text:
Why are Irish universities ranked so low and are relatively unknown internationally?
The United States and the United Kingdom have world famous universities with very good reputations in various fields, such as Oxford, Harvard, MIT or Princeton. On the other hand, Ireland, which is an English-speaking developed country, has few well-known universities. It has Trinity College Dublin, but it is nowhere near as famous as its American and British counterparts. Moreover, Irish universities are ranked poorly in all university rankings, such as the QS Ranking or the Shanghai Ranking. I am very curious about this, why are Irish universities ranked poorly and are relatively unknown despite Ireland being an English-speaking country?

I am not sure why you think that being an English speaking country should correlate in any way with quality of education?

@Sursula The reason I mentioned the English speaking country thing is because English is the lingua franca of the modern world and as such it gives content created by the universities more opportunites to be published in well-known reputed places.

How do Irish rankings compare to other countries with population similar to Ireland's?  Or with GDP similar to Ireland's?  For example, compare Ireland to Sweden or Thailand.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

We've had this question for a lot of different countries in the past. The reasons all tend to be similar - maybe you should explain better why you expect Ireland to have internationally outstanding universities when most other developed countries also do not?

@xLeitix Because Ireland is an English speaking country, which is the current lingua franca. In principle, that should give the country a greater advantage in international rankings and a greater chance to get works done by people in their universities published in well-known journals.

"a greater chance to get works done by people in their universities published in well-known journals" This claim seems very questionable. How precisely would being an English native speaket increase the chances to publish in well-known journals? Well ok, I could imagine such a phenomenon for a few fields where research is very sensitive to language subtleties. On the other hand, I don't think that this will be a significant phenomenon in, e.g., STEM fields.

@JochenGlueck Being an English-speaking country might be expected to give benefit because people from other countries don't have to worry about a language barrier and might be more willing to move there.

@gib: Yes, sure. My comment only refers to the "higher chances to publish in reputable journals" claim.

@GEdgar: Universities status and reputation is built over long periods of time. Ireland's GDP has changed from comparatively low to comparatively high in the last decades, but even that is misleading - GDP is poor measure of actual wealth for countries that effectively operate as tax havens, like Ireland.

Ranking systems also tend to be biased towards large universities.

@Sursula your premise is misguiding. Whereas English might or might not be related to quality of education, rankings are not strongly related to just quality of education. They are strongly related to many factors, but especially to quality of research, and this is VERY strongly related to language. Native English speakers have a HUGE head start by being able to access international works and in turn by being able to publish there, because they are all in English.

@JJMDriessen I would argue the exact opposite: someone who learned English as a second language has a huge head start compared to someone who only knows English and has never learned a second language.

I would like to request that the "grammatical corrections" by another user be reverted: changing "reputation" to "reputations" is debatable (the original idiom seemed fine to me) and changing "not many" to "few" alters the meaning. Can we please not do this.

One could easily ask the exact same question about universities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and I expect a few other places that I'm not remembering right now.

You're confusing unrelated things: "reputation" vs "quality of research/teaching (as measured by practitioners, not ranking consultancies)" vs unreliable marketing-influenced stuff like QS or Shanghai Ranking. Also to point out to you, even QS ranks TCD 81, but Shanghai only "201-300", which is absurd.

Does Ireland even have all that many universities? It's not surprising for a country that has — let's say 10 — universities to have few of high rank.

The United States has about 100X more universities than Ireland.  The average American university has about the same fame as the average Irish university (nearly zero in both cases).

Caution: there are so many biases in international rankings that it's questionable whether they actually represent anything other than what people believe to be the institutions reputations.
That being said, it should be noted that it's not surprising that a country with only 5 millions inhabitants, which was one of the poorest in western Europe until the 1980s, does not rank as high as countries which have been much stronger in population and in wealth for centuries. Let's not forget that Ireland did not even exist as a country when the UK was colonizing half the world (including Ireland), and this alone could explain a little delay.
If anything, Ireland actually had an absolutely brilliant recovery in the past few decades, becoming one of the top modern economies despite its small size.

one of the poorest in Europe until the 1980s is a bit of a hyperbole unless you ignore all countries that were run by communist parties.

@gerrit Portugal's Salazar was not exactly communist ;)

@EarlGrey Portugal is also today poorer than Czechia, but I think it's the only "western" country in Europe that is.

A huge part of these ranking boils down to international students. Students that choose high ranking universities.

Not to mention the Troubles lasted till '98, which may well have impacted international student exchanges and (other) quality indicators.

Historical reason: Ireland's population started only recently to recover from the famine of ~ 1840 and decades of emigration. The population recently made it back to the level of 1800.
It takes some time to build up "credibility" for "rankings" like QS or Shanghai ... because these ranking are purely opinion-based: they are surveys, they do not hold intrinsic value (as an example please read a critical review (Krauskopf, 2021) of Shanghai "ranking").

Krauskopf, Erwin. (2021). The Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects: Room for improvement. Profesional de la Informacion. 30. 1699-2407. 10.3145/epi.2021.jul.08.

Disclaimer, regaridng the last publication I linked: the only improvement possible with these rankings is to thrown them away

Agreed. Shanghai Global Ranking is laughably terrible.

while these rankings might seem vacuous and trivial to us, there is tremendous demand among non-academics for rankings in order to make decisions without the luxury of a life spent in the academy, and until this demand goes away (i.e. never), supply is going to be created to meet that demand; our only choice is how involved to be in that process.

And the ratings are also a zero-sum game: you can only get ahead if someone else loses out.

@JohnMadden I agree, but every occasion possible that these rankings have mentioned, academics have the moral duty to say they are crap.
I am a bit neutral reg. writing publications about them: it is a tempting idea to exploit their popularity writing papers about them.

@EarlGrey the shanghi rankings or the rankings in general?

@NAMcMahon for QS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QS_World_University_Rankings#Criticisms
I repeat myself: most of these rankings are surveys, and there is in general a very poor control on checking if the population responding to the survey is statistically representative.
There are other rankings, and they are as well fundamentally flawed, see this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education_World_University_Rankings#Criticism
One may wonder why these rankings exist, and there lies the problem of these rankings.

@EarlGrey: the second sentence is grossly misleading. Ireland was already the European developer HQ for (in the 1990s) Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and subsequently Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Paypal and others. Most of those were pre-2007, they weren't "only for fiscal purposes", and the 1994-2009 property bubble was not the cause of that. Intel also has fabs there since 1989.

@smci you are correct, many companies were favouable to having some activity in Ireland since the 80s. The correlation with Ireland being a recognized tax haven for the US IRS since 1981 is therefore spurious ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven ).
Mind you: I am not against countries being tax-haven. I wonder how gullyible (or, better said, how complacent) are most of the Western governments when industrial competitivity boils down to tax elusion and squeezing downwards wages, either by allowing offhsoring most of the production or by fiscal policies for the 1%.

Questions of this kind pop up on this site on a regular base and under such questions several answers and comments typically point out why such rankings tend to be heavily overinterpreted and tend to be a poor measure of the quality of education. I agree with those answers and comments - but there is another important point which is often not stressed as much and which also applies very much to the present question:
Let us, just for the sake of the argument, ignore all the issues with those ranking and assume that they do indeed carry a lot of relevant information. Then the premise of the question seems to be that the United States and the United Kingdom do extremely well in those ranking, and thus the question arises why a certain other country (in this case, the Republic of Ireland) ranks worse. However:
The premise that the United States and the United Kingdom do very well in those rankings is not supported by the results of the rankings.
For some reason people tend to look at an extremely small percentile of those ranking, see that most universities there are from the US and the UK and conclude that the US and the UK did very well on those rankings. It is, however, worthwhile to note that, for instance, the top 25 universities in the QS ranking only represent the top 1.66% of the overall about 1500 institutions that occur in those ranking - and that, in turn, those 1500 institutions only represent a small fractions of all institutions of tertiary education in the world.
So if your main interest is in those universities which rank top 2% or so in, say, the QS ranking (and even in a much smaller top fraction of all universities worldwide), then you can come to the conclusion that the US and the UK are top.
If however, you're interested in, say, the top 10% (which is arguably still very good) the situation is entirely different. For a few countries I computed the number of universities that occur in the top 150 (i.e., the top 10%) of the QS ranking linked in the OP, normalized per 10 million inhabitants. Here are the results:

Switzerland: 6.7 (6 / 9 millions)

Denmark: 5.0 (3 / 6 millions)

Sweden: 4.5 (11 / 11 millions)

Australia: 4.1 (11 / 27 millions)

Netherlands: 3.3 (6 / 18 millions)

United Kingdom: 3.2 (22 / 68 millions)

Republic of Ireland: 2.0 (1 / 5 millions)

Canada = 1.8 (7 / 40 millions)

South Korea = 1.2 (6 / 52 millions)

United States = 1.0 (34 / 333 millions)

Germany = 0.8 (7 / 84 millions)

France = 0.6 (4 / 68 millions)

So if you consider how many universities a country has in the top 10% of the QS ranking, Ireland is somewhere between the UK and the US, and the US ranks much worse  than several smaller countries.
(I'm now tempted to ask the follow-up question "Why do the US lose out in university rankings?", but I think I'll rather refrain from doing so... ;-) )
Remark. My answer is related to the much shorter answer by Anonymous Physicist, but there are two differences why I think that a separate answer was warranted: (i) the other answer speaks of average universities, while the numbers that I listed above show that the same phenomenon even occurs in the top 10%; and (ii) in addition to general observations about quality and reputation of universities beyond the top few percents, it's worthwhile to point out that even the numbers in the rankings themselves show a completely different picture if one leaves the extreme top of the rankings.

