text:
Requesting raw data from previously published research
I am working on a mathematical model to help explain some experimental results and generate new hypotheses. Unfortunately, I have neither the resources nor interest to gather experimental data, but in this particular sub-field publishing a model without showing its usefulness on some experimental data is not common.
There are several existing experimental findings that can be explained by my model. However, they are presented in other modeling papers and the raw data is not available with the paper or on the authors' websites. In the papers they only present partially-analyzed data (for instance, they show results averages over participants, but not individual participant's results; or sometimes they only give the results of statistical tests).
I want to contact the authors for their raw data and have 3 related questions:

What is the protocol for contacting by email to ask for authors' raw data? Is this common?
Will the researchers expect to be invited on-board as co-authors? Or is a citation to their papers, and an acknowledgement of the form "AK would like to thank X, Y, Z for providing their raw data" sufficient?
If my model (without fits to specific data) is in a pre-print state then should I send a pre-print to the authors I contact? What if the pre-print points out weaknesses in their approach to modeling similar problems?

See a site for requesting data from papers: http://www.isitopendata.org/

This will, as it seems nearly all questions on this site, vary based on field. My answer applies to Epidemiology and medical research only. Your mileage may vary.

It is very common for this to happen in my field. There has been an increasing emphasis on using meta-analysis and systematic reviews to summarize bodies of work, and with those there is almost always a need for some more information, raw data, etc. to come from study authors. It's fairly routine now. They may not say "yes" for a number of reasons. One may be that they're working on their own projects in a similar direction. But there are others - that privacy laws prohibit releasing data to just anyone or their funding dictates similarly is a fairly common one. So be prepared for "no".
As for the authorship question, it likely depends on the extent of your data request. Generally, if you're just asking for a few numbers that go into a reported value, then in all likelihood, an acknowledgement is more than sufficient. If, on the other hand, you're asking for access to the raw data from their 5 year, many thousands of dollars cohort study? You're likely going to have a member of their study team be an author on your paper, and there will be far more extensive approval processes than just "Sure, .csv file is attached."
"If my model (without fits to specific data) is in a pre-print state then should I send a pre-print to the authors I contact? What if the pre-print points out weaknesses in their approach to modeling similar problems?" For the initial contact, I'd suggest it isn't necessary, because what you're really trying to find out is "Is the release possible". At later stages, I would expect to see what you were doing, either in a full explanation, or as a pre-print. As to your "What if?" question - so what if it does? Science is about improving the methods we use.

I do not think of it as the amount of data being asked for, but rather the extent to which the data is critical for publication. Supplying a ton of data which gets condensed down into a single data point in the publication does not warrant authorship in my mind. Supplying a single number which is critical to the publication might.

@DanielE.Shub It may indeed vary - I picked an example in my field of a request that would very likely require approvals, authorship, etc.

Many journal formats (and the arXiv) indicate a "corresponding author". That's the person you'll want to contact.
Doing so isn't a everyday occurrence, but it does happen.
In some fields access to the data may be covered by agreements to keep it confidential for a certain period of time (or until first publication). These agreement often specify the answer to the authorship question as well.

While I would try the corresponding author at the given email address, often the corresponding author is the grad student who did the work. Grad students tend to move after finishing and sometimes even drop out. If that fails, and I didn't know anyone on the paper, I would try the last author.

In principle, the arXiv lets corresponding authors keep the contact email up-to-date, but the fall back strategy that Daniel suggests is good.

This may or may not be helpful in this case, but you may be able to persuade them to publish the data separately, in a dedicated data journal or other data archive. Depending on the field, they may already have done so (some UK funders, for example, are starting to require this as a condition of funding).
This gives you the additional option to give credit by citing the dataset directly as well as relevant papers, and also opens up the possibility that others will use and cite the data as well, bringing more prestige to the original researchers.
Currently, some researchers are open to this type of data publication, while others are not, so your mileage may vary.
If you want to find data to reuse, or to suggest somewhere for them to deposit, there are some lists of archives available to look through, such as the DataCite repository list and Databib.

As a side note, figshare allows to upload raw data and get a DOI identifier for that (making it easy to cite and get credit).

I talk about biological sciences, but this can probably apply elsewhere. In theory, the moment a set of analysis is published, the data associated with it should also be public or available for:

Other researchers who want to use them
Other researchers who want to evaluate (i.e. repeat) the experiments and verify the initial findings.

So, in principle, if the publication does not have a link to the public data, then you could contact the journal and complain. Of course it depends on the data, but dna sequencing or protein analysis data are usually available. There might be legal or other limitations for patient, medical or other types of data.
This is the formal way.
There are some exceptions: The data are public but no publication is out yet. Because of policy they want/have to provide the data to the public, but the publication is in preparation. In this case you cannot use the data and you have to contact the PI to see how your analysis comes in conflict (or not) with theirs. Every institution has different guidelines.
Back to the initial issue, in reality, you might find resistance in getting access to the raw data of a published work (which, as I said it shouldn't be the case if the data are not sensitive, because anyone should be able to evaluate and validate their analysis).
You have two options: Check publicly available data (depending on your field - I can propose some in biological sciences I'm familiar to, if needed) and work your models on them. That would be easier for you, as you could avoid peculiar situations.
Contact the authors and propose a collaboration to do a different type of analysis than theirs (with your model) on those data. They would be happy to collaborate with you and they might even provide some insights on your analysis that would make it even better.
To the initial questions:

I would say that it's common. It's more common to look directly at the public repositories and see data that are already published. The collaboration proposal might be a safer approach (in terms of results and good relationship and future collaborations)
They might be expecting to be invited. It depends on the terms of the collaboration. In any case, it should be agreed upon on the beginning, so you can avoid the frustration at the time of publication (and after you have spent time on working on the data).
I'm not familiar, but if you go for a collaboration, then it makes sense to explain your method at the first meeting. If you just need the data, or you take the data from a public repository, you don't have to send anything.


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How should I email dissertation to committee?
I have to send my doctoral dissertation to the members of my committee and I wonder how I should write the email. It is not a question of inviting them to be on the committee (they have already agreed with my advisor), but on how to tactfully send them the dissertation.
Besides, is there anything else I should send besides the dissertation and my CV?

You guys are overthinking these things.

Is this seriously a question about how to write an email to a few people? Lordy...

If you are obliged to send them the two documents, simply do so. Keep the cover letter as simple as possible. Just remember to address each of them separately, it looks better.

Dear Prof. Smith,
I'm sending you, as you are a member of my PhD committee, the PDF version of my thesis together with my CV. In case you had any questions, feel free to contact me at any time.
I'm looking forward to meeting you.
Best Regards,
capadocia

As Bill Barth points out, make sure the people know when the defence is. In most places, university staff sends the official invitation, but if you know the dates, you can include them:

I'm looking forward to meeting you on October 15 at the defence.

What, no "thank you"?

@LightnessRacesinOrbit Well, when sending to the opponents, I would probably add a thankie. When sending to the committee members, I would likely consider it over-polite, but remember I'm in (quite pure) maths.

If they've already agreed to be on the committee and all that, you don't need to say anything fancy.  "Here is my dissertation, please let me know if you have any questions" will do just fine.

you beat me by 2 minutes, I decided to include a sample letter, too :-)

The other answers are good, but it might be better to also include some reminders about the timing. If you are sending them your dissertation today intending to defend and graduate this fall, you should say that. You might suggest that assuming everything is looking good that you'll be getting back to them soon to start looking for a time in December that everyone can get together for your defense.

I would suppose that they receive this in the official invitation, which is sent here by the university stuff. I think I should make a remark about this in my answer.

