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How to encourage students to seek alternate citations for an assignment?
I am teaching at a relatively large, public institution in the United States. I have assigned my students a research paper related to the thermodynamics of human biology. I have asked the students for a project summary including several anticipated citations, and one student has included a paper from the journal "Creation Research Society Quarterly" as an anticipated citation.
As far as I can tell, this is a reputable journal in the sense that it is not predatory. However, I'm concerned that the perspective of the journal, including "Fresh perspectives on science and society as impacted by origins" will not be compatible with accepted scientific theories (and here I use theory in the rigorous, scientific sense that means established according to all scientific evidence, rather than in the colloquial sense that means hypotheses). Moreover, the "Statement of Belief" published by the Creation Research Society explicitly states the religious motivations of the organization, whose viewpoints are generally considered incompatible with accepted scientific theory.
I have not read the article that the student intends to cite, so I do not know the information contained within that article and its perspective on the subject required for the assignment. Nevertheless, my general questions are:

Should I encourage this student to seek out alternate sources for this assignment? Before doing this in my specific case, I should obviously read the paper the student will cite, but consider the case that I have read the paper and I am concerned about the scientific validity of the article.
If so, how can I do that without encroaching on his freedom of religious expression?
Finally, how can I fairly grade the scientific content of an assignment that presents a viewpoint opposed to established theories, such as the Theory of Evolution?

(It is not my intention here to begin a discussion on the merits of various hypotheses/theories related to religion and science, and I would note that this question could very easily be posed from the other direction. This is obviously a very complicated and fraught area, and I hope I have not caused offense in my presentation.)

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/17815/7346

A good way to think about this is to de-charge the religious aspect of the question by considering a parallel situation involving an equally dubious published paper with no religious aspects, such as this one.  What would you do if a student wanted to cite such a piece of nonsense as support for their claims in a paper?
Rather than simply prohibiting the citation, you can treat this as a teaching opportunity to talk about how to determine the credibility of a scientific paper.  It is, of course, certain that the paper that the student wishes to cite will fail any reasonable test, given the notoriety of the journal involved and its complete disconnect from the rest of the scientific literature.  This is also an excellent opportunity to talk about how in science publication is not the end, but the start of the real conversation.
Perhaps rather than immediately talking to the individual student, you can take a few minutes in class to talk about how to evaluate a paper and its place within the scientific community.  Compare a nice strong peer-reviewed paper to a lunatic one like that linked above, both of which are completely secular in nature.  Then explain that part of what students will be graded on in their assignment is their ability to evaluate references.  This gives you good grounds to warn the student that their citation is a problem without even having to bring religion into the picture, as well as teaching the whole class some valuable information.
Let the creationist citation fail on its scientific (lack of) merits, rather than making this an argument about authority and belief. The beauty of science is that, in the long run, authority and belief are simply irrelevant.  Eppur si muove.

This is a good answer. Using this as a teaching moment would be really beneficial for students. You can also mark them down for not using sources appropriate to the subject. I.E a creationist view on evolution in a theoretical biological course that uses scientific methods is not a relevant source for their paper unless its used to be critiqued.

My feeling on this is it's their paper. This is college, not high school. If you want to cite a religious journal in a biology paper, it better be a damn good citation or come with follow up citations from other journals.
To be honest, I wouldn't address it at all based on the principal that all academic papers should be thoroughly researched. If you want to start giving heads up on what journals not to use, be prepared to never move on from that topic. Some people just lack the proper level of judgement for these things and no amount of teaching will get them to understand.
I would say grade all the papers fairly on content. Anyone who used sketchy information, without further citations to help support their view, should be docked points simply for failing to write a proper paper.
Hand holding is over-this is college, there are REAL academic aspirations out there that need your guidance and spending time explaining that creationism doesn't belong in thermal dynamic biology is only taking away from people who can improve.


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Computer Science vs Computer Graphics Masters
I am an undergraduate student who wants to do research in computer graphics field. I would like to know how a computer science masters degree and a computer graphics and Game Technology (goes with similar names at different universities) would affect my future Ph.D. applications and career, upon graduating from the masters program.
At this point I should also mention that some of the "Computer Graphics and ..." master programs are 1 year long. (No thesis I assume?)
Thank you

I am choosing Jeffe's answer as best because although it does not discuss the differences between programs content-wise, it directly tells me to avoid it if it is a 1 year program, which seems to be more vital in my case. Thank you all responders

If you think you might pursue a PhD later, it's a very bad idea to pursue a one-year master's degree without a thesis, no matter what it's called.  PhD admissions committees tend to consider all applicants with master's degrees together as one equivalence class (because it's difficult to remember the exact details of hundreds of different master's degrees).  You will be directly competing with other applicants who took more time doing and publishing research during the first full year master's program, before applying at in their third semester.  Students in one-year master's programs would apply after only two or three months in their program, which (for most mortals) is not enough time to do any significant research, much less publish it.

I'd look at this a little like a wager on where you want to go in the future.
If you'd like to do a PhD in the future, then focus on the fundamentals will pay off. I can't think of a single PhD that wouldn't benefit from stronger research and math skills. Especially if you want to go on to a PhD, ensure that you're getting the background in research --- typically this will mean a focus on thesis based programs.
If you're unsure of where you want to go afterwards, be aware, that a good master's program in Computer Science, is unlikely to close any doors for you, whereas a focus on Computer Graphics may mean that it's more difficult to make the transition into a different field later should you decide it's not for you.

It really depends on what sort of research you want to do. I know people who I work with in scientific visualization that have Computer Science degrees and that's probably the best thing for their kind of work. They use computer graphics, but most of their work is more related to computer science. If you're going to go the route of Computer Science but are interested in graphics, make sure you pick a program that offers enough education in that area (good coursework, professor interested in the research, etc.) and take plenty of Math, possibly even another Master's degree.
I'm not sure what kind of PhD work you would do in Computer Graphics outside of scientific visualization (though I'm sure there's some of which I'm unaware), but it sounds like the kinds of programs at which you're looking are more focused on people who are using the Master's program as an end goal to go into the computer games industry. I'd be wary of those programs if you're trying to move into a Ph. D. later as they may not be relevant to the kind of program where you'd be applying in another year or two.

You've not said anything about where it is studied.  A handful of "ivy league" comp sci labs are the parking place where old ARPANET pioneers end up, and those might pass on useful undocumented procedures to their best students.  It is not by chance that the collection of protocols and permission changing routines used in an annual "The Facebook" were all in one place at one time.
At an upgraded sixth form college who've decided to rebrand their media studies and colouring-in creche staff as "computer graphics", you won't find out nearly as much as at a specialist massively-parrallel programming satellite of ATI reasearch division located at MIT.  Look up "Jeff Garzic".
What I'm saying is; look at industry links.  ex-Bell labs:MIT.  google:stanford, facebook:harvard and so on, and avoid anywhere which has no useful spinoff to swap interesting comp sci information with.  Define your interests and strengths, and choose from that where to apply to.

So, basically, what you're saying is "abandon computer science if you can't get into one of the top few universities." That's terrible advice.

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Is it okay to put up a submitted paper and a paper which is about to be submitted on Academia.edu?
I'm applying to graduate school (CS MS/PhD) this year and I wanted to put up a copy of my papers online so that admission committees would be able to see them. The problem is one of the papers is currently under submission at a conference and notification for the same is only on Jan 22nd. Another one is still in preparation and I will be submitting it soon to a journal/conference. So I was just wondering if it is okay if I put up these papers in my Academia.edu page?
Actually one of my friends' told me that since Academia.edu submissions are searchable on Google, the conference I have submitted to and the journal or conference I would be submitting the other paper will have a problem. Is he right? How else can I provide a way for others to view these papers?

For your submitted paper: Check the copyright and "prior publication" policies of the conference you've submitted to.  It's very likely that they allow you to post a "preprint" of your paper on your web page.  This is a very common practice in Computer Science, since it allows researchers to share their work without being delayed by the peer review process.  You might also consider posting on a preprint server such as arXiv.org as this will further increase your audience (this is also usually allowed).  And it would also be a good idea to include a copy of the paper with your applications, or at least a link; don't expect the admissions committee to find it by themselves.
For your not-yet-submitted paper: Again, there shouldn't be a problem with the journal/conference, but it's probably best to wait to make it public until it is completely finished and ready to submit.  However, you could certainly include a copy with your applications.