Normalizing by number of inhabitants is total nonsense. This answer (since it makes a point about normalization) can be improved by normalizing by a factor that is related to the number of universities in the top rankings, such as the number of universities per country. As is, the answer shows how you can massage real data to show whatever you want.

@uberhaxed: How is normalizing by the number of universities per country any less non-sensical than normalizing by the number of inhabitants? You mean that taking a bunch of more or less arbitrarily chosen numbers, doing a few more or less arbitrary computations to get a ranking, and then using this to compare the education in different countries is not a meaningful endeavour? Don't you say...

The number of universities in the rankings is related to the number of universities (i.e. the former is upper bounded by the latter, since the former is a subset of the latter). The number of ranked universities is not related to the number of inhabitants whatsoever. An easy way to show this is comparing two similar area countries that are neighbors on the same continental (for example, Canada and the US). The US population is about an order of magnitude higher than Canada, but the number of universities in the US is about 2 orders of magnitude higher.

@uberhaxed In Canada, degree-mills in malls are not called "universities".

@Yakk and many places in the US (both in the job market and academia) do not accept that foreign schools are equivalent accreditation to a US one. What's your point?

@uberhaxed Number of places which use the name "university" is not very relevant, as it is not a comparable term between countries.  I hereby declare every grain of sand on this beach to be a university!  Now my percentage of top-tier universities just dropped.  On the other hand, number of humans is comparable.  So, top-tier universities per person can be used to compare between countries; top-tier universities per university is nonsense.  Countries scale with population.

@Yakk Not relevant, you can obviously pick what qualifies as a university and the original statement about upper bounds will still be true.  A person who did not go to a medical school in the US can't practice medicine in the US, but that doesn't mean that a ranking of medical schools should only include US accredited institutions. Also, as the original statement said, the number of inhabitants is unrelated to the number of universities so dividing two unrelated quantities gives a meaningless number.

@uberhaxed The population of a country has a lot to do with how many institutions of higher learning it can and usually does support; a claim they are unrelated is frankly nonsense.

@Yakk and yet, it has nothing to do with the number that make the ranking list.

New Zealand is another (primarily) anglophone country with around 5 million people, like Ireland. The top 2 QS rated unis in Ireland have scores of 64 and 49. The top 2 in NZ have scores of 68 and 45 (the latter of which is of course underrated because it's where I did my undergrad), practically indistinguishable. You could say perhaps that you'd expect Ireland to attract more talent by being close to Europe and in the EU compared to the remoteness of NZ, but otherwise I think this is just where this category of country tends to rank.

you'd expect Ireland to attract more talent by being close to Europe and in the EU compared to the remoteness of NZ True. But likely exactly balanced by students in Ireland can easily study in the rest of Europe, unlike the remoteness of NZ.

I think there's some truth to this, but just to give one counterexample of sorts, Scotland has 5.5m people.

Academic ratings take different factors in account, and it is not possible to name one single reason why a University (Irish or not) is placed lower than they would have liked to.
A University essentially consists of people. Hence, the ability of the University to attract and retain high-calibre academics from all around the world is essential. So, what does attract best academics and motivate them to move to a particular place?

How famous the place already is. The currency of academia is fame, and academics love to be associated with famous Universities just like Universities like to link their history with world-famous people (Nobel laureates, politicians, etc). Long established Universities have acquired a lot of recognition and fame over the years, so for them being high in ratings become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How well it pays. In many countries academic pay scales are strictly defined, but in some it's more competitive. In many countries research grants can only be used to fund research (postdocs etc), but in some PI can boost their salary from the grant. In many countries researchers are obligated to publish, but in some they are also offered financial incentives for each paper.
What is the teaching/research/admin balance in the workload. Some Universities are predominantly research-focused, and academics are asked to teach one course per year maximum. Some are teaching-focused and academics are asked to teach 6 courses per year and do admin tasks. While research fame remains with the researcher, and is recognised nationally and internationally, the success in teaching is only appreciated within the Department. The balance is predominantly defined by University strategy, i.e. if they target fast income from teaching, or slow income from research. Academics who value their research would not consider moving to a teaching-focused University.

From what I know, Ireland had some tough times in 19th century, and most of their Universities are relatively young. Irish Universities are reasonably teaching-focused, and they offer slightly better payscale compared to the UK, but lower compared to the US or China. This may be a significant factor in why they can't quickly attract excellent researchers or retain their best staff. This in turn may affect their ratings.

"the success in teaching is only appreciated within the Department." ..or sometimes, only within the atudents ;)


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Quitting a postdoc: how to justify myself with my PI?
I am 8 months into a postdoc that  is not matching with the job description and the proposal. The project was about investigating an unknown phenomenon that emerged during some experiments carried out before my started.
However, someone just switched some columns in some databases and this caused the misinterpretation. Therefore, my project now only consists in fixing the databases, and what is emerging is that there is no new phenomenon at all. There is nothing new worth a publication.
Since I already have an alternative lined up, I will quit my present institution. I will give no more than a two-week notification before leaving, as I have to start with the new position.
Some other info:

my PI perfectly know of the situation and of the data mistake.

fixing the remaining data is something that someone else in the team could easily do and in any case it is so trivial that they will be able to find a replacement.

I do not have any teaching or mentoring assignments.

Now the question. What should I tell my PI? Should I be sincere and (politely) tell him that I don’t like the project anymore? Or should I find some other excuse not to risk offending him?

Do you have any evidence that he would be offended? I think he shares responsibility for the problem, actually.

@Buffy no, I do not have evidences that he would be offended. You’re correct, he didn’t make the error himself but he based my whole project on that.

@gnometorule I have already brought up the issue with my PI. Of course he didn’t know that was considering quitting: I relocated from another country and I couldn’t risk getting fired without another job.

If he is a reasonable person then be honest. Something like:
I was happy and enthusiastic to come and work with you on the project, but it changed before I started and I don't see any advancement for me in the current situation. I've found another position that I think will be more productive and need to start it soon. I'm sorry that it didn't work out.
Hopefully all of that is true.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Can I implement and share implementations of papers
Can I implement and share implementations of papers on say, GitHub? Can I licence those implementations such that if people are using my implementations they have to cite?

Do you mean the papers of other people? What field are you asking about? What sort of "implementations"?

Can you describe more clearly exactly that you want to achieve? To me it unclear what kind of "implementations of papers" you are referring to.

Presuming this is about implementing an approach in code, yes you can. One question might be why would somebody else use your implementation? The more barriers to using it the less likely somebody will be to use it.

Hello there. I am studying on MRI. Generally, the implementations I am talkin about are reconstruction algorithms from other people's papers. I am implementing them on MATLAB generally and I want to share those implementations.

MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging or something else?

Yes, it is magnetic resonance imaging

Yes, you can implement them. Technically, you can attach any license you like, as long as it passes legal muster. In practice you'll find it very difficult to enforce a "you must cite this" license, but you can try.

Well, getting cited is not important at all. However, I am investing lots of time to implement those algorithms and I want to at least create a repository that can act as a portfolio for my resume. What I really want is to make people understand and beleive that I am actually implementing those papers :D

If the repository is in your name, and you have a commit history, I'm sure no one is going to doubt you.

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


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Am I receiving "good" higher education for graphic design?
my name is Asfand and I'm currently in my Junior year at a university in Lahore, Pakistan, studying Graphic Design.
However, I'm not sure if I'm receiving a quality education or not.
All the classes senior to me seem to have a general discontent with the quality of the education, and they all openly admit that university didn't teach them much. We spend 90% of our time just doing assignments (for example, "create a national design policy for your country", "create a piece of design using humour", "create an art piece that represents 'you' [based on surveys that you will design and conduct]")
So we do most of our learning through doing, troubleshooting, and taking online tutorials while in the process of creating our assignments.
There is not as much (if any) basic education as to the etiquettes of design, what makes good design, etc etc (other than some basic knowledge we got in our freshman year). They don't really show us the ropes much or "teach" us, as much as we just learn what we do by making stuff along the way.
My question is, am I asking for too much? Yes we slack off and don't do as much research as we should before delving into our designs/artworks, but should it not be the institutions responsibility to an extent to point you in the right direction and show you the right/wrong, how to actually DO good design, before leaving it up to us to create art? I understand that they may not want to creatively stifle us by putting certain notions into our heads, but at the same time, this feels like very little/no effort is put into it, and we leave with 4 years worth of work experience from assignments, but not a lot of design education

To the close voters: I think questions about university-level pedagogy are on-topic.