@yo', My university didn't use an official system to find a date. The student, supervisor, and the committee members agreed on a date around everyone's schedules, registered the date with the university, and then it happened. The committee might have gotten official notice at that point, but the date was set by the parties not the university.

Ah ok. Well, still, they are aware of the date, so it's fine.

In my department, in order for a Ph.D. degree to be awarded in a particular semester, all of the committee members must submit their (short) reports to the graduate school office by a certain date, and two of them (the adviser and the "second reader") must submit more extensive reports to the department by an earlier date.  If the OP's university or department have such rules, this would be a good opportunity to remind (or inform) the committee members about the deadlines.

I would keep it as short and simple as possible. These folks are going to be doing a lot of work for you (i.e. a lot of reading and reviewing) so the last thing they need at this point is a long flowery email.
You might want to throw in a link to a version of it in the cloud or something though. Giving extra file formats and ways to access the document from various devices would probably be well received.

I am not sure throw in a link to a version of it in the cloud is a good idea. What if there is some discrepancy between the e-mail version and the linked version? Which one do you want the commitee members to read?

Why would there be a discrepancy? This doesn't seem to make sense... if we assume the author is capable of attaching a file to an email isn't it fair to think that he or she is equally capable of copying the same file to his or her Dropbox or Google Drive, etc? Documents don't randomly mutate when stored in a cloud as opposed to an email...

I like the multiple format idea.  Some people like to read a PDF, some people like to read a Word file.

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Italicize translated text?
Should the translation of a name or title be italicized? In quotes? Roman type?
Some examples:
We encoded the list of the National Classification of Occupations (Clasificación Nacional de Ocupaciones, CNO).
They coordinate with the Comunidades Autonomas.
One of these events was the Spanish-American War (La Guerra de Cuba).

Does the publisher list any style (e.g. Chicago) they prefer to stick to? If yes, what does this style say?

Publisher unknown. I'm proofreading for an author.

Ask the author for the specific format they're using, if they have one.

Well, there is only one thing that is for sure: Be consistent.
Other than that, it really depends. If no specific style is prescribed, ask yourself the question: Does the reader benefit from visually marking the foreign words? This shall be your decision point, and we can't know the answer without seeing the manuscript.
Second thing is, how shall these be marked; there are several options:

We encoded the list of the National Classification of Occupations (Clasificación Nacional de Ocupaciones, CNO).

We encoded the list of the National Classification of Occupations (ES: Clasificación Nacional de Ocupaciones, abbr. CNO).

We encoded the list of the National Classification of Occupations (“Clasificación Nacional de Ocupaciones” or shortly “CNO” in Spanish).

...

Which one you choose is up to you. You probably don't need to specify the language if all your foreign terms come from a single language. And so on. The style is mostly up to your or the author's preferences, just remeber: Be consistent.

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A term similar to "ABD" for PhD student who's completed all coursework but neither comprehensive exams nor dissertation?
Is there a term similar to "ABD" (All But Dissertation) that denotes a PhD student who has completed all coursework, but who hasn't taken comprehensive exams and of course hasn't done the dissertation?
I left my PhD program unfinished, just before taking the comps. Hoping there's something similar to "ABD" that I can put on my CV/resume.
Thanks!

I won't try to give a definite answer, because I'm not 100% sure. But I think that there's no such notion for it. Note that in many countries, there are no courses taken in a PhD programme. So for people in such a place, passing some exams is not interesting at all; they only long for a scientific work done.

PhD pretty much amounts to the thesis... There might some loophole somewhere, but it would be pretty weird... You can put that you started and didn't finish....

Similar question here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/28717/when-can-a-person-be-called-a-phd-abd

Why not just refer to it simply as it is: either "complete coursework toward(s) Ph.D. in ..." (noun variant), or "completed all coursework toward(s) Ph.D. in ..." (verb variant)?

What's wrong with "former PhD student"?

Ah, thanks "yo'" for pointing out some PhD programs involve no course, at all. I completed 69 credit hours in my program. (I wonder if I should mention the heft course load in some way? (PS:  I've jotted down a few salient details re. why I left, below.)

Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate it.  John, I'll check out that thread, thanks.

In the US, you'd have completed the coursework master's portion of a typical PhD program. There's no shorthand for this. Some people take a master's degree at this point and go on to something else. It's reasonably common to do so. I don't know if typical corporate recruiters know about all of this, but academic-ish labs, government labs, and similar organizations that employ a lot of folks with advanced degrees will understand what happened. So much so that you probably want to have a good stock answer for what happened to your PhD aspirations that isn't a complaint of some sort.

Great suggestion (having a stock answer), Bill, thanks!

Thanks, Bill. I'll def have to work on my "stock answer," as my real answer would only sound like complaint. (See the narrative I've posted, below, added to Pete L. Clark's comment.)

@martyl1000, that's not a terrible story, actually. Good luck with the writing!

In PhD programs where entering with a master's degree is not expected, then the best way I can think of to denote this status is to list your enrollment in a PhD program for a period of years and then list that you got a master's degree at the end.  (Added: Forgive me for not mentioning this explicitly, but: of course you actually have to get a master's degree at the end in order to do this!  What was left implicit is that this is a very common procedure for students who drop out in the middle of a PhD program.  Often it is something that can be arranged with relatively little trouble.) This does not correspond to exactly what you asked for: you mentioned "completed all coursework", but in fact many PhD programs do not have much in the way of required coursework.  I think it gives approximately the right spirit: i.e., you left in the middle of a PhD program, you were not almost finished in any sense, but there is a recognizable sense in which you completed some of the work.
If you entered your program with a master's degree, you could still list this if you've gotten a second master's degree (I have seen this happen).  However if you were enrolled in a program which has a master's degree as a prerequisite, then I don't know what you can write: at least in my experience there is not a clearly defined level of "PhD coursework" separate from both master's coursework and exams and PhD-level exams.
I should also mention that in most non-academic walks of life, "attended a PhD program and didn't complete it" is about as fine a point as most others will naturally draw.  There is usually little or no stigma in having left a PhD program.

I don't follow your logic. If you didn't actually get a Master's degree from the school, I don't think you should claim one by virtue of having completed some or all of the courses in a PhD program. Whether or not the work you did towards a PhD is sufficient to earn you a Masters is a judgement to be made by the school, not the student.

While I cannot tell whether there indeed is a stigma or not on dropping out of a PhD program, the analogy of people in the U.S. sounds unfitting. A PhD is an undertaking that takes a limited amount of time, the general dimension of which (+/- 2 years) is generally clear beforehand, not a lifelong commitment that is citizenship (for those who consider leaving a country "dropping out of something", anyway). Also, a PhD means achieving certain standards, and people usually drop out because they do not think they can live up to those standards, not because they think they're ...

... too good for a PhD. The opposite happened with the ancestors of U.S. Americans, who left hoping to build a better place, not because they felt inferior and unable to live up to the standards of the old world. Lastly, the ancestors of U.S. Americans had to spend some effort leaving their original countries (read: becoming independent), whereas it's the opposite in a PhD again: You do not spend any effort to leave, you spend effort to stay in.

@Tyler: Yikes, I seem to have left implicit that one needs to actually get a master's degree in order to do this! Thanks for pointing it out: it has been added.

@O.R. Mapper: It wasn't an analogy exactly (there are four things in analogy), it was an inequality.  But not the most convincing one: I took it out.  And for what it's worth: it does take some courage and effort to leave a PhD program, especially to do it in a productive way.  I have known several PhD students over the years that took much longer than they should have to muster that effort.