Listing of approaches to self-publishing: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

There are two separate issues: terms of copyright and journal policy regarding prior publication. Be sure to check both before posting your manuscript online. Also, whether it is "very likely" that the journal allows it depends on your field: in math and physics it is common practice, but in chemistry or medicine it is rarely allowed.

@F'x: Thanks, I added a note about prior publication policy. They may or may not be found in the same place. The asker is in computer science, where I understand posting preprints is the norm. You are right that other fields may be different.

@NateEldredge great, I had missed that the OP specified CS… I have taken the liberty of adding the precision to your post, to avoid misleading potential other readers :)

This may not be relevant to OP's situation but it's relevant to the general question:  There is one additional issue not addressed so far: Are you sure that you want everyone in the world seeing your paper now?  Are you sure, even, that you want admissions committees seeing it?  If a paper is accepted for a conference, that means that someone has decided it's at least good enough for that conference.  You have a little bit of confirmation that you're not embarrassing yourself by posting your paper publicly.  But conference papers don't necessarily have to be good in a self-contained way.  It might be enough, from the point of view of the conference organizers and reviewers, if the paper is intriguing and could lead to interesting discussion and feedback.
The safest thing to do is to restrict circulation of your papers to people you know until the paper has been published.  I'm putting aside issues about copyright, prior publication, etc.  My point is that having had a paper reviewed, having gotten feedback, and having revised to the extent that reviewers think the paper is worth publishing provides good reason to think that you are not embarrassing yourself by making the paper publicly available.  (Alternatively, just get lots of feedback from people who are qualified to give it.)
That's the safest thing to do.  I'm not saying it's the best thing to do.  There are tradeoffs.  By putting the paper out on the web early, you promote your ideas, advertise what you're about, and promote discussion.
I'm not sure that any of this applies to CS, and I'm not sure that any of it applies to your situation.  It's more relevant to people who are going on the academic job market after graduate school.  I think that what people are probably looking for in graduate applicants is that applicants have a lot of promise.  If there is good raw material, but also rough edges, that's OK: Helping you grow past the rough edges is the job of the graduate program.

Are you sure that you want everyone in the world seeing your paper now? — If the answer is "no", the paper is not ready to submit.

It's not just that.  You may think the paper is ready for everyone to see when it's not.

first of all thanks for the reply :)
Although it's true that I might end up embarrassing myself, my adviser thinks that it is good idea to submit it somewhere and so we plan to do it in a few days time. But in the meantime I just wanted to put this up (at least the first draft) so that admission committees might be convinced that I'm just not boasting when I say that "I want to pursue research".
One more reason is that I just thought doing so might increase my chances of getting in.

Don't the job ads ask you to send a writing sample?  If not, would it be OK, in your situation, to send it with your application, anyway?  That way, if someone looks at your materials, the paper is right there.  They don't have to go looking for it on the web.  I can tell you that when someone is plowing through dozens of applications, whether printed or in front of them on a computer, they may not want to go looking around at academia.edu or anywhere else.  Maybe there won't be many applications competing with yours, but if there are, try to make it easy for the people reading them.

Sorry, I forgot that you're applying for a slot in a graduate program rather than a job.  But the general principle is the same.

@Mars They do ask for a statement of purpose and I would be writing about these there. But not all them allow us to submit additional materials like papers or other writing samples with applications. And those are the places because of which I just wanted to put it online.  In fact someone suggested me another idea - to make a simple webpage on dropbox and put the papers there. That way it would be known to only those to whom I give the link. Any opinion on that?

If you can't get it in front of them, then I think it's fine to make it available on the web.  I personally like the idea of a private link (although putting it in a public place does have the advantage that people evaluating you can find it even if they lose track of the link).

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Should I inform the graduate admissions committees (of all the Universities I have applied to) of the acceptance of one of my papers?
I think if it was a standalone question then the answer would be an unequivocal "Yes". So I will present you my situation: while applying to graduate school I had mentioned that two of my papers are under submission at 2 different conferences (I had given the names of the conferences as well). One of them got accepted today and the other one was rejected a few days back.
Now the thing is, I feel that informing them about the acceptance might increase my chances considering this is my first paper and I'm an undergrad currently (is this a myth?). But the issue is, if I inform the committees about the accepted paper alone then I feel guilty about the fact that I'm deliberately concealing information about the rejected paper. And if I don't, I feel I might not be making any use of the fact that the paper got accepted somewhere.
Can someone tell me what could be done?

Good papers get rejected all of the time for a variety of reasons. It has happened to the folks who will be reviewing your application. Don't worry too much about informing them of the status of both submissions.

I would say that, on my rating scale "submitted paper"=0 (anybody who can cover a few pages with TeX symbols and read the submission rules can submit a paper), "accepted paper"=+10, and "rejected paper" = minus some coefficient depending on the journal times the current reputation of the mathematician. Since the second factor for you is about 0 at the moment, in my eyes neither the rejection, nor the submissions count but the acceptance does. However, most likely I'm not in the admission committee considering your case, so take everything I said with a grain of salt.

Ben Norris' comment is right.  I will elaborate a bit.
As an undergrad, having an accepted paper is much more significant than having a rejected paper (i.e., the net perception is very positive even if they learn about both).  Furthermore, rejection is probably temporary (you'll probably resubmit after improving it and it may get accepted) whereas acceptance is permanent.
Tell them about the acceptance.  If they ask directly, tell them about the rejection.  But there is no reason to feel obligated to broadcast a paper's rejection.  The people reviewing your application certainly don't list their paper rejections when they apply for a job or a grant!

Thank you for that. But as I said, I did mention the conference names. And even if I hadn't, wouldn't it be ethically wrong on my part to highlight only the accepted paper without giving any result for the other one?


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Should I include a bibliographical entry in the Works Cited pages for works I just mention?
Should I include a bibliographical entry in the Works Cited pages for works I just mention?
For example, if I mention the work of an author by title just as an example without quoting from it, should I include an entry for it in the Works Cited page?

As opposed to what?

To put JeffE's comment a little more directly: Yes, of course.

If you mean by "as opposed to what?" what is the other alternative, then I mean mention the work in the text without including it in the Works Cited page.

Yes.
A bibliographical entry allows readers to unambiguously identify and locate the work you mention. (Which they must be able to do if they would like to verify your claims about this work.)


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I missed the PhD application deadline, what now?
I missed the PhD application deadline (Physics), and apart from applying late, what can I do if I get no position and I have to wait another year?
I would like to keep doing what I was doing for the Master thesis, and so spend a good amount of time staying in research somehow, so I won't feel like I'm wasting my time. Are there some alternative paths to follow?

find a research post, or a job in McDonalds, then make sure the next application is early...

I have a steady part time job already and in a couple of weeks I'm finishing my master. It's not that I didn't apply, I just can't apply.

If, as you say, "you can't apply" then you did not really "miss" this deadline...

I missed it in relation with my master thesis being handed in late, better now?

If they think you had a valid reason for submitting your Master thesis late then they may make an exception, on the other hand they may look at the reason and not make an exception.

I'm going to guess you're based in the US, because that's the biggest country with application deadlines. The easiest alternative is to apply to a PhD program that doesn't have application deadlines, and accept students throughout the year. As far as I know, this is actually the dominant model for PhD students in the rest of the world, with the US as the biggest exception (some Canadian & UK universities also have deadlines). All you need to do is convince a supervisor to accept you, and find the funding somewhere.
Example.

Eligible candidates can enrol and start their PhD at any time of year. If you are a New Zealand student, you must enrol within 3 months of your unconditional offer. If you are an international student, you must enrol in the programme within 6 months of your unconditional offer.

I am based in Europe, where I live the applications are once a year.

Some universities will let you  take classes as an un-matriculated student. But you need some (personal) funding for this.
Some laboratories might hire you as a low level lab technician or assistant. This would give you some funding and a bit of experience.
Either of the above can give you contacts that might be useful in the future.
In the rarer case, you might be able to do both. Hire on at a university lab that also lets you take a few courses as a perk.