Spend some time exploring Active Learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning). It sounds a lot like this is what you are seeing. Whether it is good or bad might depend a lot on how much feedback you get from what you do. But doing it is a good thing.
If the focus of the program is on creativity, not technology, then this might be a great program. I think that for someone to become a poet they need to spend a lot of time writing poetry, not listening to lectures about it.
But you might want to explore the philosophy behind your program with some trusted faculty member. You might also want to look at the sort of positions that graduates of your program wind up with.
A friend of mine once led an education program that was focused around "studio learning" in which the students did almost nothing but work on projects - from real clients. The faculty was there to guide. It was incredibly innovative.


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Should I include web pages in the references
I am doing a course in a university. Course has 60% of weightage alloted to the project (which involves implementing algrithm to solve a problem), which we may turn into thesis if at all we succeed to find out something new (we have only one semester duration). I have to write a initial document of the work. I want to know if its ok to specify webpages (which I went through for some related information, not strictly of referred jornal papers, but some articles on some site) as references. I have never seen any journal paper to include webpage URL in the references. But, at least now, mine is a project and not a thesis (not yet come up with something new). So, I was thinking whether should I include webpage references.
Q.1 I was thinking I should include them as long as its a project (implementation of existing algorithms). Once I come up with something new, I can skip webpages and specify only non webpage references (books and journal papers which helped me find new algorithm) in the thesis. Am I correct with this?
Q.2 Also if I have to include webpage as a reference, in what format should I?

Questions about how your instructor will assess your homework are off topic because they depend on individual circumstances -  the preferences of the instructor.

The general rule for such things is that if you use the work of others for things not commonly known, then you must cite them. So, yes, cite web pages as needed and quote, formally, from them also when needed. But cite them even if you paraphrase things.
You also probably need to do more than just include a list of references at the end of the paper. The reason for including a reference should be made clear, usually in the text itself. There are exceptions to this, but it is better to be clear about why you include a reference and to be specific about what you have used within any referenced article.
The form of the citation/reference is a bit less important than the fact of it and unless you are given some specific format, use examples from things you read. Use something similar to what is used in Wikipedia or a textbook if you have no better source.

One note about citing web pages. Since such things can change without notice, the correct thing is to include the date at which you last read/used the web page. "Last accessed 29 Jan 2021" for example

It might be overkill for the OP here, but in general it ought to become good practice also to make sure that web pages cited in journal articles have also been stored in online archive services such as the Wayback Machine (archive.org).

Since this is about homework, not research, any answer other than "ask your instructor" could be wrong.

From my experience:
Q1: Include it as a regular reference (like an article) and if you find a published paper then exchange it. At our department we followed this strategy and published also our papers with references to websites.
Also I personally do not like this strategy, it seems inevitable in some cases. Be careful to include only really meaningful websites which correspond to a specific topic or software package.
Q2: I would recommend to use Bibtex and follow the style in this question: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3587/how-can-i-use-bibtex-to-cite-a-web-page

Short answer: Because this is not yet a thesis or scientific publication, you may be able to cite websites instead of papers and books (your Q1 question). Other answers have already discussed the format of citing a webpage (Q2), and there are a few related questions on academia.stackexchange.com.
However, there is also the long answer:
You should try very, very hard not to cite websites. The reason is that you should not use websites as sources for scientific information:

The website may disappear after publication, making the reference useless and putting the burden of trying to find an archived version on the reader of the work.
The website may change (and become irrelevant or wrong).
Websites are (more often than not) full of mistakes.
It is hard to verify the reliability of the information if you do not know where the author of the website got it.
If you do know where the author got the information, that is probably the source you want to read and cite (see also: wikipedia on Chinese whispers).

So the question is: why are you using the website(s)?
To learn something that is "common knowledge"?
If you use a website to learn something that is common knowledge, there is no need to cite it. The exception is when you copy text literally from the website, but that is usually frowned upon and sometimes violates copyright (even if a reference is added). In most cases you are better off by reading multiple sources and rephrasing the knowledge to fit the style and application of your work.
To learn something new?
If a website describes something that is not common knowledge, you should ask yourself where this knowledge came from. That will often lead you to a better source to cite. This is a check you should be doing anyway (even when reading and citing scientific papers) to make sure you are citing something that is scientifically sound.
Because you found the one website on the internet where good scientific research is published that is not published elsewhere?
In my field (biophysics) I have never seen any examples in grant proposals, scientific papers, or other academic works where a website contained useful information that was not available elsewhere. But if you found the rare case where citing a website is really necessary, you should absolutely do so. By citing the website, the interested reader knows where to find more information (hopefully, this was discussed above). And of course you would not want to be accused of plagiarism.
Because of a lack of time?
Totally understandable, but not exactly a good reason.

Actually, for mathematics and CS, at least, I've found web pages, even Wikipedia, to be quite reliable. Wikipedia, of course, requires that the information there be cited.

Yes, I agree. Wikipedia is a great resource. Of course it usually contains references to the original sources. But there are also many weblogs and other websites (especially about computer science and algorithms) full of oversimplification or errors.

I routinely cite websites in scientific papers (maths), such as the Block Library (https://wiki.manchester.ac.uk/blocks/) or similar pages on status of conjectures. A good practice is to make sure that the specific piece of information you are using is archived in the Wayback Machine.

This is wrong.  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148405/why-is-it-acceptable-to-cite-unpublished-works

You should cite any source of information. So yes, you cite web pages.
Whether you should follow links on those pages to primary sources is a question for your instructor.
Your bibliography software may suggest a format. If none i s given, provide the title of the page, the author (if appropriate), the url and the date when you last visited it.

You should cite the exact thing you used. If you read and relied on the website, cite that, regardless of what materials the website claims to rely on. However, it may be good practice to read and rely on the sources that informed the website instead.

The answer is a definitive YES. We live in the information age and fully connected to the internet 24/7, where everything is a web link address.
One may ask the question differently: the web address is long and ugly. In such cases, the writer should try to find a more standard and commonly used address link. For instance, use links of type DOI when referencing a published article.
For example, http://doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2013.10.3
An example of a reference in APA style is as follows: (boldface type added for emphasis but not included in the reference):
Morey, C. C., Cong, Y., Zheng, Y., Price, M., & Morey, R. D. (2015). The color-sharing bonus: Roles of perceptual organization and attentive processes in visual working memory. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 3, 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/arc0000014.
As last resort can use an address shortener, as long as a clear description is made before including the link in text paragraph (otherwise you may leave the reader wondering what is the link for)
Remember that all the style manuals are especially picky about how citations are formatted and those styles can change over time, so when you’re including a Web address in a citation, be sure to check the specific style you’re supposed to be following. For example, the current APA style is to not put a period after a URL in a citation. Their rationale is that the specific alphanumeric sequence is important because it is what points readers to the reference.
The Modern Language Association style guide also recommends using the short URL in running text—simply Forbes.com instead of http://www.forbes.com, for example).


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Acknowledge professional/paid language correction service?
I am a non-native English speaker and had a paper manuscript corrected by a professional/paid agency. The agency only corrected language mistakes and did not do any content-related work. Should I acknowledge this when publishing the paper and if so, how?

The area of research is important here.  In some areas (humanities) phrasing, denotation and connotation are critical.  In an extreme case, say the translation of a poem, the translator might need to be coauthor.

Thank you for your comment. You raise a point here! However, in this specific instance, the main output of the scientific work is quantitative and the key results should not be influenced by the language corrections.

You could do so in an "acknowledgements" section or even a footnote. But, if they haven't contributed to the content (ideas) of the paper, then it isn't required. But it is polite. Don't make it seem like you are giving them free advertising, however.
And an editor or reviewer of a journal might ask you to remove it, depending on their rules. They might have valuable advice in any case.


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Is it possible that implementations based on same paper show different performance?
I'm a junior research engineer of AI.
Looking for the code in the particular paper, I found two git-hub repositories.
However, I think it's weird that how they show different performance, even though they are based on exact same paper and have a similar structure at the code level.
(Of course, I didn't compare the code line by line)
Is it possible, and common things?

Content of research is off-topic.

@AnonymousPhysicist Yeah. I almost wrote an answer of my own, and then I went "wait a moment".