Thanks, everyone. Just FYI, I went into the program with an MFA. It was a fiction writing PhD program, at that time the #2 program in the country. Mine is a not an atypical PhD-student horror story: my committee chair published her second novel in two years and promptly left academia; my second-in-command succumbed to alcoholism (and what a mean drunk he was!); and his replacement died. Needless to say, I felt abandoned, adrift. My writing was going really well -- I won the program's big prize that year. So I left and finished my book. It didn't sell. But I became an entrepreneur. The end.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, O.R. and Pete. I really appreciate.

@martyl1000: Thanks for the additional comments.  Your situation is indeed rather different from the typical one on this site, which is quite focused on STEM disciplines.  I don't have any direct experience with fiction-writing PhD programs, but I'm having trouble of thinking of a non-academic job which has a PhD in fiction writing as a requirement.  Having a prize and a published book seem better to me in all real world situations, and if you are now in the business world I especially doubt that the PhD would matter to anyone.  Do you have a situation in mind in which it does?


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How should I communicate that I do not hold the views expressed in a paper I wrote
I am writing a paper for a class that requires me to write from a perspective I disagree with.  To an external observer it may not be clear that I am not allowed to disagree with the premise of the prompt.
I disagree with it to such a degree that I would like to add something at the beginning or end of the paper that expresses my dissent in case my work or record is made public for some reason.  It would be professionally and personally embarrassing to have the work become public.
Is there a way to do this professionally?  Is there a way to do this without offending my professor?

Can it be incorporated in the introduction like "while I personally do not agree with the premise, some points from the angle of the proponents are worth discussing. In this paper I list a, b, and c...?"

It is in the form of a proposal, the introduction is really a letter of transmittal, it would feel forced to shoehorn it in there.

Footnote on the title page: "The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the personal beliefs of the author."

@JeffE that's much too weak. It sounds like a cop-out, something you would write if you were actually a cannibal/Nazi/racist/whatever and wanted an outlet to express your reprehensible views while maintaining plausible deniability so you cannot be accused later of actually holding those views.

If this is just for a class, why do you really care? You arent going to publish it. If you really want you can delete it when its done.

@DavidGrinberg A seminar paper of mine got a citation. But well, I uploaded it in a public place.

@thisischuck, regarding whether you can do this without offending your professor, that seems very tricky - I get the impression you and him/her have some kind of fundamental disagreement about the subject of the paper, and if you take proper care as I suggested in my answer to make sure your views are not conflated with those expressed in the paper, that seems like precisely the kind of action that is likely to offend the prof. I don't really see a solution except to rely on the professor's sense of professionalism and hope for the best.

@DanRomik It's really none of the readers' business what your real opinions are. But if you insist, take the word "necessarily" out of the disclaimer.

@DanRomik - So in other words you agree with what JeffE wrote because that is exactly what the OP asked for?  Of course the OP didn't ask to be compared to the groups you mentioned, but the OP obviously seems to disagree with what they wrote to the same level of contempt.

@JeffE logically you are correct, but in this situation the OP obviously cares greatly how others perceive his views, so from his point of view it is not okay to have a document bearing his name essentially saying "I may be a racist [say], or I may not be one - it's none of your business". Removing the "necessarily" would be an improvement, but I still feel your suggestion wouldn't meet the OP's goals as he stated them in the question.

For what it's worth, this is sometimes known as a non credo statement.

This isn't worth making an answer, but while you seem to have accepted the inevitable about writing the paper, if the stance you are being asked to take is abhorrent to you (morally, religiously, or psychologically), I think you could have grounds to challenge it, perhaps even as a violation of your free speech rights (where compelled speech is as illegal as disallowed speech), depending on the laws of the country you live in.

@DavidGrinberg You never know where your paper will surface 10, 20, 30 years down the road. How many Presidential Candidates have had to distance themselves from seemingly controversial essays written in their university days?

@SnakeDoc I don't know, is it none?

I would precede my paper by a strong explanatory note disassociating myself from the views expressed in the paper, in boldface and surrounded by a big black frame. For extra clarity and safety, I would then quote verbatim the assignment that the project is fulfilling, before starting the actual paper. E.g.:

Confessions of a cannibal
  Final project for Philosophy 101
  [your name]
Explanatory note: the views in the essay below are written in the context of a final project assignment for the course Philosophy 101. They are fictional and do not represent the author's actual views on cannibalism or on any other subject.
Project assignment: "Write a 4000-word essay written from the point of view of a cannibal living in New York City in the year 1987. Discuss the narrator's views and opinions on cannibalism and other topics of interest."
[body of the essay]

I should note that you say "To an external observer it may not be clear that I am not allowed to disagree with the premise of the prompt." It's not clear to me if you mean that you are not allowed to include an explanatory note of this type, or even to quote the assignment text. If that's what you meant, I'd have to say that forbidding you from including such explanatory text would in my opinion be tantamount to requiring you to actually pretend to be a cannibal (or other such person with unsavory views), which would be a highly unethical requirement. In the face of such a restriction, I would frankly refuse to hand in such an assignment, and take the matter up with the instructor and/or higher university authorities.

+1 for adding the directions copied verbatim. This is probably even more important than the explanatory note because it explains exactly what was asked of the writer and will make the issue very transparent.

Nice creativity.  Something tells me you have an active account over at World Building...

@JPhi1618 that would be nice, but one time-sucking online addiction is enough for me at the moment...

I'd like to point out that the traditional debate form often involves defending a proposition that you don't agree with, as may the traditional essay form. A brief statement at the start that this is hypothetical/fiction will do the job (as I said in the comments, this could be abbreviated down to "n.b.: non credo").
But I'm reminded of the student who, in response to te Writing Requirement's demand for "a great man", wrote an essay about Hitlers strengths and successes. The school accepted it without an eyeblink; they understood that he was protesting the assignment, and that all that mattered for their purposes was that he had proven he could write. Unless you're doing things like actively posting the essay without explanation, and/or posting it to hate sites, I really don't think it will be that hard to explain.

It's extremely troubling if the professor will not allow you to disagree with an opinion that is a premise of a writing prompt, except perhaps in a debate class, as was mentioned in a previous answer. It may also not necessarily be the case.
One approach to consider is to email the professor, tell him that you disagree with the premise of the prompt, briefly explain why, and suggest an alternative prompt that is substantially the same but assumes a premise that you can agree with.
The advantage to this approach is that either (1) the professor may permit you to discuss the subject from a position with which you agree or (2) you will have on record that the professor required you to answer the prompt as written.

Why is it extremely troubling?

@jwg: Clearly, the OP finds it extremely troubling, because to him it would be "professionally and personally embarrassing to have the work become public". For me, the key word in my answer is "opinion": if the premise is an opinion--a statement that is unsupported by evidence or argument, or only by evidence or argument that the student can refute--then, in my opinion, requiring the student to accept the opinion is tantamount to indoctrination. Of course, this is my opinion, so I will not ask you to accept it if you find this argument unconvincing.

It's extremely troubling if the professor will not allow you to disagree with an opinion. What gives you the impression that that's what's happening? The professor obviously isn't forbidding the student from disagreeing (what would that mean anyway?), he is simply requiring the student to write an essay from the POV he disagrees with, which is quite a different thing. Writing an essay doesn't entail agreeing with the views it expresses. What I agree would be troubling is if the professor forbade the student from including a disclaimer clarifying that the POV of the essay is not his own.

@Dan: My impression is that "the professor will not allow him to disagree" may not be what's happening--I'm responding to the OP's claim that he is "not allowed to disagree with the premise of the prompt". Unfortunately we don't have the text of the prompt, but my impression was that it is not "write A from the POV of B" but "write a proposal C" which implicitly requires assuming D. This is a problem if the student reasonably believes that D is untrue. By discussing it with the professor first he might avoid the need to write a disclaimer at all.