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what steps to take when research result is patentable
I'm working on a nearly completed paper in CS. It deals with a memory module design, which, apart from being a novel idea, turned out to be of potentially commercial value. Now I was thinking of patenting it, of course, I doubt I will be able to make its commercial development a priority of mine until at least I finish my PhD (relatively soon) and find some "solid ground" in academia (I have some job offers, but can't specify any amount of time). However, I am under the impression that this should not prevent me from protecting my work.
As I am quite inexperienced with it, I must also ask if I'm having the right conception and approach to patenting here?
What is the procedure of patenting an idea that is to be published in a journal? Are there any consequences?

What did your supervisor say? What did your university's IP specialists say?

I talked naturally with my supervisor, he said that it was in the end my decision, as it was my idea. He was supportive from the start, especially since this is not my main research, but some side project, for which he was kind enough to let me spare a few hours a week and offer moral and academic support.
His approach would be: 1. file for patent 2. wait for acceptance 3. publish paper
I'm not quite sure if we have any IP specialists at the uni, I haven't heard of any, nor did anyone mention them...

It's almost certain that your university does have IP people. And if you don't talk to them now, you may hear from them later when they sue you claiming a share of your patent.

@NateEldredge +several_million rep points! Extremely important point, this!

@drN what happened to you?

I was recently speaking with a colleague of mine who had done a lot of work in the IP area. The comment I received was that it took a lot of time from initial idea to the awarding of a patent—typically about three years and potentially lots of money (thousands of dollars or euros, depending on the filing location).
Depending on your local laws, you may be able to use your manuscript as part of the provisional patent application (an initial filing to the relevant patent office saying "we're going to file a real application soon"). However, as EnergyNumbers has suggested in a comment—you must contact someone with knowledge of local patent laws, as the rules vary greatly between countries. If your university has such an office (check with their grants and funding office for suggestions about whom you should talk to), this will save you the expense of hiring a patent attorney.

Thanks. I was under the, obviously wrong, impression that those procedures would need symbolic cost and negligible administrative time. I'll definitely ask around the uni.
Have you any comments on how this works with a paper publication involved? Can a published paper prove authorship over an idea before the patent is approved/submitted?

You have to be careful about this. Depending on where you are, publishing your paper can either prove ownership of the idea (good) or establish prior art (very bad, as your idea is no longer "new"!).

@aeismail why is that? Then shall we make the date of publication strictly later than the filing of the patent?

If what you have is potentially patentable do not publish any critical element before filing the patent application or you risk losing eligibility due to existence of prior art (even if it is yours!).
Be aware that your university may claim ownership of the IP since it concerns ideas that you got in the context of a project while they were paying you (my university would claim partial ownership). This need not be a problem, as this also means they get to pay the piper. This is not necessarily an issue since, if your name is on the patent, you are entitled to a slice of the cake.
You should really talk to patent experts. Your university probably has them. Most universities have a dedicated tech transfer office (TTO) which handles patents, spin-offs and industrial collaboration. They have the expertise to guide you in such endeavours.

Does that mean that the uni could further develop and commercialize my idea, while I would still get paid a percentage as co-owner? That is obviously a situation that benefits both parties, and I would most certainly have no objections to that. Of course, I realize that the exact implementation depends on the policy of the uni, but I wanted to ask some other experience, mainly to prevent being clueless or being under the wrong impressions when talking to (hopefully adequate) faculty staff.

@lagort this is the usual route for good ideas once the TTO gets involved. The specifics depend on the university, your advisor and you. This certainly has potential to become a win-win situation so it is worth pursuing.


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How can code be classified in a Thesis(Figure, Table, Listing, etc)
I am writing a Thesis and there are sections that require me to add fragments of code or a complete code. Should this be classified as a figure, table,listing or snippet ?

Insert it as a listing. The convention is to print code verbatim in monospace font. If you're writing in LaTeX, the listings package exists for this purpose.

While this is helpful for LaTeX users, it doesn't tell @beginningperl how to label it.

@BillBarth Yes it does. It is a listing - that is what it is called. You can have listings labelled 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 etc just like figures, and a List of Listings (or perhaps Code Listings) in the TOC.

Withdrawn. You're right. I hadn't used that feature before. Not sure how I missed it. +1

One quick addition, you'll probably want to use \lstlistoflistings to produce an appropriate Table of Listings at the front of your document. The optional arguments label=someAwesomeLabel and caption={This is my caption} are also very helpful.

@Moriarty Thank you very much for your reply. I thought about the listing to but wasn't sure. I am using Microsoft word and since it doesn't have that label, i could create a custom label as listing. I will leave the question open for now should anyone have any other answers.

@beginningperl Might I add that if you are writing a thesis about software, there is no reason to stick to Word. The learning curve of LaTeX is shallower than that of HTML, and the advantages outweigh the cost of learning it.

@JonathanLandrum Thanks i will take some time to learn it.


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How to develop your own argument in a literature review?
In a literature review, we look at recent publications and put what other researchers have said in this context. However, how can I develop my own argument? Should I write it with my own words or should the argument be based in what others have said?

possible duplicate of How to do a literature review efficiently?

Not the same. This is asking if one can come up with "original" arguments in a review.

Damien Igoe's answer is very accurate, however, I would add that I think it is possible to interpret what someone wrote in a different way than others have previously interpreted. However, your arguments should not be confused with the other authors' arguments.
Originality in analysis is often welcomed. However, originality in structure should be done very carefully. Common structures exist for a reason. In my field, it is common to switch between the reviewed author's points and your own:

Jones (1991) claimed that the primary motivator for workers was public
  recognition while Smith (2004) believed that workers were more
  concerned with monetary compensation. I will show that both were
  correct by showing that workers really care most about their
  compensation being publicly higher than the average for their
  position.

I would offer a slightly different answer from either of the others, both of which are excellent. Each of these answers and my own are probably (at least somewhat) discipline-specific.
Rarely, in my view, should a literature review be just that - a simple review. Instead, the best structure for papers in my field is an introduction, followed by a single section that provides theory and specific hypotheses derived from that theory, followed by empirics, etc. There is no "literature review" per se.
Instead, literature that is relevant for establishing a problem is cited in the introduction and literature relevant for building new theory, elaborating existing theory, and/or challenging existing evidence/arguments is cited in the course of making one's theoretical argument. From that argument come testable hypotheses, all of this being stated in one section (possibly with subsections, depending on the scope of the paper) between introduction and research design.
In this way, relevant literature is reviewed in the course of constructing arguments, with quotes and references both bringing credibility to your arguments and being used to demonstrate weaknesses in extant work. Thus, your review should be your own argument largely in your own words, with others' work cited and sparingly quoted where it helps you.


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How can I make sure that the words I write are my own?
Well, I don't know how to confirm to myself that the words which I'm writing are my own words. Now, maybe those words are based on what I have read recently because if not there won't be anything to say. Should I for example just comment in what other researchers say which I'm paraphrasing what they wrote or can I also write as if I was talking (words which are based on what I have read)?

I don't know what the purpose of your writing is, so the answer really depends on that. It sounds like you're writing some kind of review of prior work (either as a survey or as part of a paper) ? In that case, the goal here is not to regurgitate (in your words or via paraphrase) what others say. Rather, you should be reading what they say and thinking about it (and seeing if you're convinced by it).
Only after that should you even attempt to describe the work. And when you do so, put all reference material away. If you can't describe someone else's work without referring to it, then you don't really understand it yet. In this way you'll ensure that you use your own ideas/thoughts to express what's gone before.

I second @Suresh's remarks, but/and the situation is truly more complicated, as your explanation of your question correctly indicates.
For example, complicated, sophisticated things are often so easy to mis-represent that it seems as though there's almost a unique path, a unique narrative, that is correct. And it may be non-trivial to learn what this path is. Thus, in effect, the phrasing of a high authority is not only "burned into one's retinas", but, also, seems the only correct thing to say.
So, first, do not try to "say something else", just for the sake of avoiding "quoting", because that seeming paraphrase may be wrong, or deficient, or ...
But, at the same time, extended passages should not be quoted, unless put in quotation marks. It's best to internalize ideas well enough to give "the standard definition" and such things, even if that ends up sounding very similar to other sources. Similarity is inevitable in many cases.
As in many scenarios, honesty is a clarifying criterion. That is, is what you write coming out of your own head, even if it resembles other sources, or are you quite literally copying? The latter is not so good.


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Should sections of a chapter have introductions and conclusions?
Consider the following situation:
The review of the literature chapter has seven sections: the first one is for the introduction, the five medial are for different themes, the last one for the conclusion.
In writing the five medial sections, should I write an introduction and conclusion for each or just paragraphs discussing certain points?