@AnonymousPhysicist, sorry, but I don't understand why you say this is about the "content of research". It seems to be about discrepancy of results.

"Different Performance" can mean a lot of things. What do you mean here, exactly. And was the performance reported or did you run the code yourself? And was it run on the same data? And is there a randomizer involved in any way?

@Buffy Resolving discrepancies in research results is a normal research activity.

It's certainly possible. You just demonstrated that. (I assume you have compared implementations in the same language, compiled the same way.)
I don't think it's surprising. Implementing any reasonably complex algorithm calls for many choices that can affect performance to different degrees - choice of data structures and libraries, efficient use of space or memory.
Whether you should or want to compare the implementations "line by line" to ferret out the differences depends on how the difference in performance matters to you.

In particular, AI-related algorithms tend to make heavy use of linear algebra. This is an area where there is considerable scope for different implementations to have very different run-times. For example, the product of three non-square matrices A, B & C may have very different costs if computed as (AB)C or A(BC). This sort of optimisation is very easy to miss if just glancing over code, but can add up to substantial savings.

Using machine performance as a measure, it also requires being run on identical machines with the same operating system and with identical (or similar) loads.

It's certainly possible. A simple example is, perhaps one code is parallelized and the other isn't. More technical differences could be, perhaps one code uses X method to perform numerical integration and the other uses Y, and X is better than Y for small datasets and inferior for larger ones.
As for whether it's common, I imagine it's uncommon for complex codes to have the same performance. That's how one can tell they're written independently.


text:
Software for projecting the PC screen to an android/iphone without intermediate services
I'm giving  a class next semester in a room with no preinstalled projector system and next to non-existent wifi accessibility (during the busy hours its not possible to connect to the router; let alone stream video or images).
It's a class (in engineering statics) that I want to give examples of how to use and incorporate software in the solution of exercises. I find it more beneficial when I show them examples from my computer screen.
Solutions I have considered are:

use the university teleconferencing software (based on BigBlueButton) to share my screen (however the wifi bandwidth is the limiting factor).
get a mobile projector: the setup, and swithing on/off lights every time I am making the presentation seems to me disproportionate to the amount of time I am expecting to use it.

So I was wondering: if someone knows of a system that uses Bluetooth (or similar technologies)(maybe also wifi, but through the local router) to project simultaneously (and securely) to about 20-40 smartphone screens.
Hopefully, this will not be considered off-topic. (I lean anyways towards the projector, so this is not crucial, however I am interested if someone has a solution that has tried because it seems that the technology exists to do it for one, and I would imagine it might be feasible for many).

I would suggest asking this on https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

I can try to elaborate if this direction makes sense, but I think you can stream your desktop to a local web server using VLC. Then you can open a local hotspot, so the rest of the group  would be able to connect to you and open your stream in their browsers. Thus, no app would be needed on their side.

@rg_software actually it would make sense, and I would appreciate it if you would.

@user2390246 I can appreciate your perspective , and thanks for the recommendation. Still, unless the question is closed here, because I'd value the input of people who tried it in a classroom environment (not a generic audience) I'll wait a little bit.

There are orthogonal solutions to the basic problem. Send a url to a page with the images the day before the lecture. This allows previews by students.

@buffy which I agree that's a perfectly acceptable solution, it is not in line with my approach. I favor impromptu sessions lead by Q&A with the students. I find that involving the audience enhances the interaction and keeps the students more alert that rigid pdfs. Also, it helps them to see how they can debug problems which can occur (probably this is as important if not more so)

Do students want to try to follow along engineering diagrams on their tiny phone screens? Just host class on Zoom for a day

It turned out to be more complex than I expected, as most of the setups I tried actually failed. However, this one seems to work.

Get OBS Studio. Skip initial setup, in the main window find "Sources" box and add a "Display capture" source. This will add a desktop picture to your stream. Next, go to Tools, Settings, Advanced, Recording pane, and set "Filename Formatting" to some wildcard-free name like playlist. Go to Output, set Output Mode to "Advanced", go to Recording tab, set Type to "Custom Output (FFmpeg)", FFMpeg Output Type to "Output to File" and in the "File path or URL" box below set a path to any empty folder on your disk, e.g., C:\temp. Set "Container Format" to hls. You can also set "Keyframe interval" to something lower like 90 to reduce latency (more details here). Close the settings.

Now if you press "Start recording" (not "Start streaming"), your session will begin. It generates a lot of garbage in the temp folder, so you'll need to clean it afterwards. By this moment we have a screencast running, so the next task is to share it. The trouble is that the hls format we use isn't supported natively everywhere, so we need to create a helper HTML page.

In the same temp folder create a page index.html. Copy & paste there this "quick example page". If you want to operate in a full offline mode, download hls.js file and change the link to it in your index.html. Oh, also it makes sense to change controls into autoplay in the video tag there.

Finally, run a web server from your temp folder: python -m http.server. If you are in the same local network with your audience, just give them the link to your screencast: http://<your-IP>:8000/


text:
Is it ethical to publish my own idea when ex-colleagues also wanted to work on it, and how do I make it clear which parts are my own contributions?
Context: Some years ago I collaborated on a paper, with my advisor and another grad student (first author), in which we would include

a certain competitive machine learning algorithm and

a formalization of the representation (model) that the algorithm used internally, which was a  model introduced by the first author in a previous paper, with some new theoretical analysis and guarantees.

In the end, our advisor decided to split this into two papers (an idea with which I disagreed at the time since it seemed like trying to inflate our number of publications), and we got paper #1 sent and later rejected (two reasons: lack of theoretical soundness and low impact). AFAIK, they never started working on paper #2. Paper #1 has been on hold for years but all of us have agreed that "some time in the future" we will try to improve it and re-submit it. At one point, my advisor and I asked the first author if he would be willing to let me do the theoretical analysis and include it in the same paper (#1), but he didn't agree, mainly because we have conflicting ways of conceptualizing the model.
At present: I no longer work with any of the co-authors, but with my previous knowledge and some work I devised a number of proofs that may merit a paper on their own, i.e., paper #2 (not the greatest impact since it's all theoretical and very specific, but I believe it's still a meaningful contribution to the area). This paper would answer all the questions about soundness that (partially) got our first paper rejected. It might even allow us to get paper #1 published later. The problem is that, even though the ideas are all my own, I'm a bit worried about the ethical implications, since the other two authors had the explicit intention of working on the same idea (which I don't think should limit my freedom to publish my own ideas, but who knows?).
Also, I need to make some corrections in the way the ideas are described: there is at least one plain error and there is a certain idea they proposed that explains part of the models used, but this idea is confusing and does not even justify the model theoretically. Moreover, reviewers mentioned that it made no sense. I find the idea a bit "embarrassing", but the model itself is sound, and I don't want to make anyone look bad, so I just want to try to avoid that concept and simply put forward my own conceptualization and explanations. The problem is that I may come across as taking credit for the part of the formalization that was already defined in the first author's previous paper. Avoiding this is complicated, since the paper claims that the model is explained by this "strange" idea. They even wrote a misleading algorithm that is said to use this idea, but in reality the implemented algorithm works a bit differently and uses previous methods (I implemented it, and they both have full knowledge of how it works). My explanation establishes a link with previous concepts in the area and formulates an equivalence with other models. It explains how the previous methods are used by algorithms in order to build these models and why they are correct. If I try to get validation from the other authors, the first author will most likely disagree with my ideas or ask me to send him the manuscript. The other author may agree with me but will probably want to be a co-author and make things incredibly harder (based on my experience working with him). I may be wrong, but I believe that the worst case scenario is that they may try to prevent me from publishing, and the best case scenario is that they will try to be co-authors (even though they didn't come up with any of the contributions and I'm pretty sure I can make a decent paper on my own), and they may even try to change my concepts back to the "faulty" or misleading concepts. I've already had endless debates with the first author on these models, which lead to nowhere, and that's unlikely to change.
So my questions are:
Is it ethical to go forward and try to publish my paper?
How do I "objectively" and politely explain that my proofs are my own contribution, given that previous works have claimed that they explain the same thing but failed to do so or did it poorly?


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How to cite a paper that gives background and context about another paper
I'm starting work on writing my Master thesis in computer science (after doing a lot of experimentation last semester.) I want to give some background on neural networks relevant to my work. By reading various papers I have found there are several foundational papers (say paper A) in the field that I would like to cite and include. I understand that I should read and cite the primary source regardless of where I found it. However, some of the papers (say paper B) that reference it give background/context on the paper (and even authors) I would also like to include. Should I cite paper B for points like the relevance of the paper, the backgrounds of the authors, and comparison to future work / other papers?
Thanks!