Provide context by putting the prompt/constraints at the top of the page, preceding the content.
Use this to demonstrate that you are answering the task assigned, rather than coming up with the content completely on your own.  That helps shift a reader's evaluation to "how well does this fit the prompt" instead of trying to assess it against their own evaluations (like agreeableness of points presented).

Use a pseudonym.  Write a separate email, or tell the professor in person, what your pen name is for this project.
You don't need to give a reason for using a pseudonym.

That's a clever idea, but what if the professor prints out a copy of the submitted paper, and to make sure he remembers, scribbles the OP's real name at the top; 20 years later, OP is running for office, and the paper emerges bearing OP's name. Journalists then ask: "Did you write that paper?" and OP obviously cannot honestly deny it. However OP in this situation does not have the strong disclaimer suggested in my answer to prevent a misinterpretation of his intents. Anyway, +1 for the creativity.

@DanRomik In such a (perhaps contrived) scenario, I'd like to hope that a simple explanation of the assignment would suffice…plus, we now have this question for the record! :D

20 years later, OP is running for office, and the paper emerges — Who still keeps paper for 20 years?

@JeffE people who plan to run for office (and their enemies) :-)

@JeffE: supposedly confidential data are being leaked frequently. All it takes is for some hacker to dump the entire university server on the net, after which point anyone with a search engine will be able to dredge up anything. Maybe this doesn't happen yet, but I would not bet on this not happening in the next 20 years. I already try to write each and every email in a way that it could be publicly available on the net without embarrassing me. Paranoid? Maybe.

@StephanKolassa: I take it one step further. Assume that everything you say or do is being recorded, and act appropriately. I find that it makes me a nicer, more understanding and forgiving person towards other. However, I sudder to think of what this would do to revolutionary types, and I completely agree that society needs a good helping of revolutionary types.

A more likely backfire: the professor misses the clarification and marks the OP with a 0 for not turning anything in, while wondering who is this "thisischuck" that wrote an essay for the class.

Just back up the conversation with an email.  If you have a paper trail, you can easily get the grade changed.

Find something better to worry about.
First of all it is very unlikely that someone is going to try and smear you by either publishing this paper or keeping it for a number of years and then publishing. I don't know why you are specifically worried about this, but it's hard to think of many situations where someone would have a significant motivation to do this.
Secondly, even if someone does try and do this, it's unlikely to work. Information simply sticks around longer than it used to at the times of Barack Obama's birth certificate and Ben Carson's joke exam. If it's possible to find your paper, it's probably going to be relatively easy to find the nature of the assignment, details of the course, the contact details of other people who remember the situation, etc.
Thirdly, disclaimers and so on just will not protect you against a certain type of attack. If someone is really holding up your paper in the future as an example of your true but secret beliefs, they will easily be able to claim that the disclaimer is fake, that it was not present in the original, that its presence was itself a deception, and so on. These claims might be laughable - but so was the original one. This won't stop some people from believing them.
You might be someone with a very active imagination, who spends their whole time reimagining how their current actions will look when they are a presidential candidate in the future. Maybe you are simply indulging in a form of role-playing where you cut down cherry trees with your little hatchet, and then refuse to lie about it, and so on. I suspect however, that you simply object to having to write a paper from an opposing point of view, so you have invented this supposed practical objection as a form of protest.
In either case your energy might be better spent trying to develop your compassion and emotional maturity.

These types of things to come up, and as you point out they come up fairly often.  "I suspect however, that you simply object to having to write a paper from an opposing point of view, so you have invented this supposed practical objection as a form of protest." I had already completed the paper when I asked this question.

Your addition of an ad hominem statement at the end is quite telling.  There were some valid points in there but you go off the rails in the last two paragraphs.  Perhaps this answer is more indicative of your own inability to cope with the fact that you have not achieved your goals in life.

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text:
Should I order references on surname or paper title when using Harvard style?
I use the harvard referencing style.
One of our assignment instructions is:

The reference list should be in alphabetical order

Lets use the following references as an example

Kopecky, J. and Simperl, E., 2008. Semantic Web Service Offer
  Discovery for E-commerce.
Sanvido, F., Sanchez, D., Mendoza, A. and Lopez, A., 2011. Dynamic
  Negotiation Layer for Secure Semantic Service Oriented Architectures.

Following the instruction I was given to order the references, is it generally implied that I should order the references by the first authors surname: Kopecky then Sanvido.
Or is it implied that I should order by the paper titles: "Dynamic Negotiation Layer..." then "Semantic Web Service..."

From Harvard website:

The entries in the list should be in alphabetical order by the
  author's last name [sic].

As pointed out by aeismail in the comment, the second criterion is the date:

Works by the same author should be ordered chronologically, from oldest to most recent

Of course, you might have many articles with the same author and same year, in that case, they say that:

If your reference list includes multiple works by the same author in
  the same year, identify them in your parenthetical citations and in
  your reference list by a lowercase letter after the year, assigning
  each letter in alphabetical order by the title of the work

That instruction should really be "authors' last names," since it's not just the first author's last name that gets used in the alphabetization process. Year should be the second sorting criterion.

@aeismail Thanks for pointing out that I missed the 'Year' as sorting criterion. But thank you so much more for allowing me to add a (sic) on a quote from Harvard website.

I sic'ed your [sic]—it should have gone after "name." :-) [And, even more entertainingly, the sample that website shows doesn't even follow that rule correctly, as two articles are listed out of order!]

Just as an addendum, even outside Harvard style referencing, it is typical to use the same sorting order.


text:
What percentage of a professor's salary is paid for by tuition?
Is it possible to determine what percentage of a tenure track/tenured professor's salary is paid for by tuition? At my UK university, our school budget includes income from student fees (we only get a portion of the fees each student pays), grants, and central university funds (presumably some of this is indirectly from student fees). I am curious if a calculation could be made for STEM departments at US R1 type universities. Presumably some of this information may be available for state schools.
I think the answer I am looking for would be something along the lines of the ratio of the total amount of tuition fees (hopefully divided up into undergraduate and graduate fees) given to the department divided by the total costs of teaching (again, ideally divided up into undergraduate and graduate costs). In other words if a department gets $500,000 from tuition fees and the teaching costs are $1,000,000, then 50% of the teaching costs are paid for by tuition. Teaching costs would have to include space charges, IT charges, printing charges, and the cost of staff time. These all seem to be known, well defined, quantities. An exact estimate of the cost of staff time would require going through each member of staff and prorating the salary by the percentage of time allocated for teaching (e.g., 0% for someone who has bought out his teaching and maybe 40% for someone who has not). Presumably, someone in the university/department has access to these numbers.
This is only a guess as to what an answer will include, but if there is a different (more general) way of getting to the answer, that is fine too.

Is the question here just what percentage of the school budget comes from tuition, or are you expecting info of the type "Prof. A is paid to 15% from tuition, while it is 25% for Prof. B"? In the latter case, I am not sure how you would establish this.

There is also the issue that at least in the US, some percentage of (grad student) tuition seems to be basically imaginary money, where a university pays a nominal stipend and partially keeps it in as tuition.

@xLeitix I am not sure how to calculate it. I don't think percentage of the total school budget is enough info. I think the answer needs to focus on the amount of time the average academic is allocated for teaching (e.g., some people might be at 60% time and other might be at 20%, or even 0%, time), the average academic salary and the amount of money from tuition.

In that case I am looking forward to the answers, but I am not getting my hopes up just yet :) basically, I think the only professors where one can really say where the money comes from are Sponsored Chairs.

