)
Answering from the point of view of a physical scientist, and in keeping with my personal take on what kinds of help are appropriate or inappropriate.
(I haven't been a TA for a long time, but I teach at an all-undergrad department so I have to be my own TA.)
These are great teachable moments if you have the time (and it can take a lot of time).
You don't check their homework, you ask them to explain their solutions to you.
But there is a catch: you don't let them get away with "I used this formula, and I solved for [variable]"; instead, make them explain their logic and the conceptual basis of their work step by step. When they are stuck or are proceeding incorrectly, you probe their understanding of the problem in a Socratic style.
The kind of questions you might ask include:
Conceptual basis
What physical principles apply to this problem?
Are their any hidden assumptions here? If so, what are they?
What statements in the problem or facts about the world brought you to select that particular approach? And why did you use that expression of the principle in mathematical form?
How well do the explicit assumptions in the problem match the real world (i.e. is this a PhysicsLand (tm) cartoon or a somewhat realistic treatment)?
Are these results reasonable for the real world? If so, why? If not how do you expect the world to differ and what neglected effects would make the answer more realistic?
Math basis (where they'll want to spend all their time at first)
Why is is that the right value for that variable?
Why is that substitution allowed in this case?
What does it mean that there are two solution to that equation? Which one do you use and why? Is the other one meaningful as well?
Does this situation actually meet the preconditions used in deriving the result you want to use?
Can this problem be stated as a special case of one we're already done? Why or why not?
Problem solving basis
What is the goal here? (You'd be surprised how often they lose sight of that.)
What can you learn from what we've been given? (If you don't know how to proceed just try shotgunning it; forward version.)
What list of thing would get you in position to find the answer? (If you don't know how to proceed just try shotgunning it; backward version.)
Do we already know the correct solution to a simpler version of the problem? Does that hint at a way to proceed here?
Most students will find those questions very difficult at first, but as they become more adept at handling the questions they should see their homework and exam scores improve markedly.
If they have the patience they will solve the problem for themselves right there in your office.
Though this is very time consuming most students will not be regulars. Some will simply become frustrated at what they see as your unwillingness to "help" and look elsewhere; and others will get better at the discipline: as the term progresses they'll bring you fewer problems and ask more perceptive questions about them.
In addition to wanting to talk about formulas first, they are going to want to talk about values ("and then I plugged in the 18 from the problem..."). Don't let them do that either. Make they say what quantity it was ("and then inserted the given initial velocity ...").
Beginners are all about numbers and formulas, but learning the discipline is about principles first, problem solving process second, and particular results last.
Philosophical note: As I see it the purpose of homework is to facilitate learning. I wouldn't even grade it except that there is no other way to insure that they will do it. That's why it doesn't bother me that they are getting a lot of support doing the homework for my class: when they come to me I get to make it a learning experience for them.
(The first time they come in they may think they are going to get one for free, but they're in for some skull sweat.)
Admittedly, I get to decide that for my own class and when you are a TA, you may have to abide by the professor's opinion about how much and how directly you should help with assignments.
don't let them get away with "I used this formula, and I solved for [variable]" - See highly relevant video
Ouch. Painfully true to life, except that I was never as perky and attractive as the TA in the video.
How about giving them a blog of SE wirtten by Jeff about how SE has improved his life?
For CS assignments I wouldn't point out specific mistakes but would gesture vaguely in the direction of anything glaring or get them to talk me through the logic step by step and make sure they knew what they were being asked for. If there was a significant mistake I might put the assignment to the side and go through some of the basis material with them related to the mistake.
This is eerily similar to Pólya's "How to solve it"...
Re grading: One of my favorite professors has a homework grading policy I have always liked. If you turned it in, seriously attempted every problem (and explained why you got stuck if you couldn't get it) and got at least 75% of the questions right, it was a 100%. If you attempted them all but got less than 75% right (even if it was 0 right), it was a 66%. If you didn't seriously attempt them all, no matter how many were right, it was a 0%.
I love using a technique like this on people who come to me for help with questions when I'm not the TA. The only real danger I've found is that it's too easy to accidentally go overboard and suddenly realize that three hours have disappeared on what should have been a pretty simple problem!
I never understood why my fellow TAs took the attitude of "I won't help you with homework problems". My approach was always that, if you're willing to show up to my office hours and actively try to solve the problem, I'd be happy to keep dropping hints until you finally get the answer.
Your students are lucky.
When I was a TA, my preferred approach to this dilemma was to offer to work a problem that was thematically similar to the problem, but different in its specifics. For example, if the problem was working out an application of a particular algorithm to a scenario by hand, then I would make up another scenario with similar properties and we would work the algorithm on that. In those cases where a student tried to then turn us back to the homework problem again, I would say something like: "I'm not going to work on homework problems, but we can work another similar one if you like."
I found this approach valuable because it let us address the skill and content questions and concerns that the student had, yet at the same time made sure I wasn't doing their homework for them.
This is what I do with my kids to help them with their homework. For example, give the following problem.
2x +5 = y, solve for x
Then I may instead work out this problem with them.
9 + 6y = 2x
The answer may very much depend on departmental practice. I've been in departments where the TA's office hours were essentially going over the homework and helping you arrive at an answer, and departments where that's absolutely not the practice.
Assuming it's not the practice, something simple like "I'm sorry, I can't tell you if your answer is right or wrong. If you have a specific question about a step, I'd be happy to go over that with you."
This is essentially what I do. However, I'll also offer to discuss other example problems that are not part of the homework assignment if the student would like to do that.
s/can't/won't/ in the suggested reponse
"If you have a specific question about a step, I'd be happy to go over that with you." Then they could just ask about every step of the problem.
@user8001 "How do I do the next step" is not a specific question. If they want to solve their homework during my office hours and ask a question when they grind to a halt, I don't mind. And if someone wants to try and rules lawyer my help...well, that's certainly a strategy.
Standard answer around here is "I don't know" or more politely "I won't check your work other than for grading it".
Want to ask about a knotty point? Go ahead. I'll even solve a very similar problem with you. Still outstanding homework is off limits.
I asked vonbrand and not even the TA knows how to resolve this problem!
@Ángel , it's the lecturer in my case
Maybe set 3 homework problems, only grade problem C, but tell the students that if they completely understand how to do problem A and B, and then C will be easy for them. Give them as much help as they need on A and B.
Even publish a worked solution for A and B a short time before C has to be handed in.
How does this answer the question?
@corsiKa "What to do with such students?" "Solve problems A and B, but not C." Actually it is a variation of jakebeal's answer.
This is a good time to teach a student good study practices. E.g. remind them to review their work regularly, do their work on schedule, use course resources such as texts. Tell the student how learn to get the right answer on their own.
Aren't TA office hours supposed to be one of those resources? I've found that working through a problem that actually counts towards their grade gets students' attention in a way that very few things do.
A TA who holds office hours for students should by all means consider homework assignments "fair game" for discussion during student interactions. Typically, the best approach during those meetings isn't to correct/grade the assignment, but rather to confirm whether the student's approach and methodology was appropriate, and deliver guidance or identify resources that will aid the student.
However, "proofreading" a homework assignment for a student who wants you to catch their "sloppy" is not really why a TA is there.
I tell my students:
I will mark your assignment any time you like. If you want me to mark it well before it's due, I will be happy to do that. But I will only mark it once. Hand it in, and I'll mark it,
So that rules out "please look this whole thing over and let me know how close it is to being complete." I think that's a real imposition and it interferes with learning too. However, if someone wants to come to me and ask whether one particular thing is headed in the right direction, or if they are stuck and want me to unstick them, I will. I will answer any specific, crisp question that they ask. But I won't just take the whole thing, put energy and effort into looking it over as a whole, and then hand it back for them to improve. That request comes from a desire to get 10/10, not a desire to learn the material of my course.
In a practical point of view, it would be best to teach the student at this stage. Neglecting might affect the interest of the student within the subject. This is the time when the student can learn the most as he/she is readily prepared to accept inputs. Doing so would greatly boost your reputation among eager students since a true teacher grows the interest of her/his students.
As it may not be ethical to solve homework problems of individuals per se as you stated that this makes up as part of the academic score. But it would be better to make the student understand how to solve the problem. If several students have the similar doubt, then it would be best to solve the problem as a group intimating the remaining students of this special solving session. After all, the motive of homework is to make students learn and remember as well as verifying what they have learnt.
A lot of these responses seem to be based on the idea that education is somehow a battle between teacher and student, and that they can only learn from suffering. People learn from one on one instruction, and anything else is an expensive waste of time. Denying them that so as to make absolutely sure that they don't benefit unfairly ... I suppose that's a sign of the relationship between students and teachers in the university setting - the student pays but the teacher tries to avoid being responsible for the outcome, acting instead as though he's the point of the whole thing. That none of this is clear to a lot of university staff makes me wonder exactly how much intellectual life goes on at your various institutions.
In case you did not understand the question, homework problems weigh 20 - 50% of the grades. Checking the correctness of homework for an individual student may be unfair to the other students.
This answer comes very close to saying "I am paying for the education, so the instructors should do what I say." Among the many things students are paying for is the opportunity to be certified in a particular subject. This question is asking how to provide effective instruction without undermining the assessments that go into this certification. I don't see how this post answers that question.
Also, the tone of the question suggests that at least some of the students are wanting a "premark" - getting a grade from the TA before actually submitting the exercise. Depending on how much time the TA has for such things (in particular - is there enough office hours for all students to do this?) it could be quite the advantage...
I am having great difficulty where this notion of "unfairness" comes from. It would seem to be a misplaced notion...or a lack of understanding of what "fairness" means. If a student is allowed additional resources that are denied to others, for example given additional time to complete, then that's possibly unfair. If student A's paper is graded to a different standard than student B, that's unfair. If student A avails herself of resources that student B could access as well, but declines, then that is not an example of unfairness.
If each solution counts as a negative score to them, and if you have a solution manual, tell them the problems they got wrong. Students sometimes know the subject and are just trying to get the best grade they can.
If you don't have some sort of solution manual of course it may be difficult to tell them every question they got wrong. However if you don't have other students during office hours who have actual questions about the subject, what's the point in not receiving their request. Office hours are for the student. If you don't have any other student requests, go through the homework with them.
Of course if each question doesn't hurt the student's grade if they get it wrong, then you should expect them to give real questions about how to solve a problem.
"Check my homework" is an unreasonable request. This is a teachable moment that can help you teach a student how to ask a question, which is more important than anything going on in an idiot dual class. You need to get the student to ask questions that can inform you where the student is conceptually weak, so you can try to patch the holes.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.746914 | 2015-09-22T01:15:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/54765",
"authors": [
"Aiah",
"Alex",
"Allen Gould",
"Amanda Bartell",
"BartekChom",
"Ben Voigt",
"Brian Borchers",
"Corey Harris",
"David Baucum",
"David Hill",
"Dr. S.",
"Exodus",
"Floris",
"Fomite",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"J. Doe",
"Josh Rumbut",
"Lightness Races in Orbit",
"Mr.Kondo",
"Muhammad Bilal",
"Murphy",
"Nobody",
"Ooker",
"Queen Eun",
"Spammer",
"VALENTINA MERCADO GARCIA",
"Wesley",
"alexw",
"apnorton",
"arete",
"chipbuster",
"corsiKa",
"dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten",
"dwoz",
"ff524",
"hello",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11258",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11647",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12378",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14341",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149635",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149636",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149637",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149638",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149639",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149642",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149645",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149647",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149648",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149657",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149663",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149691",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149881",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149898",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149934",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/149999",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/150150",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/150212",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15062",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16078",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20218",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21841",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26834",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27102",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37881",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38642",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3878",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41476",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41568",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/440",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8158",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8705",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9934",
"iheartkafka",
"jwenting",
"plumrain",
"tpg2114",
"user428517",
"user8001",
"vdavietnam",
"vonbrand",
"Ángel"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
56398 | Patent trial data set
I am looking for a data set that would list patent trials that involve an academic institution, if possible with the date, the parties involved and the outcome.
I am aware of this list of number of US patents awarded by academic institutions in 2014, as well as (1), which lists the evolution of yearly aggregate costs for resolved lawsuits, unresolved lawsuits,
and nonlitigated assertion for patent trials (non-academic specific), but I couldn't find a similar data set for academic patent trials.
(1) Bessen, James, and Michael J. Meurer. "The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes" Cornell L. Rev. 99 (2013): 387.
Have you tried asking a law library's reference desk how you could research this?
@keshlam No, there is no library near me.
If you're asking about a (presumably, preferably, open) data set, this question might be a better fit for the Open Data SE site. However, since you express some interest in references and I was quite curious about what information on the topic is available, I will try to answer your question here.
I would start searching for the relevant data sets, at least, on U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and European Patent Office (EPO). Doing so reveals some data sets that certainly could be useful for the task at hand. In particular, the following data sets & services might be of interest:
Data sets and databases
USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset
USPTO Historical Patent Data Files
USPTO's PatentsView Datasets (query tool and APIs seem to be unavailable at present)
Electronic Document Information System (EDIS) by U.S. International Trade Commission
EPO Datasets
Databases by Darts-ip (commercial; see "Patent focused" quadrant)
LITALERT (LITigation ALERTs) Database (commercial)
Services (search + analytics, etc.)
Lex Machina
Docket Navigator
Patexia Litigation Search
Papers / Books (bonus)
The effects of patent litigation on university licensing efforts
Innovation and litigation: Tensions between universities and patents and how to fix them
The trials of academe: The new era of campus litigation
P.S. Obviously, for most data sets and databases, you would have to perform data pre-processing to select/associate data relevant to academic institutions and, perhaps, some additional steps. Considering your background, it should not be a big problem. I hope that my answer is helpful.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.748478 | 2015-10-18T03:58:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/56398",
"authors": [
"Alex",
"Aria Guzu",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Marcus Ahmed Spam",
"Spam",
"cerdem",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/154504",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/154505",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/154506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/154508",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/154537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"keshlam"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
57071 | Why do so many publishing venues limit the length of paper submissions?
I wonder why so many publishing venues limit the length of paper submissions. I understand that such page limits were first created when papers were published offline, but nowadays, what are the reasons? One important downside of page limits it that authors often crop useful details out, which hinders reproducibility and/or understanding.
Anyway, I'm absolutely in favour of page limits, even with online publications. There are authors who seem unable to reasonably limit themselves and try to put everything they've done in a paper, even when it is barely connected to the title. And really, I don't want to read 50 page long papers, unless all those 50 pages are really significant.
...and some authors go on and on at length about unrelated garbage without limits.
In many journals, you can use the Supporting Information document, which has no page limit, for technical details.
Thanks. Shouldn't it be up to the reviewers do give such feedback, rather than enforcing such page limits a priori? Also, do venues that have no page limit actually have this kind of issue (prolixity)?
The hardest thing to write is a short paper. It really makes you refine everything until you are sure that each sentence and word is necessary to make your point. And, you have to figure out what your point really is. You are trying to take somebody through an exposition so they understand something at the end of it, not write another Faulkner or James Joyce novel (which are good, but not a technical paper).
There are a couple reasons I can think of why page limits might be imposed:
"when papers were published offline, but nowadays"...I've got six physical journals sitting on my desk. Papers are still published offline.
Even if they don't arrive in bound journal form, many people, myself included, still print journal articles. How an article is distributed and how it is actually read are not the same thing.
For journals that provide typesetting, copy editing, etc., the amount of work they're required to do will scale upwards as the length of articles gets longer. Having a page limit at least imposes some sort of ceiling on that.
It imposes a kind of discipline on the paper writing process that hopefully makes a paper more acceptable. Long, undirected digressions, spending a lot of time in the metaphorical "weeds' in the methods section, etc. are discouraged with size limits - again, hopefully promoting papers appearing in a way that's of general interest and readable to the audience of the journal. As some people have mentioned, unstructured supplemental material is often offered for those longer form sections that are only of interest to a much more narrow audience.
I think number 4 might be the best reason to limit length.
@APrioriRainbows They are definitely not listed in order of importance :)
Oh yes--just adding my two cents (airing my grievances about much academic writing).
Earlier this year, I attended an editor’s panel at a conference, which included some editors of letter journals, i.e., journals with a strong length limit and higher relevance threshold (e.g., PRL with a limit of 3500 words, if you have no figures). In their presentations and answers they implied the following benefits of a length limit for these letter journals:
It accelerates the peer-review process, as the reviewers need to read less.
It makes the papers more attractive for readers (and thus increases the impact), as they need less time to read them and focus on the central results.
Before anybody begins to argue: These are the journal’s/editor’s arguments, not mine (in fact, I think there are some serious practical flaws to them).
An additional reason is that it may become impossible to secure reviews, or decent reviews, if the paper is too long. I would decline to review any paper that is longer than 50 pages unless it was clearly superb, and many reviewers would accept, but then not do a high-quality review. However, if an article contains large amounts of supporting data which does not need to be scrutinized piece-by-piece, then greater page length might not be an impediment for reviewers.
Page limit in conferences and/or symposiums are based on the research field. For example a full paper in a high rank electronic journal is 4 pages, where in computer science is 10-12. Two main reasons:
Enough Information: The page limit is given by the conference organisers and it should be enough to provide enough information about a topic in that field.
Not a Journal Nor an Abstract: They should draw a line somewhere, if there are too many pages, then the publication become journal. If not then it becomes an abstract. Most of the time the page limit is somewhere in between.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.748739 | 2015-10-28T18:11:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/57071",
"authors": [
"1St Choice Chimney Sweep......",
"APrioriRainbows",
"Bill Barth",
"Fomite",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Hilde",
"Igor Custodio",
"Jerry Dean",
"Jill Munger",
"Jon Custer",
"Marat Talipov",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Ravenry",
"Wrzlprmft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156593",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156594",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156602",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156627",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156644",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/156662",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27418",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/43327",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"sbox",
"user919133"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2752 | Is it acceptable to extend results from an arXiv paper that has not appeared in a journal?
In general, building on unpublished work of another author, which he may have told you in confidence, or you may encountered as a reviewer or by word of mouth or other informal means, is not an acceptable practice. Does the same apply if the author has uploaded his work on arXiv?
Here's a specific scenario: Suppose I submit a paper for review to a journal. The paper has results that could possibly be extended, however, the idea for extension is either not obvious or is not compatible with the theme of the paper, so I may plan to keep it for a later paper. If I put the paper on arXiv would it be considered ok if someone else extends my results? This would ruin the theme of the other paper I wanted to write with the extension.
If this happened to me it would make me uncomfortable, as if my confidence has been breached. I don't know if this feeling is justified. This feeling stems from my view of arXiv. My personal theory is that arXiv is an informal medium, unlike journals and conferences, and in that sense it is no different from other channels of informal communication. It allows for structured and faster dissemination of work (thus inform the ongoing work of others), in addition to establishing priority of results, but that does not grant it a formal status. I think an author should exercise restraint in extending results from arXiv, and apply the same standards that he would if he were to encounter the work through classical informal channels.
Of course, this is just my theory. I would like to hear what others have to say about this issue.
I do not understand the question at all. What you learn as a reviewer is very confidential information. What people have posted on well-known public web sites is very public information. To me these seem to be the opposite extremes, not similar situations. One of the main benefits in posting to Arxiv is that others can start building on your work. In the best case, you have already lots of citations even before your paper is formally published. This is great, from everyone's perspective.
I am confused by your addition in revision 5. Do you want to argue that your logic is correct and other people should follow it? If so, you are on a wrong website; this is a place for questions and answers, not a place to discuss what we should do. Your logic is reasonable, but it is not the only reasonable logic. In the current community of theoretical computer science, I do not think that people employ that logic. I thought that your question was “Do other people act according to this view?”, so I answered no. If you want to convert other people, please do it somewhere else.
No I don't mean to convert anyone or initiate a discussion. I only meant to clarify my theory. Furthermore, the topic has been changed to "is it considered ok to" to "is it wrong to", so therefore answers are now solicited about whether people think it is right or wrong, not merely what people perceive other people to consider ok. So I thought I should expand on why I felt it was wrong. I don't plan to keep editing the above in response to all responses I receive and as such don't plan to indulge in an argument. I have also removed any references to responses in the new edit.
"Is this considered right or wrong" is asking for an objective evaluation of publication culture. "Is this actually right or wrong?" is asking for personal opinion. The former question is in scope for this site; the latter question is not. I've removed the argumentative edit.
@JukkaSuomela: it is not always great. I know several people who do not put their work on arxiv because of the following (real) case: author A puts a big result in the arxiv and submits to a very good journal; the journal takes almost a year to referee it, and ends up rejecting by reason of standards (i.e. there's nothing wrong with the paper, it is just not good enough for our super journal). But during that year B and C read the arxiv paper, find a generalization, and get it published (acknowledging A's preprint). So, after a year, author A finds himself with his best work unpublishable.
I understand your logic, but I do not think that many people treat papers on arXiv in that way. Papers on arXiv are public unlike the papers you reviewed or the work you just heard by personal communication. As such, extending the results in a paper on arXiv is a perfectly acceptable practice as long as the second paper cites the paper on arXiv properly.
Just to make sure, I had posted this answer when the question was posted on cstheory.stackexchange.com, and therefore it is my implicit assumption that the question is about a paper in theoretical computer science. Because different fields have different research practices including the roles of journals and preprints, this answer may not apply to other fields which also use arXiv.org.
I believe building on ArXiv preprints is also standard practice in mathematics and physics, which are much heavier users of ArXiv than theoretical computer science.
@Jeffe Do you think theoretical CS uses the arXiv less because they rely so heavily on conferences (rather than journals), and thus typically disseminate their results more rapidly than math and physics?
No, I think theoretical computer science uses the ArXiv less because computer scientists are generally Luddites. No, I am not joking.
One of the main points of preprint archives like arXiv is to get papers available ASAP, so others can build on your results sooner thus speeding up science.
I feel like publishing something on arXiv is an act of "publishing" nonetheless.
It has the advantages of publishing. These include: getting your work out there (with more visibility than if simply posting it on your webpage , which requires people be looking for your articles), getting people interested in it, and perhaps even getting citations before the paper has gone through the long and grueling process of being validated by a journal. It also had the advantage of showing that this is your result, thus preventing anybody from "preempting" you.
But then it also has the "disadvantage" that someone may run with your idea, and extend it, possibly even obtaining a result that is more significant than your own.
This does not mean publishing things on arXiv should be seen as a risk. It means that publishing on arXiv, like anywhere else, should be a well-thought decision. Note that with all the turmoil surrounding official journals, and common practices, it seems we are slowly evolving towards archives such as arXiv getting increasing legitimacy.
So to answer your question: an article on arXiv is not "unpublished" at all (unlike papers you get to read as a referee, or which a colleague has shared with you in confidence---those are other issues altogether), so yes, there is generally nothing wrong with extending results.
In mathematics, it is very common to build on papers that are on arXiv. Indeed, this is more or less the whole point of arXiv: to disseminate work faster than the journal publication cycle, so that the community can immediately begin to make use of it, which includes extending it. If you wait until the paper is published, you will be well behind the curve.
I don't think your reservations about building on "unpublished" work are applicable here. At least in mathematics, preprints are generally posted on arXiv at the same time as they are submitted for publication; they are thus already in the "final" form intended by the authors. Of course it may be that further revisions take place before publication (perhaps as a result of the peer review process), but the arXiv version is usually perfectly suitable as a foundation for future work.
However, a few extra caveats are in order:
Since a paper from arXiv has not passed peer review yet, you should probably be even more diligent than usual about checking its results before using them. If you find errors or unclear points, it would behoove you to alert the authors, since they may be able to be corrected before publication.
Conversely, you should also keep an eye out for updates to the preprint which may contain important corrections.
You may certainly cite the arXiv preprint in your own paper. However, you should check for a published version before final acceptance of your own (and again when correcting the proofs), and update the citation if necessary.
There is however one more important distinction between arXiv and journals/conferences. Whatever is published in journals/conferences is final and can no more be revised. It is as if the author has said all that he has to say on the topic and it is now fair game for others to say what they want.
Whether this is a meaningful distinction depends on the circumstances: it's common to write a series of papers on a given topic, in which case no single paper contains all the author has to say on the topic.