I actually disagree that you should always cite the original source for exactly the reasons you give. Each subsequent paper provides additional context that can help the reader understand the importance of an idea. But it should be clear to a reader who originated the idea even if you cite a later work. "Master Kwan originated the idea of ... as is explicated in the later work of her disciple Master Kuo in as found in ...".
Just make it clear that you don't attribute Kwan's ideas to Kuo, similarly to not attributing the work of others to yourself. And the above assumes that Kuo has properly cited Kwan so the chain is intact.
A Masters thesis, however, could have an extensive bibliography and could even organize it by ideas rather than simply alphabetically or chronologically. Then, there is no real need to choose. So, in the body of the text you could cite original sources, but say elsewhere that the bibliography contains later important sources that explain ramifications of the original. That might be too much for a paper that has severe page limits, but not for a thesis.

Thanks for your input! I guess part of my issue is that the secondary source isn't really building on the primary source on it directly so much as giving background. The same background that  I would find in a number of other papers. Is that sort of background/context something that I need an in-text citation for the papers I'm learning it from?

I am planning on having both papers in my bibliography


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Should i leave the lab i am in even though i like the science but my pi disrespect me?
I am a freshman. I have been in a lab but I felt that I am not interested in science, so left it. in my spring semester, I joined another lab, and I was pretty interested in the science I am working on. I loved the people there, and they were helpful and supportive.
However, my pi actions were weird. I was thinking about adding a new idea to the project I am working on; she got upset and said that she thinks that the lab does not fit me because I want to add something new. I elaborated that that was not my intention and that I just thought it might be a good addition but rather than that I am content with the science I am working on. After a month things got even worse. Whenever I got something wrong, she gets so angry although I am a freshman.
The other two people joined the lab at my grade, and they were so good as they have previous lab experience when they were in high school. she started to state an indirect comparison between me and them. After that, in every meeting, she used to tell me that I look so stressed from the lab, and she feels that I am out of place and does not know how to interact with the lab members. To me, that sounded wrong because I always interact with my lab mates and most of the time my pi is not even around to make such a judgment.
I work so hard in the lab, and I find that working most of my day in the lab is fun because I love what I am doing; however, she thinks that this stresses me out. My other lab mates are also hard-working and they leave the lab at 1 am! She never comments on that. Eventually, she limited my access to the lab and deactivated my id access. I am so confused and do not know what to do. She also keeps on saying that I am naive, and she sees that my transition to her kab was hard for me . To me, it was not. I am not interested in the science that other labs are working on at my university. I want to leave, but at the same time, I do not know if I should. Should I follow her rules? or should I leave? I really love working in the lab and I do not want to be restricted like that. I feel that I am disrespected. I am planning to do PhD, and I am afraid that if I stayed in this lab, she might mess up the recommendation letters.

Please reformat this wall of text and break it into paragraphs. Please also use correct capitalization and punctuation (your "I"s are small at the beginning of the sentence). All this will make your question easier to read and thus more likely to attract responses.

"she limited my access to the lab and de-activated my id access" It kind of sounds like you've been fired, which would solve the dilemma.

I suggest you leave the lab and find a better one. It sounds like you have a toxic PI. Don't let her ruin your mental health and your career. Not all PI's are like that and there are many nice ones who will not berate you for getting things wrong, compare among students, or make students work until 1 am. My PI doesn't do that. Other more senior members of your lab might be able to recommend another lab for you to move to. This is what I did back in undergrad, moving to another lab on the same floor. Unfortunately, toxic PI's aren't uncommon. While I mainly worked with nice PI's back in undergrad and grad school, I heard horror stories from colleagues who moved to our lab after candidacy about their toxic former PI's.
You may discover that you like the research in another lab as you learn more about the lab or progress further in your major. Furthermore, you are not locked into your undergrad research topic forever; my graduate school research had a very different topic from my undergraduate research.


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Supervision is rather intrusion than guidance
Recently I joined a Ph.D. program (1st year) and I have already been thinking of quitting multiple times. It comes and goes, but I am basically very disappointed of the intellectual and social standards of my supervisors. It starts to affect me and I feel like I am not doing well at all. For this reason, I want to reach out and talk through this, because I do not know anyone who I could really talk about this.
To give some context, I want to mention, that I have been studying hard in my Master's and therefore was able to achieve a perfect GPA. (Only one A and otherwise A+ throughout.) This came with a lot of revisioning lectures, correcting professors and their lecture notes, getting all the details down for exams and also doing research in my Master's thesis. Especially, I developed almost any idea in the thesis on my own and have just been working on what my idea was. My Master's thesis supervisor was happy about it and just did let me follow my ideas. We only met occasionally, I gave him updates and he trusted me. The thesis was fine and got an A+, especially because I did almost everything on my own. So, I find myself quite confident in my abilities and was excited to get started with my Ph.D. and to make this a great researching experience.
My Master thesis supervisor told me that he knows two more professors, I could continue my Ph.D. with and that he would offer me a position himself, if he had another free position left. Moreover, I think I would have had quite nice job opportunities with this transcript and next to that there is always an option to get into a business runned by my family. So I am feeling sometimes, that I decided very poorly. I almost regret getting to this new place.
But back in time: I wanted to follow a Ph.D. and moreover try to live in a new area, because I was living in the same city for Bachelor's and Master's. The Ph.D. project sounded very unique and interesting to me, because it incorporates different theories I had studied and was interested in. It felt almost like this position was made for me, so I was writing an application during the writing of my Master's thesis and got accepted. Actually, I thought this would only be an application to get familiarized with the application process, but it got accepted very fast. (It was only my second application.)
Now, as mentioned I am in my first year of my Ph.D. and I have developed almost some kind of aversion towards my supervisors. Especially one of them is very annoying and I do not want to meet her anymore. In meetings she is talking 80-90% of the time. She does not really care where things are going, but is just chaotically talking from her mind. After the meeting we mostly never end up with something fruitful.
She told me I should read her freshly released book as a start and to get going. However, this book is by far the worst book or script I have ever read. Even the easiest proofs (Bachelor’s and Master’s level) are done incorrectly. I have decided to not read this book, because this is not readable. That took some courage and I was letting that slide for some months, but the other supervisor eventually approved. So that is some of the first months down the drain.
Over time, she revealed the one or other questionable thing. For example, that she had copied some of the chapters of her Master’s students thesis. The „funny“ thing is, that we even met this student at some point. My supervisor then told the student: „She (pointing to me) did not like what you have written in your thesis.“ and to explain this „joke“ my supervisor mentioned to the student on the side, that she had copied some of the student’s chapters into her own book. Is this common to just copy parts of a students thesis and put it in your own book? That seems like complete fraud to me and this will most likely happen to myself in that case.
She also sometimes complains about collaborators that they are taking their time and it seems like she is trying to make it look like „we are on the same boat“. I believe she will not leave the best words about me neither, if she is talking like this about other people. She also mentioned at some point, that she just wants at least one paper with me, so she can justify that in front of some employment office or something. Just to tick one box of, so to speak...
I feel like this is really quite tactless behavior and I have not experienced that before with other supervisors. At least no one has ever just talked so openly about it as if it was nothing. Am I completely wrong here?
But moreover: I have not written a single piece of paper on research, because the guidance is so chaotic and unorganized, that I really just do not know, what I should read or what I should be working on. My impression is, that my supervisor do not really know themselves what they are trying to be working on. But I feel like the biggest thing that is holding me back, is that I dislike them for some of the above mentioned reasons. I do not want to be taken advantage of just like that and I think, this is another reason why I am not really working on things. There is not really building up trust here or I think it is even worse, that the trust is already broken at this point.
I do not fear quitting the program, but I do not know how to get into another program or a job after quitting. Also I was thinking, I just need to adjust to the new place. But then, on the other hand, I do not want to get used to this situation... Before my PhD, everything was going quite well, so I do not know, how a switch or a transition to another institute could be managed or if it is even possible. What options do I have? Do I just reapply for other programs and is that legit? What could I do and to whom should I talk to? Do people question me, if I act upon my own standards?
EDIT: Another bit of information is, that both have quite a lot of things going on in their private lifes and they have never had any PhD student before. Also, they seem to be very unprepared overall. We meet sometimes multiple times in a week and they seem to be not really informed about each other what should be happening. Then, it's really only them talking about some things vaguely and I mostly cannot contribute anything, because I do not know about any direction. As mentioned, I had written the application while writing my Master's thesis, so they had at least 3 to 4 months time to meet by themselves and prepare something. They could in fact discuss this on their own, but my impression is that they only ever meet up, when I am around in the meeting.
EDIT 2: I've addressed this multiple times to my first supervisor already. I even suggested that we should work on another project first in which she feels more comfortable, such that we can find a way to work with each other and create positive momentum. My impression is, that she did not really understand why I proposed this or why we should do this. Only after some back and forth she proposed several projects and said "We have these 3 options. I would probably take 2 or 3, but of course you decide." It's nice that she wants to give me options, but my main objective was, that she should pick something she is really comfortable with, such that we can get busy with something. She also feared that the other supervisor could feel left out. However, after some time this idea was dropped anyways and we are back to the original project. So nothing has changed really.