Everything that you write should be justified by the goals of the document. Introductions, conclusions and "linking" material between sections are written in order to support your overall argument (for example, by summarizing higher-level ideas) or to assist the reader (for example, by letting them know something about what they are about to read). So you need to think about the needs of each part of your document, and how the whole thing fits together, to discover where introductions and conclusions ought to be placed.
Introductory material does not need to be very long, and it does not need to occupy its own section. Within a chapter, it's perfectly fine to have a short introductory passage before the first numbered section. For smaller divisions of your document, it's likely that you don't need to say very much in the way of introduction. When you find yourself writing an introductory sentence that doesn't add anything to the section heading, you are better off just omitting that sentence.
Readers can be served by short "hints" at the beginning or end of a section, that explain how the topics are linked together. This sort of thing lets you move more smoothly from one topic to another, and makes your overall argument more coherent. Without using many words, you can let readers know whether the new topic is:

A later counterargument to the material in the previous section.
A supporting argument from a different perspective.
An additional example of the same thing we have just seen.
Superficially different, but actually the same underneath.
etc.

This is much better than having a template introductory sentence that just says "This section is about ..." without giving any indication how the section fits in to the overall structure.
Conclusions are the same: for a short section, there's no need to sum up what's just been said. That doesn't add anything. In particular, for a literature review chapter, you are likely to be better off having a general conclusion to the chapter (if there is a conclusion at all), rather than a separate conclusion in each section.


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Is it considered cheating to ask a friend or tutor to proofread your thesis before submission?
Even after having proofread my thesis many times, I think asking another person to proofread it before submission is necessary.
Is it considered cheating to ask a friend or tutor to proofread your thesis before submission?

Is it considered cheating to ask a friend or tutor to proofread your thesis before submission? — No.

If the answer to this question would be yes, almost every book ever published would be cheated/plagiarized as you normally have an editor.

If it were, then the entire journal refereeing system would be an epic cheating scandal.

If anything, not having your document proofread (and address the issues that come up) is unethical: you'll waste your readers' time with suboptimal presentation.

I am a bit surprised by the question. Is there a reason that you are asking this question? i.e. does your institute have some explicit policies that you are border-lining on?

I can't imagine why it would be cheating: So long as you're producing the majority of the content, it wouldn't be cheating to have someone check for the problems that are now invisible to you!

Yeah - I don't see how finding typos has anything to do with 'cheating'.  But I would go further - in my days as a grad student it was a social norm to help proofread papers, resumes, and theses. Everyone needs the extra set of eyes that haven't read it a thousand times already. And the help goes beyond just typos - pointing out difficult-to-understand sections (even suggesting alternate wording) is still far far away from cheating.

@JonCuster: Definitely. Hints like "this proof is wrong" or "your example does not match your definition" or "you should label your axes" are also much appreciated.

Definitely not. In fact, I wish more students in my department would do this!

Hi, RoboKaren. This is more of a comment than answer. . . .

The OP asked a yes/no question.

No. The purpose of your thesis review is not to test your ability to use a word processor or to compose text in a social vacuum. It is a test of your ability to conduct research and communicate those findings to others. Treat it like you would treat any publication, and get feedback from your peers in order to make it as good as possible.

What if it is a Bachelor Thesis submitted to a Department of English Studies, that tests the student mastery of the English language as well?

Then ask the department (or students in the department) about such a situation.

If the Dept. of English Studies has anything at all to do with publishing or commercially-published works, they'll be teaching that everything should be proofread by someone other than the author. Always. By rights, they should fail you for not getting someone else to proofread, but like Not says, check the rules ;-) Btw one convention when acknowledging a proofreader is to say that "any remaining errors are entirely my own responsibility", or words to that effect, which explicitly absolves the proofreader of any blame for the content.

@HifaMo: Likely, the student mastery of the English language is tested in that the document focuses topically on the English language. That way, the student will display an equivalent amount of knowledge about the English language as a biology student does by writing about a biology topic.

@HifaMo I'd say English studies is as much about correct spelling, as advanced math is about being able to do sums in your head.. that is to say incidental although certainly not a bad idea. I sure hope that nobody would ever publish a paper/thesis without someone else proofreading it, independent of the field.

No, not at all! Every writer needs readers, and the purpose of those readers is, as already mentioned, to find the errors, typos, and unclear sections that are now invisible to the writer who has seen the manuscript a thousand times.
Obviously, if your friend or tutor is actually providing content for you, and you are not acknowledging their contribution, then that IS cheating. When you ask someone to read for you, be sure to tell them exactly why you need another set of eyes on the manuscript. I usually ask my friend (or supervisor, if willing) to simply flag all typos and mark the margin where a paragraph is less than clear to them. I can usually figure out what is wrong without having them actually give me any content.
I find that writing--at least good writing!-- is usually not a solo effort, and I am always indebted to at least one person for taking the time to read my manuscript and flag the problem spots for me.

I don't think incorporating specific proposals of proofreaders is cheating either. If the help becomes substantial, credit is to be given but it's still not cheating.

Excellent point, @Raphael. I edited my answer to reflect this.

It is normal practice in the UK to have your thesis read by your supervisor and, probably, others. However, you should check the rules for your own institute as they may vary on what exactly is permitted.

If your thesis is in math, by all means have others proofread it.   Once it is released, it will no longer be possible to correct an error!
However, if your proofreader finds something more substantial than a typing or simple mistake, you must not only credit him with his ideas on the acknowledgement page, but also in a footnote.  No harm in this.  It is better to get it right and give credit than to get it wrong and take the credit for that for yourself!  The quality of your work also reflects on the reputation of your project director and your committee members, you have to respect them by turning out a high quality product.
However, I have found that the probability of a totally error-free thesis is equal to or less than the smallest positive number.
I cannot advise those whose who are English majors; that is a foreign language to an engineer!

"However, if your proofreader finds something more substantial than a typing or simple mistake, you must not only credit him with his ideas on the acknowledgement page, but also in a footnote." No, that is simply not a requirement in any department or thesis I have ever been involved with.  Acknowledgements serve to acknowledge.  Footnotes are not an inherently higher honor.

If that is an actual requirement in any current or former department of yours, that would be interesting to know: please provide us with a link or citation.


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Can the word "subsubsection" be used in a thesis?
Can the word "subsubsection" be used in a thesis?
For example:
The next subsubsection discusses so and so.
It is not listed in English dictionaries.
What do you think?
Thank you

No. Don't do that. Rather give the section a number and refer to that, e.g. "for blaa blaa please refer to section 2.1.3."

@mmh, isn't your comment an answer to the question?

I recently encountered a mathematics paper where one part of the reasoning required a careful division into different cases, then division of those, and so on. The word "sub-sub-sub-case" was used.

@Senex: probably there's a difference between inventing terminology that refers to the domain of discourse of the paper, and inventing terminology that refers to the paper itself. A thesis about the structure of theses could define and use "subsubsection" ;-)

I would think that in normal use (I don't mean specifically academic, hence not an answer) the main risk of the word "subsubsection" is that it will be misread as "subsection". If that's acceptable then you could just say "subsection" in the first place, and if it's not acceptable then don't risk it!

Isn't that highly field-specific? I can see at least borderline-nerdy IT people (uh, like myself) to be much more willing to deal with neologisms if they are logical and concise replacements for otherwise inefficient expressions for which no single official word exists than, say, some people from literature-oriented fields that may apply a stricter framework of stylistic rules on how to use a given language.

One very important point has yet to be touched on. Indeed, subsubsection is not a dictionary word -- and even if it were, it's awfully cumbersome. Saying "section 1.2.3" is neater and more informative, as it tells the reader exactly where to go.
The most important reason to use numbered references is if the order of your text changes. For example, if you move a particular subsection to another section or chapter, any references to it in the form of "the next subsection" will now be invalid. By using numbered references and attaching these to either the subsection header or a key sentence (as appropriate), the numbers will automatically update and your referencing will remain correct.
The above is applicable to references to anything.  It is very dangerous to write such things as "in the following...", "in the previous section we introduced...", etc. Such phrases do not refer to an exact place, and they can easily became invalid as you add, remove, or change parts of the text. Proof-reading will also be more difficult.

Could please tell me how I can make the numbers of subsection inside the text update automatically?