The other answers have clearly explained how the communities that use the arXiv view this matter. However, I'd go a step further: a system where people could stake out credit for unpublished work while preventing other people from building on it would be bad for science. Currently, this is the trade-off researchers face. You can keep your ideas private for as long as you want, to give you time to exploit them fully. However, you run the risk that someone else may independently discover them. In that case, the best you can hope for is to share the credit if you promptly make your work public (and make a convincing case that it was independent). On the other hand, if you circulate a paper publicly, then you no longer need to worry about credit, but anyone can use your ideas. This is very reasonable: credit is not awarded for being smart or accomplished, but rather for contributing to the community, and that contribution is the ideas. Being able to use and build on these ideas is why they are so valuable, and this is the justification for awarding credit.
The alternative to this trade-off would be to allow researchers to claim credit while temporarily reserving the exclusive right to do follow-up work. In that case, the optimal strategy would be clear: make a public announcement as soon as you cross the neecessary threshold, but then delay finalizing the work for as long as possible. This would be very disruptive for the research community.
In practice, things are slightly less black and white than I've described them above. It can be considered rude to compete too strenuously without a very good reason. If you come up with a minor idea building on someone else's work in progress, it's common to donate it to them rather than competing, and a major idea may lead to a collaboration. However, this is a matter of politeness rather than ethics.
There is a risk in releasing your results early (since others may build on your work before you do it), but there is also a risk in not doing it (since an article doing the exact same thing may appear before you make your preprint public).
There are also other advantages in publishing early (and, more in general, making your work known in conferences before it is fully peer-reviewed):
instead of "stealing your ideas", people may contact you and propose a collaboration.
if people know your work, they can cite you.
That is why I suggest releasing early, at least in my field (numerical linear algebra --- which, I realize, is a quite friendly and relaxed field, so your mileage may vary).
I upvoted all the earlier answers... and want to reiterate certain points. First, arXiv (and stable personally-maintained web-sites, e.g., at universities) should count as "publication" in the sense of making the information available, which is the ideal point of research.
Yes, there is some conflict with "the other" point, namely, staking a claim, getting credit, getting a job, getting tenure. But, as others have pointed out, it would have a bad effect if one could "stake a claim" without divulging details, thereby stifling others' work (if they needed to hope to get some "credit" also).
(There has always been an analogous hazard for beginners, all the worse pre-internet, that senior people can be "rumored" to be "working on something", circulated in mimeo to friends, etc. Mercifully, this is now diminished, I think, exactly because there's no excuse for limiting circulation.)
As Anon Math and others said, of course it is more civil to offer collaboration rather than to compete directly, etc., and this is vastly more consistent with our ideal of advancing knowledge (rather than mere self-advancement, as necessary as some of the latter may be).
In summary, then, yes, a relative novice risks having their ideas taken up by more experienced people. Yes, in particular, some people are able to rationalize that non-refereed papers need not be cited at all! This is, of course, barbaric. :)
A few points to add -
Why publish things on arxiv? So that others know your results. This is only relevant if you can get others to start using your results. It'll increase your citation count and speed up progress. You run the risk of getting people who publish things you want to do in the future.
What to do about the risk? You can explicitly state you plan on doing X. If I'm already doing X, that might light a fire and get me to quickly finish. Or I might try to collaborate with you. If I'm not already doing X, would it be wise for me to compete with you? I don't know how far along you are, but you're almost surely ahead of me - would I really put in the effort to try to catch up with such a high risk of being scooped? No.
So if you tell people you plan to do an extension the real risk you run is that someone else who is already doing it might speed up their work, not that someone will come along and start up quickly.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.749185 | 2012-08-04T17:06:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2752",
"authors": [
"Albin",
"Ankur",
"Asif Qureshi",
"Dan C",
"David",
"Grey",
"JeffE",
"Josh Watson",
"Jukka Suomela",
"Loic Coenen",
"Marc Claesen",
"Maria Diab",
"Martin Argerami",
"Michael Rosario",
"Neo",
"Raúl Salinas-Monteagudo",
"Tsuyoshi Ito",
"Tunchuk GalGal",
"Vincent Pfenninger",
"cagnol",
"dayuloli",
"dbmag9",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1069",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/122834",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1416",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1417",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/351",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/542",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6898",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6899",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6902",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6904",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6905",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6906",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6907",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6933",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6940",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6941",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6942",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6943",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6944",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6945",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6951",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6997",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7173",
"jkn",
"nohat",
"vamshi vundekode"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
11923 | Can a reviewer suggest references?
I had submitted a paper to a reputed Computer Science Journal. The reviewer has a lot of constructive changes, in addition to that he also suggested citing a few more papers, all by the same author. Since this is a double blind process, we don't know each other's identity. So, is it common for reviewers to suggest references in this field or any other field ?
"a few more papers from the same author". The same author as what?
@FaheemMitha I think he means that the suggested papers have all the same author. Which can be in the best interest of the paper, but could also be a way for the reviewer to get extra citations...
@NickS: I see. That should have occurred to me. Thanks.
It is a pretty common suggestion but you are under no obligation to follow it. Just look at those papers and, if you think they deserve to be included, include them. Otherwise just tell the editors that you disagree with the reviewer and briefly explain why.
I'd say it is a common practice, and I have both been given reference suggestions in blind reviews and given reference suggestions in my own reviews. If you are concerned about a reviewer trying to promote his/her own papers by the suggestions, I'll just say that if the recommendations are apt (i.e., if you read the suggested papers and they do appear to be legitimate references), then it makes sense to cite the papers regardless of whether there is a seemingly disingenuous motive by the reviewer. Even if you don't specifically use the prior work, it makes sense to mention them in your "Related Work" section. If you don't cite the suggested papers, provide a legitimate reason in your rebuttal.
Indeed, if a reviewer is chosen well, he or she should be an expert in the topic of the paper, and most likely does have apt references under his or her name.
I agree: judge the referred paper, not the person suggesting it. The last time a referee gave me such a suggestion, I wrote an additional section which nicely rounded up my paper, and I'm very happy for his/her suggestions.
It is very common. In fact, some journals explicitly ask the reviewer to answer the question “Are the literature references appropriate and up to date?” (in addition to other reviewing criteria).
Proper citation is an important part of academic publishing, and it should not be treated lightly. It is also the reviewers' job to make sure that you did not, in good or bad faith, forget to cite relevant work in the field. As such, it is common (and desirable) for reviewers to recommend citation of some papers that the authors may have forgotten, or not know of. It has also happened to me in the past, as a reviewer, to recommend deleting some references which I believed were irrelevant or too numerous. (In particular, some overly enthusiastic self-citation or friend-citation).
Now, it may happen that many references you were required to add are from the same author. Maybe it's the reviewer, maybe it's not, but it shouldn't matter to you. Read the papers, and if they're relevant, cite them. If they're not relevant, and you really believe citing them would not be correct, then simply don't cite them and explain your position in the reply to the editor. Don't make accusations (“the reviewer is trying to improve his h-index”), simply state that you do not believe the references to be relevant for reasons X and Y. Remember, the editor is the one making the final decision, not the reviewer!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.750391 | 2013-08-16T17:52:58 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11923",
"authors": [
"Faheem Mitha",
"Nick S",
"Vedran Šego",
"fedja",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/285",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7161",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7624"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
14224 | Potential disadvantages of a math postdoc in Europe vs US
I am a mathematics Ph.D student in the United States, and recently received a 3 year postdoctoral offer in Germany, which I have only a few weeks to accept or decline. The offer is very good (high salary, travel funding, no teaching unless I want to) the PI is basically the top person in my field, and the position also solves my 2 body problem (my SO has a similar offer from the same place), so I am tempted to accept it.
However, I have sometimes heard that an American doing a postdoc in Europe is at a disadvantage applying for permanent jobs since European positions are often restricted to EU citizens and American schools are less likely to hire someone who did a postdoc in Europe.
Can someone (on either side of the pond) offer perspective on whether my concerns are valid?
I need to accept or decline the position before offers for US postdocs are sent out.
One of the bigger concerns often is in respect to teaching: the expectations for teaching during a postdoc position is different for American and European universities, which may cause problems when you seek positions in the US (where teaching is, at least on paper, something that everyone asks about). But if you read "no teaching unless I want to" as "I will get the opportunity to choose to teach", then you shouldn't have a problem there.
This is a no-brainer. You are clearly afraid. Get the German post-doc and go with your SO. Quite frankly, European postdocs are way more prestigious than American ones and there is absolutely no restriction on nationality (rather on the contrary).
I'm aware of a few potential issues applying for academic jobs in the US after a European (or non-North American) postdoc. These won't necessarily come up in any given job, but they're the problems I've heard of people having. (Specifically, I know of different people who've had each of these problems individually.)
Many American schools are reluctant to hire someone who doesn't have adequate teaching experience, and especially at least some experience teaching service courses (courses to non-majors), since that's such a large part of the job in the US. European postdocs often have less or different teaching requirements.
Many schools can't afford to fly people in from Europe to interview for position, and will therefore officially or unofficially discount applications from someone in Europe.
There's still some variation in how people write recommendation letters, so a European writer is more likely to write a letter which comes across as negative to Americans. (More specifically, in the US, almost any negative comment in a recommendation letter, even a very mild one, is taken as a hint that the problem is much worse than is being said. In Europe, I'm told it's more common to include mild critique of an applicant in an overall positive letter.)
In my experience letters of recommendation follow the same standards in Europe and US: anything other than a glowing review and listing of the applicant's many extraordinary qualities will be considered a weakness. But I work in a very international setting, so maybe other fields/settings are different.
I have heard the same as Henry about European letter writers, but I think if you coach your letter writer properly and explain how letters are read in the North American context, you might be fine.
I'll contribute to answering on the European side… nationality requirements for European positions are rare, although not totally unheard of (especially in some strategic sectors). To give only a few examples, French CNRS positions and UK EPSRC fellowships have no nationality requirements.
More common, however, are language requirements: positions that include some teaching (lecturer, assistant professor, …) very often require that you speak the language of the country. So, unless you're targeting the UK in particular, if you get a post-doc in the EU, you'd better pick up the language!
I can say this is not completely correct. I'm from Belgium and I've studied physics where almost all classes were given in English by people from all around - even lecturers from Belgium had to speak English for exchange students. Same goes for software engineering which I'm studying now.
I'd say it depends on the field and country, not just the whole of EU. Most science/engineering classes here seem to be given partly, or completely in English :)
@DylanMeeus I agree it's not always the case… but still, the point of view of the professor is not the same as that of the student. You said “partly in English”, and in most places that's only above a certain level (Masters program, for example, tend to be in English, but Bachelor not so much)… but if you recruit someone as a colleague, you want him to help with all the classes, not only the high-level stuff :)
I was talking about a bachelor course actually.
But yes, it's more prominent in master courses - and the country plays a big part.
In Belgium, we are split in 3 national languages, so we use English to communicate very often.
For countries such as France / Germany, I think English is more of a 'stretch' :)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.750727 | 2013-11-19T11:00:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14224",
"authors": [
"Dylan Meeus",
"F'x",
"Jon jokja",
"Kallus",
"Pasoe",
"Willie Wong",
"heyox",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36705",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36706",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36708",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36709",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7976",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9084",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/94",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9570",
"my.back",
"rsujatha"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
21727 | High school summer research in fields other than biology/medicine
I am currently in high school in the USA, and it is relatively common for students to work with various researchers in the summer. The majority of the work done is the medical/biology fields, and I would like to know whether this is a common practice (or a possible practice) in areas outside of biology and medicine.
The biology and medicine fields make sense for several reasons:
My area (a large US city) has a large biology and medicine faculty (especially because it is considered a "hub" for medicine)
Biology and (to a lesser extent medicine) seems to be more accessible to a high school student with a background in the AP curriculum and the medical programs available to students at the local districts. Subjects like mathematics are hardly accessible to undergraduates, much less high school students.
Biology and Medicine are largely laboratory sciences, while the same can not be said about things like mathematics. Furthermore, the social sciences and the humanities (less present in my area, but still significant) seem to be nearly absent in summer research type work.
It makes sense, therefore that with a large population of students wanting to be in the medical field, and a large research faculty, that the practice of either formal (through a program), or more informal (E-mail a researcher for a spot in lab rotation), research happens in these fields. So, is there a similar practice in mathematics, physics, the social sciences, or any other area of science?
EDIT: In response to amlrg's post I have some further questions: how can I tell if a researcher in physics or math is studding a computational area? How should I go about approaching such a researcher>
It is interesting to note that the fact that a similar thing does not happen in the non medical/academic disciplines popular around here. For example, as an Engineering hub, you might expect that it would be common for students to shadow or intern with engineers, but this is much less common than high school research in academia.
For what it's worth: I have high school summer research interns every summer in my engineering lab, and I know others who do too. But only through formal programs.
I changed tags to add US, as it is country-specific; the long digression about medicine is somehow an another topic, with some good guesses, but I think - not all (and may deserve a different question).
"it is relatively common for students to work with various researchers in the summer" What? is that true? is that common even? I have never heard of that.
This is not really a proper answer, but rather more like a stretched out comment. In the field of biology, lab hands can be relatively quickly trained. Now, they probably won't understand much of the science that is going on behind the scenes, but doing some of the routine tasks of "pressing buttons", they can free the more senior researchers to do the more challenging parts of the research.
Mathematics, on the other hand, often requires several years of training before you can start contributing in any way and there is no good way to avoid this. A beginning university student might have heard of the concepts that are being researched in some lab, but it is unlikely that a typical high school student can do much. This is all something that you already mentioned in your question.
Having said this, many things in the field of computational science (be it physics, mathematics, astronomy, biology, sociology, or whatever) are rather mundane and could easily be done by someone with a limited knowledge of the field (and I remember there being a recent example in astronomy where a high school student coded up an algorithm to find some shapes of galaxies/starts/something, and it worked so remarkably well that it ended up being published, but I could not find the reference right now). If you truly are motivated enough to contact and seek advisers in your area yourself, I am sure that many would be happy to show you the ropes. Don't be too discouraged, though, if some refuse (or do not even respond), as they might be too busy doing their own research to train new people who will shortly be leaving the lab, anyway.
EDIT to reflect the revised question: I want to point out that earlier I suggested computational science, but there are also experimental physics (for example) labs, which might also have something to do for an interested high school student.
There is no separate department for computational science, because it is not really a study of its own; rather you can use computers in any field (for the sake of completeness, there sometimes might be a department called computational science, but its scope is usually more limited than my definition here). Suppose you were interested in physics at institute X. Go to the website of the department of physics of X and see what the groups are working on. Find the homepages of the individual groups (professors) and see if they seem to be using computers (it will usually be more or less obvious from the types of figures on the website, or they might just explicitly mention it) and if their research appears to be of interest to you. See their publications, and while you some of the papers might be behind a paywall, try Googling the titles and you might find them on arXiv.org or similar free to access preprint servers.
Now the publications themselves are often quite technical, don't get disappointed if you don't understand much, but the introduction section should often be more or less understandable. One of the things you might want to look for is to see whether the group is using some software package (they should cite it if they do), or if everything seems custom made. In the former case, a considerable amount of the work might be in preparing files for the software and with some training could easily be done by a high school student.
As for approaching a professor, and I am hoping that other users on SE might comment more on this topic, the best way, I think, is to have read a paper or two by the group and to point out in your email that you have a rudimentary understanding of the science and the scope of the work. I, and I am not even the group leader, get emails from students (often from other countries) looking for a position (bachelor's thesis or something similar) at our lab because they are 'engineers'. Being an 'engineer' hardly qualifies them for the rather specific work we do and shows that they have not done any research as to who to send the email to, nor to what the group is working on (as they never, ever, specify what they want to do or why they want to join our group, in particular). These types of emails probably never get a reply from anyone (although a high school student just might, for their lack of knowledge as to the specifics would be more understandable). Essentially the more specific you can get in showing your knowledge and asking some questions, the better.
Much of what I write about is a lot to ask from a high school student, and might not even fully pay off in the end (i.e. you might get rejected). I hope that in any case this gets you interested in reading academic papers and gives you a better understanding of what it is that scientists do.
That is what I suspected to be true. I have two "follow up" questions: is computational science its own department? (i.e. if I go the university's website, where would I find the scientist working in computational projects rather than non-computational projects?) Secondly, and perhaps this deserves its own question, but how would I go about contacting such a scientist about working with them?
@JuanSebastianLozanoMuñoz I'm not sure if you get a notification of my edit, so I am pointing out that I expanded my "answer" quite a bit (and again I am a bit hesitant in calling it an answer, for it is not very specific).
Thank you so much for this expanded answer, it is exactly what I was looking for. I am already relatively comfortable with reading physics, chemistry and biology papers to glean some meaning from them (no doubt that a lot goes over my head, but I usually get the general idea of the paper) and so I think that your advice is feasible and prima facie spot on.
You can look for organizations for gifted high school students. For example in Poland there is Polish Children's Fund providing possibility of research work in institutes. In US I am not much aware of possibilities, but there is Center of Excellence in Education organizing Research Science Institute each summer. Such programs are highly competitive.
Another route would be asking participants of Intel ISEF with topics related to your research interests.
And I know a number of people who went into some collaborations through informal routes. But more than often they were onsite, visiting some institute and talking with professors a lot long before starting collaboration (rather than meeting / mailing with the main goal of summer internship). In any case, there are many random variables, but if you are really motivated it might be worth trying!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.751137 | 2014-05-31T03:15:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21727",
"authors": [
"Juan Sebastian Lozano",
"Piotr Migdal",
"alarge",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15151",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53576",
"user4052054"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
9761 | What's the expected level of paper for top conferences in Computer Science
What's the expected level of paper to be submitted to top level conferences in theoretical computer science (FOCS/SODA/STOC)?
I think there should be four main concern:
Is it a novel results?
How hard is the paper?
Generality and extension of the results.
Is it an interesting topic?
But actually I cannot imagine how reviewers are going to measure above concerns, e.g, If in some paper there is 10 mediocre result means is good? ...., also I don't know is there any other important thing that we should be careful about it for top conferences.
Actually someone can try to send the paper to the FOCS/SODA/STOC and see if is rejected then send it to some other conferences, but IMHO this is not appreciated. It's good if referees to related conferences help to understand what did they expecting for top conferences?
P.S1: Actually one of an important things in all the conferences is writing style, but suppose all preliminary stuffs like writing are OK.
P.S2: I could talk about this with my adviser, but also it's very appreciated to see other top conferences reviewers/participants/... opinion about this.
P.S3: Also experience of reviewers in similar fields would be very appreciated.
What's the expected level of paper to be submitted to top level conferences in theoritical computer science (FOCS/SODA/STOC)?
Top. The top level.
My experience on program committees for STOC, FOCS, ITCS, SODA, SOCG, etc., is that there are FAR more submissions of publishable quality than can be accepted into the conference. By "publishable quality" I mean a well-written presentation of a novel, interesting, and non-trivial result within the scope of the conference.
For example, I was on the STOC 2013 program committee. We accepted 99 out of 361 submissions. Program committee members were specifically instructed to limit the top rating to only the top 20% of the papers we reviewed; at least for me, that meant some very hard choices. Most of the discussion in the last week of the review cycle revolved around papers that were clearly very strong, but were not obviously "competitive" with other papers that were already accepted.
There are several questions that come up over and over in the FOCS/STOC review cycle:
How surprising / novel / elegant / interesting is the result?
How surprising / novel / elegant / interesting / general are the techniques?
How technically difficult is the result? Ironically, FOCS and STOC committees have a reputation for ignoring the distinction between trivial (easy to derive from scratch) and nondeterministically trivial (easy to understand after the fact).
What is the expected impact of this result? Is this paper going to change the way people do theoretical computer science over the next five years?
Is the result of general interest to the theoretical computer science community? Or is it only of interest to a narrow subcommunity? In particular, if the topic is outside the STOC/FOCS mainstream—say, for example, computational topology—does the paper do a good job of explaining and motivating the results to a typical STOC/FOCS audience?
As a general rule, for a paper to be accepted to STOC/FOCS, at least one person on the program committee must be willing to pound on the table and demand that the paper is accepted, with strong answers to all these questions. Which means that as a minimum, the authors must have compelling answers to all these questions, even if professional modesty forbids writing those answers into the paper.
Specific criteria vary between different conferences, and not only because of the obvious differences in topical coverage. A well-written paper that combines existing techniques is a surprising way to obtain an elegant proof of a novel and interesting result, but does not introduce new techniques or require much technical sophistication, is much more likely to be accepted at SODA than at STOC or FOCS. (I've seen more than one paper rejected from STOC and accepted to SODA with precisely that review summary at both conferences.) ITCS favors conceptual contributions — new approaches, new models, new problem areas — over technical difficulty.
But at its core, conference reviewing is a random process. (As Baruch Awerbuch put it: "...whose expectation depends on the submissions, and whose variance depends on the program committee.") Every submission is a gamble. Your chances of winning the lottery may be small, but they're infinitely larger if you actually buy a ticket than if you don't.
Write the best papers you can.
Keep your target audience in mind when you write.
Especially if you're submitting to a conference for the first time, get feedback on your paper from a community expert well before you submit.
If you believe you have a reasonable chance of acceptance, submit it. Be respectful but brutally honest with yourself. Do not listen to the Impostor Syndrome.
Regardless of the outcome, take reviews and other feedback seriously. Don't just revise your paper; also revise your writing habits and your mental model of the audience for future submissions.
Rejection is not the end of the world. It's only one paper; you'll write dozens more.
Actually someone can try to send the paper to the FOCS/SODA/STOC and see if is rejected then send it to some other conferences, but IMHO this is not appreciated.
It's a bit more subtle than that. Submitting a paper that might get in is fine. What PCs really don't like is being asked to review submissions that are clearly below threshold, especially papers that were previously submitted to comparable conferences but were not updated to respond to previous reviews. (Even when a paper is submitted to several different conferences, it's not uncommon to have overlapping sets of reviewers. I've been asked to review four different submissions of the same paper.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.751816 | 2013-05-01T15:15:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9761",
"authors": [
"Gaurav Mishra",
"Kevin Schenkers",
"Mohit",
"Morwenn",
"d-coder",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24002",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24006",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24011",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24013",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24015",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24020",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24117",
"user24006",
"vkoukou"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
32980 | Who is eligible to apply for instructor or assistant professor positions?
I am a math PhD student in my last year, and I've been on mathjobs.org looking for jobs.
I see a lot of jobs for instructor positions, or jobs titled "assistant professor", where the main work load seems to be teaching undergraduates and no research.
It seems that the main qualifications are a PhD. I am confused on what kind of applicant is qualified to apply. It seems that I am qualified enough to apply, assuming I receive my PhD by the time the job starts, but I am worried I am being naive. I do realize that someone that has already had an instructing position, or "assistant professor" position previously, or experience as a postdoc, would look better than a fresh PhD.
Are these jobs typically given to PhD's that have been through a few postdocs, or do PhDs straight out of grad school have a fair enough chance at getting the job?
To be blunt, am I wasting my time applying for these positions?
A reasonable way to get a sense of your chances at a particular department is to look at their faculty web page and see if recent hires have their CVs posted. You can see how their qualifications (as of their hire date) compare to yours.
No, you are not wasting your time. For assistant professorships at colleges with little or no research component, you should feel free to apply in your last year of a PhD program.
I do realize that someone that has already had an instructing position, or "assistant professor" position previously, or experience as a postdoc, would look better than a fresh PhD.
In my experience that is not necessarily the case. In my PhD program, probably more graduates go on to this type of job than any other career trajectory. Many of our graduates do get tenure track jobs straight out of graduate school. Getting such jobs later after doing a temporary position is still possible, but it seems to me that the chance goes down. Even top twenty liberal arts colleges still hire many assistant professors straight out of grad school. Obviously they could select candidates with postdoctoral / visiting faculty experience. They often choose not to. I would go so far as to say that in many teaching jobs, postdoctoral experience could be viewed as a bit of a mismatch.
(An old friend of mine has written an article about the pleasures of being a visiting faculty member. To a certain degree it contradicts what I said above. But I think he is more looking on the bright side of taking multiple visiting positions than suggesting that they are necessary.)