Welcome to Academia.SE. Unfortunately, your post is likely to be closed. Remember, our role is to give objective answers to general questions that others could potentially have in the future. I don't really see such a question in your post. It's one thing to give a few examples that help to illustrate the dilemma you're facing; it's another thing to tell your entire story. If you can, consider [edit]ing to boil this down to the key issue or tradeoff that you want advice about.

I’m voting to close this question because this is too long and discursive with excessive background --- get to the point with essential details and a clear question.

I hate to say it but the situation doesn't seem sustainable. You should consider changing programs, but, first, by talking to your old advisor who was helpful and supportive.
You probably still have access to other people who can write on your behalf and suggest alternatives. It might even be that your old advisor now has an opening, or expects one.
But, your current advisor sounds like someone interested only in their own career without sufficient focus on that of her students. She sounds very inexperienced at this.
If you stay, expect to do almost everything on your own. Some people can manage that. Others need more support. Consider your alternatives. Good luck.

Yes, I forgot, that both of my current supervisors haven't had any PhD students yet and I also know, that they currently have a lot in their private lifes going on.

Not a good situation for you. Not a high predictor of success unless you can manage it on your own and they won't interfere.

Yes, this is sort of my whole point. I think I could probably do it on my own, but they are very chaotic. They sometimes want to meet multiple times in a week and try to tell me what I should be doing, even though - as I mentioned - I have quite some research experience and would like to keep working. It is really not enjoyable at the moment. Thank you for your answer.

I think there's a lot to untangle here.
First, you are unhappy with your supervisors and from what you describe here the frustration is understandable. It is unclear in how far you have already phrased your concerns with them and/or talked it over with your former supervisor (as suggested in another answer). Do both and do it ASAP and then decide if you see room for improvement.
Second, I am also getting mixed signals. You spend quite some time going detail on your independence and excellence as a Master student, but now you are a PhD student and you "really just do not know what I should read or what I should be working on". Do you feel/see the same freedom you saw as a  Master student? Are your current supervisors preventing you from following your own track? Could it be that you yourself also find yourself in a new situation where things are unclear and it feels different because, well, it's a PhD and it's also in large part your responsibility now? It might also be beneficial to reflect on that. You cannot expect the perfect project or the perfect supervisor anywhere, probably.
Third: Do you really want to do the PhD? Not just here, but anywhere? You mention lots of other opportunities so be honest with yourself. Does your heart lie with research? Not forever, maybe, but at least for the next 4-6 years?


text:
Grading Answers during a Self-Study
I have recently begun self-studying Complex Variables An Introduction by Dr. Berenstein and Dr. Gay from the Springer-Verlag series in graduate maths. Unlike my experience with undergraduate texts, the manuscript, unfortunately, does not contain an answer key. Without a teaching assistant to grade my work, I am largely at a loss about grading my work for the more sophisticated questions.
I have already posted a sampling of problems on Mathematics StackExchange; however, no one has answered them.
Question: Is there a service where I could hire somebody to grade my work?
Thank you all in advance.

Have you tried googling to see if the solutions exist online? Asking your supervisor or university librarian? You could even email the authors to ask for it.

If you have access to a university library, it might help to check out several of the many complex analysis texts at the same level for supplementary reading and text-worked examples and problems and problem solutions. If not, or even in addition, perhaps obtain a copy of Schaum's Outline of Complex Variables and refer to it for specific topics you have difficulty with. (Moments later) Oh, I just googled this book (one I am not familiar with) and see it's at a much higher level than the Schaum's Outline. My first suggestion still applies, however.

So far, I've tried Google, Bing, and others to no avail. Although the book is ~30 years old, it appears that no one has made a public answer key available. A while back, I was able to find an answer key and solutions manual to Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds from the Caltech Electrical Engineering Department. Do you know of any keywords that would be helpful in a search?

Googling "Complex Variables" + "Berenstein" + "Gay" + "solutions" (note quotes used) led me to this course blog with some solutions.


text:
How do you tell a professor you interviewed with you will be going to a different program?
I had an email exchange and interview with this professor and I feel like I should tell her I've been accepted elsewhere to my first choice program, but writing the words down and getting the tone right are hard.

Yes, that's a hard letter to write. But she will have gotten letters like this before. Thank her, say you would have enjoyed working with her but that you have found another position that suits you better or better fits your interests.
If you want to edit your question to show us a draft you may get useful feedback.
Write her soon, so she can offer the job to someone else.

Thanks for your reply. I should probably add that this is for a masters program, so it isn't quite as serious and I haven't started, I've only considered applying.

If you can add some mild complement to the mail, provided it is true, it is also good in general. "interesting work", "helpful support", ...

Not as important for a masters' program, but if you're working in the same area and likely to run in to each other, it can kind to mention that; "I appreciate the time you put into evaluating my application, and hope to meet you in person sometime at $CONFERENCE". Reasonable professors will welcome you into the community, even if you're doing your studies elsewhere.


text:
Demonstrating capacity for independent work in light of parasitic co-authorship
I'm applying to a prestigious funding program for early-career researchers* that places a heavy emphasis on the "scientific excellence" and "intellectual capacity and creativity" of the PI.  To demonstrate this, the proposal is required to include a section on "early achievements" that lists five top publications, "highlighting those as main author and/or without the co-authorship of [the applicant's] PhD supervisor".
My problem is that my best publications overall, as well as the publications most relevant to my proposal, list my PhD supervisor as the co-author, even though they had no significant involvement, neither in the formulation of the research questions, nor the planning and execution of the experiments, nor the writing up of the research results.  This is because I worked in a fairly large research lab where the more experienced doctoral candidates and postdocs were granted considerable autonomy in pursuing their research, but it was the official, documented policy for the lab head to be credited as co-author on all publications, irrespective of their involvement.  There was a minor kerfuffle when a colleague of mine pointed out that this policy was at odds with the ethics and authorship guidelines of the journals and proceedings we regularly published in. This resulted in the deletion of the policy from our lab's internal handbook, but the policy continued to be applied in practice.
So I'm wondering what to do about my publication list in the grant application.  Should I focus on the publications without my supervisor as the co-author, even though these aren't my strongest or most relevant work?  If I do include one or more publications that list my supervisor as co-author, should I explain in the proposal that the co-authorship is purely nominal, or will this come across as suspicious, egotistical, and/or desperate?  What course of action is most likely to leave a favorable impression on the reviewers?

*The program is the ERC Starting Grant, though my question is probably relevant for others applying for an ERC Consolidator Grant (which has the same evaluation criteria) or to similar programs from other funding agencies.

What field are you in? Authorship norms vary quite a bit.

While the question in abstract surely is interesting, I doubt that it is relevant for the ERC consolidator grant. If your best publications center involve your advisor, then they are either almost a decade old, or you somehow have managed to spend all this time working in the same lab, with the same people, not making a name on your own. In either case, your chances of getting such a competitive grant would be close to zero. Even for the starter grant not having done a postdoc or two with good publications will probably look odd.

The guidance in the general description of the ERC suggests that applicants must show "the potential for research independence ... for example by having produced at least one important publication without the participation of their PhD supervisor." I think there are two key points from this.
Firstly, it is not necessary to fully avoid publications with your PhD supervisor - these are (relatively) early career grants, so your PhD will represent a sizeable fraction of your research experience and publication record. Particularly if the papers are strongly relevant to the proposal, don't shy away entirely from including them.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the purpose of this recommendation - to show independence, and this is important even in schemes without that explicit criteria. If all of your 'good' papers are in the same PI's lab, in an area associated with the group, then just saying your PI's co-authorship is nominal is unlikely to convince anyone. This is doubly so if you feel your research since leaving the group is of a significantly lower quality.
If you can make a clear case about how you instigated and/or developed this research area in a way you can show some ownership, you might be able to convince the referees, but you would be giving yourself an uphill struggle. As noted by another answer, the easiest way to address these sorts of concerns is through mobility, and publishing good quality work as part of another group or smaller independent fellowship. If another year or two will give you the time you need to achieve that, then that might be well worth considering as it would significantly strengthen your position.


text:
Getting an API key on Web of Science
I am trying to use "Web of Science API Expanded" or "Web of Science API Lite" for my search. I have managed to log on to the developer website and register an application. Now there comes the step where I should subscribe the application to one of the available APIs by clicking on a subscribe button. This step is supposed to be the last one on the path leading me to an API KEY.
However, when I navigate to the preferred API's information page from my application, I see the sections "Api Settings" and "Description" but no "Applications" section! Hence, no Subscribe button and no API KEY! Any suggestions on how else to get my Application subscribed or get an API KEY?


text:
Is there a particular structure that a research lab should have?
I want to know if a research lab at a university should normally include specific roles in order to be considered a lab ?
I explain, for a newly joining Ph.D. student, i expect the lab to include a post-doc and at least other Ph.Ds, is it reasonable expectations ?
Thanks for clarifying this.