I think that you'll never be able to sort this out. Most universities cross-subsidize departments to the point that even individual departments don't know how much of their own faculty lines come from the tuition of students majoring in that subject vs. tuition from other departments' students. Does the English department fully fund itself through the fees students pay for English classes? I doubt it. State funding, though a diminishing portion of most state universities' budgets, picks up some fraction of the costs.
Also, departments see level funding in the face of modest fluctuations in class enrollments. If 45 students took Calculus I last fall and 52 sign up this fall, the department doesn't see increased revenue for that. The department has a number of faculty lines coming from the dean's office to teach the projected enrollment. If that spikes or drops off substantially such that more instructors are required, then the department has to negotiate more or fewer lines with their dean.
That being said, I think that most departments negotiate expected breakdowns in effort with the faculty they hire. Of a typical 9 month appointment, a faculty member might be expected to do 35% teaching, 35%  service, and 30% research (or whatever), and that might be the expectation regardless of whether the teaching load is a 1-1, 2-1, or 2-2. Where, again, it's entirely unclear whether that 35% teaching is completely funded by tuition or partly funded by tuition, central endowment, and/or a local named chair.

tl;dr: Money is fungible.

I don't always appreciate your snark @JeffE, but when I do I LOL.

Importantly, the percentage can also be 0% for 100% soft money positions.

Seems unlikely that a professor would be paid 0% on tuition dollars and be carrying a teaching load, but I can't speak to academic department budgeting.

What does n-m mean in the context of a teaching load?

@Azor-Ahai, for a semester-based system, it means how many "full" courses per semester a professor must teach or account for. Where by a full course I mean a class that meets 3 hours per week. Typically a professor can either teach those classes or buy out part of their teaching load with research funds or a chair or something similar.

To the best of my knowledge, my university salary is paid out of what the university calls the "general fund".  That fund includes the money the university gets from tuition, the money it gets from the state (except possibly for state money earmarked for specific projects, like a new building), and I think also the indirect cost funds from research grants (and maybe other income sources too).  Once that money is in the general fund, it gets completely mixed together, regardless of source.  And I get the same salary, entirely from that fund, whether I'm teaching my normal course load or whether part of my time is devoted to administrative duties, or whether I'm on sabbatical.  So, as far as I can tell, the proportion of my salary that comes from tuition is just the proportion of the general fund that comes from tuition; no finer analysis is possible. (Unfortunately, I don't know what proportion of the general fund comes from tuition, but, since the University of Michigan is a public institution, that information is undoubtedly publicly available somewhere.) [Edit: Deleted the sentence about "25% quite some years ago but not from an authoritative source". That 25% was for state support, which has probably decreased since then.  Tuition is probably a much larger share of the general fund.]

As a (slightly fuzzy) data point, someone told me a year or two ago that at UIC (another large public institution), about 80% of the general fund was provided by tuition. That seems to be in the same ballpark as what you are suggesting (maybe slightly higher).

I agree with Bill's answer, but also want to contribute a few more points:

In many other European countries, students pay no tuition, and thus there can be no contribution.
Faculty in the US can be paid according to either a 9-month or 12-month salary scheme. When they're paid for nine months per year, they are expected to raise their remaining salary through external grants. Then you have to ask the question of which salary you're referring to in your calculations.
Salary differs widely among faculty members at differing levels of pay.
Graduate tuition is often an internal accounting device, as graduate students themselves (and particularly PhD students) are rarely expected to cover their own tuition costs.

Great points! I'd say that grad students in the US do receive tuition bills, but many, if not most, of them have benefits directly applied or are given grants/stipends/etc to cover them.

Another wrinkle: different pots of money for different delivery modalities. Where I am, online courses are paid for VERY differently from face-to-face ones. General-fund money pretty much can't be used for online courses, so a much higher percentage of instructor salary for those comes from tuition.
Of course, the mix of online and face-to-face courses for any given instructor varies from semester to semester, so... have fun with that math, I suppose.
Yet another wrinkle: grant funding, for instructors who also pursue research grants. Grants don't last forever, but they may "buy out" one or more classes for a given instructor for a while (at which point less of their salary is from tuition).

The average annual total compensation of a lecturer at a public baccalaureate US institution in 2014-15 is $76,893 ($54,223 for salary only) according to higheredjobs.com. You can look on the chronicle, glassdoor, etc. for average information about the type of faculty your interested in at your institution.
"The average published tuition and fee price for in-state students enrolled full time at public four-year colleges and universities is $9,139 in 2014-15" collegeboard.org.  I am sure you can find the tuition at the institution you are interested in.  A typical full time student takes 15 credits per semester or 30 credits a year.
Now class sizes are all over (typically from 10 to 200 for intro courses), which is what you would want to know if you are talking about your professor that is teaching your class.  However, if you are interested in the total amount of faculty including those that do not teach (research faculty or graduate faculty that do not teach undergrad courses) you will want to look at the student-to-faculty ratio (typically 12:1 to 20:1).  For this purpose lets suppose you are interested in a course that has enrolled 20 and the faculty member that is teaching that course (or in general all faculty at an institution with a student-to-faculty ratio of 20:1).
Now we have to consider the teaching load of the faculty member of interest.  These can range from 1-0 (tenure track at a research institution) to 4-4 (full time teaching faculty) depending on position (see higheredprofessor.com, I can only post 2 links).  Let's assume you are talking about the ever increasingly prevalent full time teaching faculty, which would mean 24 credit hours annually ((4+4)X3) for the typical 3 credit hour course.
Now it is simple math:
$9,139 student tuition / 30 credit hours X 20 students / faculty X 24 credit hours/ $76,893 faculty salary = ~2
This means that income from student tuition is twice that of what the total compensation to faculty are paid or that half of a tuition dollar goes to pay for the faculty that teach the course.  This of course is often much worse, where non-tenure adjunct or part-time faculty are paid less to teach larger classes that may have a lot of students paying higher rates for out-of-state tuition.  But to answer the question about salary only, lets look at an instructor's salary at master's institution to teach this load with an average class size of 200 students paying out of state tuition:
$22,958 student tuition / 30 credit hours X 200 students / faculty X 24 credit hours/ $46,878 faculty salary = ~78
or about 1 cent of a tuition dollar goes to pay for instructor's salary.  This is more of the trend of how things are going as tuition and class sizes increase and higher paying tenure track jobs are replaced with low paying benefits ineligible part-time non-tenure instructor jobs.

The question asks what percent of faculty salary comes from tuition. Your calculations are about what percent of tuition goes to faculty salary, which is not the same thing at all. (Your calculations seem to assume 100% of faculty salary comes from tuition.)

While you're not going to get department- or professor-specific breakdowns, there are reports that show proportions for public colleges as a whole. Unfortunately charts in articles below (sourced from GAO and State Higher Education Executive Officers, respectively) for public college funding don't totally synch up (one says 25% funding from tuition, the other 47% in 2012), but all agree that tuition as a percent of total revenue has markedly increased in recent years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/04/student-tuition-public-colleges-gao_n_6411998.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/04/21/states-increase-higher-education-spending-rely-on-tuition-in-economic-recovery

Presumably some of that tuition goes to other things besides teaching (e.g.,  salaries for the football coach and university president). I want to know about the money that goes into and out of a department.


text:
What exactly is "nostrification" of a university diploma?
I have been reading a bit about nostrification of a university diploma, but I don't quite understand what it means. I do understand that nostrification is basically validation of your diploma in a foreign country. But, does it only mean that your diploma is recognized in this foreign country (so you can actually take a job there, or you can continue to a higher education there) or it actually means that you can go to a university at this foreign country and require the same degree diploma from that university?
For example, if you have a civil engineering degree from a university in country A, and you do nostrification in country B, does it also mean that you can go to a university that offers a civil engineering programme in country B, and just require a degree diploma from that university cause you already had one from country A?