@HifaMo If you write in LaTeX, the \label{xx} and \ref{xx} commands update automatically. If you use Microsoft Word, try this (though I have only rudimentary knowledge of the program myself). If your chosen typesetter or word processor doesn't support this, then it is probably woefully unsuitable to write a thesis with.

Should I call it a section even though it is a subsubsection, for example. (eg Section 1.2.3.4)

@HifaMo Yes, I think so. Perhaps one of the style manuals has a more authoritative answer. But it's the neatest way I can think of to write it, and it's still correct -- a subsubsection is a section, after all.

It's better to avoid it if you can. Rephrase it with something like "Later we will...", "further in the text...", "in the following we will...", etc. You can also refer to it specifically as "in Sec. X.Y."

How about a rationale as to why this is better avoided? @mmh, ditto.

The absence of this word from general dictionaries seems a sufficient rationale to me.

By definition, (although the word is not in the dictionary), subsection is a division of a section, hence, does not have a meaning of its own. Section, however, if isolated, has a meaning of its own. Each section can be read and understood without reading the other sections. If necessary, other sections can be referred.

In this experiment, we validate the theorem presented in Section 4.

is a fine sentence. Whereas, a subsection might be entitled Experiments with Abnormal Data, such that one cannot understand before reading the definition of abnormal data (which is probably given at the beginning of the section).
Therefore, instead of

The next subsection discusses the effects of abnormal data to our
  super-duper proposed solution

I'd prefer

We examine the effects of abnormal data to our super-duper proposed
  solution in detail, in Section 4.3

I think the problem with "subsubsection" is that it leads to troublesome situations for the reader.
In your case, if you are in a section, then you will introduce a subsection.
If you are in a subsection, then you will introduce a subsubsection.
If you are in a subsubsection, then you will introduce a subsubsubsection.
And so on.
This is a situation you are going to get into if you want to be consistent in your thesis, and as it is not convenient, I suggest you to avoid it early. Use labels for referencing portions of your work. Just like Dimitry says in his answer.


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Why does the APA style call it 'the footnotes page' even though the notes are not placed at the bottom of pages?
The APA style recommends the use of either footnotes or endnotes.
The term 'endnotes' means notes are placed in a separate page in the back matter.
The term 'footnotes' means notes are placed at the bottom of relevant pages.
However, I have seen official sample APA papers with a page in the back matter entitled 'Footnotes.'
Why does the APA style call it 'the footnotes page' even though the notes are not placed at the bottom of pages?

This seems to be a question about a slightly strange-sounding choice made by the American Psychological Association and not about Academia.

The American Psychological Association is part and parcel of Academia.

The APA publication manual describes the way you should submit your manuscript, not the way the paper will ultimately be typeset. For APA journals, footnotes are grouped at the end in the manuscript but they appear at the bottom of the relevant page (actually at the bottom of the right column) in the final published version. Similarly, you would traditionally put tables and figures at the end of your manuscript, one-by-one on separate pages but once published in a journal, figures and tables will be embedded in the article.
If you are working on a student paper, you should first and foremost follow the instructions from your instructor but there is no reason to put footnotes at the end of the document. The APA publication manual provides useful guidance regarding language or statistical reporting but it's not a typography textbook. In fact, some publishers ask authors to follow (some) APA guidelines for the submission even if the final publication will have a different layout than APA journals.

This doesn't answer the question: why is the page with the endnotes on it called the "footnotes page"?

@DavidRicherby I think it does. It's called footnotes page because it contains footnotes, obviously. The confusion comes from the fact that, in the manuscript, they are not typeset as such just yet. That's what I tried to explain in the first paragraph.


text:
Should limitations of a methodology with proposed solutions be discussed in the Limitations Section?
My methodology is online ethnography. This methodology has certain limitations such as identity play, falsification, and artificiality of data.
However, its proponents have suggested some strategies for coping with these limitations and my study is based on them.
I am confused because I think the limitations section is concerned with limitations of a study that were not solved or accounted for, and that are to be avoided in future research.
So, should I discuss these limitations, that have alternative approaches or proposed solutions, in the limitations section?
Thank you

With the caveat that this is discipline specific, you could discuss your questions in several places in your article.
First, you can begin to nod at this briefly in the methods section of your article. Every methodology has some drawback or limitation and my advisers always told me to acknowledge this in the beginning. For instance, while doing semi-structured interviews, I admitted that my sampling was convenience and snowball based and restricted to 30 participants. However, I followed this up by citing 2 papers which talk about appropriateness of sample size in grounded theory approaches and theoretical saturation and why this is not hamstringing my paper completely.
Second, one of the ways of validating qualitative studies from a methodological perspective is to look at issues of credibility, transferability etc. One of their solutions is to do member checks (especially for interview based studies) In one of my current projects, I did do member checks and talk about this approach as mitigating some of my methodological drawbacks in the Discussion section of my article.
Third, you can definitely talk about this in the limitations section of your paper. There is no panacea to solving a human-centered research problem (and indeed various nuanced facets of every research project, however thoroughly investigated they might be are almost always incomplete) In the limitations section of my papers, I put down both theoretical as well as methodological limitations of my work and discuss potential ways to approach them in future work or follow up studies.

While I do not directly address your question, the following might help you to find a point of view that allows you to structure your work. Also note that I am from an entirely different discipline.

I am confused because I think the limitations section is concerned with limitations of a study that were not solved or accounted for, and that are to be avoided in future research.

With exception to the rare case that you can fully reduce the effects of a limitation of your methodology to a neglible magnitude, it remains a limitation and thus further work can improve on this aspect.
Moreover, a limitation of a methodology that is neither addressed by countermeasures nor argument (i.e., you can argue that the limitation’s effects are limited) is not only a limitation but a flaw – with some exceptions such as if that limitation only became apparent in hindsight or your main work is to explore the methodology rather than just to apply it. Any claims resulting from a methodology that has errors of fully unknown magnitude are worthless.
Finally, unless your advisor or some other relevant person has dogmatic views on how your thesis is to be structured, your structure should be determined by your content and not vice versa. In particular, it may be wise to address certain aspects only once and thouroughly – and not in multiple places and in parts. For example, you may consider titling a section along the lines of Limitations and how to circumvent them.


text:
Advice on publishing original theorems with easy proofs
I got a rejection recently on a short paper that gave a fairly short proof that a conjecture of a well-known mathematician was false.  The reviewer said that “while the results are new and interesting,” “the proofs are fine, but not very difficult, and the techniques are not new.”  Nonetheless, the arguments previously evaded some top people in the field who were interested in the topic.  My question is, to what kinds of mathematics journals should one submit significant results whose proofs involve some clever trick rather than a revolutionary method?  Also, should one not strive to find the most transparent form of a mathematical argument?

Where was the conjecture made?  If it was made in a journal paper, then perhaps you can write a "letter" ("correspondence," "short communication") to that journal containing your proof.

@JoelReyesNoche Good idea, but it was made in a book chapter.

To answer the very last question: yes you should always strive to find the most transparent way to state your proof. It will benefit everyone, will make you a better communicator in your field, and a better educator in your university.

A journal targeting a broad audience, one that includes graduate and undergraduate level readers. American Mathematical Monthly comes to mind. It’ll be how you present the twist and embellish upon it.

It's hard to answer this based on a single review without knowing the situation.  Can you ask an expert/mentor/advisor for their advice?

There is a slight distinction between "conjecture of a well-known mathematician" and "well-known conjecture of a mathematician", and it may depend on the profile of the person who made the conjecture. That said: this is most probably "just bad luck of the draw" and perhaps one cannot extrapolate too much.

regarding your question about particular types of journals: you might try asking on meta.MO if the current mods/gods think the question is OK to ask on MO. The stated aims of journals, and what actually happens in practice, change over time

I guess another point is that, though the conjecture was made by a "well-known mathematician," its validity yea or nay might not be particularly impactful, at least by that journal's standards. Sometimes the beauty of conjectures lies in the interesting analytics and reasoning addressing it.

It's possible that other researchers in this field arrived at a similar result to yours, but didn't think it was important enough to publish, giving the impression that other people haven't considered this. I'm not a mathematician, but my impression is that these kinds of folklore or unpublished results are very common in math.