Why "should"? Do you think it impossible to work without some specific structure?

i expect at least to find a postdoc to help with the work

So, if a lab doesn't have a postdoc then it isn't a lab? Postdocs aren't there to "help". They are there to advance their research interests for the most part.

i seen good labs only with : PhDs and at least one postdoc, could also include MS .. but mostly what i am saying postdocs will play the role of teamleads, because the advisor won't

I suspect you've "seen" only a small subset of what exists.

not exactly especially when it comes to team members

@marcnicole I think these are personal preferences imo! However, there's not a "for all" structure. However, if you're putting a perspective on whether the workflow should have a structure, that's a different matter though!

Varies greatly by field. Biology, mathematics, engineering, medical research, ...

A lab: just me in my office.

As others have said, this is very dependent on the nature of research. I'll share some trends that are common to many engineering research labs. The commonality derives from the following:

At least some of the equipment is specialized and high-end,
requiring extensive training to be used. This means that senior PhD
or post-docs are generally tasked with transferring skills to new
students.

Some part of the research is directed towards
building/improving/expanding machines or processes. So some students
build skills in a specific subsystem over the PhD, and often future
students work on extensions of the same. If so, you may find within
the lab some students focusing on (for example) developing
instrumentation, others on finding new uses for it, and so on.

The turnaround time for PhDs is often limited by grants/funding,
so its necessary to keep things moving. That can happen when
knowledge and skills are continually passed down across student
generations.

In such a setting, each PhD student, over their tenure, would typically mentor 2-3 generations of students (doctoral or masters) and meet two post-docs (since they usually stay for shorter periods). The post-docs may not have any academic/technical overlap with many students since they are working in very specialized areas. It is therefore not a great idea to think of post-docs as being there (or being able!) to help fresh students. Ideally, once the lab is established, other PhD students will partially shoulder that responsibility.

No, there are no standards for what is considered a "lab."
I know of labs with many postdocs, lots of staff, and few students. I know of other labs that are more focused on undergrads, with a few grad students and no postdocs.
Of course, you can take the lab composition into account when deciding whether it is a good fit, but there is no criterion to point to and say "ah, this is a poorly structured lab."

If the lab is small(ish), there just won't be that many people around to assign a lot of roles. How it is structured is quite irrelevant, what is important is (a) the results it puts out, and (b) (probably more important to you) do the people participating there get their degrees in a timely manner, with good results (publications).
I've seen labs that had a few master's students (working on their theses), a bunch of undergraduate students (on their theses or preparing for them) and some interested undergraduates hanging on. There was no PhD program here in that time frame,

quite irrelevant for who ? for the student definitely no


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Are advisors supposed to know programming?
I want to know if, as a Ph.D. student, i can ask my advisor a programming question ?
Actually my advisor gave me a coding task, and i want to know how they will verify what i code is right ? i can code wrong still get right results, how they will verify my code is strictly right ?
Thanks.

Very much depends on the supervisor.  I know of supervisors who are active hackers.  So they have a wealth of programming/system knowledge.  Then you have supervisors who leave programming tasks to students.  In this respect, they assume that if a student understands the fundamental concepts/ideas, and the student is able to explain the results logically, then the code is likely to be correct.

It would depend on the field.  If the field was, say, theology, then, no, the advisor is not supposed to know programming.

We don't know your advisor, so we have no way of knowing what they do or don't know.  There isn't a universal "knowledge" that PhD advisors are tested on before they get to have students, like there is for London taxi drivers.  They should know whatever they need to conduct successful research in their area, and programming may or may not be part of that.  If you want to find out what your advisor knows or can help you with, you will have to talk to them!

@ProfSantaClaus& Nate Eldredge sorry but your comments are out of topic of this question and thus are not helping

It may come as a shock to those in the Academia.SE environment that tend to be biased a bit towards disciplines involving code due to the connection with StackOverflow, but some disciplines don't involve programming at all! So of course generally no, PhD advisors are not "supposed to know" programming.
In a field where programming is the norm, then you can expect that anyone advising students in that field at a minimum did some programming at least in their past life as a student. For some, their programming knowledge may be stuck in the past (I imagine that professors are highly overrepresented in the population "current users of FORTRAN") or out of practice. For others, part of their job involves specifically teaching students to code (though the prior sentence may still apply..), or they still program as part of their research and are more on par with the students in their lab.
In summary: it depends, but you can certainly ask. You should have a better idea than anyone here whether it's reasonable to expect your specific advisor to have programming knowledge. However, I wouldn't bring basic programming questions to your advisor, or really anyone else, until you've made a solid effort to find a solution on your own.
As far as your own code, you're the one personally responsible for getting it "right". You shouldn't expect your advisor to grade your work the way an instructor would for a course. The ways to find that your code is working properly involve some combination of good proofreading and documentation of your own code (principles like breaking up your code into brief functions with clear and limited purpose can help immensely with this) and testing; I'd put the emphasis on the latter. Make sure your code is working right by giving it problems where you know or can verify the output. How to do this properly is a subject that could fill libraries.

@Roland thank your very much for your comment ! if you make it an answer i will accept it instead ! because through my last questions i was trying to hightlight the importance of postdocs in helping PhD students in their research work ...

@Roland Really depends on the size of the lab. Some labs might have multiple tenured professors working under one mega professor among several post docs, post-post doc career scientists, grad students of all stages, and various technical support staff. For others, there is simply not a postdoc or tech as a go-to person, just one professor runs the show.


text:
Is it possible to do a professional internship while a Ph.D. student?
I have this opportunity in a company as an intern which i am interested in. As a Ph.D. student is it recommended to go for industry ?
Thanks

Closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/160140/i-am-a-phd-candidate-and-i-have-been-offered-an-internship-that-i-want-to-take

The answer depends upon your adviser and your program. Some programs require internships (because they want students to gain experience). Others prohibit them (because they want students only doing research/teaching). Many programs are somewhere in between.

At this point in your career do one thing and do it well. You’re developing mental discipline and perseverance along with your intelligence and knowledge of a field. If you have the capacity and talent and resilience needed, a summer internship might be useful to you. What does your advisor think about it?

I havent yet talked about to my advisor, but for a short period internship (3 months) i don't think he'd say no

It is possible based on your evaluation by your advisor. If he agrees to it, all you've to keep in perspective is to be able to coop with a shift of environments after you return back to your Ph.D work. However, if you're working on the same field in your professional internship as your Ph.D (which is obvious, mostly). An internship will surely help you in expanding your network of connections who share the same interest as you which is also a boost for both your research prospects and your career in general. However, you should also understand that Ph.D shouldn't be considered just like any other course. It is a process of gaining expertise, professional experience, understanding the values of ethics, deadlines, guidance, mentorship etc. It is also a process of realizing your own potential and abilities to challenge yourself based on the problem in perspective at various points in time. It's about sticking to the same thing even after failing uncountable times, thereby enhancing your thinking capabilities and in turn giving rise to new possibilities, and amazing research results which therefore provide some/great value to a field.


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What is the role of your advisor and other lab members in your research work?
I have a very simple question : how involved should a Ph.D. advisor be in the work of a Ph.D. student ?
Should he / she be correcting the work assigned to the student after few days / weeks of student's work, won't they check anything for simulations outputs for example ? or should they be saying few guiding words and it's up to the student to write code, simulate and write the paper ?
Thanks.

I don't think there is a universal answer. Different advisers have different styles.  I look over the code that my students write and offer suggestions on how to improve it (and sometimes do it myself); my students like that. My adviser did not have any significant programming skills despite being in computational mathematics, and was mostly hands-off -- but I think he was an excellent adviser anyway.
In the end, different students need different advising styles, and one of the things I have learned advising 8 graduate students so far is this: what works with one student does not work for another one. I suspect one could also turn this around and say from the perspective of the student: The style of one professor may work for them, whereas the style of another may not.

+1 another important factor is the stage of the student. A beginning student will likely need more involvement from the supervisor than one who is close to completion.

Other thing is that the advisor should provide adequate environment for the Ph.D. student to succeed (he could then be less involved if the lab members cooperate with the Ph.D. student and help him/her especially for a starting student like @astronat pointed out.)

Also how could a student know if he / she did right or wrong the task, there should be a validation performed by the advisor or some lab member

The goal of a PhD is to make you better at research, ready to take up a research position later. So, regarding the advisor, he should be:

Someone with vast knowledge on your field of research, who knows what is right and wrong, what are the techniques and tools, the latest developments and so on;
Someone that stimulates you to come up with your own ideas;
Someone who can supervise your work and ideas and see if you're on a good path or if you should be doing something differently.
Someone (ideally) who adapts to your style in a way: some students need more supervising and to discuss quite often, some do not.
Someone who motivates you to use the scientific method and report relevant conclusions, even when they do not please you.