Three more comments:
You should know that an "instructor" position is typically very different from an "assistant professor" position. Suffice it to say that if you want an assistant professor position, you probably do not want an instructor position. In many math departments, there are recently hired instructors with PhDs teaching alongside of instructors without PhDs who have had the job for a longer period of time. This is not saying good things about the current job market. In my opinion, having a PhD makes you overqualified (and certainly, underpaid) for most instructorships, but of course it's up to you to decide on what's worth your while.
Rather than further academic training, what you want to have in order to get these jobs are a strong teaching record and excellent teaching abilities in an interview / model classroom situation. Many PhD programs nowadays provide opportunities for their students to display these credentials. If you are looking for a primarily teaching job post-PhD, I hope you have been doing everything in your power to acquire these credentials during your graduate career: in many cases, this provides the best opportunity to do so. (If you are not sure where you want to go on the teaching/research perspective, I hope that you have erred on the side of acquiring more of these credentials than you will necessarily need.)
When it comes to individual departments, Nate Eldredge made a good suggestion: you can look through CVs of recent (and less recent) hires to see what their credentials are. However, a small department may have a small sample size. Nowadays many (most?) people on the academic job market apply to on the order of a hundred jobs; necessarily this includes many jobs for whom the goodness of fit is unknown to them. Not applying to jobs because you are worried that you might not be competitive does not seem like a good strategy when so many other strong candidates are applying for everything in sight. You don't have to stuff envelopes anymore (like I did when I was applying for jobs less than ten years ago!), so the differential amount of work in applying to some positions that you fear might be a stretch but don't know is small. When in doubt, apply. I say this as someone who reads through hundreds of applications a year. If we're not interested, then we're not interested, but it's no problem.
It's becoming more and more common for new PhD's in mathematics to do one or two years as a "visiting assistant professor" before landing a tenure track position at a four year college, even one with no research expectations to speak of.
@Brian: I think you're right. I take that more as a sign of the tightness of the job market than an indication that these colleges are specifically looking for post-PhD experience. What do you think? (And it depends on your student teaching experience: if all you did was grading and TAing, you need to take an actual teaching job to get a teaching portfolio.) But all in all, I see the (ostensibly) stronger people getting teaching jobs straight out. In research it's usually the reverse: not doing a postdoc all but locks you out of R1 jobs except in a small number of exceptional cases.
Someone with a couple of years as a visiting assistant professor will typically have more teaching experience than a newly graduated PhD (who may have been a TA and/or taught as an adjunct at some other institution while in the PhD program.) That experience is a big plus. In my department, I don't believe we have hired a brand new PhD since I was hired in 1992- everyone has had some post PhD experience, mostly as VAP's.
i should add that I'm a professor in a mathematics department, and that these comments really apply in the discipline of mathematics, which has hiring patterns that are quite different most of the sciences and engineering and also quite different from the humanities and social sciences.
@Brian: Well, first: thus far we're all in math, so no issues there. I appreciate your feedback: the job market is subtle and I haven't fully figured it out yet. I think I am describing things accurately from my end. Would you describe your department as having "little to no research component"? Anyway, I think a lot turns on how much experience the candidate can acquire as a student, as we've both mentioned.
Thanks for the helpful comments. I actually had no idea that I could be applying for visiting assistant professor positions.
No, I wouldn't describe my department as being "little to no research component", but rather as "in between." We have a graduate program (which until recently was just at the MS level), 2-3 teaching loads, and research expectations, but not at the level of the R1's. To get hired in a tenure track position in our department you have to demonstrate good teaching as well as promise in research.
@Felx; VAP positions are often much less competitive than tenure track positions. As I recall we had only a couple of dozen applicants for our last VAP position but we'll likely end up with hundreds of applicants for the tenure track position that we've advertised this year.
From my perspective at a regional university: most of our hires in math are new PhDs or have just a few years after PhD. But the application you need to be competitive for teaching-focused schools and positions is quite different than what you need for research-first positions.
For postdocs and tenure-track jobs at R-1 schools, you want to emphasize your research, while showing that your teaching is decent and not likely to cause complaints among the students. Bland teaching, to some degree, is a good thing - if you focus "too much" about teaching, it may cause people to worry about your research productivity.
For tenure-track jobs at teaching-oriented schools, you want to demonstrate that you will be excellent at teaching, not just unobjectionable. As much as possible, you want to demonstrate a history of teaching excellence as a graduate student (and after graduation, if applicable). If you focus "too much" on research, it may cause people to worry about your teaching quality.
Many schools "in the middle", including mine, are looking to increase their research profile, so we require much more in the area of research than we did 20 years ago. But we still look for teaching excellence, not just competence.
One common mistake (particularly among people who are sending out hundreds of applications) is sending the same application everywhere. If you send a research-focused application to a school where teaching is the primary criterion, you are not likely to make it past the first round of cuts. With hundreds of applications for the position, there will almost certainly be other candidates who have similar research accomplishments and demonstrated teaching excellence.
My advice for graduate students in general is to keep in mind the type of position you'd like to have 10 years after getting your PhD, and begin to groom your vita during graduate school to be competitive for that type of position. This may be easier said than done, of course.
Not customizing your application to a particular position is a huge mistake, and it's very common. Sometimes the applications are laughable (for example, I've seen cover letters that were addressed to the search committee at a different university.) There are certainly going to be other candidates who've bothered to read the advertisement and customize their application to the particular position, and since there will be hundreds of applications for any desirable position, the search committee will skip right over any application that doesn't meet this test.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.752608 | 2014-12-10T04:56:03 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32980",
"authors": [
"Almir Nunes",
"Brian Borchers",
"Churchill Ouma",
"Felix Y.",
"Ibrahim",
"Jerzy Jankun",
"Nate Eldredge",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Stephen Valenta",
"andreibosco",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22503",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92107",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92108",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92109",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92122",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92144",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/92148",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
29334 | Can a PhD student transfer to another graduate school after advancing to candidacy?
I am in a PhD program in mathematics, and I am in my last year in the program. This is the last year that they will fund me for. If I need more time, I will either need to pay the tuition on my own, or not complete my degree.
I feel that my advisor and department do not support me well. I am not going to go into the details, but if I had known better, I should have left with a Master's three years ago and applied for another PhD program. I was wondering how feasible it would be to re-apply into a PhD program at another institution. Keep in mind that I am entering my sixth year into the program, and I've already passed to candidacy. I realize that this may look bad on my part, that I've stayed at my own institution and at the last moment decided to leave. I am looking for advice and thoughts on this.
I realize that the reasonable thing to do would be to stick it out in my own program and try to finish, and if that doesn't work, then possibly try to apply somewhere else. One of my professors told me that it may be just as hard for me to get a postdoc as it is for me to be accepted into another PhD program. So I am curious if anyone has any experience with a similar situation. The reason why I am considering re-applying to grad school is that I feel that I may thrive at a different institution and have a better possibility of landing a postdoc or an academic job if I started all over.
Unfortunately, it's probably not feasible to start over elsewhere in the near future. You can certainly try applying, and it might work out, especially if you have a really compelling explanation. However, I think the chances are slim.
The basic question is how much progress towards a thesis you have made during your six years in grad school. If you're close to finishing, then nobody will think it makes sense to start over from scratch in the same subfield (or even a related one). At that point, you're not genuinely starting over, but just extending your time in grad school beyond six years. In particular, continuing in a similar area will come across as a request for another school to provide the additional funding your current university won't give you, and that won't sound like a good use of money. Most schools wouldn't give their own students a seventh year of funding, so why would they give it to a student from another university?
On the other hand, if you aren't close to finishing after six years, then starting over might make sense, but your track record will look bad. You'll need to present a powerful argument for why you'll do much better the second time around. In particular, there are people who have strong backgrounds and excellent grades but somehow don't end up succeeding at research, and the admissions committee will worry that you may fall into that category. Taking a chance on a fresh graduate student will seem like a much better bet than admitting someone who has already spent six years in graduate school but been unable to finish.
So basically you're stuck. Either you are too far along for starting over to make sense, or you have a track record of failure.
Of course it's difficult to say without knowing more about your specific situation, but I'd guess your best chances lie in two possibilities:
Even if you don't get admitted now, you might fare better in a few years. As your previous time in graduate school fades into the past, you can try to make a case that you have increased perspective and maturity and a renewed desire to get a Ph.D. in math. I don't know how likely this is to work, but at least it gives you a chance to explain that you have changed since your first attempt at grad school.
You could try radically changing your research area. For example, from algebraic geometry to bioinformatics. Of course this depends on being able to make a good argument for your change of interests. You have to really demonstrate that you've finally figured out what you want to do, in the face of skepticism (many people will assume you are just flailing about looking for any chance to try something new). However, it gives you a ready-made explanation for what went wrong the first time: you were trying to do something that in the end just wasn't suited to your interests and talents, but you've discovered that this new topic is a much better fit.
Whatever approach you take, I expect it will be difficult to get admitted. It can't hurt to try, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. My gut feeling is that it would be easier to try to finish your Ph.D. and then salvage your career (but of course I don't know enough about your situation to say that with any confidence).
I'd second this explanation/recommendation, given my experience. Grad programs in the U.S. will be fairly suspicious of a grad student who's been in any reasonable program for 5-6 years and wants to move elsewhere (the notion of "transfer" does not meaningfully exist, by the way). "Running into trouble" in one's graduate work cannot be any sort of "plus", but it may eventually be forgive-able (job-wise) if/when one shows that one can do better than what happened in grad school. Yes, it may well be the case that getting a postdoc is no harder than getting into a new PhD program for you...
While this does not answer your stated question, I think it is important to point out that the end of the normal enrollment period is not the end of the road. At a research university, it is often accepted that some students will, for reasons possibly beyond their control, require longer time to finish a degree than typically envisioned. And schools are often willing to accommodate this by offering special enrollment status to these ABD candidates, often at reduced tuition rates, and at effectively part-time or in absentia physical presence, which would allow you to continue towards finishing your graduate degree while at the same time holding on to an external job.
I do not know how close you are toward finishing your dissertation, but I will assume here that
You have completed all coursework requirements.
You are well into the process of writing your dissertation.
By "last year in the program" you meant the last year in the standard program length and not the last year in the standard program length + any additional special terminal status.
Under such assumptions you may want to contact the graduate school of your university to see if they offer anything similar to
Princeton's DCE status which gives up to two years of additional enrollment past the regular period at a heavily discounted tuition rate.
Princeton's ET/DCC status where you are actually not enrolled as a graduate student. But you get a little extra time during which you are expected to keep in touch with your advisor and finish your dissertation on your own. In particular, you will not get charged tuition at all.
Stanford's TGR status in which you remain enrolled but at a reduce tuition rate.
I should also remark that while the job market has not yet rebounded entirely to the pre-2008 glory, it has improved sufficiently that this year I saw some advertisements for teaching positions that are willing to take ABD students if will complete their dissertation within one year of the start date. So if you are really close to finishing, but just need a little bit more time, you should consider that as an option.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.753438 | 2014-10-03T03:11:39 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29334",
"authors": [
"Anita Chan",
"Anton Sergeyev",
"David C. Ullrich",
"Glane Mabell",
"Hussain M Faraj",
"Jonas Schwarz",
"Matt",
"Ryan",
"Ryan Hopkins",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80494",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80495",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80496",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80498",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80499",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80500",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80507",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80509",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80510",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/80530",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"katalin_2003",
"paul garrett"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
108006 | What circumstances could justify getting an extension on graduate admission offer deadline?
A large number of US schools I applied to have put me on their waitlist, and since I also applied to a few programs in other Europe that release their decisions later, I still need more time to make my decision. (Especially because I've been put on the waitlist for the best graduate school in the world (or at least US) in my field, so it would be painful to accept a different offer, and then receive an offer from them that I cannot accept!)
I started receiving offers just this week, which is only a few days to the April 15th deadline, and I have at most 2 weeks to decide. That being said, I understand that there are other people on the waitlist, and I think the grad schools may say it's not possible to get an extension. But another problem I have for making the decision, is that I'm in a super-stressful situation for my finals now, and with all grad school stuff, the psychological pressure is high and I really believe I might make a bad decision in this situation.
Is that (the stress and pressure) a good reason to ask for at least a few days more time for making the decision (so I'll be done with my exams and have a couple of days to make decision in a more relaxed condition), or is that too personal to explain to grad school and not acceptable?
Most of your colleagues are going through stressful scenarios right now as well, finishing up exams, projects, term papers, and the other parts of their undergraduate careers as well. So it’s unlikely that you’d get an extension just because of deadlines.
If you had extreme extenuating circumstances—personal illness, family issues, or other events—you could make a request that is more likely to be accepted. But in general, there’s not much you can do.
I don't see the trouble with asking for a few days extension. In general, an inquiry in advance doesn't cause problems, as long as you make the request professionally. You should, however, be prepared for this request to be denied at least some of the time.
First, I would reiterate your continued interest in the program. Then I would use the short turnaround as the justification for my request, rather than stress.
If you were not invited to/able to attend the visit day as a waitlisted student, you might also request to be put in contact with some faculty or grad students to help you make your decision.
The problem with asking for an extension is that at that time the program may want to open up admission to their waitlist. If they wait any time at all after the deadline, the chances of admitting anyone off the waitlist drop dramatically, because those students are going to assume they will not get off the waitlist and they will make plans to go elsewhere. Asking for an extension sort of ignores all the other people that the deadline exists for.
@BryanKrause Sure, but I trust the program can weigh those dynamics for itself. For instance, my program has no wait list and routinely grants short extensions. I don't think it is the OPs responsibility to guess what the department's situation is - OP can ask and get an answer.
OP was already on a waitlist at those institutions, and therefore doesn't have much bargaining power. I see your point though that asking is unlikely to destroy relationships.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.754076 | 2018-04-11T17:33:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108006",
"authors": [
"Bryan Krause",
"Dawn",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/63475"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
13654 | Is the math jobs wiki around this year (2013)?
For the past few years there has been a math jobs wiki with lists of posted jobs together with "rumors" about shortlists, interviews and offers. This year the website hasn't been working. Does anyone know if the website will be available this year?
Here's the reply from Greg Kuperberg to this exact question asked a month ago on MathOverflow.
I will put it back up soon. – Greg Kuperberg, Sep 24 at 10:56
It'll be up soon unless he has changed his mind. Upvoting the comment there might help... hopefully.
It is now up and running!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.754369 | 2013-10-25T14:39:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13654",
"authors": [
"Aragon",
"Chameleon",
"F'x",
"Greg",
"Logan",
"Naser Hamidi",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35091",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35092",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35095",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35096",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35133",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35819",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35820",
"user3390629",
"Édouard"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
14173 | Creating paper on software tool
In my master thesis I developed a software tool that improves a common workflow used in a certain industry. Currently, no such tool exists, and this workflow is conducted manually all around the globe. I am currently in the finalization phase of my thesis and my supervisor told me to write a paper on the tool and the worflow improvement.
Now here is my Problem:
I have the tool and I can show that the workflow is performed better with it (our industry partner puts almost no limits on use cases, interviews, etc)
I have no idea how properly package this into a paper (also, what to objectively measure to "proof" the improvement)
Could someone please point out a few "good" papers, where a software tool was created for a problem domain (where no such tool existed before) and evaluated so that I can learn from it's structure, the approach and the proper "packaging" of the entire paper?
I think it's impossible to answer without knowing more about the domain of the software you've developed. If it is numerical software, I can help.
It's a decision support tool for customer relationship management
I wrote one that I think is "good" and that was published as a synthesis (as opposed to a methods) paper http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/12-0137.1
Read recent ICSE and CHI proceedings, many of them are about the design and evaluation of tools.
possible duplicate of Should I write a paper on open-source software I've built?
Although I don't have any specific tips on structuring this type of paper, you might be interested in this list of journals that focus on publishing scientific software. You should be able to find lots of examples of "software" papers there. Those papers that I have read in Methods in Ecology and Evolution have been particularly high quality, and you might try starting there.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.754490 | 2013-11-17T13:30:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14173",
"authors": [
"410 gone",
"Alex Sifuentes",
"Austin Henley",
"David Ketcheson",
"David LeBauer",
"Isa9a3",
"PureLine",
"Richard Albayaty",
"Tiffanee C. Lang",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/258",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36569",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36570",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36574",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36636",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9535",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
16677 | Literature search: Finding the most reliable data
My problem: I need a value for a specific physical quantity. I found several papers with contradicting numbers. How do I make sure to not miss the most accurate data by e.g. missing the newest publications on it?
In other words: What is a good strategy to find the most reliable sources due to newest insights (where to start, which websites to use best, which books etc)?
The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) runs a web database where you can look up constants: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/
These might not be the most recent ones, but they are regularly updated, reliable and represent, sort of, the academic consensus.
There are similar databases for specific fields of research. E.g. in particle physics, there is the Particle Data Group (PDG) which publishes the Review of Particle Physics (and the much shorter, yet comprehensive & handy Particle Physics Booklet).
I was not speaking of such general constants but very specific ones. In my case, I like to know how fast the inter-valley scattering time for electrons in bulk Germanium is.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.754705 | 2014-01-08T10:06:03 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16677",
"authors": [
"Andrew M",
"Cosima Maslani",
"DaPhil",
"Geosinus",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44876",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44879",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44900",
"illcu1day"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1124 | Good ways to multitask
While multitasking is not a desired trait unique to academia, it's something that seems particularly important for graduate students and new faculty. I've had many students ask me how to multitask effectively, and I'm curious to know what the collective wisdom of this forum would be.
what are good practices to manage multiple distinct academic
activities effectively ?
To make this more focused and relevant, I'll limit academic activities to
Taking (or teaching) classes
Working on multiple research projects
Writing grant proposals (or applying for fellowships)
service responsibilities
a healthy lifestyle with outside hobbies
flagged to make CW if the mods feel it necessary
I actually have a counterargument. In my personal experience (and also cited by a bunch of articles that are freely available on google scholar), I belong to the school of multitasking being counter productive. However that doesn't quite answer you question, If I really have too many things on my plate, I do end up being less efficient. I either try to limit my involvement or drop low priority tasks temporarily.
BTW, here http://productivity.stackexchange.com/ is a SE dedicated to personal productivity.
@Suresh: In general, we do not want to make questions community wiki. However, this question is precise enough that it makes sense to see if there are academia-specific approaches.
My professor once told me, if you are multi-tasking then probably something is wrong.
I have three answers to this question; I'll put them all here for you.
Don't.
Multi-tasking is a necessity when there are many tasks that demand your attention all at once. The people who most need these skills are either managers, whose work demands that they divide their attention among their subordinates as necessary, and those working in a highly collaborative environment, where interaction with colleagues happens regularly.
As a graduate student, this will almost never happen. Your responsibilities will typically include coursework, teaching assistantships, and research duties, and writing. Even your collaborations will happen at a slow pace. You'll rarely be in a situation where you need to get in touch with someone within the hour; almost all your issues will be able to wait a day. Considering that almost all research shows that multitasking decreases productivity, consider yourself lucky.
To that end, if you can train yourself to focus on a single task at a time, your work will benefit from it.
Pomodoro technique
I recently (~6 mos) read about this technique online, and I've found it very useful for certain tasks. The concept is ridiculously simple. Before you start working, write down the task you're about to start on a piece of paper. Start a 25 minute timer and work until it runs out. Take a 5 min stretch, put a tic next to the task on the piece of paper, and then repeat until you're done. If you need to switch to something else, write it down on the paper as well, and switch every 25 minutes. This way, you always have at least 25 minutes to do each task, and you can set up your multitasking in 25 minute chunks. (As an added benefit, you're taking stretch breaks every 5 minutes, which is good for your health.)
Getting Things Done
There's an answer below that mentions this, but doesn't do it justice. I've been using this for years and it's a wonderful way of keeping track of what you need to do. At it's simplest, the technique just advocates that you make a to-do list of everything you need to do. The useful part of this technique is how he separates tasks; he puts them into "contexts", which you can think of as "environments". Some tasks will be done at home, some at work, some wherever you have email access, etc. By breaking up tasks like this, you can easily see what you need to do at any given time by simply consulting the correct list.
This technique has gained immense popularity, and because of that many to-do lists online feature "GTD compatibility". This basically means that they let you make lists of your to-dos.
This method comes with a catch; if you don't do it rigorously, you may as well not do it at all. As soon as some tasks aren't on your lists, then you'll stop checking the lists, and then the whole thing goes to pot. However, if you keep the lists current, then it's an immensely helpful technique. For forgetful people like me, the to-do concept is a veritable necessity, and the context idea is a good way of segmenting what you need to do.
nice ! regarding the first point though, I'm intending this not just for students, but also for faculty. Even for students, they often work on more than one project.
@Suresh - My point in the "don't" section is that multitasking it typically more productive when you dedicate large chunks of time to a project, on the scale of days or weeks. Trying to advance a number of projects at a time is difficult, and it's often better to just work on one thing at a time. If you need to switch, try (2) or use (3) to keep track of what's what.
Different people would have different techniques. What I found very useful for me is to have a list of the 5-8 most important things I need to do.
I don't use any specific tool, just a simple text file to write my tasks down (always adding tasks so I will not forget anything), but keep the most urgent 5-8 tasks at the top.
I found out that the sole existence of this list is what helps me to focus. I don't follow the list item by item; I do jump between tasks; I start one task before I complete the the other. The important thing is that I keep looking at that list several times a day, recalling what else I still need to do, and trying to see the 'big picture'. Each time I look at the list I allow myself to re-prioritize tasks. Sometimes just to see the tasks written down is enough for one's mind to be able to arrange the day in the most effective way.
In writing papers about finished projects, it is important to take breaks - write something, and then get back to it next day (re-read what you wrote). So multitasking could be beneficial.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.754875 | 2012-04-15T03:29:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1124",
"authors": [
"Arash Sarshar",
"Fabian Fagerholm",
"Kelly Tessena Keck",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Suresh",
"acoolguy",
"aeismail",
"avi",
"dearN",
"eykanal",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2645",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2646",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2647",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2650",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2651",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6240",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7928",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7929",
"n s",
"user2651",
"william007"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
15595 | Why are there so many papers written in bad English?
I am pretty sure that anyone who has spent some time reading academic papers have come across quite a few "lemons" among them, with bad grammar, strange word choices and incoherent sentences. Such papers are always a chore to read, even if the topic is interesting and the research is good, and I have found myself throwing away papers just because they are so awful to read.
The strange thing is that these papers have been peer reviewed and are published in reputable journals. But still they are often near unreadable because of bad language. Why is this the case? Why isn't bad language picked up and corrected when peer review is done? I understand that a lot of these academics don't have English as their first language, but publishing a paper that reads like it was translated from Chinese to English with Google Translate and a thesaurus is not a good way to publish your research.
I don't think there's a black and white here. As a reviewer, I tend to go easy on non-native English authors and try to give a list of typos and sentences to rephrase. If the technical content is good and the paper is readable, I can certainly forgive even frequent minor typos. What really p*sses me off, however, is when I have to review papers with poor English written with co-authors that are clearly native English speakers (i.e., "free-riders" that couldn't be bothered to improve the writing of their own paper). Grr.
I found this gem in another answer: "the language of science is bad English"
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14921/how-to-improve-my-english-from-academic-papers/14923#14923
On the most recent paper I reviewed, the review form had a checkbox for "needs English language corrections". I think English language corrections should be done by English language professionals, not by other scientists. There are plenty of companies that can correct academic English.
Peers doing peer review may not also be editors/proofreaders/language experts. Poorly written published papers have probably not had editing done to them as part of the publication process.
I'm sure it depends a lot on the publication. There are many less-than-reputable academic publications that exist just so researchers can be "published."
@badroit : the last paper I reviewed had the same issue (native English speaking co-authors who should've caught the problems) ... but it also didn't cite any of the co-authors' papers on related projects, so I told the editor that I suspected the co-authors were likely listed without their knowledge.