@d_b: Such folklore results are indeed extremelly prevalent in many areas of mathematics (although we have no way to determine whether the situation described by the OP is one instance of this). One should probably add that these folklore results tend to be a huge pain in the ass for all people who are not experts in the field, but whose research has some non-trivial intersection with it. So the attitude not to publish something since it is "not deep enough" is probably not doing mathematics a great favour, in general. ;-)

@d_b Well I know in this instance it was not the case; the result was new.

@mbsq I think d_b's point is that you cannot know if it's really "new" or just not formally published before. All in all, there should be a place for this kind of results, if of course, the relevant conjecture has any reach aside from some discussion in a small section in a book chapter..

@rubenvb One can know within a reasonable certainty, and anyway the reviewer said that the result was new.

Actually if you search, do you find any work beeing built up on this conjecture? Like 'assuming conjecture .. to be true, it follows...'. If there is a body of papers depending on it , published in good journals, which would there be all invalidated by your finding, I would add this in an email to the editor of the journal (if e.g. some of the mentioned papers have been published there). If it was just an off-hand conjecture nobody really though to be true or interesting, just find low impact journal in the field.

@d_b re folklore: relevant?

@JochenGlueck re folklore: relevant?

Post it in arxiv and move on

If you are sufficiently junior, one good option is to contact the mathematician who made the conjecture and ask if they can recommend a venue to submit. Alternatively, if they are on the editorial board of a journal that you deem appropriate, submit to them as the editor. By making the conjecture in the first place, they have demonstrated that they view the problem as interesting!

There's a good chance the rejection is because your results are not interesting enough for the journal. In other words, the journal is looking for not only new and interesting results, but also complicated proofs and/or new techniques.
So: submit to another, probably less prestigious journal. Alternatively, you can submit to a similarly-ranked journal and hope the peer review process results in acceptance, which is entirely possible, because this particular reject reason is a judgement call and different people will come to different recommendations.

I view the peer-review process essentially as a random Bernoulli trial, where the success probability p varies with the journal (and of course the paper).

@Kimball: Why "view"? It's true for ≈80% of papers submitted to good places.

@Kimball I know what you mean (that the outcome depends on the random reviewer), but wouldn't that also describe situations where the majority of a journal's reviewers are likely to love your paper? Take for instance a Bernoulli process with p = 0.99. I think we need to put some theoretical upper bounds on p as a function of journal and paper here. :)

Keep submitting to other journals. If the result is indeed significant then you will eventually find a journal that will want to publish it. If on the other hand you continue to consistently get more rejections, that probably means the result is not as significant as you seem to think. Keep in mind that just because a well known mathematician conjectures something, that does not automatically make it interesting, and does not automatically mean that your counterexample “evaded top people in the field”.

But what do you do with "not as significant" results that have not "evaded top people in the field"? Isn't a "simple" theorem that takes a couple of days to solve also worth publishing? I've myself saved notable amount of time from fairly simple preprints on arxiv. How to identify the journals (if such exist) that provide peer vetting and a tiny bit of credit for such results?

@Džuris your result may or may not be worth publishing, I cannot say based on the information you provided. Certainly many papers are published thatcontain results that are not terribly significant but still somewhat interesting, and there are journals that are not as strict in their standards. So as I say, keep trying to publish the paper, and possibly think about whether you can improve it in various ways. You will get valuable feedback and hopefully a positive result eventually.

my question (which imo aligns with the OP question) was how to identify appropriate journals when you are quite convinced that your result is worth publishing but is nowhere near the top in significance.

@Džuris in the absence of specific information about reeearch areas etc, any low-ranking journal should be as good a choice as any other. https://mathoverflow.net/q/136261/78525

I would suggest that you focus your thoughts less on "the proofs are [...] not very difficult" and more of your thoughts on "the techniques are not new."  What happened here is that the referee doesn't think your paper is interesting enough for the journal that you submitted to because it doesn't contain important new ideas.  This is a perfectly valid reason to reject a paper from a strong journal.
The first thing to think about is whether you agree with the referee here, do you think that the paper does involve substantial new ideas?  If you think there are new ideas, then rewrite the introduction so that it will be clear to a referee that there are new ideas and then resubmit to another journal of the same caliber.  If you agree with the referee and think there aren't new ideas, then leave the paper alone and resubmit to a less competitive journal.  The referee clearly thinks that your paper would be publishable somewhere, so if you just lower your aims a little you shouldn't have trouble publishing it.
Finally two random bits of advice.  First, if the paper is quite short you might consider a journal that focuses on short papers (like Proceedings of the AMS).  Second, make sure that your intro explicitly says "this is an open problem posed by X in year Y."  If it's only been open for a year or two and it's solvable by a standard method, then that means it just wasn't as interesting a problem as the person who posed it thought it was.  But if it's been open for 10 years, then that's evidence your application of these techniques is more clever than it looks at first glance.

You could perhaps emphasize the importance of your proof, therefore making your paper more about the result than the proof itself.
Sometimes, some writing judo (turning the disadvantages into advantages) can also help. Instead of "the proof is simple" and "the techniques are not new", maybe the proof is "elegant in its simplicity" and uses "well-established techniques". Being up-front with it allows you to control the narrative. Of course, this type of reframing can only take you so far...

You could talk to the famous mathematician who made the conjecture. He could be more resourceful than you and he might know the proper journal for your contribution. Moreover, he could be one of few people who can endorse your contribution as the conjecture is in a non-peer reviewed book chapter.
Edit: if he is an editor, you can also submit the paper to him if the paper align with the journal's coverage.
He will be more than happy to read your paper and provide you feedbacks because your proof is smart and concise.

I've seen some scenarios similar to your case. Usually, a junior researcher find a famous conjecture published on a top journal, the junior researcher prove or disprove the conjecture. In case of disproving the conjecture, the junior researcher will usually provide an additional condition that the conjecture will hold.
Finally, the junior researcher will publish the paper either by himself or coauthoring/acknowledging the original author.

Or, more directly, submit to a journal where that mathematician is an editor.

Even if it turns out that your results won't ever be published, the professor might fix the proof or change the conjecture in the next edition of his book, thanks to your hint.

To complement the other answers: on one hand, yes, I have seen several instances where a proof (of a significant result) turned out to be "insufficiently impressive/interesting", and was rejected. On another hand, yes, this can mean that an interesting meta-fact was discovered, namely, that the result turns_out to be (construable as!!!) so easy that it's abruptly not-so-interesting. Yes, a bit ironic.
On a third hand, there is a possibility that some state-of-the-art methods, possibly not widely known, render a question "routine", even though to the perception of many it is not obviously answerable at all. To greatly exaggerate: not all products of large integers are "known/documented", but those of us hip to the grade-school algorithm (or better) will not be interested at all in seeing any particular product explained (without some further features of interest). So the "new" feature is there, but it's insufficient...
Unsurprisingly, in the end, there is considerable context-dependence/subjectivity in referees' appraisals of submissions. And, indeed, to some degree, editors care about whether a given paper will enhance, versus diminish, the "reputation" of the journal. "Impressive" papers are sometimes preferred... And, again, this is context-dependent and subjective.
So, yes, sometimes a (meta?) proof that an issue is, after all, (potentially) straightforward often does not lend itself to "publishability". :)
EDIT: I added the quotes to "publishability" because, after all, putting a document on the internet is a far more powerful form ofliteral publishing than anything achieved prior to 1985 or so. Yes, I know we're talking about various forms of status-certification and gate-keeping. Yes, some quality control also, but not only...

"So, yes, sometimes a (meta?) proof that an issue is, after all, (potentially) straightforward often does not lend itself to "publishability" This sounds like the mathematical version of the publication bias that affects several scientific fields. In case that a question was previously thought to be interesting, the discovery that it is actually more straightforward than expected, is indeed useful and important and thus, almost by definition, publishable. [to be continued]

[continuation] I agree with you that, in practice though, such a "negative result" will often be regarded as less publishable - but I would like to object the subtext of the sentence I quoted, which seems to describe this state of affairs as perfectly reasonable rather than biased.

@JochenGlueck, I do agree that this state of affairs is not at all perfectly reasonable... but only meant to explain it in "human terms", to explain how it can happen, as opposed to, yes, why it probably should not happen. That kind of thing. Thanks for your clarifying remarks! :)

Thanks for your response! It seems that I misinterpreted the answer a bit. :) Anyway, I think that your answer makes a good point about  the underlying human motivation. (+1)

Say 20 years ago someone published a conjecture that seemed to require a complex and interesting proof. And for twenty years nobody figured out that there was actually a very simple proof that the conjecture was false. So there seems to be an argument here that the false conjecture can never be corrected!