Your advisor should not:

Micromanage you, following every single step;
Tell you exactly what to do. Don't forget a PhD is a research job, so neither you or your advisor will always have the answers; however, if it's always your advisor telling you what to do, you're not a PhD student, but a technician.

There must also be a mutual trust between you two. If the advisor knows you and your technical capabilities, he won't need to correct every line of code you write, only the results coming from it (unless your thesis is about the coding itself).


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My supervisor suddenly told me not to submit to the top conference
As a newcomer to research I'd like to ask a question about submitting papers to conferences. My supervisor has been telling me before that my project can be submitted to the top conference and she's always been super confident, but in a recent meeting she suddenly told me that the top conference paper requires a specific setup for study and it would be too late to finish everything before the deadline. My supervisor is very nice and helped me a lot with my writing and project but idk why she never told me about this before. Before she said if the review of the top conference isn't great I can still submit to conference B.
Now she said I can submit for conference B, which is also great but of course it's not the top, plus the submission will be in early next year (and my work is kind of time-sensitive). She said that I can use the upcoming months to polish the paper and make a better prototype etc. She also proposed another idea to submit to another conference, which might be easier to get accepted.
My idea is that it's true that I don’t have a lot of time left to submit the top conference, but if I work harder and finish everything early I still got chances. It's my first submission and I really hope to get some advice on what I should do and how I should deal with this with my supervisor. Thanks in advance!

The advice seems sound. As a co-author, she doesn't have a great incentive to discourage you from submitting to a top conference, unless the chances for the paper to be accepted are zero-ish. The main issue is that she didn't formulate her expectations for a top conference paper early enough in advance for you to respond to them in time, which can be seen as an example of poor leadership on her part.

What is your question? What about discussing the issue with her?

It seems that they thought the work would be up to some standard/format for the deadline and now that the deadline is closer, they realize there is not enough time, and thus they are suggesting an alternative that would certainly work, rather than risking not making it at all. This is a normal thing to happen in academia an otherwise, for projects that are long.

Assuming that her advice about conference requirements is correct, I think you are getting good advice and should follow it. You don't need to start at the top to get there. Submitting to a more appropriate conference will likely provide a better result all around, including the fact that you may not be quite ready for prime time.
It is also, generally speaking, a mistake to fight with your advisor.
This isn't your last chance for success, only the start of the process. Your supervisor seems both supporting and giving good advice. It is probably your best option to follow it.

Adding to what @Buffy wrote (which I fully endorse): don't chase the idea of submissions at top conferences too much. Depending on the size of such conferences, your work will not gain a lot of exposure. Smaller, more thematically focused venues can be great to start building your research portfolio and meet like-minded people.
In particular for your first submission, it can be very dissuading to receive negative reviews; your adviser seems to know the field and appears to be looking out for you. If they are suggesting a better suitable venue, I'd heed their advice.
Good luck with this and any future submissions!


text:
How to respond to a professor not happy with me
I am in the final year of my bachelor and only need to pass one last course to complete my bachelor. The thing is I failed this course this year. Which means I have to continue for a whole other year just to follow one course which is only given in the last quarter of the year. Since I really would like to start the follow up master after the summer, I applied for an extra resit exam. This has to be done via an exam commitee not via the professor themself.
One of the requirments for this extra resit exam is you participating in all the exam possibilities which were two for this course (just the final exam and then a resit). I however did only participate in the resit for which I had a reason. The exam commitee thought I had a good reason and therefore accepted my request for the extra resit.
Of course when they accept the extra request they then ask the professor to give me the extra resit but you have to arrange a date for this exam yourself with the professors. My course sort of has two professors, one main professor and a sort of "side" professor who gives a smaller part of the course. As the exam committee instructed I contacted the two professors explaining the situation and that the exam committee gave me this resit asking them when it would fit their schedules and apologizing for the extra work load this resit would bring.
The "side" professor responded with that the decision of course has to wait till the main professor gets back (he is out of office for now) but that he is unhappy with this decision and thinks I did not have a good reason for not participating in the first exam and therefore thinks I don't have a strong case at all. Mentioning I expect them to do all this extra work with important deadlines coming up for them.
Now my question is how do I respond to that. I really understand this situation sucks for them and I really don't want to anger him further. So I was hoping to get some advice how to respond to this.

Could you clarify whether this is an oral exam or a written exam?

The exam is originally a written exam but the exam comittee said that the professors can decide to make this extra resit an oral exam. @JochenGlueck

To be honest, having an out of the ordinary resit prepared for a single student is a major pain. You got the (binding?) decision of the committee in your favour. Don't anger the prof further by rubbing this in in your letter as written - this will not gain you points. Keep your head down and ask the prof how you can make their job the least burdensome. You can mention that you are happy with any form of exam, even oral, if that is more suitable for them. They know that you will save a year, but your special case is messing up their schedule big time, so show to be appreciative of that.

Thank you @CaptainEmacs. The decisions is binding but feels like the professor disagrees. Would this be a better response? "Dear [name professor] thank you for taking time to considering my request. If there is anything I can do to make the organisation less burdensome I would be happy help. I am available all summer and can fit your schedule. I am happy with any form of exam, even oral if that's more suitable for you. Kind regards, [my name]"

@Qwerty123 Much better. Not sure however how the exam is arranged, so, before making such suggestions, you should probably find out how the matter is going to be organized.

@CaptainEmacs: I'm a bit surprised by your point that "having an out of the ordinary resit prepared for a single student is a major pain." If the resit is in written form, then yes, I can see that this is quite a bit of extra work (but I'd still find "major pain" a bit of an exaggaration). If, however, the profs can even decide to make it an oral exam, I don't really see where the pain is. Not sure about other places - my oral exams usually take 30-45 minutes and I need maybe 5-10 minutes of preparation (mainly for agreeing on a date for the exam with the student).

@JochenGlueck Yes, an oral exam is less work on its outset, but maybe the prof does not like the outlook of an oral exam for something that should be assessed in writing? We do not know. Also, if this precedence is created, they may end up with a dozen oral exams for a second resit next time and that's a real time sink. So, as we are second-guessing why the prof does not like the idea of a second resit, I offered a possible rationale.

My opinion is that you need to wait to hear from the course director, and not worry about what some other instructor has said to you.
I've never heard of a "resit" mechanism, and you haven't mentioned what your reason for eligibility for this mechanism is (We don't need to hear it) -- but by your description, you applied for one through some administrative body that is empowered to make this decision, and they decided in your favor.
I suppose in theory, it's even possible that this body that found in your favor has access to more info than the instructor, and based their decision on that extra information.  This happens to me all the time in the context of academic honesty hearings.  Our committee board hears all the information about a case, and then determines responsibility or non-responsibility, and if responsible, determines a sanction.  We are instructed not to tweak sanctions based upon things we don't know.  For example, if a student says "If I fail this course, I lose my scholarship (or visa)".  We have no mechanism to know if that's true or not -- so the mechanism is for the student to appeal the honesty sanction to the Dean's Office, which is in a much better situation to know whether the assigned sanction has a much bigger  impact on the student's life than is merited by the offense, and can mitigate the sanction.
If the course director has any problems with the decision they made, then the course director's recourse is some sort of appeal to that administrative body.  If the course director simply refuses to abide by the administrative body's decision, and refuses to give you the exam or count it in your grade, then it seems to me that your recourse is through the administrative body, not through the course director.
All that said, according to your narrative, the course director has not made any decision yet, or at least has not let you (and possibly the administrative body) formally know what they will do, so you have two choices.
If this is time sensitive, and  you need an immediate decision, then you should probably email the body that found you eligible for a resit, saying that you have been having issues scheduling your exam as the decision maker is not available.  Otherwise, you need to wait to officially hear from the course director.  If the course director then refuses to give you your resit exam, or refuses to adjust your course grade based upon the exam, then you would contact the body that said you're eligible for a resit, and ask them to sort things out with the prof.
Other than communicating with the prof about scheduling the resit, which is what you have been charged to do, I would not contact the professor at all.  If you get some hemming and hawing from the prof, I would recommend cc-ing communications with him to the appropriate person on the resit committee.
As a last note, your "not happy with me" language may be overpersonalizing.  The prof is not happy with the situation.  Depersonalize stuff like this.  Think of these things as problems you need to get resolved, and not worry about blame and where it may or may not belong.  You'll be happier.

Thank you for your helpfull response. I have decided to take your advice and will wait for the main professor to get back (he will be back at the end of this month). As for your final note I really appreciate that advice aswell and will think of it the way you described.