U R seriuz? U R rejektin mai paipur "I can curez kansa" becuz U no like the way 1 ritez? I am humble sorri 4 waistin mai live learnin buyoloji insted uv praktisin mai ritinz 4 U. Urz A. N. Ortha. PS U can find morg on googlemapz. ---
If you want to ask why journals don't spend more time helping authors to polish their papers, that's a valid and interesting question. But, as it is, it sounds a lot like you're ungratefully criticizing authors for not being very good at writing or, even worse, for daring to learn your language instead of making you learn Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portugue
I tend to go easy on non-native English authors — Me too, if they're students. But I tend to be fairly harsh with tenured authors. After a while, not being a native speaker isn't a sufficient excuse; lots of non-native English speakers write beautiful English.
I think English language corrections should be done by English language professionals, — Oh come on. Seriously?
Why does everyone here assume that it's the reviewers' job to correct English mistakes? We should blame the journals and their "added value" here.
Also, keep in mind that not all reviewers are native English speakers.
Related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15824/is-there-such-a-thing-called-native-speaker-bias-when-publishing?rq=1
This question seems like hyperbole. Most papers I read in top journals have very functional language, and a few have inspiring (literally - they have inspired my own writing), elegant prose. Can you give some examples of these supposed prestigious publications with bad English?
I like V. Rossetto's answer (+1), but I think the level of cynicism it contains is more appropriate as an answer for why bad papers are published (to which I would add that there is now a glut of mediocre venues looking for content ... everyone wants to be editor or co-organiser of something; and I would also add that, unfortunately, authoring and peer-review is still done by humans).
But as for badly written ... I feel a little balance is needed. In particular, I feel it's important to caution against a common hyper-sensitivity to language problems in publications.
The phrase "badly-written" is subjective. Sure, the readability of the paper is an important aspect of the quality of the paper, and there is some minimum level of language quality that is a prerequisite, but that level can be artificially high for some academics.
The majority of research is published in English by non-native speakers. Many papers are primarily authored by students in their 20's/30's who might be quite new to English and to writing scientific works. Even certain native English speakers will struggle to structure a paper in such a way that it reads well (sometimes because they are still of the belief that things have to be complicated and difficult before they can be published, so they write in a complicated and difficult way).
As an example of hypersensitivity, I am a native English speaker and for a journal paper I was primary author of, I once had a reviewer complain that the paper was poorly written. His/her main complaint was that we were confusing the semantics of "that" vs. "which" in the paper, saying that mixing the two up is not up to the formal standard of English required for journals. Eventually I did actually manage to stop laughing, but as I picked myself up from the floor, I realised I'd have to "correct" it for the revision. Three hours of Ctrl+F'ing "that/which" in a 40 page journal paper (and even worse, fixing the resulting bad boxes and widows again) wiped the smile off my face.
I also find that students new to reviewing, particularly non-native speakers, tend to expect a very high standard of writing. For example, I assigned a workshop review to a student once that wanted to reject the paper, primarily due to having "several typos". These would take 5 minutes to fix and didn't affect the paper at all. I asked the student if he had had any problem reading the paper? He said he hadn't. Did he learn something from the paper? Well yes, X, Y and Z. Why is he rejecting the paper? Necessary has two 's's.
Yes, the quality of writing often sucks in published works, but I don't believe that a paper should be automatically rejected just because it could be labelled as "badly written".
The goal is to communicate ideas with good science/maths, not to give an exposition of English grammar and phrasing. The original versions of many important publications were almost indecipherable in their writing. Even if an idea is written in such a way that you have to spend a few more hours to understand it, the idea itself might influence you and many other people in a positive way for many years.
Yes such influential papers are rare, but there are many shades of grey in between black and white.
And think of all the raw brain-power we will be missing out on if we perpetuate a culture that implicitly discourages non-English speakers from publishing!
In any case, for journals, I would tend to blame poor copy-editing and typesetting from the publishers. Most journals employ professional technical writers whose job is to avoid this situation. (I don't envy them their job, but still.)
I agree that my answer was cynical, yours is quite empathic for the non-native English speakers. +1 for this more optimistic viewpoint.
This is a very important addendum to V.Rossetto's answer, because, frankly, we don't WANT to reject papers just because of problems of presentation and writing.
Your answer contains a significant typo. ;-)
You tease! I did find another typo though. :)
@xLeitix. What do you mean by "Because we don't want" ? That "we" want to consider only scientific content ? that "we" want the editors to do it, it's their part of the job ? that "we" as scientists have other things to do ? I my opinion, not discouraging bad presentation is actually offering those who know about "good" presentation real opportunities for getting grants and positions even if their scientific work is not as good as the one of "bad" presenters. When examining applications, this remark comes to my mind quite regularly.
I might also note that an alternative, people only publishing in their native tongue with only the finest grammar and word choice, would be vastly worse for us native English speakers than having to wade through some less than poetic prose. Native English speakers are exceedingly lucky in coming to the table with a skill nearing mastery level, in a language that by total happen-stance turned out to the lingua franca of academics. Papers could all still have to be written in Latin, or...French. Please don't make me learn Russian because word choice miss sometimes!
"Three hours of Ctrl-Fing"? Find a nearby CS student and get them to use emacs on it!
Actually for this task I guess Emacs takes more keystrokes that a normal third-millennium editor with the usual shortcuts.
@sweeneyrod I got the impression it might be Word. But even MS Word would have shortcut for search and replace, surely?
Is someone claiming there's an editor whose search-and-replace can automatically replace only instances where "that" is incorrect? (In fact, I believe that WordPro and Word grammar check are almost there, but not simple find-replace)
I'm grateful to the editor who explained to me the difference between "that" and "which", which none of my high-school and college English teachers had taught us. (I still make mistakes, but at least I know "in principle" what I should write.)
To add something not contained in any of the existing answers: in some fields, language errors are more prone to create important misunderstanding in the mind of the reader. For instance, in mathematics, even seemingly minor grammatical changes to the statement of a theorem will often drastically change its meaning. My (purely anecdotal) sense is that in such fields, badly written papers rarely get through peer review at reputable journals. But I'm sure someone will disagree, since these terms are subjective.
Of course, plenty of badly written mathematical papers get through peer-review in disreputable journals. The result can be complete gibberish. For example, see this entertaining abstract.
Finally, I respect badroit's answer, but I still get annoyed when I'm asked to spend hours reviewing a paper and I find that the authors didn't even take a minute to run spell-check. That's rude, to say the least.
I agree on spellchecking. In defense of authors, I've learned to spellcheck LaTeX (without spellchecking the commands) using a terminal or Emacs, but that seems not entirely trivial.
Might be worth noting that the abstract you linked is by SCIRP, which was on Beall's list when it was discontinued.
@Blaisorblade, Most authors nowayas use GuI-based text editors for LaTeX, and most of them have good spell-checks (but, grammar-check is not really there unfortunately).
Badly written papers can still serve the interests of
the editors and the authors, if it concerns a hot topic (or considered as such), the article will potentially be cited by others even if they do not read it at all;
the editors, if they have difficulties to find enough good papers to fill the next issue. They need to show their employers they are working;
the referees, if they are cited in the references;
the scientific editors, if they have conflicting interests (like being at the same time head of a university's department);
the list does not stop here (please edit).
These are no scientific reasons, but they are dictated by the "numbers" and these numbers play a significant role for researchers applying to a position, a grant or a promotion.
It can also be that the authors made a really good discovery, want to publish to avoid being spotted, but prefer to keep their "advance". So they publish intentionally in a way that is difficult to read. This reason is rare in my opinion, but I've heard of a case. In this situation, maybe it is a deal between the editor and the author.
I would add that "Badly written papers can still serve the interests of" ... the journal and science itself, if the scientific content is better than the writing.
@xLeitix. Good point (+1). Feel free to edit the answer if you wish.
If only we could edit the published papers ...
@SamB lost count on how many times I thought that. WikiDemia.
"want to publish to avoid being spotted", fully agreed, especially in the cases of patents!
It's simply about saving money. Until the 1990s, publishers of academic books and journals employed copy editors to put text into readable form. This, not least, was because the typesetter had to input text by hand, character by character, into the machine. Typesetters, although as capable as anyone else of making unintended errors, had high professional standards, and would find it painful to deliberately embody obvious errors into their work. Since typesetters had to read the material, it was necessary at least to correct errors that would make their life hard. Moreover, the publisher, commissioning editor, copy editor, and typesetter had a shared culture of seeking high quality for the customer who ultimately provided their living: the intended reader.
With the advent of computerization, the expensive copy editor and typesetter could be cut out. The author is instructed to follow the style file, and the editorial job is now principally to check that this has been done---at least well enough for the output to appear at a glance to conform in style to the publisher's standards. Driving this compression, in the same period, were four other strong trends: the expansion of higher education; the increasing specialization of academic works; the establishment of English as the principal medium of publication for authors who are not native speakers of that language; and the measurement of academics' worth by the quantity of their published output. These trends all put pressure on publishers to produce a great multiplicity of titles. With money available to buy books constrained by general economic growth, and with libraries not having the highest priority in university spending, this profusion of titles could only be printed, at affordable prices for the end user, by sacrificing quality to cut costs.
Of course, this is an oversimplified description of what has happened diversely in hundreds of publishing houses over the past 25 years or so. It applies particularly to titles with a low print run (say 500 copies), where the costs of copy-editing and typesetting are hard to recover from sales, and not so much to more popular books and journals.
Good answer, but I doubt the saved money meant lower prices. Without copyediting (and with only free peer review) we have journals run for next to nothing.
A reviewer who receives a submission which he/she has sent back a few times on grounds of serious problems with the scientific content or superficial presentation might just be happy at least those have been corrected and not bother also correcting typos and odd choices of words.
One more thing: a lot of reviewers aren't native speakers themselves (me, for example) and don't pick up on all the errors or have a hard time formulating what's wrong with a given word or phrase.
+1, but it is not the responsibility of the reviewer to provide a detailed list of typos. Remarking on the quality of writing is important, but to provide a detailed typo list is (or at least should be) considered by all involved purely as a bonus. So don't sweat it.
A few years ago, I was asked to work with folk from a specific sub-discipline of our field. I'm not a scientist, but had been doing IT support in the general discipline for 6 years at that point.
They all spoke English well, and the majority were native English speakers -- yet their documentation had all of the same problems that you describe. So I wrote up notes about problems that I saw.
... and they rejected every comment I gave them.
The problem was that they had developed their own jargon, and what I had assumed they were talking about wasn't actually it.
The problems don't seem bad when you talk about it ... they had a 'prime key' which is somewhat related to a 'primary key', but not quite. And the 'dataset name' isn't the name of the table where the data's being stored (the 'data series name', but a serialized string for a given query. These are just subtle enough that you make assumptions when reading that they've obviously made a mistake, attempt to correct when reading it, and the whole thing just makes no sense by the time you're done.
...
I've heard people joke that jargon is a way for communities to keep out people who haven't yet given enough time to the community ... and I understand that sometimes different communities have slightly incompatible definitions ... but you really need some sort of a warning for certain cases.
When I was in grad school, we had a textbook that spent a full chapter defining what they meant by information. I thought it was horrible. I even told the author that when I met him at a conference (he told me some of my comments would've been more useful, but they had gone to press on the 2nd edtion just weeks before). But I've since come to understand why he had to do it -- as painful as that chapter was to read, it would've been even worse to try to read the whole book without a shared understanding of 'information'.
update : I said they didn't seem so bad on the surface, and until you actually run into these cases you probably won't appreciate just what a problem is can be. Although spelling wasn't originally called out by the question, here are a few situations where jargon can look like the problems mentioned so far:
Spelling : Some communities will use foreign words or the British spelling of words rather than an Americanized spelling to convey slightly different meaning. eg, archaelogy's provenience to distinguish between provenance as used by archives and museums.
Grammar : Some communities may consider the same term to be singular or plural; eg, 'data' is considered by the scientific community to be the plural of 'datum', while the computer science community considers it to be an abbreviation of 'dataset', a collective noun and therefore singular.
Odd word choices : Some communities, especially in the legal field, will assign specific meaning to words or phrases. eg, Bill Clinton's insistence that he did not have 'sexual relations' with Monica Lewinsky. In some cases, the specific meaning differs between communities (eg, an earth science, a 'data product' is composed of multiple 'datasets' (individual files; the relationship is reversed in solar physics). Issues also arise with metaphor in informal speach, such as the American 'kick the bucket' or the British 'Bob's your uncle'.
Incoherent sentences : When combined, the above issues seem make statements seem incoherent because we think we understand the message based on our incorrect assumption that we understood each of the words within the statement. It can be almost painful to read / listen to / etc. If as an American, you've never seen early episodes of Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef, you'll realize that American and British cooking terms are different enough to cause significant confusion
Even with all of those issues, I don't want to say that the above problems never appear in published papers. I peer-reviewed a paper last year that had many of the issues, and told the editor that I suspected the co-authors (American and British) had never read the paper; they didn't accept the poor spelling and grammar as evidence, but they did accept when I pointed out the co-authors' papers that hadn't been cited.
Problem with jargon is especially true when the papers are among the pioneers published, and they really must invent some words to describe something still not very affirmative, or still much fluid in understanding.
In my opinion, this answer has nothing to do with the question.
Using strange jargon is something different then using wrong spelling and grammar everywhere.
@PaŭloEbermann the point Joe is making is that it looked like spelling and grammar problems, but was really jargon.
@PaŭloEbermann : I was focusing on the 'bad grammar, strange word choices and incoherent sentences ' from the original question. Although it didn't mention spelling, I know of cases where jargon might look like spelling issues; in archaelogy, they make a distinction between 'provenance' (chain of custody) and 'provenience' (where the item was found). To someone who doesn't know they're two different (but related) terms, it looks like a spelling mistake. In other cases, the jargon is a word used as a different part of speech (eg, verbing of nouns) which looks like a grammar error.
@DavidKetcheson : I've added more details and examples to attempt to explain how this can be mistaken for the problem.
If you don't know the field's jargon, you don't stand much chance of understanding the paper anyway. If you do know the jargon, you won't mistake it for poor writing.
Unfortunately, you don't have to write a pioneer paper to invent your own jargon. I have seen this done way too often.
Because the authors' English is poor, the reviewers feel their job is to figure out the science and not the English, and the copyeditor does not understand the manuscript enough to make changes.
Try writing a paper in a language you know but are not at native level with, and you'll quickly see how difficult it is.
Then try fixing the English in the manuscript you're reading. I'm sure you'll think it can be done, but it takes a lot of effort. As a reviewer, your time is precious, so you might feel that it's not worth it and you should concentrate on the science not the English. If there are a few errors, you could fix those because it's relatively easy, but if there are a lot that will involve rewriting, then you might think no.
Then try fixing the English in a manuscript you do not understand. You can find examples of these in published papers. Pick a technical field you don't know well and take a random paper. For example, here's something I found on when I did this search:
Since we saw that in the case of rigid susy, the algebra closes even on-shell on the dynamical boson (the scalar in that case), but it doesn’t on the fermion, we now require closure on the graviton, even on-shell (without the S), hoping it will work in the same way.
This sentence reads pretty convoluted, suggesting that something should change. But if you don't understand it, can you be sure it's actually convoluted? Maybe it makes perfect sense to an expert. Furthermore, how would you change it? The only option is to make some kind of "best guess" and then ask the author, but 1) this is very time-consuming since it involves communication with the authors; if there are pages of such issues then the authors will take a long time to respond to, and 2) remember the authors' English aren't very good either.
Then add in the fact that the readership of the average academic paper is miserable and some people will conclude that it's not a problem worth fixing.
In my discipline, the reason is because most reviewers and editors are non-native speakers. Hence, they know that their English is poor and no longer comment on it.
Then try fixing the English in a manuscript you do not understand. --- This was essentially my problem a few years ago, as described in comments to this 5 May 2019 answer of yours: "... virtually every paper that was offered up was in computer science, and the two or three I selected, I felt that I didn't know enough about the field to intelligently make any but the most trivial editing changes ..."
I can name seven reasons off hand (listed, roughly speaking, in the reverse order of the "validity of excuse" they offer)
1) The stuff is so complicated that there is no way to explain everything
without writing a three volume treatise.
2) The author is pretty much "dyslexic" or incapable of expressing himself
clearly for some other reason (it is amazing how many first rate mathematicians
are like that at least occasionally)
3) The language in which the paper is written is not the mother tongue of the author.
4) This is the first paper of an inexperienced author (a student, say).
5) Someone is in a hurry to set up his priority.
6) Neither the author, nor the referee care much about style, and the editors are
too busy with other stuff to take a close look.
7) The journal is happy to get at least something that doesn't look like an outright garbage.
and, surely, there are many more.
The role of a reviewer is clear: Review the scientific quality of the paper, no the language one, as long as the language is "bearable". The problem is on the other side.
Too much is published. Journals are missing good Language Editors, but as well good Copy Editors and good Typesetters. If they have these people and they are good, they have to deal with too much work to do it well.
In 2012, Priem and Hemminger proposed the decoupled journal, in which these services are a 'bolt-on' rather than part of the journal.
In addition to what has been listed by others, in particular,
no need to spend money on copy-editors
no need to spend time on proof-reading
there are many scientists who couldn't care less about grammar and style, even in their own language.
I am thinking of the cliche engineer who hated language subjects in school and absolutely doesn't care about comma conventions or subtleties in word choice. They don't even care in their own language. If their own language is not English, they will care even less.
Apart from language, the same is true with bad formatting. Whether it's Microsoft Word or Latex or anything else, most scientists just want to get out the information and don't bother about stylistic issues that they don't even know exist.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.755556 | 2014-01-10T12:55:51 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15595",
"authors": [
"Allure",
"Andreas Blass",
"Ben Voigt",
"Blaisorblade",
"Blazemonger",
"BrianH",
"Cyriac Antony",
"Dave L Renfro",
"David Ketcheson",
"David Richerby",
"Faheem Mitha",
"Federico Poloni",
"Heywood Floyd",
"JRE",
"Jacki",
"JeffE",
"Joe",
"John Inglis",
"Mathieu B",
"Nick S",
"Paŭlo Ebermann",
"Peter Teoh",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Rafa",
"Rik W",
"SRobertJames",
"SamB",
"Sarah Allen Kibler",
"StasK",
"Super'd",
"Superbest",
"Thomas Hansen",
"Tom-Tom",
"Wendley",
"badroit",
"gerrit",
"gokul_uf",
"heavelock",
"hildred",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10030",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10666",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10677",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10680",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10683",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10685",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10692",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10695",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10708",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10719",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/148877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1622",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/285",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3867",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40730",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40731",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40732",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40733",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40757",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40760",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40761",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40764",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40765",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40800",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40807",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40809",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40890",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41113",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41116",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41600",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41601",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49593",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/739",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7624",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/84834",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8705",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8966",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/91305",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"kaoD",
"nxx",
"rlms",
"user1049697",
"user1505713",
"user3288943",
"xLeitix",
"zarathustra"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
57622 | Why don't most academic conferences make their budget publicly available?
I wonder why most academic conferences don't make their budget publicly available.
Making budgets publicly available could help explain high conference fees (which attendees often complain about), help other conference organizers, receive feedback to be able to improve, improve transparency towards the taxpayers since they fund most of academic research, explicitly mention what the private sponsors are and to what extent they are involved (e.g. to detect conflict of interests), etc.
Why would they?
@FranckDernoncourt: If the goal of that explanation of registration fees is finding items that could be saved, even the arguably questionable parts of the registration fees that are publicly visible (yes, gala dinners are nice, and when they are indicated as compulsory upon registration, conference attendees are often likely to get reimbursed by their employers, but that doesn't mean they are really needed at the level they often have) do not seem to really interest anyone now.
Asking too many questions like this is a good way to get invited / volunteered to join the organizing committee for a conference, at which point you will learn far more about these issues than you ever wanted to know.
People who organize conferences are already helping other conference organizers by the mere act of organizing. E.g., I recently co-organized a conference with around 50 attendees. Someday soon, one of them will organize a conference, and will have my event as a small (positive, or maybe negative) role model. I think it's a matter of efficient allocation of resources. I spend my time in the way I think helps the world best. That doesn't include releasing a budget, which to me seems pointless. My time and energy are better spent working on a paper, or even answering questions on Academia.SE.
@NateEldredge I can easily go next door and ask a bunch of conference organizers, but I'm trying to bring the information to some public place. It's sad to see the number of downvotes.
The downvotes are telling you that lack of financial information about conference organization is not a pressing problem for academia and that working on changing this is not a good use of anyone's time. I don't see why that should make you sad. Instead, you should be happy to hear that the world has one less problem than you thought it did. :-)
P.S. I didn't downvote the question...
I also don't understand the down votes. The question is ok, it has an answer between "because nobody cares" and "because it's not anyone else's business".
@CapeCode it's a concept called transparency
All conferences I have attended actually disclosed their budget during the business meeting. I guess this is field-dependant.
I don't think there's any universal policy behind this. One reason is lack of interest: in many cases I'd bet nobody involved has thought much about the issue, the world isn't clamoring for the budget, and publicly releasing it would take at least a little work. Inertia is a common reason for not doing things.
Another reason is to avoid arguments. The main thing people would do with a publicly available budget is criticize it. Some criticisms would be based on ignorance of the options and constraints, while others would amount to saying "more should be spent on my favorite things, and less on the things I don't care about" (which is not so useful if there's no consensus as to which aspects are more valuable). E.g., is money for snacks essential or wasteful? What if they are overpriced hotel snacks, but there's no other option without moving to a venue that is worse overall? What about a reception with alcohol? Basically, imagine repeating every discussion the organizers had about the budget, but with an unmanageably large group arguing, and with random trolls from the internet chiming in.
In general, I would assume it's not an attempt to preserve secrets or disguise unpopular spending. If the conference is funded by a grant, then the funding agency saw a budget. If it's funded by registration fees, then participants at least know how large those fees are and can compare them with other conferences.
I foresee vast wars at medical conferences between the people who are and are not claiming CME.
"there's no consensus as to which aspects are more valuable" - Indeed. A particularly nasty discussion would be between those students that are on low travel budgets or even self-funded and those from "rich" labs that see conferences as nice paid vacations :)
I think the last sentence is a good point. Conference participants are in some sense purchasing a product. In general, you don't see sellers providing a cost accounting to justify the prices they ask. They charge what they think the market will bear, and consumers decide if that price makes the product worth buying for them, considering their other options. Consumers really don't care how the producer sets a price, nor how the price relates to the costs.
Furthermore, for many conferences I've been associated with, the budget walks a very fine line - you have venue-required minimums to get the number of rooms you think you need. If you get fewer attendees, you lose money (which normally is not possible to allow), if you get more attendees than expected you 'make' money, but that usually gets plowed back into the next iteration of the conference. Indeed, the OP should actually help plan a conference.
@NateEldredge At the same time, since quite some funding come from taxpayers, the latter may want to look at how their money is used.
@FranckDernoncourt: In that case I would group the funding agency as a producer, not a consumer. As mentioned, the funding agency will have had some oversight over the budget, and the budget may be available to taxpayers via freedom-of-information laws. If you really want to see some conference budgets, you could go that route.
@NateEldredge: I think "In general, you don't see sellers providing a cost accounting to justify the prices they ask." is spot-on, but I wholeheartedly disagree with "Consumers really don't care how the producer sets a price, nor how the price relates to the costs." The mere fact that for most products, sellers can convince their customers that the production costs make up most of the price doesn't mean customers aren't very interested in the actual production costs as soon as they suspect they are being fooled into paying much more than what the product actually costs.
There are two basic reasons that I know of:
First, we have better things to do with our time than putting together a detailed financial report along with necessary explanations.
Second, the information is not useful to anyone except a potential conference organizer, and the variation across institutions in terms of what one has to pay for is considerable.
For example, some universities charge for room usage, and some don't; some require you to use official catering facilities, and some don't. Sometimes you can get a student assistant for free, and sometimes you have to pay. Costs vary according to venue so much that a having someone else's budget is useless. What might be useful for a neophyte organizer is a summary of things that they might not think of (such as huge catering charges for coffee breaks; administrative fees for processing credit card payments; ludicrous room rental charges; surprise, you have to pay extra to get projectors in those rooms).
Concise and comprehensive answer +1.
I can't answer directly the titular question, but, having served in the organizing committee of a couple of conferences, I can try to explain the high conference fees.