Why would you expect the latter? You could not do that with a diploma from another university in the same country either.

@TobiasKildetoft You can actually, if the curriculum is the same in both universities, just transfer the credits and you are more or less done (in rare instances).

No, that is not even close to true. If it were, there would be a lot more people with diplomas from places like Harvard and MIT.

In order to transfer credits, you first need to get accepted by that university, which is a lot harder than getting your foreign degree recognized.

I don't see that anywhere. Once you have a degree, you usually don't enroll for the same degree in another university.

@terett You keep forgetting that in Europe, while you can transfer your ETCS credits to another university, this new university: (1) has different rules set up for many things, (2) can lower the number of ETCS credits it acknowledges, (3) won't acknowledge your thesis (final project) defense, and defending the same thesis twice could be considered a very serious self-plagiarism.

Nostrification is verification that Degree X you received in Country A has the same value as Degree Y received in Country B. You do not receive a new diploma for Degree Y in Country B.
Well, actually a university in Country B may decide to give you Degree Y based on your work in Country A, but it's certainly not standard, and usually bond to university-level agreement and cooperated studies, but even then it's often not the degree that's nostrificated, but rather the thesis, its reports etc. and the defense that's considered.
The most common reason for diploma nostrification is (1) job requirements in Country B, often in governmental jobs such as offices, schools etc.; or (2) continuation of study, for instance nostrification of Masters for the admission to PhD studies in Country B. In neither case, it is necessary to have Degree Y in Country B.


text:
Include logo of cooperating company on thesis cover
I've just finished writing my master's thesis, which heavily relied on data that I received from a municipality. The data was collected within a project that was mainly conducted by colleagues of mine in behalf of the municipality (I'm working half-time).
I obviously mention the municipality and my main contact there as well as the company I work for and 2 of my colleagues in my acknowledgements.
Would you include the logo of either the municipality and/or the company on the cover?
What other options do I have?
(engineering science in Germany, if that matters)

What do the municipality, the company, and the university say about this? Are you allowed to modify the thesis cover at all?

This question should have been put in a five-line email, not on the internet.

Have you considered adding the logo on a different page than the cover (a benefactor page perhaps)?

I have written my thesis in cooperation with a very well known research institute and included their logo opposite of my universities' logo on the title page. But smallish, on the bottom. Graduated in CS also in Germany.

The thesis is a scientific work, and it is the university that is responsible for it. The fact that you got someone funding you or that you performed the science somewhere else doesn't change this fact. I would keep the cover as simple as possible, and include only the university logo, and maybe even not that one.
Note that inclusion of logos of institutions that fund you seems to be a thing now. Sometimes rules are set up that the logo has to be on every slide of every talk that the people perform. This means that for some people, the slides are unusable, because they contain 5 or 6 logos. Some authors try to get their logo in an article they publish in the journal I typeset/copy edit; we have hard times explaining them that this is not acceptable in the journal and that only text acknowledgements are possible. Journals are quite strict on this, conferences commence to limit this as well.
Please, do not support this logo frenzy. If you really really want to include the logos, present them nicely in the acknowledgements section.

That last line is golden

In contrast, there are also some conferences that mandate logos on only one slide.

@Fomite Yes I know, forgot to mention it.


text:
PhD student hiring a LaTeX expert to typeset thesis?
I am close to finishing my PhD. Some of my peers use LaTeX. Obviously, it looks much better than Word and alike. As I wrote a few papers that go into my final thesis, I however have numerous formats depending on the journal in question. I would like to transform them all into one final document with matching layout. I am OK with TeX, but I'd rather see a professional do it.
I am now considering two options:

Taking my limited TeX-Knowhow to the next level.
Hiring an expert.

My time is limited. I've got a couple more weeks to go and that should be enough for option #1, as I already know a bit of TeX. But I am an external PhD student and I work on the side.
I have two questions:

What factors should I take into consideration in deciding which route to take?
If I decide for an expert, what criteria do I need to evaluate if the expert is any good?

Once I worked (for hire) with translating a master thesis to LaTeX... and I don't recommend it. Even at a low $/h rate it gets costly (LaTeX takes time...) and you would be stripped of the full control. And if you want to stay in science, creating good documents without someone's else help will be an important skill. If anything, I would rather ask/pay only for LaTeX corrections/proofreading than translating it from hand-written notes or Word documents.

I agree with Piotr that investing your own time would give you a better result now, and useful skills for the future -- especially since you say you're already OK with TeX. However, if you really do want to hire someone else, you might find better answers on http://tex.stackexchange.com . In fact, something very similar to your question has already been asked there.. The answers to this question may also be useful to you.

Thanks! I agree, investing your own time usually pays off in the long run. No question. But I am down to a little time constraint. So I am trying to evaluate all my options.

Please read @PiotrMigdal's comment carefully. In particular, you would be stripped of the full control. Exactly because you have time constraints, you want to do it yourself. You don't want to wait for someone to finalize your PhD thesis the week before the thesis defense.

To imagine the costs, you can have a look at this time estimate I posted on TeX.SE and get the price by considering how much you'd pay for an hour of a DTP specialist or a very specialized IT consultant.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is WYSIWYG LaTeX editors, which can potentially give you the power and prettiness of LaTeX without you having to learn the language.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because I think that it is more appropriate for TeX.SE, and may already be answered there.

@jakebeal (me coming from TeX.SE) I don't 100% agree, I think the relation to academia can be important.

Don't just glue together your articles as published. Aggregate them in a meaningful way that adds value; a shared format is just one dimension.

@jakebeal This isn't a technical question about writing latex code (which would belong on TeX, but not here). If a question could belong on another site, but is still on-topic for this site, that's not a reason to close it.

Asking for a Latex service is a shopping question / product recommendation question.  Such questions are not suitable for the Stack Exchange format: see https://blog.stackexchange.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/ and http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/158809/160917.  You might consider whether there is a question you actually want to ask, that isn't just asking for a recommendation for a particular service/company/product, and then edit your question accordingly.

@D.W.: Ok! I altered the question to better fit the requirements. Should be fine now. I do think that this question is worth keeping for others. Please consider taking the question off hold.

If I may, I don't think that hiring a professional to typeset your document in LaTeX because "it looks good" is that great an idea. I don't really think that having a beautifully typeset document will matter much when defending your dissertation (EWD refused to use anything but his Hermes typewriter to type his seminal papers and nobody complained). If you want to hire a professional to have a pretty document that's okay... but said professional might use InDesign or something. You'd want to use LaTeX because of the flexibility it gives you, the author (eliminating the need to hire people).

I remember that my former boss told me that he wrote his PhD thesis by hand, and hired somebody to type it... But that was in the 1960's...

before thinking of employing anyone for this, read the rules of your University. Many will forbid this. Mine has the following clause: "It is university policy that the practice of engaging professional editorial services to assist in writing the thesis is not permitted." See NUIG Guidelines for Research Degree Programmes section 6.2.3, Directions on Format, Layout and Presentation.

"Obviously, it looks much better than Word" - Not necessarily.

@carandraug: are you sure that applies to typesetting as well rather than just copy editing?

@TobiaTesan that is a question for the university. Considering the context, I would assume it also includes typesetting.

So here is what I did: I did it myself. However, I used a professional academic LaTeX and proofreading service as a final checkpoint - correcting both grammar/syntax and format/layout. I found numoerous services online and chose for a service offered by a renounced journal in my field. I believe I chose for the right mixture between knuckling down on my own and professional help. Thanks again for all the advice.