@gnasher729, yes, to some degree that dynamic is in play. Crazy business. This is why I've lost enthusiasm for "journal publication"...

You might want to start by putting it on a preprint server.

Not technically an answer to OP’s question, but it’s actually great advice!

Which you can't really do unless you get someone else to vouch for you.

@Džuris What why? Everybody can upload to ArXiv..?!

@usr1234567 https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

This answer seems to assume that the OP has not already done so, and it does not address the actual issue at hand which is about getting things published (which may be important for e.g. career reasons). Hence I do not think that in its current form it is very helpful

What you are discovering is that, in many cases, the proofs are more important than the theorems, especially when they bring insight or when there is a new technique in the proof that might be applied to other work.
It seems like your work is "a bit interesting" but doesn't have the potential impact to bother with publishing it. Especially when seen in competition with other papers.
For my doctoral research I worked on three problems. For one it was so easy to postulate and prove theorems (several per week) that it was abandoned as trivial. It was "cute" but, as they say, there was no "there" there.
You likely gained some insight in the work, but if the proofs were trivial, others before you likely did also, but didn't think it was worth publishing.
The comment of Joel Reyes Noche  to transform it into a short note is a good one, as are the comments and answers of others to just try somewhere else are also possibilities.
But another possibility is to take what insight you got from this work and use it to extend to something with more potential impact.

The now current XKCD might apply here.

Thanks for the answer. I just want to say that I know for a fact that one other very famous mathematician gave a more complicated argument for a weaker result.  Maybe he didn't think the question was super interesting, but if he knew how to do what I did, he would have done it, since there were parameters that called out for minimization.  (He even mentioned that his "3" could be reduced to "2" with more work, but I got it to "1" with a different method.)

I would also say, sometimes a simple proof is valuable because it is simple. The idea is easier to grasp and apply to other things. And it's not always easy to come up with these things.

I agree that simplicity is good and a worthy goal. But insight and extensibility are what gives a proof its value. All the better if it is also simple, but simplicity alone isn't sufficient.

It sounds like you are saying that a simple solution to a problem is only worthwhile if its method has lots of applications.  Is there some rough rule of thumb on this, like the number of applications or number of total pages in the paper that make it worthy?  I find it a bit strange that the interest of the original problem doesn’t carry more weight.

Actually, no. Don't make it an either/or. The word "only" in your comment is too strong. And number of pages is a worthless measure. Insight is very important in math.

I’m not sure what you mean by insight, but arguably the construction of a simple proof using clever definitions or drawing on other powerful results is insightful, yes?

I would be more towards saying     if  is it a theorem that you reproved?  in what level and what audience?  If it is very specific  i guess this helps others give you responses and advices.

@mbsq :  "I know for a fact that one other very famous mathematician gave a more complicated argument for a weaker result" --- is this fact prominently mentioned in the introduction to your paper? Also, have you considered submitting your work to the journal that this weaker result is published in?

"but if the proofs were trivial, others before you likely did also, but didn't think it was worth publishing" I think I disagree with this reasoning. First, it is not consistent with the description given in the question. More importantly, though, I do not agree with the rationale "if a proof is simple, it's likely that others have found it before": in my experience, proofs have a very strong tendency to appear simple only after we know them (even more so if the person who came up with the proof took some care to write things down as clearly as possible).

@babu_babu The situation is that originally mathematician A made a series of conjectures in a chapter in a collection.  He wrote in a footnote that B proved one of them false just before publication. I asked A about it, he said to ask B.  I asked B, and he sent me a two page argument over email, so it was unpublished except for A’s mention.

@JochenGlueck I am often reminded of Pascal's apology for having written a long letter, because he did not have time to write a short one.

The problem here is that yes B had a worse argument, but B also didn't think that argument was interesting or important enough to publish.  So that doesn't give you a strong argument.

@NoahSnyder Well he is one of those living legends who doesn’t publish much.

@mbsq I don't understand. If you've been in contact with B and he was willing to take the time to write you a two-page email, why don't you ask him whether your proof is interesting?

Does the intro to your paper lay this out clearly?  “This question was posed by A, and the current state of the art is a unpublished result by B who showed the weaker result X.  We improve on that result in two ways, by strengthening the conclusion and by giving a more direct argument.”

@NoahSnyder Yes, I said that, more or less. So the referee wasn’t saying my argument was too derivative of B’s, just that it was too simple in itself.

It sounds like you’ve done everything right then.  So just resubmit to another journal, either lower ranked or that aims at short papers.  No one has ever rejected a paper at Proceedings AMS because the proof is too short (similarly no one has ever rejected a paper at Memoirs for being too long).  Papers get rejected all the time, they usually get published elsewhere, one rejection (especially if it’s quick) is not a big deal.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Do I have an obligation to resubmit to the same journal?
I submitted a paper to a mathematics journal last year and got a "revise and resubmit" type of response.  I edited the paper following some of the referees' comments and suggestions, but the paper has changed quite substantially since then.  I brought on a coauthor, reworked some of the basics (not at the suggestion of the referee), added a lot of material, and ended up more than doubling the length of the paper.  However, certain core aspects remain from the original paper.
I would like to submit to a different journal because I feel the paper is now somewhat different and of a higher quality.  I am worried though that there is some ethical obligation to stick with the original journal because of the labor that the editor and referees have already put in with the first version of my paper; otherwise it seems that labor is wasted with respect to their publishing interests.
Should I stick with the original journal, or is OK to switch?

inform them you are "widthdrawing".

@PatrickT there is no withdrawal

There is no obligation. The paper is yours. Make your own decisions. They have no obligation to publish the revised paper and you have none to resubmit to them either.
They have spent some limited resources in helping you, but that is within their business model. The referees have done you a service, but many review for more than one journal. But that service is just one that we do for one another in the pursuit of a greater goal.
You haven't signed a contract. Make your own best choice.
If the option is open to you, formally withdraw the paper or inform the editor that you won't be resubmitting so that they can arrange their systems appropriately. That might also be an opportunity to thank them for their consideration.

+1. If you do withdraw you might say why (paper is now quite different and twice as long) . Do thank the editor.

With the "revise and resubmit" decision, I imagine one would not have to formally withdraw, because the EMS is treating the paper as rejected.

@EthanBolker technically there is no  "withdraw. The paper has to be resubmitted. Still, it is possible to inform the editor of the development and new choice, if this becomes actual.

I think it would be wrong to intend ahead of time to submit to one journal just to see what the reviews say, and then to submit elsewhere. Kind of like interviewing for a job you know you won't ever take just for interview experience.
Your circumstance is different: the paper has changed substantially and you don't see it as fitting this journal any more. You don't have a contract with them, the referees are taken from the academic community you belong to and aren't belonging to the journal. The editor's time is worth considering but overall that's a minor bit of effort for just one paper.
Your revised paper needs a thorough peer review from start to finish now. It's not merely a modification of the old paper if you've doubled the length and added a bunch of comment. I think you can feel free to submit it where you feel it is most appropriate. It could possibly be a faster process to stick with the same journal, but that may not be a strong concern of yours, and may not even be true given the extent of changes made.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's that wrong to interview for a job that you think you probably won't take.  Maybe in academia, in the business world, not so much.  And, you never know, you may end up being enchanted with what you find during the interview.

@Flydog57 I think it's perfectly fine if it's honest; a lot of universities host internship fairs and such where students are invited and expected to practice interview skills, and there's less of a implication of interest in the particular position. There's also a difference between "probably won't take" and "definitely won't take". I think it's unethical to waste other peoples' time and money; if you say "I like my current job and don't plan to move" but you are open to an interview anyways, then it's up to the interviewer whether they want to spend the time or not.

"Kind of like interviewing for a job you know you won't ever take just for interview experience." I always advise graduating students to make their first interview ever in their life for a job they probably don't want. I don't advise them to lie, but in general there's no expectation that the candidate must want the job above some threshold X before even having an opportunity to ask about the job. Interviews go both ways. With the reduced anxiety of low risk of bombing, the candidate could actually do well and find out they are interested.