Let's take as example a medium-sized 5-day conference with about 500 participants. The main expense is the venue: a quality venue with a capacity of 500 participants, with several rooms for parallel sessions, can cost around (200-250) k€ for five days, probably more for high-quality venues in several countries (e.g. large 5-star hotels in the US). This makes already (400-600) € per participant.
Then, you have to serve lunches and coffee breaks. This, depending on the service, can cost around (20-30) €/day. For five days, this adds another (100-150) € to the conference fees.
Then there are the conference gadgets and the proceedings. These are not too expensive if the proceedings are edited voluntarily by the organizers -- let's consider around 50 €/participants for both the gadgets and the proceedings.
Now, what about inviting a few speakers? Paying the travel, lodging and conference expenses of, say, five speakers can cost around 20 k€, which divided among 500 participants, adds another 40 €/participant.
Finally, there is the support for young researchers, and this can add another 50 €/participant.
So, we are already in the (700-900) € range. But, wait, am I missing something? Sure, how could I forget? Of course, you might need to pay some extra-personnel, depending on how many services you need to outsource (conference secretariat, side events, etc.). These can quickly add another bunch of euros for participants. And if you also want to the social dinner, add another bunch.
You see that we have quickly arrived to conference fees in the (800-1000) € range.
Exactly. And every single one of these line items could be discussed, and seriously so. The entire budget is already discussed in great depth by the conference organizers. The very last thing they want is another six months of discussions of the exact same topics after the conference, if they publish the budget.
What this answer does not explain is the huge price differences between conferences across fields. In math, I never saw a conference fee this high, for example.
This. Even the cost of the snack service is often shocking if you haven't been involved in this sort of thing before. And "space for parallel sessions" is a killer: most of us can think of a facility where we could find one big room for merely a lot of money, but if you need two big ones and three medium sized one? No choice but to go with the built to purpose venues, and they know what the traffic will bear.
+1 This answer is great, but it misses one crucial component. At least in my discipline (CS), good conferences have sponsors (Oracle, Google, MS), that cover part of those expenses.
@Alexandros: yes, also in my field (other, less wealthy, sponsors, though), but frequently you have to decide the fees before having completed the list of sponsors. Later on, I will edit the answer to take into account your comment and that of Boris Bukh.
It makes me sad that "quality venue" or "five-star hotel" is even a serious item on this list. (Also, didn't you miss "pay some publisher a large sum for proceedings"?)
@Raphael as a rule of thumb, in most cities the top-range venues will be the only ones that have large enough facilities for a major conference. If you have 50 people, then you have all kinds of options from budget to luxury; but for large events it may well be impossible to find any facilities that aren't run by some five-star hotel chain.
My experience is that the conference budget is typically presented and discussed in the business meeting (which is of course open to all conference participants). So there is no mystery about the registration fees: all participants see precisely where the money goes.
Moreover, conference organisers are usually very happy to share conference budgets with anyone who is e.g. organising the same conference in the future.
Do you mean "open to all conference attendees", instead of organisers?
@Mangara: Yes, of course.
Game Theory Answer v.0.1
Suppose that two rival groups, the Mathematician's Guild Of Firenze ("a") and the Firenze Guild of Mathematicians ("b") both get granted some money and use of a building to hold a conference on game theory mathematics. Each wants to attract Da Vinci to their conference and each wants to ruin the other, as this town is too small to have enough funding for two rival guilds doing much the same mathematics as one another.
Now if (a) publish their budget in full then (b) can calculate how much money they need to borrow to decorate the conference hall with paintings by Michaelangelo, provide lavish conference food, and any other comparable nonsense thought likely to make their conference more popular and ruin the other lot. Alternatively, (b) can publish their budget with enough exaggerations in it to provoke (a) to outspend the published budget with borrowed money and ruin themselves.
Personaly, I prefer the approach taken by Da Vinci, which was to lock himself in his room, write everything backwards just in case, and stay away from the likes of a and b.
Funny, but not really an answer. Reality is much more complex, as anybody involved in organizing a conference can attest.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.757609 | 2015-11-05T17:43:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/57622",
"authors": [
"Alexandros",
"Alireza",
"Ander Biguri",
"BSC",
"Boris Bukh",
"Cape Code",
"Dan Romik",
"Fomite",
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"John Lucey",
"Jon Custer",
"Jukka Suomela",
"M. Galanakis",
"Mangara",
"Massimo Ortolano",
"Nads",
"Nate Eldredge",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Peteris",
"Raphael",
"Spammer",
"Stephan Kolassa",
"Tracy Mpofu",
"artificial_moonlet",
"dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten",
"fjtcin",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10730",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15477",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158261",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158262",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158263",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158266",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158269",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158281",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158291",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158301",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158304",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158621",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158625",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158642",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/158647",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16023",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/351",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38135",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40589",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/440",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/609",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8185",
"pebox11",
"vonbrand",
"xLeitix",
"xyzzy",
"y y",
"Даниил Носиков",
"瑾汐黍离"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
58304 | Data exchange between academic institutions
Is there any publicly available statistics on the amount of exchange of data that transit through Internet between academic institutions? (e.g. X TB yearly from institution A to institution B)
Including or excluding cat movies? (SCNR. I wonder how such a study could even be set up, with everyone using DropBox and similar services for large data sets. I'd therefore not trust such statistics overmuch.)
@StephanKolassa including cat movies. Yes, I don't expect data transiting via 3rd party applications to be easily countable: just focusing on direct connections (i.e. what network admins could see).
You should look at statistics from the different research networks that exist. For instance, the european GEANT network claims to transfer over 1000 Terabytes per day (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%89ANT . The US has the Internet2 backbone which is mainly for academic institutions and I expect they are moving even more than 1000 Terabytes per day.
In France, the network RENATER, which connect many universities, publish some statistics showing the live load of links:
(the French phrase "charge des liens" in the legend means link load)
Paris area:
Metropolitan France:
Brazil has similar resources for the RNP: http://www.rnp.br/servicos/conectividade/trafego
This seems to be like Internet2 in the US. But I suspect that most data transfer happens over the public Internet, not over these research/educational networks.
(Also, since these research/educational networks are widely used for experimenting with networks, they tend to carry a lot of "fake" data, which may or may not be useful to you in the context of this question.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.758792 | 2015-11-16T20:36:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/58304",
"authors": [
"Franck Dernoncourt",
"Fábio Dias",
"Spammer",
"Stephan Kolassa",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/160397",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/160398",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/160399",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/160545",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/160546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27555",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41208",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/452",
"semi-extrinsic"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
8464 | What is the easiest way to check for plagiarism in student essay papers?
I've had to grade quite a few essay papers in the classes I've taught, and I've suspected some may have plagiarized but I never really pursued check on them because it would be too time consuming to check their sources and pursue any/all possible sources where they may have copied from.
What's the easiest way to check for plagiarism? Is there a search engine tool that one could use to upload a paper and check for it? I doubt it, but other than that, I don't know of any other way to check for it than to put in more effort than I have time for.
easiest way...google some sentences
I've always wondered what happens if I take the definition of an uncommon concept out of my dissertation and make a new Wikipedia page out of it. Does that mean that my thesis will automatically get flagged as plagiarized in future?
Ironically? Your students are looking at an easy way out of their work ... too! I mean, they at least search for their ill-gotten works - you didn't search for this or talk to colleagues, presumably. Or tell us what age, subject, institution size ... Despite all that, you got a good answer, why haven't you accepted it?
From my experience of peer reviewing my friends who are ESOL, it is painfully obvious when they just copied and paste. And then Google pulls up whatever source they used.
There are plenty of tools out there. The best 'seems' to be TurnItIn. It's costly so if the school won't pay for it, you might not be interested. My school does not so I found other options.
Here is a tool called WCopyFind that is very good at finding plagiarism when one student copies from another but it will not find something online. After collecting papers for several semesters it has been catching more and more and most students take the same easy way out.
There are other options if you search for online plagiarism checking but they are not as robust as this tool above...however to really see the benefits, you need to maintain a library of old papers to compare against. What I like about it (besides being FOSS) is that it is highly configurable (consider a match 6 words in a row, or consider a match 9 words in a row where 70% of the words match). It all runs local (since there's no internet search) so it's quite fast.
It's worth noting that TurnItIn also offer their services to students who can use it to iteratively hide their plagarism. This makes me extremely dubious about their reliability.
In my department/university we have access to some systems for checking for plagiarism but most of us end up using Google, believe it or not. The reasons are that the plagiarism systems (we have access to) seem to work on a limited subset of work and that Google is extremely easy to use. My suspicion is that the existing systems may be tailored to specific subjects and may be excellent within these. So I would simply say, test your suspected essay by inserting sentences or even larger (key) parts of paragraphs into Google and see what comes out.
You can also do it yourself using google. Pick a single idiosyncratic phrase from the manuscript and search for it in quotes. It is amazing how often you will find search results have that same phrase followed by and preceded by the same words as in the paper. If so, you have found plagiarism. I once found a term paper substantially ripped off from a MS thesis (from a small schol in Australia) using this technique.
Some of the plagiarism tools do not seem to be effective against bilingual students who plagiarize and then translate the works with machine translation. It only takes 1 minute to catch:
Select and copy a random sentence from the paper containing some rare words.
Paste this sentence into an on-line translation tool, set to translate from English to the student's L1.
Copy this output and search for it in your favorite search English.
If the search preview finds a sentence word-for-word match, copy that address.
Translate the whole address from that student's L1 to English and compare that with their paper.
Since most students who plagiarize are also lazy, many do not seem to bother with editing the translation, so I've caught many students who submitted papers in this fashion where the output from the Web translation service was identical to the output they gave me.
If your school uses blackboard, d2L, or something of the sort...plagiarism detection (if that's what we can call it) is built into the system. For blackboard, the program is called safeassign. Students submit their papers through safeassign (I'm convinced that just telling them about this program cuts down on plagiarism), and then the program gives you a report (ie 23% plagiarized). A couple of great things about the program: it gives you the source where the student lifted the information and keeps a running database of papers so that students cannot use each others assignments. It makes the process totally objective, and you won't have to worry....the program does all the work. Good luck!
It's worth remembering that the report is only useful if you check what it is saying. For example, I just had a whole page flagged up - the cover sheet.
Recently, I had to check several texts for plagiarism, and I used a free plagiarism checking tool (you can google for one, there are a few that are returned). You just copy and paste text there and if it is copied from any published source the tool will detect it and provide you with the link to the source. That's how you can actually check the accuracy of references as well. Though the tools are not designed for academic purposes, it works well for checking any kind of papers.
Please note that some "free plagiarism checkers" will turn around and sell the papers that are submitted to them to other students. Be careful with their use.
I find TurnItIn to be well worth the cost. Even though students can check their own papers through the system, this is a GOOD thing because it teaches students what is plagiarized and what is not. If the student has to make adjustments to ensure that they aren't plagiarizing, isn't that what we want them to do?
Learning what minimal changes they need to make to hide plagiarism is undoubtedly a skill that will be useful outside academia, yes. These days, of course, they can simply ask an AI to rewrite it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.759013 | 2013-03-08T14:07:57 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8464",
"authors": [
"Borhan Kazimipour",
"Daniel Gaeta",
"Federico Poloni",
"Jack Aidley",
"Jessica B",
"Konrad Viltersten",
"Mallow",
"Mishax",
"Muhammad Siddique",
"Troy Woo",
"Zahra Dehghani Tafti",
"acr4",
"arp",
"grace",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1184",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/189887",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/195190",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20036",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20460",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20462",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20463",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20464",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20492",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20539",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23831",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5614",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5928",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7055",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87823",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87899",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87923",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"hunter2",
"nathan hayfield",
"user20464",
"رند عواد"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5964 | Choosing which version of an article to cite
I sometimes find an article published in several conferences.
If similar material is published in different conference proceedings,
how do I choose which one to cite?
Can you give a real-world example? I realize you might have to put some care into choosing the example if you want to preserve anonymity, but it would be much easier to answer the question if we could see the sort of situation you are facing.
Publishing similar material at different conferences is usually forbidden. Perhaps you mean publishing a short-version at a conference and publishing a longer-version in a journal. Or maybe you mean publishing papers with a common underlying theory.
@user2768 that is a rule in CS, where conferences are the main way of transmitting information. In other fields it is very common to repeat content in conferences.
Normally you should cite the most recent version, which is probably also the most prestigious venue (normally republication is done while ideas are working their way up the prestige ladder). It's possible that only the earlier version contains the material you want to cite though, but unless that's substantially longer than a later version, then I would assume that means the author(s) have recanted that part, and you should probably mention that in your article e.g. "Bryson (1986) claims fish can fly (p. 253), though note later work does not reiterate this claim (Bryson 1991; Bryson 1993)."
I have a paper that I had to cut in length by a factor of two, and I often recommend looking at the tech report/working paper version of the journal publication as it contains more interesting results.
It's a little unusual to have the same or even similar material published in different venues. First of all, you didn't say whether your area uses conferences as primary publication venues or not - I'm assuming it does, otherwise why even cite a conference publication.
In that case, what exactly are you citing in the article ? If it's a specific result (empirical, theoretical etc), then probably the oldest venue where it appears is the first occurrence of that result, and should be cited. If you're citing background material or motivation, then either the first paper that discusses the relevant motivation, or maybe a survey article ?
At any rate, the key is to understand exactly what you're citing the article for, and find the oldest occurrence of that concept.
I don't think this is unusual at all. Many people put drafts online e.g. arxiv, or "publish" in workshops before conferences, and conferences before journals. Also, material may appear in papers before or after it appears in a dissertation. Looking for the most archival version of a paper is a skill I always teach my research students.
Yes that's true. I was just a little surprised by the "difference conference proceedings" which I interpreted as "multiple conferences" as opposed to "workshop, conference, arxiv" which as you point out is quite normal.
You should have two goals in mind when choosing what to cite:
Give credit, by citing the first person to discover the result, in the form in which it was originally found
Helping the reader interested in looking the result up and learn it in more depth.
Either one of them can be more important than the other, depending on the type of your paper and of the context of the specific citation.
The two goals are often conflicting; for instance, #1 might tell you to use an obscure conference proceeding with a clumsy first version of the result, and #2 might suggest to use a clear exposition in a book by another author instead. You might want to go for a tradeoff instead and cite a newer paper by the first author with a better version of the result.
In any case, if your choice is backed up by either of these two rationales, or by a suitably weighted linear combination of them, then in my opinion no one can blame you.
On a number of occasions, I found myself knowing the author personally pretty closely, and would ask them which version they want me to cite. On other occasions, I would cite whichever source I read first, and just stick to that. People should not be cited five times for one idea; it is little of my business to untangle their political games of publishing the same stuff in different journals (a very common thing in the social sciences I mingle with), and I would do whatever works for me, not for them.
Cite all versions! I find this practice useful, because it gives me all the information that the author has. Ideally, you should explain the distinctions between different versions too.
This is not always a realistic option when you are under a strong page limit (and references are counted in the page limit).
@a3nm, individual citations can be condensed and/or merged, i.e., a single citation can include all versions.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.759831 | 2012-12-27T16:58:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5964",
"authors": [
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Caleb Hughes",
"Christian",
"Davidmh",
"Iceberg Slim",
"JDror",
"Joanna Bryson",
"Robbie JW",
"StasK",
"Suresh",
"a3nm",
"abhishek",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15456",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15457",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15458",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15460",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15461",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15462",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15463",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15480",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15508",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17423",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22768",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/739",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83275",
"lochok",
"robintibor",
"tvk",
"user2768",
"user3653377"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1660 | Contribution of gifts and hospital services to university revenue
This question is based on the pie-charts shown in this link, such as this one for the University of Michigan.
In most of these charts, around 5% of the revenue comes from gifts. What are these exactly?
How do hospitals and clinical services play such a critical role for the revenue?
I think those edits to focus the question are a great improvement.
Gifts are donations, typically from former students but they could come from anyone. That's just how higher education works in the US, and the tradition of making these donations is a big factor in how some US universities have become very wealthy (some of the donations are spent each year, but many are added to the endowment). The donations qualify for a tax deduction, so there's an element of government subsidy as well.
Hospitals and clinical services can loom large because university teaching hospitals are huge and medical services are very expensive. (You can have thousands of employees, some of them very well paid, and elaborate equipment.) However, this is really not relevant. The medical revenue is typically paying for the hospital activities and medical education, but not used to subsidize the rest of the university. Many universities do not have hospitals or medical schools.
+1 - One has to realize that medical schools and teaching hospitals are often massive healthcare systems.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.760251 | 2012-05-23T09:18:24 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1660",
"authors": [
"Aurélien Thieriot",
"Cugel",
"Elizabeth Lagesse",
"Fomite",
"Gregor Botero",
"Jay Pete",
"Jeromy Anglim",
"Jim",
"Marcin Kotowski",
"Sudarshan Thitte",
"Zlol",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17674",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17675",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17676",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17692",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17712",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4101",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4104",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4105",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4108",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7902",
"user4105"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1298 | Is the end of April too late to find placement in Ph.D programs in the U.S.?
I am wondering if it would be worth emailing departments that I haven't applied to this year, asking if they'd be willing to take a look at my application material. Any advice, or should I just wait till next year?
I applied to too few places this year, because I couldn't afford all the application fees. I'm saving up now but I feel bad that I don't have anything planned for next year, and I really want to begin my higher education since I feel strongly about it.
Closely related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1531/is-the-middle-of-may-very-late-for-graduate-admissions-in-the-same-year
Yep, but this one was asked first.
For the most part, yes, it is too late to be considered for graduate admissions at most programs for this coming fall, as most schools have already made their decisions as to who they will admit.
That said, if you are an exceptionally qualified candidate, and unusual circumstances have taken place, it may be possible to be considered by specific programs. However, there has to be some really strange events taking place. (For instance, one school I know had a banquet during their one prospective students' weekend, and accidentally food poisoned everybody—and ended up with 20% of their expected yield of students. They probably would have loved additional late applicants!)
But, basically, you'd need a department that had a major shortfall of accepted students compared to their research needs, and you'd need to be a candidate that would be strong enough to accept in the regular admissions cycle.
accidentally food poisoned everybody — Ouch!
@JeffE: Yep. Emergency-room visits and warm, fuzzy feelings about a graduate program do not mix.
We usually take our prospectives skiiing, and one year someone had some serious problems getting down the slopes. We've had to filter the skiing option to people who aren't rank beginners :)
The short answer is yes it is too late. The long answer is that usually only top programs have only one round of admission and other schools actually have also a spring round of admissions so you could trying going for that. This is not common but I found a few schools that do that, and some of them are actually decent schools. But I would say 85% don't accept late applications.
How about getting a lab tech position at your current school and get more experience/pubs under your belt?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.760531 | 2012-04-28T09:37:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1298",
"authors": [
"Bravo",
"JeffE",
"Suresh",
"aeismail",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/411",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
100850 | Can I submit my application before fall semester grades are released?
I'm applying to grad schools, and my fall semester grades will be out before the deadline. I know my GPA is going to fall, so I'm thinking of submitting my applications without those grades. Is it acceptable to submit my application when the grades aren't out yet, even though they will be out before the deadline for the application or when the deadlines are in January, that means they expect to see the grades for the Fall semester? (They'll be out in a few days actually.)
You certainly can do so—many students must, given that the deadline at many schools is before the fall semester is complete.
However, note that any school that accepts you will want to see your finished transcript before allowing you to enroll. Significant plummets in grade (going from an A average to a C average in your final year, for instance) will raise eyebrows, and potentially cause some schools to withdraw offers.
Thanks very much for the answer.
Could submitting the transcript without this semester's grades hurt my application? (Given that they probably know that I could submit my application a bit later with the grades.)
I'd still probably have no grade worse than a B+ (my grades will most probably be A-, A+, B+). The reason I want to avoid submitting with the new grades is that my outstanding GPA will become just a good GPA. I was wondering if in this situation not submitting my new grades could hurt my application more than it helps it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.760744 | 2017-12-19T22:26:08 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/100850",
"authors": [
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83029",
"nara"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
99059 | How can I highlight particular authors of an "in preparation" manuscript on my CV?
What's the right format for in-prep publication on CV? I saw on another post that the format should be something like
[My name], & Author, ([year]). [Title of article].
But the problem is that the paper has a few dozen co-authors and my name will come somewhere closer to the end of the list. Also, there are two incredibly well-known scholars that are co-authors of the paper, so I prefer to somehow include their names! :-D But is there any way I can turn the format below into something acceptable?
[first author], ..., [my name], ..., [Prof. 1], ..., [Prof. 2] ..., ([year]). [Title of article].
The paper is in a sense "sequel" to a highly-cited previous paper published in Nature, so there is a chance this will be accepted by Nature too. Is there any way I could mention that? (It's not technically exactly "sequel" to that work, so using that word would be somewhat misleading and wrong.)
Perhaps better to include in research statement. The statement would allow you set the context you want.
On formatting.
You should list publications/drafts as they would appear in a bibliography. The reader will assume that you (co-)authored every document listed. (Personally, I would assume your honesty and I would never think to check that you truly are the author.) The reader is interested in the titles of your publications/drafts and the venues at which you published. I'd suggest using italics for titles, so that they stand out, and for published works, I'd suggest that the venue follows immediately after the title, since it can then be found easily, e.g., Cynthia S. Cooper, Willie E. Wright & Sun He (2017) Mathematics: Criticizing Nervous Essentialism and Xenon. In ALB'17: 17th ALpha Bravo conference, pp317-495, publisher.
On name-dropping. You can name-drop in the body of your CV. But, I'm unsure whether name-dropping should be encouraged. I think it would be better to say what you've done. You could perhaps achieve both, e.g., in collaboration with [name-drop], I extended their earlier results (Nature'XX) to A, B, and C.
What do you mean by "the main body"? All CVs I have seen are completely separated into sections listing specific things, and I would find any form of free-form prose odd to include.
(I've replaced main body with body. Your publication list presumably appears at the end, outside the 1-2 page body.) I mean you can name-drop in the section where you describe that particular collaboration. E.g., Jan'16 -- present \t XYZ Corporation, Country \n ... In collaboration with [name-drop], I extended their earlier results (Nature'XX) to A, B, and C.
There's not really an elegant way to include some names that are scattered throughout.
If you cite it as Bigdeal, J. et al. then it's implied that your in that list somewhere, but you can't really pick and choose just to highlight the fancy people scattered through the authorship list.
The first author is not one of those reputable professors though. Any way I could somehow write something that at least implies one of those professors is a co-author? like "a project of [prof. 1] lab" or something?
@nra Not really. You could potentially reach into two or three authors before you hit et al. But I'd be skeptical about any other improvisation from standard citation practice. People are already a little skeptical of in prep in a CV as a concept.
You could list that you've worked with reputable professors in the main body of your CV.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.760879 | 2017-11-16T22:56:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99059",
"authors": [
"Dawn",
"Fomite",
"Tobias Kildetoft",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12592",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22768",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56938",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83029",
"nara",
"user2768"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
99637 | How to tell my advisor I stopped sending him weekly reports on my results because he was not answering my emails?
I have been working on my PhD from home for several months now because my mom is sick, which was fine with my supervisor up until a few weeks ago. Before starting to work from home (in a different country than my supervisor is), we agreed that we would communicate every two weeks and that I would send reports about my progress.
As I did so over the last months, I would rarely receive a response from my supervisor, who is a big name in our domain and is very, very busy.
After a few unanswered emails, I had the impression that I should just contact him in urgent cases, so I stopped contacting him every two weeks.
Now he is asking me to come back to work at the office because he thinks that I have not been communicating enough in the last weeks.
I am aware that I should not have supposed that he only wanted urgent information and thus I should have continued sending him my weekly reports, but how can I tell him that it is because I never got any answer from his side?
My wish is to find a good equilibrium in our communication style so that I can continue working from home!
Just tell him, honestly and nicely. Easy.
"Sorry for what happened. I stopped sending reports because I never got a reply. I promise that I will keep you updated in future. But it would feel better if you could send me a reply, even if it's only a note that you received my report. Can we meet and discuss how to continue since I would like to continue staying with my mom who is still sick?"
@Mark: That should be an answer, not a comment!