(I will quote a comment by kahen and a chat message by Ulrike Fischer.)
You have got three qualities of the thesis production: good, cheap, fast. You can choose two.

Hiring a LaTeX specialist is good (if you find a good one), fast (if you find a good one) but expensive --- typesetting a 100-page thesis can take around 20--30 hours of work, easily more depending on the text, on the person you work with, on the amount of discussion about the appearance, proofreading etc.
Making it yourself is cheap. However, unless you are Jarod from the Pretender series or you know LaTeX already, it cannot be both good and fast.

Of course, making it yourself is better in moving your LaTeX skills forward, but I do not think this is crucial for an academic career, surely it is not more crucial than submitting a quality thesis in time. People hire services of all kinds, you get grant-writing, typesetting, conference organization, IT, etc. --- very various kind of out-sourced services for which someone can say: "A good researcher has to be able to do this."
To answer your question about LaTeX services: I doubt universities have, in general, such services themselves. Some have a LaTeX theses class (of varying quality), some even do not have this. However, there are independent LaTeX consults and consulting companies. I can't list any since (1) I don't know them and (2) this is not an advertising site. However, remember that these people are highly specialized, and the prices of their services reflect this.

In particular, getting someone at short notice will be more expensive than if you are flexible with regard to scheduling.

I've seen some of the publications out of the computer science department at my university. The professors who publish such seem to be doing just fine, and their publications are ugly. Interesting, but ugly. Pretty papers (in my opinion) are a bit easier to read, but if the content is good enough I don't really care (personally).

I do not think this is crucial for an academic career — Unless your work in a field where most papers are written and published using LaTeX (like mathematics, physics, and most of computer science).

@JeffE Doing it might be important, but doing it well certainly is not ;). And there are mathematicians who do not use TeX. I know because it was one such I found when I turned up in the maths department frantic that my PhD stopped compiling on the day it was due....

@JeffE It may be important. Still, there is a lot of mathematicians who know a very little about LaTeX, surely not enough to make a thesis look nice.

@cfr Doing it might be important, but doing it well certainly is not — But why would you want to do anything badly?

@JeffE Because you don't care enough and you have other priorities? I can tell you, as a journal typesetter, that badly done articles -- in both LaTeX and Word. People in general do not care too much, and if you asked me, I think that journals should care about the quality of the typesetting and provide the typesetting services themselves. So from my point of view, it makes a sense that researchers are not LaTeX experts in general. They should be able to do the minimum needed to provide comprehensible output, but not to provide a typographically good output.

@yo' People in general do not care too much — Oh, yes, that's very clear, and not only about typesetting. — I think that journals should care about the quality of the typesetting — Me, too!  Alas, journals in general do not care too much.

@JeffE It isn't a question of wanting to do it badly. But sometimes, it makes sense to want to do something well enough, without wanting to do it well. Time and attention are short. You have limited resources. You need to jump through a hoop, satisfy an institutional requirement, get a publication.... Since a journal is going to impose their style anyway, how long should I spend worrying about the aesthetics of my submission? I need it to be readable, clear... good enough. Especially if I have to satisfy formatting requirements which undermine typographic quality anyway (e.g. double spacing).

+1 for "surely it is not more crucial than submitting a quality thesis in time."

Actually, people do care a lot about good typesetting, and it is crucial for an academic career in any maths-related subject! Just not all people care consciously. But a well-typeset thesis is easier to read and to remember. If I have two articles with similar results, one with good typesetting, the other with bad typesetting, I'll certainly cite the one with good typesetting. The chances that I've misunderstood a formula because of bad typesetting is too big.

@JeffE My wife used to work for a quite famous scientist in her field, with lots of publications in Nature and Science.  He would write his papers by hand, and his secretary would type them out — in LaTeX.  (He was already well above retirement age at this time)

In contrast to JeffE's comment "Unless your work in a field where most papers are written and published using LaTeX (like mathematics, physics, and most of computer science)." - this is doubly true in a number of other fields. My own for example, where I have never submitted anything using LaTeX, and doing so would be at best a curious affectation.

The best thing to do would be to practice it yourself and code with the help from forums such as TeX-LaTeX at StackExchange. If your school/university provides the class file for LaTeX formats, then more than half your thesis compilation work is already done for you. The Wikibook on LaTeX is a great start and should have nearly all you need to start typesetting your thesis in LaTeX.
As my University didn't have a standard thesis class (at that time) I had to come up with my own class file for my masters thesis by deriving it from the existing thesis.cls class file. It may take a bit of work for a week or two. But it really pays off at the long run. I never thought typesetting a thesis would be much simpler. I had a much easier time than my colleagues who used Word and was very easy to make from the very minute to the most complex changes without affecting the perfection of the formatting. It is what LaTeX is all about: focus on the content and not the formatting.

Thank you, I agree. But I am down to quite a time constraint. I thus merely see a professional service as a quick fix.

How much time do you have left - days, weeks or months? It took me less than a month to learn and typeset my masters thesis.

Couple of weeks. Shouldn't be a problem, really. But I am an external PhD student and work quite a bit on the side.

The WikiBook is not a great start (IMHO). There are much better choices listed here.

@yo': This is from my experience. I tried lshort (Not So Short Intro. to LaTeX). I felt the wikibook is much better and easier to learn. I suppose lshort is a good way to get to know what LaTeX is about though.

I wonder how you managed to leave this until the last few weeks of a PhD program....

The first 2 books at http://www.dickimaw-books.com/latex/index.html should be perfect for you -- they're listed in the list @yo' linked but IMO these are the most appropriate for you. And that from someone who likes the wikibook at least for some things.

@LightnessRacesinOrbit: I did not. All my articles are formatted individually (depending on the Journal requirement, some even with TeX). Im Ok with TeX, but I would like the final document to look much more professional than what I did so far. I hence am thinking about a professional touch up.

@RachelSleeps, select a thesis class that is near the format used locally (or use the local tweaks, or even use something like the memoir class or something out of the KOMA bundle), and type away. Can even copy-paste your articles as-is. Article formats are optimized for density (more papers in the same pages), theses are more like books, to be read and enjoyed. Just selecting another class makes an astounding difference.

@RachelSleeps Formatting is usually only the matter of the style/class/preamble. So if you are familiar with LaTeX (or do you really do it in raw TeX?), ask/pay someone to modify it, rather than write everything from the scratch.

@yo', you're citing a question where the WikiBook is listed as the most upvoted answer.

@Turion Yep, but also it's the only one with more than one downvote, remember that popular does not mean good :-) Also, it's only my opinion that I state here, nothing more.

focus on the content and not the formatting. LaTeX makes it possible to worry about typesetting-related issues that word users don't even know exist. Microtype package, anyone?

This is a bad idea, as others have said. Instead I'd recommend a very simple copy-and-paste job by yourself. Once you have a template configured (I'm using arsclassica, for example), writing LaTeX is for the most part just plain text; 90% of your thesis will copy-and-paste over without incident. Of course, the remaining 10% (tables, references, equations) will be more painful but after a few hours you'll have a great looking document and a decent life skill.
An alternative is to try an online LaTeX IDE like overleaf (formerly writelatex) which some seem to prefer. I wouldn't recommend desktop LaTeX WYSIWYG editors, if you have all your content prepared I'd imagine such an approach would be more of a headache then the copy-and-paste method.
Finally, as yo alludes to, many academics do just fine producing horribly-formatted documents, posters and presentations — it's the content that's important afterall.

Can you emphasize using Overleaf more? That is the option I came to suggest. Overleaf at least provides a controlled environment and should take a lot of the configuration headache away.

I don't have much experience with it myself (I'm an emacs guy), just I know of previously LaTeX-unaware PhD students that used it for their theses and likewise were positive about it.