I would feel some responsibility to the original journal, as the editor's ability to get the manuscript to the right referees was a factor in improving the paper.  That said, to do as you described isn't all that bad.

Referees and editors usually aren't paid; your withdrawing the paper doesn't take anything that's theirs.  And the typically parasitic publishing companies generally deserve no loyalty.  Your loyalty to your profession - to get your paper in the most appropriate journal - should come first.  If they see your paper in another journal, and see that their feedback has helped, they should smile.  Of course the specifics for this journal could be different.

Your only obligation is to take the reviewers comments seriously and act on them before submitting the revised manuscript, which you have done (kudos - there are many authors that don't and just submit somewhere else).

Since you reworked some of the basics, independent of what the referees said: I think it's morally acceptable to submit elsewhere, and likely legal, though check the applicable laws involved. NOTE:
I am US-based.  We submitted several papers that were somewhat similar several places, but they vary enough that it was valid to do so.  This was decades ago.


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how useful are solo papers?
I have heard a few times that having single-author papers is good for your career.  I suppose this is because it shows you are capable of producing research on your own.  But I wonder if it is a double-edged sword.  Say you are early in your career and have only solo papers.  Does this also look bad because it suggests you are not good at collaborating?

It certainly doesn't look bad in math.  What is your field?

Math. So that's good to know.

In math, some good researchers almost never collaborate, though collaboration is becoming a lot more common.  However, even if you want to collaborate, it can take awhile to find suitable collaborators and a suitable project, so it's perfectly normal to start off writing solo papers and later wind up collaborating a lot.

Useful reading

EDIT: Just to make the perspective clear. Disciplines have varying authorship traditions. In many fields within the sciences, and where I come from, first name in an author list is first author (considered to have contributed most) and collaborative papers are the norm.
Any article where you are first author is "good" for you. Single author articles have become increasingly rare, at least in fields with which I am familiar. The reason is of course that science is rarely done by single persons but rather in groups. Where single author articles are still relatively common are in the form of review articles where a single author can collate and critically assess the state of affairs in for example a subfield.
Going back about 20-30 years, again in the afore mentioned for me familiar fields, single authorship was almost demanded from PhD students and older faculty would basically frown on co-authored articles. Now, single authorship almost carries something odd about it in the sense that one can wonder if the person does not know how to collaborate. The later is of course not a good view to express but it shows how much the views have turned.
So to conclude, writing a well-referenced paper in a high impact journal as first author takes precedence over single or multiple authorship today. I doubt many would look at single authorship as much better than first authorship on a co-authored article today.

good points, @Peter Jansson, I would have incorporated them in my answer if you wouldn't have been faster.

Can you clarify the last sentence?

@mbsq Thanks, I was interrupted by colleagues as I was writing and lost concentration. Hopefully, it makes more sense now.

Note that in math (mbsq’s field), the usual convention is to give authors in alphabetical order, hence there is no useful concept of a “first author”. And single-author papers are quite common.

I doubt many would look at single authorship as much better than first authorship on a co-authored article today. — This is certainly not true in theoretical computer science.  But then, like math, we don't have "first authors".

@JeffE this is why I added the EDIT to my answer to acknowledge your field and other that have other traditions.

It highly depends on the discipline. In the humanities, single-authored papers are (still) often kind of the norm, in the "hard" sciences an exception, and social sciences being somewhere in between (if one can make such a broad generalization anyway). But as a general publication strategy, I think it is always good to aim for a bit of diversity: If most of your papers are probably multi-authored anyway, there is no need to fear that that two or three single-authored papers would give you a reputation of being unable to work in a team. So, if you have a good idea, and if you have the time and ressources to do it on your own, go ahead and write that solo paper. It can be fun, and in terms of reputation, I'd say it is a good chance to communicate: Hey, this is really my work and sth that I really care about, next to all the cool co-authored stuff.

Regardless of what it suggests. Having only solo papers is "suspicious", hiring such a person is therefore risky. When collaborating you are probably going to be able to write more and better papers and your statistics are probably going to look better (depending on how additional authors impact on them). Therefore, when competing for a position, usually collaboration pays off.
At the same time, having some solo paper definitively proves your skills, assuming the quality of the papers is good, they are published in some good venues, etc. Some conferences give "best paper awards", having one of those in a solo paper would definitively prove you as a reliable researcher.
Of course all this depends on the area and what is customary, but I think this summarizes the general idea. And from this you can infer the only point I want to make:

This is not a double-edged sword by any means.

The more papers, the better. In principle no paper is going to hurt you, unless it is wrong, shows no ethics, or similar issues. If you have x solo papers and y papers collaborating with other researchers, then having x+z and y+u is only going to be good (for z and u greater than 0).
It's a single edged sword, don't worry about publishing, strive for quality and quantity and worry about not-publishing.
So, to make it crisp clear. If you find yourself writing solo papers and publishing only solo papers, go ahead and do it, do it as much as you can and as well as you can. Then try to write some papers collaborating with more people additionally to that (not instead of that).

The more papers, the better. — This is simply false.  The better papers, the better.

@JeffE I pointed twice at the quality of the papers, so please don't take my words out of context. Given some quality of the papers, the more papers the better. You are right, that assertion taken out of context is "simply false", so please don't be a simpleton, consider the context of the assertions.

@JeffE I agree that is how things should be, less and better papers would make everything much easier for everybody in academia. However, that is not the way they are. Alan Turing has a low h-index when you compare it with current successful senior researchers. Current metrics focus on the number of citations and the number of papers, and the question is about "what is good for your career".

However, that is not the way they are — In my (admittedly privileged) experience, that's exactly the way they are.  Doing what's best for your metrics is not the same as doing what's best for your career, even in practice.

In principle no paper is going to hurt you — This is also wrong.  Low-quality low-impact papers can definitely hurt you, even without ethical or correctness issues.

@JeffE assuming fair competition based on objective merits, it's all and only about metrics, which provide this objectiveness. Of course, there are alternative professional paths. In my experience, low-quality low-impact papers don't hurt at all, they are an opportunity to get some feedback (e.g. reviews or attending a workshop) and improve (implies extending) the work to have a better paper submitted to a better venue, most likely a conference, and then repeating the process (review, feedback, improvement) to a journal. How could it hurt you? Simply be honest, don't overstate in the paper.

Following up on @JeffE's comments: in contemporary math, "impact factors" have never been mentioned in my hearing. But a crappy paper in a crappy journal would give any opponents (to one's hiring or tenure) a terrific target for claiming one's bad sense or lack of good projects.

It is a good practice to have both solo papers and collaborative works. While the latter show your capability of team working, the former demonstrate your self-motivation and ability to publish on your own. Both are top remarks that hiring team would consider important.

If all papers are co-authored it would sound suspicious that you are heavily dependent on others; this is a bad mark.
If all papers are solo-authored it would sound suspicious that you are incapable of working with colleagues.

Hence it is the best to have both in your CV.
Beside all the above, in current date, hiring especially in academia does not solely depend on your publication, but on many other factors.
To say that, you should not worry too much about your situation from this point of view.
And it is quite easy to find someone to be added to your authorship list of your paper. Just look around, you will notice many are waiting or willing to do so.

Big -1 for the final paragraph.

@TobiasKildetoft you are likely in favor of people working for you!

I have no idea what you mean. Adding authors who did not contribute to the paper is academic misconduct, plain and simple.

@TobiasKildetoft Of course it is a wrong doing. However the reality is that almost 99% professors in all universities around the world all are in favor of being listed as co-author in papers that they did no contribution at all. If you do not accept, I am afraid you are living in a dream world. Because of this reality (which is popular misconduct) many professors show CV in astronomy scale. I am sure that if you contact any professor in your geographic area and suggest a collaboration (and you are knowing that there is nothing he/she can help or add any value) there is no chance they reject.


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Planning for PhD, How much Master's thesis topic and coursework matter for PhD?
I am a master's student in computer science. I have almost completed my coursework and they are to different fields. I am planning to do a PhD in the future: is a master's thesis an important prerequisite for a PhD?
I exactly don't know which field to select for the thesis, I like databases, but my previous job experience was in quality assurance. I really don't want to go for hardcore programming kind of field of research.
Kindly help me with selection of my field.

A master's degree is just an administrative hurdle (which, as Charles points out, you might or might not be required to jump, depending on your country).  What matters is evidence of potential for research.