Mark's suggestion is good but soften it a bit: (1) instead of "never got a reply" say something like "I misinterpreted your silence to mean my emails were unwelcome. Was the way I was reporting during 9/x to 10/y working well? I can go back to doing that." (2) This is important: suggest a phone call or Skype once a month. To prevent small problems from snowballing.
Yeah, "misinterpreted your silence" is way better, maybe even "misinterpreted your responses" in case there was one response every now or then? Something like "I misinterpreted what you wanted, and tried to only prioritize urgent information."
What you said in this question seems very reasonable, and I'd hope that an advisor would understand. The other thing you can do would be to include summaries of what you were doing in the weeks you missed, so it's clear you were still working, even if you didn't write the email!
Yes, it would have been better for the advisor to send an acknowledgement email each time a report is received, and even better to give indications of whether the progress is OK or give the student regular 'pep talk' emails to keep the student motivated.
While I can imagine a student getting a bit peeved with the lack of reply from adviser, that is an unfortunate rationalization to use to stop their updates to the adviser.
Frankly, the reason to send the regular updates to the adviser is to prove that regular and sustainable progress is being made despite the special accommodation. If the adviser had any unvoiced concerns about agreeing to the arrangement, this likely caused all of those concerns (rational and irrational) to have blown up.
One of those concerns is likely that a typical student needs more feedback than the advisor can give remotely, and that the student might stop working without it. (or might decide they don't need to keep the advisor updated as in this case :-) ).
(this following wording is based on @Mark comment with a few tweaks.)
"Sorry for what happened. I have been continuing to work and the progress is good. I have attached the (X) reports from each the X weeks that I did not send them. It was my mistake to stop sending these updates regularly. Can we meet to discuss the work that I've completed so far and your advice whether there are areas that are weak? I'd also like to discuss how best I might continue this special accommodation in which I continue my work while staying with my mom who is still sick. My expectation is that I would need to request this special accommodation would be XXXX more weeks(month)."
My answer is not answering the question (how to tell advisor I stopped updating because he didn't reply to me) but I assumed that the real question was: how do I fix this so that I can continue the arrangement I had? In the face-to-face (or skype) discussion in renegotiating the accommodation is when one can figure out whether there is a regular feedback schedule that works for both parties.
I would say that, like others, you should tell him honestly.
Something to the effect of:
"My apologies for the lack of communication in the past few weeks. I was under the false impression that you only desired my reports in urgent cases, as there were several that you did not reply to. It was my mistake to make that supposition without explicitly asking you. In the future, I very much would like to continue working from home but I also would like to find the best way for both of us to communicate. We can certainly continue a report every two weeks but, in that case, it would be very helpful to me if you would be able to offer me a little bit of feedback for the report. I understand how busy your schedule is but I would truly appreciate it. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks,
[Your name]"
Thank you !! This was of great help, I chose Carol's answer because it made me realize that my supervisor probably thought I wasn't working the time I wasn't sending reports, but your suggestion is very helpful and i will use a combination of both answers!
What a tough situation. I'd say be direct, but I might be inclined to print a hard-copy of the unanswered email chain just to have some first-hand evidence. This kind of situation is never fun to deal with. Good luck!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.761168 | 2017-11-29T17:32:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99637",
"authors": [
"AJK",
"Louic",
"M514",
"Mark",
"aeismail",
"aparente001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/64075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/75255",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/83633",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9892"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
11910 | How to write a scholarship press release?
I recently won a scholarship related to my career focus. I was chosen as a winner in part because of a recommendation from a former professor. She is now asking me to draft a press release about winning the scholarship. I am hesitant because I do not want to appear press-hungry, but I would like to allow a write-up to be used as a means of increasing the visibility of the college and this professor. I do not want the focus to be on myself and my accomplishments. How should I handle this?
First, look at previous press releases from your institution and department. This may give you ideas.
But use the press release as an opportunity to speak to the public about things you deserve to be publicized. You're right, it doesn't have to be about you, but getting the fellowship is the award that gives you an opportunity to speak up about things you care. Press releases often contain quotes. In this case these could be quotes of other people talking about your involvement in a program you helped launch, or a quote of yourself praising whatever it is you want to praise.
In short: use that opportunity to promote something you believe in, in addition to pro outing yourself!
"[The scholarship] gives you an opportunity to speak up about things you care." I will use this opportunity...Thank you!
I do not want the focus to be on myself and my accomplishments.
While many of us (hopefully) have a modicum of modesty, there will be many times in your career where it is in your best interest to triumph your accomplishments, and this is one of them. In this case, it is a no-brainer: your former professor asked you explicitly to write the press release, and you should do it. Your university home page or newspaper probably has a news section that demonstrates the type of press release you're talking about (e.g., a short story with a picture and a description of the research and/or accomplishments).
The press release will be primarily about you (if you are the only winner at your school), but you should also include a paragraph about the scholarship itself and about the college and how it relates to the scholarship (e.g., "The X Scholarship has been awarded at Y College for the past 10 years, and was funded through the generous donation of so-and-so, who graduated from the college in 1954...). If it fits in, you can mention your professor's relationship to the scholarship and your involvement (how did she know to recommend you? Was it her impetus or yours?).
If you're concerned about how to write the press-release, I would reach out to someone with journalism experience, whether it is someone who works for the school paper, or the news-section of the school website.
+1. Another good resource would probably be your college's public relations office.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.761624 | 2013-08-16T01:49:35 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11910",
"authors": [
"J. Zimmerman",
"Nate Eldredge",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7921"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
7549 | Should I post publications in preparation (or just submitted) on my CV?
If I have works that are almost submitted to journals, or are in journal review, is it appropriate to include these on my CV?
if they are under review, then simply write under review after citing them without mentioning the journal or proceeding. I've seen many do that. But I know someone who mention in some of his papers ideas and cite them as under review but I am sure that they have never been even considered for publication. I dont know if this is ethical or not though.
FWIW - this is for a post-doctoral application to a facility in the US.
'almost submitted' = 'in preparation' Use that specific term. They will know what you mean. Like others said, just be prepared to provide a draft if asked to do so.
I will usually list things that are on the arxiv. They can be viewed as tech reports, so I don't see the harm in doing so.
Where it gets tricky is if (for example) you submit to a double blind conference. In such a case adding the paper to your CV might be viewed as a breach of the process.
But in general my view is that if you have the paper posted on your web page (and you should!) or on the arxiv, then it's perfectly fine to list it.
Okay, it seems I have to play devil's advocate again… because my position on this is different from Charles' answer.
My CV lists my scientific production separated between peer-reviewed articles, non-peer reviewed articles (I have none, but it could happen), invited conferences, oral conferences. As such, I would definitely not put a non-published paper among the “publications”, especially not among the peer-reviewed ones. In my field, it is rare to publish (in the sense of “make publicly available”) a manuscript before it is accepted (chemists don't use arXiV much, because most journals prohibit it), so I find it weird to list unpublished material in a CV.
So, because you didn't tell us your field, I would say beware:
if your manuscript is unpublished, it's not a publication, don't list it as such
if it's published (arXiV or your website or other) while in review, clearly mark it as such (and don't list it as peer-reviewed)
I would say that the “under work” manuscripts do not add much information anyway. The topic they cover is surely already covered by your research statement (or list of research interests), so why would a hirer care about whether you are writing this paper or that paper?
"why would a hirer care about whether you are writing this paper or that paper?" There's a difference between a research statement saying you're interested in something and actually producing work. Beyond that, for postdocs and the like, work currently in the pipeline may represent a fair amount of their overall productivity.
I have a Publications section on my CV with Peer Reviewed Publications, Submitted for Publication, Conference Publications and Presentations, Invited Lectures and Seminars, and Reports.
For the manuscripts that have been submitted for publication I just put the authors, title, and I put (submitted) as the year.
I see people include the journal they submitted to, but I don't think that's appropriate since it unjustifiably uses the reputation of the journal to bolster your reputation. Anyone can submit anything to Nature or Science.
I also recently had a PhD applicant say they had submitted a manuscript to relatively good journal. I asked for a copy and the article was in no way suitable for the journal they submitted to.
I never put in-prep on my CV, since it's practically meaningless.
Another thing to think about is the rules of funding agencies and other people to whom you might submit these CV's. In German and EU funding applications, only accepted papers can be listed as part of an author's "publications" list. Work that is in review, no matter how far along the review process, cannot be listed until an acceptance notification has been given.
However, it's also not clear what stage of your career you're in. If you're applying, for instance, for a post-doctoral position, then it would probably make some sense to mention manuscripts under review. Normally, in such cases, the CV isn't going to a committee—usually it's just the advisor himself.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.761878 | 2013-01-28T23:29:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7549",
"authors": [
"AJed",
"Fomite",
"Jamie",
"Jimi Oke",
"Joel DeWitt",
"Michelle K",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18030",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18039",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18045",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18075",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42219",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4472",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5776",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/81532",
"jmarple",
"tvkanters",
"user5776"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
16150 | Eagle Scout rank on CV?
Q: Should I keep Eagle Scout (the highest rank attainable in the Boy Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America) on my CV?
I do not think that this is an appropriate item to include on a CV. However, CV is loosely translated as ''the course of my life'', and this is an achievement that takes a lot of perseverance, and something that is earned and not just given away. It requires a significant amount of time and volunteer work to complete a project that gives back to your community and also shows leadership and management skills which, you don't normally acquire until a little further in your academic career, but shows the ability to do so.
Is this award detrimental to include? looked down upon by hiring committees? not even given a second glance?
I have not found a satisfactory answer for this.
If it is kept on the CV, where should it go, i.e. award or outreach (both I think would be appropriate items, and it may be that if deficient in one or the other, one could move it around).
I was a missionary for a decade and typically include it. If nothing else, it shows I've travelled the globe and expanded my world view.
@JonathanLandrum That feels very different, in that if you didn't put it, you would be the opening the question of "what the hell were you doing for that decade?" (I'm assuming you didn't have another job). Leaving off Eagle Scout doesn't leave a gap in the same way.
@BenWebster that is a valid point.
Not in academia, but... Rule of thumb in industry is that a resume should be kept down to a page. I don't quite go that far, but it should certainly be focused primarily on the position you're interviewing for. If you've got more recent and relevant experience to cite, "Eagle Scout" is just a character footnote -- and I think I'd be more interested in whether you were still actively volunteering. (I also have some personal issues with the BSA over the "three G's". I don't think I'd hold that against an individual scout, but I'm not sure I'd automatically count scouting as a plus either.)
@keshlam In academia, a CV can easily top 20 pages
I've heard a few times that non-academic achievements might bring a bit more attention (either as showing determination, or - as providing a starting point for an informal discussion; given someone in the committee know what does it mean and is emotionally engaged).
BTW: How old where you when you got it, and how old are you now?
(Personally, I'd probably be more likely to look favorably on a résumé w/ "Eagle Scout" on it... but that's me)
I wouldn't include it. I doubt it makes much of a difference, but you yourself say it's not an appropriate item. I agree.
To expand a little bit, let me say this: the things you should put on your CV are those that directly connect to the job you want to have. Something like a job you had in an unrelated field is worthwhile in that it shows you were employed and not a hobo, but most other things that aren't really directly part of your career (jobs, education, publications, info about teaching, conference presentations, grants, etc.) is just a distraction, and will make it look like you are padding. I think high school achievements are especially bad in that they focus things too much in the past. Nothing on my CV goes earlier than my junior year of college (and probably I should cut that; nobody cares where I studied abroad).
Of course, it's good to have lots of things to list on your CV, but you also want to keep the average high. There are only a few things on there that are really important, and you don't want to distract people from what they are.
It would be great to discuss your experience as an Eagle Scout in a personal conversation, say if you have an informal dinner or drinks during an interview, but I just don't think the CV is the place for it.
EDIT: A point which a deleted answer raised also occurs to me: one reason to avoid putting extraneous things on your CV is that you can't control what associations people reading it might have. For example, the Boy Scouts of America have stirred up a lot of controversy with their stances on homosexuality, and for many people that maybe be the first thing that pops to mind. It's unfair to connect one scout to that, but people aren't logical. They read "Eagle Scout," they think homophobia, and they have a negative reaction to your application that they weren't even conscious of.
I recently read an application for graduate school by a student who listed on their CV membership in some political groups with which I vehemently disagree. I don't think that should affect my judgement of their file (luckily, I'm not on the committee, so I didn't have to try to make a judgement), but I honestly did not want to know about that aspect of their lives. I'm sure they thought it showed something about leadership, but to me it looked like very poor judgement.
I agree, but as a compromise I don't think there would be much harm in mentioning it in a very short section called "miscellaneous" at the end of the CV. That would avoid emphasizing it or putting it in the same category with academic awards or outreach. It's still safest to leave it out, but including it like that is better than mixing it in with the core parts of the CV.
I agree that it's preferable, but having an miscellaneous section on your CV is also a terrible idea. If something doesn't fit in a category you recognize as professional, that's a screaming red flag that you should leave it out.
I especially like how you said "high school achievements are bad in that they focus things too much in the past." I suppose one exception to that rule would be if the candidate was still in his mid-20's. In that case, there's probably not a whole lot to put in the CV, and Eagle Scout might demonstrate character traits such as perseverence and diligence. However, the closer someone gets toward 30 – and certainly as one gets well past age 30 – the greater the chance the inclusion might come across as resting on past laurels, and look bad overall.
I mean eagle scout is a way higher honor than what most people are comparing it to like say high school valedictorian for example.
eagle scout is a way higher honor than ... high school valedictorian for example. — [citation needed]
Well you are right JeffE my comment is completely subjective, of course there are about an order of magnitude fewer ESs compared to VDs but not so many people scout in the first place while nearly everyone attends HS, so I withdraw my last comment. However, I would argue that valedictorian would raise more red flags because it looks like you are hiding more recent academic failures to include academic awards from HS, while ES doesn't really have anything comparable that one might receive later in their career, although many would consider it irrelevant.
@MMH - Validictorian means you complete all your homework and score well on tests, especially as compared to your peers. It's an academic achievement. Eagle Scout means that you have earned a lot of merit badges and helped the community in some way. Both are impressive accomplishments, both represent long-term achievements, and, in my experience, both tend to be bestowed on people who really seem have their act together. Still, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, and I wouldn't want to be stuck with the duty of determining which of the two is more impressive.
I think my personal politics place me among a group of academics who are more skeptical of BSoA. Even so, I think that being an Eagle Scout is more likely to suggest that the person has shown leadership and engaged in community service than that the person will support BSoA's historically anti-gay policies. In this particular case, it's unlikely to hurt.
@BenjaminMakoHill I agree for the most part, but people are not logical; in fact they're surprisingly free associative. So, I'm not suggesting people are likely to read "Eagle Scout" and think "Well, he must be a homophobe," but rather that they'll read it, some part of their mind will go to homophobia, and for reasons they don't even articulate to themselves, they get a negative feeling. Less information is often better, in that people tend judge, say, whether you'll be a good grad student by how consistent a picture they draw in their mind of it.
Thus, any piece of "off" information will be much more destructive than a good piece of information would be constructive. So maybe Eagle Scout isn't the best example, but I think generally this is a good reason to leave stuff that isn't directly related out.
To me, as someone who isn't an eagle scout, it seems inappropriate. But I will tell you this, every person who I personally know in academia who also happens to be an eagle scout has for some reason left it on their CV (there may be some selection bias here, but in each of these cases I didn't find the fact out by reading their CV, so probably it's not that big - sample size of 2 though is very small - 1 postdoc - 1 grad student on the job market for postdocs - note no professors). Anyways, based on this fact, I surmise that other eagle scouts will see it as a positive. So if there is an eagle scout on the hiring committee it may very well be a net positive! Now the probability there is an eagle scout on the hiring committee is very low (as you point being an eagle scout is an amazing accomplishment and very few scouts ever get it). I'd leave it out based on my initial reaction, which I think is the reaction most people would have. I see why you might not want to leave it out though. This line shows a lot of qualities that may be important in academia but most people would find it irrelevant even though it is an amazing accomplishment.
However, if you "organized" a massive charity event that is at least loosely related to academia as part of your eagle scout badge, you probably should list it, but not necessarily just putting eagle scout down. You might "sneak" it in by saying "organized ... as a part of winning my eagle scout badge" or something like that, and stick it in the service section. But if you do include it, at least make an attempt to make it sound relevant.
+1 for "if there is an Eagle Scout in the comittee". Not only that; if there's someone still active or emotionally bonded to the scouts (and there are many such people), they will see it as a positive.
Eagle Scout is nowhere near as impressive as "U.S. National Figure Skating Champion 1995." There are almost 60 thousand Eagle scouts a year and two figure skating champions.
To be fair there are 6 U.S. figure skating champions at the highest level of competition, but your point is well taken. I never said they were equal, just that they are both amazing accomplishments. Far more people attempt scouting than figure skating, but I certainly agree "U.S. National Figure Skating Champion 1995" is a more impressive accomplishment.
I downvoted this. First, I think this answer is a bit misleading about the actual statistics about Eagle Scouts: as Noah points out, there are about 58K per year, and 7% of the current membership of BSA are Eagle Scouts. Comparing this to US National Figure Skating Champions is losing four orders magnitude: I find your "equation" to be innumerate.
@PeteL.Clark I 100% conceded Noah's point. The statement was never an "equation", the words "something like" were meant to modify equate. Equate was clearly being used colloquially but also incorrectly, I agree.
I wouldn't put high school achievements on a professional CV unless it's at the level of a medal on international science olympiad or a top 10 Intel talent search finish. I don't think Eagle scout is quite at this level. That said, it probably won't make a big difference either way, unless your CV has enough questionable things that it looks padded (which is bad).
I have a "Non-academic activities" section at the end of my CV that mentions that I'm a semi-decent long distance runner and that I used to moonlight for an amateur comedy troupe. But then, I do this because I can afford to do so: we are talking here about two bullet points that come after about 150 separate items including publications, talks, grants, teaching, advising... so it's obvious that I'm not including this to make my CV look longer than it actually is. If your CV is substantially shorter than this, you might want to think twice about including this kind of section. If you do include it, please please please do not write anything banal or mundane there. I once read a postdoc application to my department that included the line "Hobbies: watching movies". The CV in question wasn't great anyways, but this line was the metaphorical nail in the coffin.
Thanks. My CV is long as is, and I have plenty in all sections. I only made the remark on where to put it if one or the other 'looked short' in comparison, but the general question remains if 'non-academic' section belongs on an 'academic' CV. Thanks for the answer.
If you have a longer and more comprehensive CV, I would keep it. It's an achievement and it tells people who know a little about the Boy Scouts that you've learned a few things about leadership and engaged in significant community service.
That said, I would put in way at the end with other trivia and less important tidbits. An an extra, it might end up being a slightly positive thing for some readers. For those of that don't care, make it very clear that you don't place this among your most important achievements as a scholar.
It depends on:
- whether you have other volunteer experiences
* If your last volunteer experience was only in Boy Scout, then I wonder why you didn't get involved in other things in undergrad/grad. If you are listing a bunch of experiences, it probably doesn't hurt to include it.
- whether this experience is related to what you are applying for
* If you see this being relevant to an education or outreach aspect for the position you are applying for, then perhaps it is a good idea.
If you list this as part of your career achievements, I might think that you are a bit desperate (as if you don't have anything else to write about and just want to pack your CV). Not to say that this is not important, but for an academic position it is not directly relevant; if you want to include it, it should go into "miscellaneous" or "volunteer experiences."
It depends on the position you are applying for. I would not include it in an application for a professorship, but for a post-doc I would keep it in under "misc" or "additional information". If there is a structured application form and they are asking for it, then include it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.764081 | 2014-01-24T20:57:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16150",
"authors": [
"8odoros",
"Anonymous Mathematician",
"Ben",
"Ben Webster",
"GLWDay",
"GloriaVictis",
"Hemang Bhatt",
"J.R.",
"JeffE",
"John Perry",
"Jonathan E. Landrum",
"Nathan",
"Noah Snyder",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Sam",
"Sergei Tikhomirov",
"Sid",
"WetlabStudent",
"WristMan",
"btmcnellis",
"cwallenpoole",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11084",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1471",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23411",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42309",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42311",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42313",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42314",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42321",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42322",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42421",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42422",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42423",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42424",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42690",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42695",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47026",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47031",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47039",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5962",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7134",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8101",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"keshlam",
"mako",
"mattiav27",
"mnemoniko",
"nagniemerg",
"problemofficer - n.f. Monica",
"yo'",
"zstefanova"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
26199 | How to find credible sources for a general reference?
I am currently writing a paper in which I have many topics to describe. It would not be productive to read and cite papers or even books on the topics because I just have to describe them very briefly as an introduction to some follow up topics.
For "private" use I would just use the corresponding Wikipedia articles but that is considered bad practice in academic papers.
So do you have any tips how to get credible definitions of and/or short introductions into (in my case computer science) topics without searching through dozens of papers/books for some useful/credible parts?
You did check sources besides Wikipedia, right? You are not looking for things to cite blindly?
What I am looking for are resources that are as easily accessable and extensive as wikipedia but considered credible. For Example: If you want to present some tools in your paper which you used for static code analysis you want to give the reader a short introduction into what static code analysis is. But you don´t want to spend the whole day looking for that information so Wikipedia would be perfect.
There's a reason why Wikipedia is not considered a citeable reference for research articles; any similar collection would share the same fate. Peer reviewed articles and textbooks are the answer, as others have noted. Yes, you have to look into them. Yes, that's work. It's also the way it is, and probably has to be.
Most schools have access to a fairly extensive electronic library full of articles. I have also used http://scholar.google.com/ to find sources acceptable for academic papers.
It would not be productive to read and cite papers or even books on the topics because... — [citation needed]
I tend to use books for this sort of thing. For example, if I need a definition of "data mining", I do a Google Books search for that term. A book about "data mining" is going to define the term in the introduction or first chapter, so it will usually be in the pages that are part of the free preview.
Another option is to look at the citations used in the Wikipedia article itself, and then look up those articles. Wikipedia tends to be pretty good at citing the key article(s) for a particular subject.
Also, it's helpful to know a few online cite-worthy dictionaries that you can search for common definitions. For example, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is useful for philosophical terms.
There's also Scholarpedia, which is a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia. It's not as extensive as Wikipedia. However, in my field at least, the articles tend to be written by well-known names.
+1 for Wiki citations. I often check those when trying to learn something new.
To @Kimball +1 for Wiki too. Wikipedia is often a fantastic source of general information. You can use the cited sources to expand your understanding of the topic. I would warn that the Wikipedia pages are crowd sourced and I've found a citation to a source which wouldn't qualify as peer-reviewed, thus probably not acceptable by academic institutions.
Consider:
textbooks on a given subject,
review (rather than research) articles on a given subject,
key papers (e.g. the one where a given subject was introduced for the first time).
Good places to start:
http://scholar.google.com/ and look for general and (typically) highly cited books or papers,
the references sections on Wikipedia.
I agree with the idea of referencing books. You may not want to buy a book for each topic.
I suggest using libraries. Most people writing papers have access to a university or other reference library. Many will let you go in and read books there, even if you are not affiliated with the university.
I read abstracts of journal articles I can find on JSTOR.
Abstracts generally serve as concise summaries of entire papers. They're also written by the author(s) of the article, so you know the emphasis will be on the core of the topic, not on side-note information.
You need not discard a Wikipedia definition if it is one that you like. Print sources can be equally sketchy as anyone can print books (cf. "Fart Proudly", by Ben Franklin). It sounds like you merely want correctness, not sources of definitions anyway.
As long as the definition is fairly accurate, just cite it as you would a print source, but (like with all internet resources) give the date and time along with your citation, since the Internet can change out from under you.
In any case, it's not really academics who have a problem with Wikipedia, it's the publishers and ever since the printing press, they've spent a good while curating influence on the minds of the Establishment. But obviously, with the Internet, it all needs re-addressed.
The credibility of Wikipedia is not the subject of this question; you might want to move this answer to this question, where that is the subject of the question.
Note: A democratic form of reputation ranking and a unified data store where academics can pull information off of the internet to store a source as they found it, is a project I'm currently working on to make the right solution in the Internet Age. (see also hypothes.is)
@ff524: The OP makes the claim that it is "bad practice" and I'm disputing that view, but will edit to make it more clear.
Actually, the OP claims that citing Wikipedia for definitions is considered bad practice by academics, not necessarily that it is objectively bad practice. If you have evidence that it is not generally considered bad practice by academics, that could be more relevant :)
In any case, it's not really academics who have a problem with Wikipedia — [citation needed] :-)
@JeffE: ha, you are right to nudge me a little on that, but I happen to be a little more studied than most on the derangements of the Establishment, so could only reference myself.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.765386 | 2014-07-21T15:47:16 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26199",
"authors": [
"Acer DC",
"Edward Anderson",
"Habib Mohammed",
"Harshraj Rathore",
"JeffE",
"Jinadasa Katupotha",
"Josh",
"João Ribeiro",
"Kimball",
"Mark Rosenblitt-Janssen",
"Mauer555",
"Raphael",
"Syeda Arju",
"Thomas Mack",
"UnkownConstants",
"asquared",
"ff524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19703",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19813",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19869",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69984",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69985",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69986",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69987",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69997",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/69998",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70000",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70001",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70013",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70014",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70015",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70016",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70018",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/70053",
"lydiom",
"multi_porpoise",
"user69984",
"user70018"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
5208 | Sending a paper to a 'Letters' journal
I am at the cusp of finishing my PhD, and my advisor and I have decided that it is time to publish since there seems to be no hole in the theories that I propose. I have always maintained that I'd like to get a publication in the good letters section such as Physical Review Letters and then submit a longer manuscript to a more specific journal (in my field that would be the Physics of Fluids). My advisor isn't a fan of arXiv as he see it only for preprints with little advantage as it would be easier to just circulate my manuscript among 10-15 established people in the field.
So my question is/questions are:
Is it useful to send in a manuscript to a letters section of a prestigious journal such as the PRL for quick dissemination of my work as well as brownie points for having published in the PRL despite a really high rejection rate.
Are letters section of journals really quick (with a short submission to publication time)?
As a contingency plan, a rejection would mean what exactly to my career/immediate future?
I have always had a soft spot for arXiv since several important works were first disseminated on it but I find that in the engineering community there is still some resistance to arXiv, any comments?
As a side note, I have read the several questions about arXiv on academia.SE and somehow I am not entirely convinced that a young academecian would gain much from publishing in arXiv than in a regular journal.
You don't "publish" in arXiv in the sense that you "publish" in a journal, by which I mean that things you make available on arXiv may be public, but they have been given much less vetting then a publication in even a second rate journal. Nor does posting to arXiv preclude publication in many (most?) journals.
I am unable to select an answer since both the answers received have equal merit in my opinion. Any advice on that?
@drN Choose the F'x's answer (it is undervoted and it that way you can bring some attention to it, effectively making both answer equal). But it general... I dunno: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/270/accepting-answers-from-soft-questions.
Is your advisor really saying that it's easier to circulate your paper to 10 or 15 people than to post it on the arXiv? I don't understand that.
Okay, let's try to attack your questions in order. I assume from your journal examples that you're working in physics, so I'll focus mainly on that in the answer…
Useful compared to what? Note that not all “letters” journals have a very high visibility, so it really depends. If we're talking Phys. Rev. Lett. in particular, then I’d say yes, having a paper published in PRL will look good on your CV. Especially on the short term, it can help publicize your results. (In the longer term, you can hope that your results may get the attention they merit, wherever you publish them.)
It depends which journal, and compared to what. In high-level journals, you will know very quickly (within a week) if your manuscript is sent to reviewers or just rejected by the editor. After that, review time can take 2–3 months, and be longer if your paper is controversial (i.e. if referees aren't unanimous).
On the other hand, some letter journals strongly emphasize short review times. The recently-launched J. Phys. Chem. Lett. has submission-to-publication times of 4 to 6 weeks, which is unmatched as far as I know (and the quality looks good).
Rejection is not part of your academic record, so it means the same as absence of publication. If you intend to publish in a journal that does not frown upon it, you can put the manuscript on arxiv as well as submit to the journal, that way there is nothing for you to lose.
No comment on that point.
On the matter of publishing in Phys. Rev. Lett., the best advice you can get will be “Successful Letters
in Physical Review Letters: An editor's perspective”.
@Fx thank you for your answer. I was also scouring the internet for journals with short review time so as to then perhaps order them based on their visibility and importance. Any tool that could help me? or should I just look through google scholar's metrics page and then try to sort according to review time? Most of the journals out there seem to be non engineering really which seems to cut my targetted group to a very small number. J of Fluid Mech, Phy of Fluids, J of Heat Tran, PRL (very rare in my field of non linear fluid dy)
@drN review times are not widely available for most of the journals, unfortunately…
@Fx I thought as much. Thank you. I have another niggling thought that isn't worthy of being a question on this forum. How should I press my extremely reasonable advisor to start publishing our results more aggressively? As an international student in the United States, the only way I can set myself apart from competition for Postdocs et al is by publishing good quality results in volume. I do respect my advisor's vision and judgement but he has never been one to publish much. But I need it. more than ever!
@drN The second issue would make a good question on its own. However, there is a big difference whether the advisor does not push for publishing (then basically you need to push yourself), or actively opposes it (then you are blocked with the joint results).
I cannot answer the first question, because it depends mostly of the result itself (if it is strong enough, interesting for reasonably wide audience and can make sense when condensed to 4 pages).
Take a look at Length of publication cycle for peer-reviewed journals from Physics.SE; in on of the answers there are mentioned the following slides:
Thomas Pattard, How to publish your work in the Physical Review or Editors are from Mars, Referees are from Venus, and Authors are from Earth
In short, it takes longer for PRL than most of other PR journals (except for PRE). The difference for Rapid Communications is the highest.
When it comes to risk of rejection - AFAIK the only bad thing for you is that you loose some time. There is no "rejected from PRL stigma" - again, AFAIK.
When it comes to arXiv - it may mean a lot for you (remember, you do it not instead of publishing in a journal, but along with):
it becomes visible a few days after uploading,
some people actively follow arXiv RSS feed on their topic (or even start each morning with it),
some people don't have access to all paid journals,
some people even claim that "normal" publication didn't influenced their cite counts once their paper went on arXiv.
So, even before it gets published (which will take at least a few months, and in case of rejections or slow journals - even years) it is visible.
And personally, I had a lot of scientific discussions based on my papers that by that time were 'only' on arXiv. If you are going to hunt for a postdoc position there may be a big difference whether they can see your paper (on arXiv) or "you said them that you had sent it".
"remember, you [post to arXiv] not instead of publishing in a journal, but along with" This.
@PiotrMigdal Thank you for your answer. I actually had taken a look at the average time to acceptance. I should have mentioned that in my question! :)
@drN But anyway, take a look at http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27606/length-of-publication-cycle-for-peer-reviewed-journals (there is also said, that there is a big variance; an most likely submitting to a fast but not-so-popular-in-your-field journal will make it longer, not shorter; as things can be accepted after one minor revision or after many long turns).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.765901 | 2012-11-08T22:45:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5208",
"authors": [
"Alain",
"Andreas Blass",
"Anon",
"C_Rod",
"Cool_Coder",
"F'x",
"JF it",
"JustRay",
"Mohsenuss91",
"Mojtahedi",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Trefex",
"dearN",
"dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten",
"erik",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13387",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13388",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13389",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13391",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13392",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13393",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13394",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13395",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13400",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13422",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2700",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/440",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
10210 | Is there a website that lists for a set of at least 1000 journals OpenAccess fees for publishing an article?
Many journals now are open access only and every article published (authors) must pay a fee.
Sometimes, this info can be hard to find. The journals does not put it visibly on the front page (next to impact factor).
If I want to compare 80 journals in the medical field and their charges - it is not easy.
Is there a site that would 'monitor' this and have data on many journals. (any list with 50+ journals and prices listed will be a good answer) (even if domain specific) (medicine domain is preferred)
Most medical journals may be operating under a few publishers and it may be less difficult than you think. Here is a list that may provide some starting materials.
I would submit to whatever journal is the best fit for my paper. I don't know how to find the prices up front. But getting published is very important so if you can save up the money, publish your research.
There is no comprehensive list.
Some partial lists are listed below: (please update when new are found)
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html
If you want others to update your post, you should mark it community wiki.
what do I click to mark it community wiki?
Try the Sherpa/RoMEO list, which is the most definitive list of open access journals that I know of. It covers many different fields.
I don't know why you are set on 1000 journals. You can only publish your paper in one journal. What's important is not the number of journals, but finding one good journal that is a great fit for your paper.
ok. what if that journal charges $3800 (Brit. Med. Journal) fee and there are other cheaper journals. It may be nice to know that.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.766532 | 2013-05-24T14:20:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10210",
"authors": [
"Abid Ali Khan",
"Frames Catherine White",
"Kimberly Fujioka",
"Penguin_Knight",
"Ujjwal",
"hashtabe_0",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25245",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25246",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25379",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6450",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7262",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/82818",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8513",
"shrey",
"userJT"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2286 | How to deploy a StackExchange-style question and answer site for a university subject?
Problems with discussion boards: After being involved with StackExchange for a couple of years, I've really grown to despise standard discussion boards. All those meandering threads, no commenting, no ability to edit questions to improve them, inadequate cross-referencing of questions, no markdown support, no voting for good answers; no rss subscription options, the list goes on...
Educational context: I have interacted with a few course management systems that include discussion boards for students to ask questions. These systems also lack most of the great features of the StackExchange model of Q&A.
Question
Is there a way of deploying a StackExchange-style Q&A site for a university subject?
Are there any examples of people doing this?
Does anyone know whether StackExchange themselves have considered this market?
Initial thoughts
I realise that there are open source clones of stack exchange in existence. However, my concern is that they take a bit of effort to setup.
Ideally any system should be very simple to deploy for the lecturer, and easy to learn for the student.
Maybe you should contact Shiva Kintali, author of Trueshelf, see how he did?
If your intended audience is broader than a single class or college, why not start (or join) an actual stackexchange? For example, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics are all SE groups currently up and running. OTOH, if your intended audience is strictly a single class or school, I doubt the format of the forum (SE vs. Discussion boards) will make much of a difference.
@Gopi Kintali's site uses Askbot: https://plus.google.com/104397321463619179338/posts/dttt5G2bTrT
Recently, Stack Exchange is being used (in beta) for specific courses/universities. More info can be found here.
Yes it's possible. Yes it's been done. There are plenty of StackExchange clones such as OSQA to use - there's a question over on meta-stackoverflow that lists them. You can pretty much pick your favourite platform, and there will be a StackExchange clone for it.
But:
You might well find that take-up rates are very very low (maybe one in 20 if you're lucky). And you need a lot of people to give a Q&A site enough critical mass to sustain itself.
They're all reasonably easy to use, for the end-users. As to how hard they are to install and maintain, that's a question of the kit and talent you have available. If you've already got a server serving Django apps, then OSQA is easy. If you've got a *AMP stack, then any of the PHP clones should be pretty easy. Installation and management is the really easy part of the process. Drumming up, and sustaining, partcipation is the really hard part.
Thanks for the list, and I agree involvement would be a factor to consider. I wonder if any of them would be simple to use in an educational context.
Piazza is to my knowledge one of the most popular to Q&A platform used for a university subject. Many courses use it in my university and we are quite happy with it.
Some features:
free
take less than a minute to create
edit questions to improve them
cross-referencing of questions
voting for good answers
notification emails
students and instructors can write answers
endorse student's answer
etc
Missing features:
allow to comment
markdown support
no rss subscription options
Screenshots:
I think you should take a look at Discourse. It is by Jeff Attwood the other coinventor of Stack Overflow.
In his blog he has mentioned all the design decisions that went into its development.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/
I don't know how straightforward it is to deploy, but you can use the open-source SE-like biostar-central developed at GitHub. It is used to host http://www.biostars.org.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.766761 | 2012-07-04T05:02:00 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2286",
"authors": [
"Aditi Rana",
"Austin Henley",
"Erik G.",
"Gopi",
"Jeromy Anglim",
"Jupiter",
"JustBeingHelpful",
"Oliver Williams",
"Paulo Matos",
"Random Elephant",
"Sam Pan",
"Suresh",
"Zeinab Abbasimazar",
"elexhobby",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1117",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/157407",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/157408",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/189873",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/42725",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53747",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53782",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53848",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5697",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5698",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5699",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5722",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5724",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87",
"kertwin Jia",
"mikemanne",
"mkennedy",
"user5724"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
7231 | What is a "TV-L 13" position?
I just received a PhD invitation letter from a German University which mentions that my remuneration will be 2/3 of full TV-L 13 position. I do not know what a TV-L 13 position is (Google is of no help here), and didn't want to be rude, so I am asking here first.
Is this a common position or specific to Germany? If anyone knows, currently how much remuneration corresponds to a TV-L position?
TV-L is the German public servant remuneration grade table (Tarifvertrag für den Öffentlichen Dienst der Länder (TV-L)). It is how civil servants Germany are graded for their salaries and similar conditions for their work.
Depending on where your position is, you'll be under TV-L West, or East, or Berlin, or Hessen. Something in your letter might specify this. Either way, there is information on the details at the Öffentlicher Dienst website.
Assuming you'd be in West Germany, taxed as a single (i.e., not married or living with a life partner or children), this boils down to a basic salary of €2103/month with a net salary after all taxes and health insurance payments of €1383/month.
This will increase as you remain hired, you'll go up the staircase of salaries, going from 1 to 2 after 1 year, from 2 to 3 after an additional 2 years, etc. Each step is a monthly salary increase of about €150/month net.
It is not unusual for research groups with less funds to offer so-called "2/3 (or even 1/2) positions", in which you unfortunately get only a part of the full position salary. I think that Mikael's figure is already for the 66% salary - Mikael, can you confirm it?
Yes Federico is right, this is especially the case for PhD students. In the page Mikael mentioned, you can also put the percentage of full-time work, in this case 67%). This amounts to about 1400 netto a month (after taxes and health insurance).
Yes, I plugged in 66% in the box at that webpage. It is very common with less than full salaries in Germany -- my own position back when I did my PhD was a 1/2 position on TV-L (Ost) level 11.
Just curious, the pay is a fraction of a salary scale, but is the work week also that fraction of, say, 40 hours, or is it a full time position.
If you are paid a fraction of the full salary, your hours are supposed to be reduced correspondingly. However, since most graduate students don't normally work 40 hours per week at any rate, the actual number of hours to be worked is somewhat open to interpretation. The official number, however, is scaled.
@PaulHiemstra: I was expected to work full time for my half salary. The argument was that I was being paid for my teaching, teaching prep, and the assistance I rendered my advisor; while my own thesis work was in my spare time but mandatory… or something like that.
@aeismail: Reduced hours? Good one.
It is worth noting that I did bring the working hours up with central HR when signing my contract. They told me I had to be at my desk 4h/day every day.
For those interested in more information: I tried to give a detailed explanation how the calculator works in my answer to a related (but curiously not linked) question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/44699
I’ve never heard of this being paid in full, it’s always just a fraction (often 1/2).
@KonradRudolph This very much depends on the subject. In maths, it is usually 1/2, while in engineering, it is usually a full-time position.
Found this link after Googling for "Tarifvertrag für den Öffentlichen Dienst der Lände" (Thanks to Mike for explaining first )
Tarifvertrag für den öffentlichen Dienst der Länder (Collective agreement for the public sector in the countries)
According to this, 13 is the pay group for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral associates. And the gross pay is from 3200 Euros upwards. (Basically it would be about 2000 Euros for 2/3 of that).
BTW, in one of the invitations, it says "E13". I'm not sure what this refers to but, I guess it's same as TV-L 13.
Hope this helps, and if you took this position, please explain further about TV-L 13.
Cheers....
"E13" stands for "Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L" (as found on the contract) that literally translates to "Remuneration group 13 TV-L"
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.767255 | 2013-01-15T10:41:00 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7231",
"authors": [
"Chris",
"Christian Clason",
"Federico",
"Federico Poloni",
"J Fabian Meier",
"João Daniel",
"Konrad Rudolph",
"Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson",
"Paul Hiemstra",
"Paul Visoianu",
"Pieter Naaijkens",
"Rafael Barbosa",
"Rajni",
"aeismail",
"bfschott",
"harrykar",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126228",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13852",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/170488",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19921",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19977",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21706",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27442",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/348",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36059",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36069",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/36070",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4091",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/519",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/958",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9621",
"mncz"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
32114 | Can I upload my open access publications on researchgate.net or academia.edu?
Maybe my question is naive, but:
If my paper was publish as open access (for example in Springer - http://www.springer.com/gp/open-access), could I upload the paper in researchgate.net and similar sites?
Open access:
Open access comes in two degrees: gratis open access, which is free
online access, and libre open access, which is free online access
plus some additional usage rights.These additional usage rights are
often granted through the use of various specific Creative Commons
licenses. Only libre open access is fully compliant with
definitions of open access such as the Berlin Declaration on Open
Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
See Gratis versus libre for more ideas.
As a result, it depends on the contract you agreed to when submitting your article to the open access journal.
Maybe. But not necessarily. It depends on the exact terms and conditions of the open access paper: there are many different variants (Springer use more than one, as do many other publishers). It also depends on the exact terms and conditions of the site you intend to upload to.
So there is no general answer, beyond this:
Read and understand the licence on the paper.
Read and understand the terms and conditions of the site you want to upload to.
Work out whether they're mutually consistent, and whether you want to accept the T&Cs of the site you want to upload to.
Also, as said elsewhere, please refer to SHERPA/RoMEO to better understand publishers's copyright and self-archiving policies.
@Aubrey I would rather contact the publisher directly. I've seen several instances where the information in Sherpa/RoMEO was incorrect.
Ok. So you should contact the publisher directly, check the info on SHERPA/RoMEO, and if incorrect send them a mail :-)
If you are uncertain, then with a truly open-access paper you can also choose to avoid the question by simply linking to the official publication page - there is often a direct PDF link, and putting that on an external webpage gives no significant difference in user experience than uploading the PDF directly.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.767627 | 2014-11-22T13:37:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32114",
"authors": [
"Aubrey",
"fileunderwater",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26682",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7223"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1582 | How important is AACSB accreditation for further study after an MBA?
I have read that many Doctor of Business Administration or PhD in Business Administration programs in the US tend to reject students who did not complete a master's program at an AACSB-accredited school. From checking the list, there are no AACSB programs in the country where I live and it seems that many other foreign students would similarly lack such opportunities.
Is this true only for American students or also of international students?
If I complete a non-AACSB-accredited program, how might this limit my opportunities for further study?
How could I demonstrate that a foreign program has sufficient quality?
This question is in reality 4 questions all of which would be excellent individual questions that would be a lot less localized and likely receive a lot more attention.
The best way to find out how important AACSB accreditation is is to ask some PhD in Business Administration programs. I doubt it is a hard and fast rule since most PhD programs do not need to maintain professional accreditation. I would be more worried about DBA programs since they may need to maintain AACSB accreditation.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.768071 | 2012-05-16T08:52:31 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1582",
"authors": [
"Felix",
"Fuhrmanator",
"Jerry Bian",
"SamB",
"StrongBad",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10420",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10917",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12724",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3858",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3859",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3860",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3867",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"marczellm",
"msh",
"user10420"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
152001 | Going into a PhD in Europe or US
I am an International Student perusing a Masters in Actuarial Science in the US. I did my Bachelors here in the US (Actuarial Science), worked for 2 years as an Actuarial Analyst in the US. I am doing my Masters now with emphasis on AI (I could not get into an AI program for Masters due to my circumstances, so this is the closest I could get).
I want to continue with AI and I am looking into a PhD in the N.America or Europe. I am excited about Europe (never been there), but feel N.America will be a safer bet. Which location would be better to do my PhD in, if I am looking at eventually migrating and getting into tech entrepreneurship?
You are perusing a masters? Or are doing one?
Safer bet in what sense? In terms of physical health and safety, Europe is certainly a better place to be than the US at the moment.
Come to Australia. We are much better than both of your choices.
Sorry for the awful question format, I just got on here.
I am current doing a Masters in Actuarial Science, but trying to take introductory AI courses, to shift the emphasis.
@astronat I am talking in terms of having a better chance of migrating. US migration is just such a mess and I don't know if I want to fester here anymore. The people I met are wonderful, but the system is just very hostile. Out of Europe, Netherlands have peeked my interest, but I hear they tend to hire from Masters not directly.
Would you be kind enough to direct me to unis with AI PhDs?
@LahiS I know nothing about PhDs in AI or in the Netherlands, so I can't help you there. I'm sure you can find some just by googling. The universities will almost certainly explain their entry requirements on their websites too.
I am afraid your question reveals a rather superficial attitude to the matter. You are talking about the whole continents as places for "better PhD" and mention "AI" as a field you are interested in. A fairly standard textbook on AI sitting on my shelf is nearly 1200 pages long, so how can one judge a continent for being a better place for studying every single topic listed in this book?
You are going to spend several years doing your PhD. So, first go spend at least several days (or, better, weeks) thinking harder what exactly are you interested in. One good starting point would be to think first what you are good at right now. Then, figure out good publications in this area (Google Scholar is your friend) and find out which labs they come from. These labs are the places of your interest, and they might pop up in quite unlikely places (though, granted, in most cases they don't come as a surprise).
Then, of course, there is a question of a job market, but I believe people coming from reputable labs are able to find a job. In any case, this isn't a question of your immediate future.
A minor nitpick about "continents": to my knowledge, American academia is on the whole fairly homogeneous (unlike European academia which has roughly country-level granularity). If the OP was born and raised in the US, they might assume out of ignorance that academia is homogeneous everywhere. OP's geography comments are IMO much less of a concern than the "PhD on AI" part (which the answer addresses well).
I am fairly new to AI but so far, my focus has been AI application in Actuarial Science. I don't have a particular area in mind but I am really interested in high volatility, low frequencies edge cases (a comparable e.g: such as extreme weather). I am also interested explaining phenomenon through AI and doing things such as coming up with new performance measures or combining old classical statistical methods to build composite statistical tools to question things. Hope this helps clarify my interests.
You are the best and should be the only person to answer this question. If I were in your shoes I would consider these points.
First, you need to answer the question: what is the objective of you pursuing a PhD degree?
Do you wish to become a professor while trying to get into tech entrepreneurship? Do you wish to invent/discover something unique and transformative? Do you wish to get overseas experience and eventually come back to your original country?
Once you nail down your objective, you need to look at the associated issues. For example, if you wish to migrate, then getting a citizenship/visa in the continent/country of your choice must be first considered. It is not straightforward and it is also not something which is consistent with time.
Second, are you looking for funding or are you self-funded? That will limit your choices to specific universities and groups.
Third, and perhaps, most importantly, you need to identify the area of your choice. Not all universities offer all kinds of research directions. You need to determine what area in AI appeals to you. In fact, this should be the motivation for your PhD and determine the objective. Anything else and you will surely struggle to do a good job with your research.
In my personal opinion, you must also consider you compatibility with potential supervisors. You must align your objectives with the expectations with him or her. Only then will your journey be smooth. You say you want to do tech entrepreneurship. Not all research groups will enable you to do that. Most of the groups consist of academicians whose main goal is to publish and grow in their field, not pursue business opportunities by developing technologies.
This is a serious business and one must give a lot of thought to it. If you want to be a tech entrepreneur, then do you really wish to wait for 3 years (7 years in US) while doing a PhD? PhD will entail a number of things which does not align with that goal. Would you be motivated enough to do it?
As you answer these questions, you will find that choice between continents is too high level a question to think about.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.768215 | 2020-07-21T07:02:37 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/152001",
"authors": [
"Lahi S",
"Prof. Santa Claus",
"Solar Mike",
"UJM",
"astronat supports the strike",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/125555",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/126584",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47727",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49043",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72855"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
14817 | How to grade a student software project?
Situation
Students have three weeks to write a little application (UI, some logic, event handling, persist data to a file). They are given one page with some requirements (input). They are supposed to hand in a compilable and running application (output). No software documentation required.
Question
How would you grade a software project? What criteria would you use? Can you give examples?
Idea
There are a few areas that seem important to me.
Are all the given requirements implemented?
Is error handling implemented or does the application crash when the user inputs invalid data?
Does the user interface look good, is it usable?
Is the code well structured?
Each class in a separate file
Small methods which do one single task
Public methods are documented
Can I save the data, quit the application, restart it again, and all the data is reloaded?
Those criteria are very vague, I know. For each of the above criteria, I don't know when to give an A and when to give an F. Any suggestions to improve the criteria and any suggestions on how to grade it?
Using the metrics that I told the students I would use when I assigned the project, of course.
@JeffE: I haven't assigned the project yet and the metrics aren't quite set yet. That's the reason for the above question. Assume I give them the metrics described under 4 above for code structure. I'd say any halfway dilligent student can achieve each metric to a 100%. Does that mean the metrics aren't challenging enough? What metrics would you take for number 4 above? I'd like to see a few concrete examples.
You should not expect software developers in college to also be good designers. Don't make a big deal out of how pretty their UI looks, unless the focus of your course is on UI design. Also, if you are new... this sounds like an awful lot of work for a 3-week project. If you are teaching at a university, keep in mind your students have other courses. Or are these grad students?
If you will grade on 'error handling' on bad logic, be sure to inform them that it will be part of the grade.
@roscoe_casita: Yes, did inform them.
@user45623: Thanks for your comment. I'm not expecting them to be good designers and deliver fancy UIs. I'm expecting clean UIs (section titles, alignments etc. suffice) as opposed to bloated difficult to understand UIs. The expectations in this regard are clear because they gotten feedback for previous pet projects. Those are vocational college students.
As @user45623 says, it sounds like a lot for a three-week project unless the students are graduate students. You know your course best, so I do not say what is wise or unwise for you to do, but it does sound like a lot. A project of 40 to 50 percent of that scope sounds more achievable.
My policy, my 2 cents:
Part of the grading corresponds to the expectation of the "customer". if this project is considered as an actual development project in industry, does it deserves that the customer is paying its full price. For instance, I will give 10 points (over 20) for that criteria. If the software fulfil all the requirements then the student is awarded the 10 points, otherwise he/she starts losing some of the points.
Part of the grading is for the quality of the code (structure, naming of variable, algorithmic aspects, etc.). I give 5 points at max here.
The rest is for the tasks around the code: modeling, UML stuff, reports, etc. The last 5 points can be found here.
Thank you for the concrete examples. Let's dig a bit deeper into your second bullet point: code. When do you give a point for structure and when not? The structure may be really bad (zero points) or it may be perfect (one point). So far it's pretty clear. But what if it is sort of okay. Is that zero points or one point? Or half a point? How do you decide where to draw the line and when to award the point and when not?
@Lernkurve if you need more flexibility, just award 100 points in total. That gives more room in the way of giving just 5 points for code structure in stead of 0.5 points (which you would have to round off).
Grading depends on the level of the students. The younger the student the more beneficial it is to be explicit in your grading policy. In an introductory class the grade is paramount for many people who may be taking that class to fulfill a requirement. In upper level undergraduate or graduate classes, grades seem like more of a curious administrative requirement.
For introductory classes one approach is to enumerate your requirements and give equal weight to all of them. The OP gives five domains. Give each 20 points. I assume that somewhere you specify what the "given requirements" are and what you mean by "error handling". (Are students expected to write custom error classes?)
If a domain has further divisions, such as #4, then divide that domain's points equally among the subdivisions. In this case 7,7,6.
This makes an explicit enough grading criteria that heads off undergraduate complaints about a biased system while giving the more motivated students something to do beyond writing code that checks off boxes.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.768679 | 2013-12-16T08:59:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14817",
"authors": [
"Anonymous",
"DBTheo",
"JeffE",
"JoGe",
"Lernkurve",
"Paul Hiemstra",
"Yi Liu",
"geekidharsh",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10026",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20820",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21239",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/35057",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38488",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38489",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38490",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38498",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38508",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38518",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4091",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"roscoe_casita",
"thb",
"user38498",
"user45623"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
40649 | What to do with research results while being in high school?
I have written a math paper on combinatorics (a generalization of a math olympiad problem) and am looking to get it published. I believe I have discovered something new (although I don't claim it is "important" in the sense of being a breakthrough or anything) and want to get credit for it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find anyone to endorse me to publish on arxiv, so I'm trying to get it published in another (less popular) repository that doesn't need endorsement.
Any suggestions? Things I have looked at so far:
academia.edu - apparently this isn't safe enough for protecting your work.
hal archives ouvertes - I tried searching about this one but there's no information regarding how trustworthy it is, etc.
github - this seems to be for computer science.
vixra - looked promising at first considering the "everything gets accepted" rule, but then the downside is that people have started viewing it as an arxiv for crackpots, so it doesn't seem like a good idea to publish there, but this being my first paper I'm not so sure.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this and any advice you can give.
Note: I'm not prepared to send my paper to any journals so that is out of the question at the moment.
I assume you don't have any academic affiliations?
Relevant: 1. Publishing amateur research, 2. Is it possible to publish a research paper as an independent undergraduate author? and 3. I believe I have solved a famous open problem. How do I convince people in the field that I am not a crank?.
@user92570 You should ask your teachers whether they have any contacts at university. My high school chemistry teacher, for example, was from Yale, and he put me in touch when I was in high school.
@user92570 Also, make absolutely sure the work you've done hasn't been done before. That means extensively searching relevant journal papers. Springer's LaTeX search engine may help, in some cases. You have written your paper in LaTeX, right? Either way, have a look at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-821-project-laboratory-in-mathematics-spring-2013/ to make sure it's well-written and conforms with general guidelines.
@user92570 Out of curiosity, what have you done (without going into too much detail) in combinatorics?
Get a sponsor, submit to Intel STS next year?
Definitely avoid vixra. It was started by crackpots for crackpots; if someone put something reasonable there it would be lost in the noise.
Tips from http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement: You can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link "Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract. The email addresses of the submitter is on the abstract page at the top of the"Submission history" section. If you do not personally know anyone eligible to endorse, search for recent submissions in your field of interest…a good idea to send eligible endorsers a copy of your proposed submission along with the endorsement request. Don't email large numbers of potential endorsers at once.
@Matt Reece: I started viXra. It was created for people who have problems submitting to arXiv. Why are you calling me a crackpot? Here is my publication list https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=Au-AVHsAAAAJ&hl=en
First, if it is not submission-ready, then it is unlikely that it is arXiv-ready either.
If you put it in another place, you won't get much prestige or recognition, so I would aim at a place accessible to everyone (without login) - your homepage, GitHub or anything (it does not matter). It may be a good place if you want to start discussions.
Second, it is rather unlikely that it's something ground-breaking that everyone would like to steal from you. (But don't get discouraged - it is certainly possible that it is an interesting result!) You would benefit more from discussions than have to lose.
Third, some guidance is needed. Ideally, you can consult it with a friendly teacher, professor or PhD student. If not possible, one way to go is to try some research-level competitions for high school students (e.g. like First Step to Nobel Prize in Physics, European Union For Young Scientists or something in that line). Even if you don't win anything (those are very though competitions) you might get some feedback. Additionally, even in Poland there are a few local competitions for works in mathematics by high schools students (e.g. this and that). I am sure in UK there are also some. If you did something in a Math Olympiad, you can try asking organizers if they know such competitions (or someone suitable for mentoring you).
@user92570 You can ask on fora, but don't take for granted that people will have time read it (hint: make it as readable as possible). If I can ask, what is your country?
@user92570 Even in Poland there are a few local competitions for works in mathematics by high schools students (e.g. this and that). I am sure in UK there are also some. Or if you did something in an Math Olympiad, you can try asking organizers if they know such competitions.
@user92570 Considering how much writing in mathematics has changed since Euler's time, I'd consider modelling your paper after modern standards. See the OCW course I linked in the comments.
@Piotr: "Even in Poland" is a strange thing to say when it comes to mathematics: Poland has a famously strong mathematical community. (One might as well say, "Even in Hungary we have our little problem-solving contests"...)
@PeteL.Clark Good point (BTW: IPhO was started by Poland). But as of the present day, I believe that UK has stronger mathematical community (though, I am not aware if it implies more opportunities for high school students).
I am actually just a few steps ahead of your shoes, so I'll tell you what I'm doing, that I think might help you as well.
In high-school I also found something interesting in mathematics. I've been developing it for a year now, so now that I'm in college I tried taking it to professors. Surprisingly, none of them had much interest in primality testing. After doing a little research of my own and looking publications similar to what I am working on, I found a few journals that have published similar work to mine. Looking at the requirements of the journal submission, I found their TeX format and I am now currently working to format my work in TeX before I submit my work to a Journal.
So my advice, although I can't relate to success yet, would be if the work you are doing is relevant enough (that it might have a use for someone else), then:
Turn it into TeX if you haven't yet
Make sure your work has a good "story" (Explain the work and its relevance thoroughly)
Make sure grammar and spelling are flawless
Find a couple Journals you could possibly submit it to, and pick the top one (Look at other's work and papers, and remember, typically you can only submit to one journal simultaneously)
Format and submit
I've found that the proof itself is less than half the work. And its taken me a couple months to were I'm at (near-finishing an semi-important generalization and a new algorithm in publication format). So just keep working on it, and give it effort. Best of Luck!
Points 1-3 are great (especially LaTeX, not necessary TeX). For 4-5 it is a bit more complicated. As of now it is "4. 5. ??? PROFIT!". In reality, these are hard steps for publishing for the first time.
I'm not sure about 4. I've found a couple Journals very easily. Like I said, just looking for similar publications I've found 3 or 4. Unless the work being done is extremely original, then there searching for publications in the area of interest should be no problem. The only thing I might not be able to relate to is the success of submitting to a Journal, which, I'll have to find out myself.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.769123 | 2015-02-26T17:04:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40649",
"authors": [
"Anonymous",
"Barbara Morgan",
"Compass",
"Dane Bouchie",
"Edward Aung",
"Ellie Windler",
"JNS",
"Matt Reece",
"Msmia2k",
"Nick Matteo",
"Odmira",
"Olivertwist",
"Pete L. Clark",
"Philip Gibbs",
"Piotr Migdal",
"Shawn P.",
"Shivering Soldier",
"Sola",
"Wouter De Coster",
"Zine Matshakeni",
"anonymous",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109497",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109499",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109500",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109513",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109516",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109517",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109518",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109529",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109577",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109580",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109582",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109604",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/109609",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13991",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15736",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22013",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31011",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6108",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7466",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pnn001",
"reach2saurabh",
"user109546"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
26928 | Should I inform students that there are cheaper alternatives to the on-campus book store?
The bookstore at my American university is an outpost of Barnes and Noble, charges much higher prices than can be found on Amazon, and in my opinion offers very poor service. Among other things that upset me, they prohibit students from browsing the stacks of textbooks -- instead you are supposed to tell the staff what you want, so they can retrieve it for you.
I prefer to mass e-mail my students in advance of the course and urge them to buy their books for my class at Amazon, used if at all possible.
Is there anything unethical, or that could possibly get me into trouble, about this?
I suggest changing the question to be less of a plug for Amazon: "Should I inform students that there are cheaper alternatives to the on-campus book store" or something in that fashion.
Please do not post answers in the comments. These will be removed without warning.
Politically?
Sure, but there is always a chance that you will step on someone's toes if you do anything. I fully agree with Nicholas that you have subtle ways to do it.
Ethically?
In the given situation the bookstore is a for-profit entity that gives below-average service to your students on an above-average price. Whatever approach you use to define the main mission of a university, it should include a good and fair service to your students for their 10-20-30 k$/year they pay. So I would say it is unethical to not tell them that they are not obligated to use a sub-par money-sucker service, and they are free to buy from internet, e.g. Amazon. If anyone is unethical in this situation, it is the person who is supervising the B&N shop's license to run at your university. But it is again a politically sensitive issue.
I do not agree that it is in any way unethical to not tell them. First of all, below-average service is a very subjective criteria (maybe they offer other things the OP never used or does not care about. Other people might think the service is superb.) and I don't see why one should be morally obliged to recommend students cheap stores - I would also not feel morally obliged to recommend them the cheapest office supply store in town. It might be a nice move, but I see nothing unethical in not doing this.
10-20-30-40-50-60 k$/year...
@dirkk First of all, I didn't say he was morally obligated to recommend the cheapest service. I said the moral move is to at least to tell they don't need to use one that OP believes low quality. The final choice is of the students, anyway. Second, quality is subjective and opinion based, it is true. But if I sell you something that is crap based on my opinion, I am still dishonest.
@Greg I feel like we could have cultural clash here. You wrote "to at least to tell they don't need to use one". Well, as I (and no other student I know of in Germany) would have never though I am obliged to use this bookstore, I would also not offer this advice. We just get told "We need book X" and no-one cares were we buy it and certainly it is not obliged to use the campus bookstore (not even many have one). That's why I see nothing unethical in not telling them, because it is common knowledge. Maybe the US campus system is more tightly integrated with their on-side bookstores?!
@dirkk Good for you, I am not American. I wrote my answer because someone argued that the university has an interest to support the bookshop on its campus, therefore advice against it is unethical. My opinion is - and my answer tries to argue - that the situation is rather opposite, and be on the side of the bookshop based on financial considerations vs focusing on the students' interest is the unethical stance.
Not wrong per se, but as others have mentioned, you may well be stepping on some toes. If you don't feel like dealing with the owners of said toes (whether in the bookstore, or the relevant person in the university), then there are ways to do so without blatantly stating that the bookstore is ripping off students. (Note that I'm not implying that you are blatantly saying any such thing!)
One option is to tell the students on the first day of class. The obvious downside to that is that many students will already have purchased the needlessly expensive bookstore texts by then.
A better option is your practice of mass-email prior to the start of the course. Instead of urging the students to buy from Amazon (which may imply that you are affiliated), why not just provide information on prices from the bookstore as well as the prices --for new and used-- from several vendors (Amazon is just a starting place, AbeBooks, eBay, Textbooks.com, etc, come to mind as well). Also, as others have mentioned in the comments, students will appreciate if you mention whether the latest edition is required, or if the previous (much cheaper!) edition will also work. The savvy student will know what you are implying for the alternate vendors, and the rest... well, perhaps they deserve to pay the bookstore prices!
Additionally, if your institution has a formal or informal student exchange, students may be able to buy used textbooks from a student who took the course last semester. You might be able to put your incoming students in touch with this network, as well.
One way to increase the impact of option #1 is to explicitly mention in the course syllabus (or some similar online resource, or even in a mass email) that the course will be structured so that students will not need the book in the first week or two of class. That will let them know they can wait until class starts to purchase it.
From what I've observed in the last 10 yrs as my own kids went thru college, any child with enough brains to qualify for college will find out directly or via his friends about discount textbook supply stores online. So, yeah, for those out-of-country students or anyone else who missed the "gossip," go right ahead and state "you don't need the latest edition. Any edition more recent than X is fine for this course."
+1 for mentioning student's exchange. Fortunately at our faculty we even had enough copies of most undergrad textbooks in the library, but that was quite specific just for the physicists and mathematicians.
I wouldn't specifically mention Amazon. It's just one vendor. Just let them know that they don't need a new copy and are probably able to order cheaper used versions of the book "online".
I don't think they'll have any sort of trouble understanding what you're trying to say, and it sounds a lot more reasonable and less rebellious to the rest of the university.
Writing an email to your students advising them to obtain their textbook from somewhere other than your University's preferred supplier - B&N - might well earn you a telling off.
Helpfully informing your students - in a lecture, not in writing - that your preferred textbook is available at the University bookshop - as well as from other sources - is less likely to cause you trouble. It is, after all, a completely true statement, and in the best interests of your students. Everyone knows about Amazon and I would expect any thrifty student to refer to Amazon's website for competitive prices for the textbook.
First, facetiously, if you consider yourself beholden to your university, so that you must shill for all their money-making activities, then, yes, you are not doing what they'd want. :)
Second, many universities' bookstores have become financially-independent, in effect for-profit, entities, taking advantage whenever possible of convenience and misunderstandings... Their being for-profit already corrupts their function, and their selection of available (=profitable) books, not to mention their pricing structure.
Third, for-profit textbook-writing is a huge industry, with the pursuant corruptions (wherever there's a dollar to be made...). New editions with pointless changes, ... In my opinion, given that the internet exists, we, collectively, can do better, in many ways. Information is not entirely free, but it's not as expensive as all these scalpers (!) would like us to believe.
Maybe I missed something, but how is a private bookstore that happens to be located on or near campus a part of the "money-making activities" of the university?
@O.R.Mapper because the university gets kickbacks.
@PieterB: Now that sounds extremely unethical to me (on the side of the university) and I would argue it is ethical to actively fight such an arrangement by advising against buying at such a store. On campus stores are fine as a convenience, but if they are a means of effectively limiting the freedom of choice on where to buy one's stuff, I'd consider that a severe issue that calls into question the credibility of the university.
@ChrisWhite, in the face of for-profits, it is not unethical to pay the lowest price, I think.
As soon as you've selected the textbook for an upcoming class, post the information, including the ISBN, on your web page. Books available in electronic form have different ISBNs; list the electronic version, too. If you require a particular edition, say so. If an earlier edition will do, explicitly say that. I try to include a link to the publisher's site for the book, which will have the publisher's list price, information about electronic versions, and sometimes even free resources for students. Here is one of my textbook listings:
Required Textbook: Stallings, William and Lawrie Brown Computer
Security Principles and Practice, Second Edition. Pearson /
Prentice Hall, 2012; ISBN-13: 9780132775069.
The second edition has
been revised substantially. Only the second edition will do for this
course. (Note: This book is available for rental as an e-book on
Google Play. Kindle editions and rentals are available on Amazon as
well as in the university bookstore. Other options may also be
available.)
I haven't told the students where to buy the book, but I've given them everything they need to make informed purchase decisions. The "other options" note is surely enough of a clue to set people to searching.
Urging student to buy from a supplier rather than another can be seen as advertisement and it's not something a professor should do.
Suggesting to look for alternatives or simply mentioning the book title and letting them do the math is probably the best way to go. You may imply that the most recent version has very small (or no) changes so clever people can go and buy the previous version from other students or used-book stores.
As a final comment I noticed that no-one mentioned to push (in this case urging is allowed) the students to use the University (or the City) Library: books are free to peruse and to borrow, what better option is there?
If the university library has only two copies of the book and there are over 100 students in the same class, what then?
one of my lecturer back then actually suggested the library strategy... she suggested us to form groups, and borrow the books in turn, till the end of the semester....
This is a terrible suggestion. Library copies of texts should be there for reference, not for a student (or even group of students) to hold for their personal use for a full semester.
If you have the student's best interests at heart, you can mail them that you'd be following the (n-1)th edition of the textbook, where n is the most recent version. That way, they can get the textbook at less than the price of a cup of coffee(or even free!), and there's almost always the exact same content!
Except many professors write this stuff, and derive income from it, and they're not likely to want to support such freeloading tactics.
Well, have you seen the difference between the successive editions of books which are released every single year? I don't see much writing being done - even the TOC from the previous edition works in some cases!
So? You're still going out of your way to avoid paying the decent price for what you have just said yourself is basically the same thing. It's not illegal and it's barely even amoral, but instructing your students to do it seems like a step too far.
@LightnessRacesinOrbit What is wrong or "barely amoral" about taking price into account when selecting a textbook for the course that fits the needs of the students? When a new edition comes out, no one has any obligation to choose it over any of the old editions. All editions remain perfectly valid options. Your accusation of "freeloading" seems wildly off-base to me. Where does your idea of a moral obligation to buy the latest edition come from? Does it also apply to buying other things, like cars?
@Trevor: That was mostly hyperbole.
I've used, as a textbook for one class, the 3rd edition of a book that was already in its 7th edition. (I told the students that newer editions are also OK.)
My informed guess is that students know anyway, and there's no need to tell them.
FWIW, I don't believe that publisher-direct is a much better option, and I also believe some of the electronic "rent-for-a-semester" deals from the publisher are not that hot.
Interestingly, the publishers are going to track purchases from your campus bookstore. My own experience with one publisher is that they gave me tons of problems about providing me with access to electronic teaching resources associated with my text because they didn't feel the bookstore was selling enough copies.
Without going into too much detail, there are some real interesting (let's just call them) "issues" with modern academic publishing. In some ways, there are problems in that area that are somewhat analogous to what record labels have been dealing with during their recent history. There are just better ways to distribute information these days, and if publishers don't tweak their business models, they'll become dinosaurs.
If there is ONE THING you should be sharing with your students, it's that finding and using illegal electronic copies is THEFT. I'm certainly no hero for the publishers, who I don't have much sympathy for, but I'd love to see textbook theft by electronic or other means specifically listed in our academic honesty language.
Regarding illegal copies, there's a practical reason as well as a moral reason. Those "free" PDFs may contain nasty surprises in addition to, or even instead of, what you thought you were getting.
Just from my own personal experience and less about ethics: my teachers tell me all the time to not waste money at the bookstore. And actually, unless you're a freshmen or a really lazy college student, no one buys from them anyways. I haven't bought a textbook from the university store in years unless (and boy do I hate this) it's a "university specific" text book that you literally can't get anywehere else.
Also, I never, ever buy books until at least the first week of class to better gauge if I actually need them. I'll get them if a teacher makes a point of saying I'll need to (and even then it usually is a 50/50 shot of if they use it or not -_-)
What I would recommend is to just verbally tell your students in class to buy the book from somewhere else (this allows no direct trail from you saying to not buy from the bookstore).
Another suggestion some of my teachers have done is to list the book and then, as others have said, give the bookstore price and an amazon/ ebay price as well and let the students figure it out.
But really, I would say, just tell them in class. Your students should really already know to never buy from the bookstore and it creates less liability (if there were ever to be one) on your part.
If all students would know never to buy form the bookstore the bookstore wouldn't be in business.
As long as Amazon is really the best place to buy them it couldn't be unethical.
It feels wrong for me because Amazon competes unfairly due to it's size. It may also feel wrong because you're telling students not to follow the norm.
Bottom line? You're helping your students. That's what you should be doing! Keep it up!
There is no need to specify a particular source lest it border on advertisement, but recommending alternative sources for materials has been fairly common in my experience. In fact, our campus bookstore's website even lists a price comparison tool for all the major online retailers. Taking that as a baseline I think it is only honest to provide information to the students if you find it particularly informative. It isn't uncommon for professors to email the class in the weeks leading up to the start about alternative versions and how compatible they would be with the class "just in case" they are having trouble acquiring the book. Even so far as "I have heard some sources are even 'selling' an electronic copy" has appeared as a subtle nod to the fact that there is a pdf that can be downloaded out there somewhere. Some universities will be happier than others in this regard, but as long as you avoid dropping specific names of retailers in any mass correspondence then I don't see anything outside of standard practice here.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:48.769921 | 2014-08-07T22:52:21 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "academia.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26928",
"authors": [
"Alex Charrington",
"Andreas Blass",
"Bob Brown",
"Carl Witthoft",
"Carlos Fernando Dimeo",
"Christian",
"David P",
"David Z",
"Duncan",
"ElizabethGiraud",
"Greg",
"Janet",
"Jeffrey04",
"Jerry07",
"Joseph",
"Kyle Strand",
"Lightness Races in Orbit",
"Lilienthal",
"Nobody",
"Noir",
"O. R. Mapper",
"Pieter B",
"Sachin Choudhary",
"Sarah Lamar",
"SeanFromIT",
"Someone",
"TCSGrad",
"Tingkai Liu",
"Trevor Wilson",
"Vladimir F Героям слава",
"cag51",
"devaaaa",
"dirkk",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10073",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10309",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12378",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13742",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14273",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14375",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14755",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15225",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15370",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20483",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/236",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72331",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72332",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72333",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72334",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72340",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72345",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72353",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72357",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72381",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72392",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72402",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72428",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72438",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72443",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72518",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72524",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72761",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72785",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/72838",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/79875",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87406",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8937",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"iWannaKnow",
"paul garrett",
"pr1268",
"uivil",
"user72518",
"zkytony"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.