Here's my brief story and two cents, since as recently as half a year ago I was in a similar situation. I was not considering hiring someone to help with LaTeX conversion or typesetting (so I won't be commenting on that aspect), so when I said "similar" I meant that in a sense that I had to choose between mastering LaTeX to a level good enough to produce my dissertation report of good quality format-wise and producing it in Microsoft Word, the format, which I have used for all of the previous iterations of my dissertation artifacts (multiple revisions of idea paper, proposal and dissertation report drafts). While I had essentially relatively much more time than you have now, I still decided against ultimately converting my dissertation into LaTeX format (though I have made some brief attempts, mostly using various software programs that automatically convert some formats into LaTeX with varying degree of accuracy). I submitted my final revision in the Word format, but when it was time to submit the document to my institutional e-repository and ProQuest, I have just converted it to PDF format, using Word's export functionality and the result was good enough.
I have made that decision, considering all circumstances at hand and realizing that it would be more valuable to not jeopardize my dissertation schedules, deadlines and defense, while, at the same time, spend more time on producing better software for data analysis and other tasks. Because I understood the importance of mastering LaTeX for my future career of researcher, I decided to go the gentle introduction route and started learning enough LaTeX and various packages (which involved lots of Internet surfing and some TeX.SE activity), so that I could use some of that functionality in my data analysis software reporting modules (hello, reproducible research!) as well as in my dissertation defense presentation slides (using LaTeX/Beamer).
While most previous answers make sense in various aspects, essentially they all are missing your main point and limitation:

"My time is limited. I've got a couple more weeks to go...".

From my experience, it would be rather naive to expect to master LaTeX and a set of necessary supporting packages to be able to produce a good quality dissertation/thesis completely in LaTeX (even without fully reproducible workflow; that is, if you have some kind of data analysis part). Of course, it is possible, if you have had enough past experience of typesetting documents in LaTeX.
P.S. While I said that I won't be commenting on the hiring external LaTeX expert perspective, I just wanted to warn you that, if you will decide to go this route, it is imperative that you would be absolutely confident in a person, whose help you will use, especially, considering your tight deadlines. It is quite risky, as if something will go wrong (that person will not honor time frames or will have issues with conversion or will produce document of poor quality, etc.), you can imagine what kind of problems you might get yourself into. So, unless some people that you trust would highly recommend someone and assure about their LaTeX mastery as well as easiness to work with, I would stay away from that route for good. Good luck with your thesis and its defense!

I agree with the sentiment(s) above. If you are really invested in having a nicely formatted document, learning LaTeX might serve you well. For me personally, using a program like LyX helped me make the transition between WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What you Get") editors like MS Word and LaTeX. I know that some people will disagree with me, but it worked pretty well for me.
Knowing people that already know how to use LaTeX or LyX will probably be your best resource if you are under a time constraint (you mentioned that some of your peers use LaTeX; maybe they have a template you can use). I was also surprised how much a mathematics/computer science research librarian was able to help me.

+1 for the research librarian.  I'm always amazed at how little graduate students take advantage of their field specialists at the libraries.

@guifa Well, no school I know has any good library service for academic stuff, not speaking about students. The most I have seen is that "they're willing to get an article for you outside the standard university subscriptions.

@yo' It's definitely going to depend on university (or even individual employees, really). Out of the four universities I've been associated with, two have had excellent specialists in my field, one did not, and the other I can't judge because I was in undergrad and never tried taking advantage of.  Obviously, when you have a 1:10-20 ratio of librarian:faculty, they can't be super specialized so they'll be of less use to faculty, but for students they can be a real boon (especially with the tech side — people with MLSs tend to know as much or more than people with degrees with CS, IME)

@yo' The research librarians at the university I got my PhD at were magnificent. Taught me things about finding literature that I didn't even know I didn't know. To the point that the default starting advice for many major projects was "Book an appointment with one of the public health librarians."

Evaluating costs and benefits.
This is not a LaTeX only problem, it is valid for almost every decision we make.
Is this a one time thing or are you planning on using LaTeX to prepare other documents in the future? If you would hire an experts once a year, this will be quite costly.
Many people do not like the work with LaTeX, because that little bit of abstract imagination that you need is missing. You got that? Great.
Are you open to the idea of expanding your knowledge? Great.
Getting around the basics should not take longer than a day. Preparation for writing a thesis might take a few days. Once you have a solid foundation, prettyfying your thesis will be easy. If you have problems, you have enough knowledge to post a good and clear question that can be answered within an hour on TeX.SE. You will learn something new and will have fun.

You need this done just once and don't want to invest time in learning something you will never need again.
Looking out for someone to hire ...
How do you do it when you are looking for a mechanic to fix your car or a doctor to fix up your knee? You talk to people, do some research, read some reviews etc.
As already mentioned, there are experts that can do the job for you. There are also non-experts who want to do the job for you, because you have the money. They might think they are experts, though.

Service A has a nice and professional looking web site, whereas service B has a pretty ugly website. Service A charges more than twice the price than service B, of course you have to ask for the prices first.

Who do you choose? Ask a bit around and you will be told, that service A provides rubbish with a high chance; whereas service B will, with a very high chance, do some excellent work.1

In conclusion, you are responsible as an intelligent human being for making a reasonable decision. Will learning LaTeX pay out for me, or should i pay someone to help me?
1 Yes, this is a real case example.

Unless your subject is very mathematical and you have lots of equations in your thesis, I would stay away from latex at this stage-just use what you're more familiar with (I believe you're studying economics). Do not trivialise how much of latex you need to know to produce a good quality thesis bearing in mind you only have a few weeks and you're also working on the side. Alternatively, if you're ok with latex then just try it yourself for a week and see how you get on. As already mentioned, you really have to trust whomever you contract your thesis out to at this stage.
You also have to consider whether your supervisors or collaborators would be happy to edit your work in pdf which is the format latex produces-I've been forced to do my work in word because my supervisors prefer to add comments, etc in word. You don't want to do the same work twice!

The most time efficient may be to autoconvert it and then fix the resultant markup.  Although I started with TeX and was converting to other formats (*.docx and MediaWiki), I have had acceptable results with Pandoc. The main caveat I have is that tables required special attention to fix.

jup, see this great Pandoc introduction for non-techies

Hello! The original post contains 2 questions. Please, how do you answer at least one of them?

It addresses the first, namely the underlying assumption that there are only two options (diy from scratch vs hire expert).

+1 I imagine some combination of pandoc and gui-driven latex editors can get a solid foundation going that you can later tweak, or, if you must, hire someone for cheaper than doing it from scratch

I would strongly advise against making the conversion yourself. Latex hase some nasty caveats which can cost huge amounts of time (creating a double-page table...), if you don't know how to solve them. Combine that with other last minute work, your work and you have a recipe for much more stress than is healthy.

The example problem you mention can be solved in minutes with the help of a simple search. You'll probably find this is the case for any common issue you come across when assembling a thesis in LaTeX.

@blmoore Jep, can be googled. As I have written my thesis in January 2011, I would have needed a time machine... even then, I need the tables rotated and broken across multiple pages. That works, but isn't fun.
You can google all thins latex, it costs time - time which can be spent on other topics, especially in the last two weeks.

LaTeX is very easy to master in a one or two days. What you need to do is make a list of the non-trivial typesetting tasks. E.g. your thesis may contain  equations, tables, figures, pictures etc.. Then you just look up in LateX manuals that you can also find online what the commands are. You then make a test tex file where you put in a template for each of the objects, compile it and then see if he result is what is should be. You can then make a few template tex files containing examples for whatever objects you need to use.
The next step is then to make a master text file containing the preamble and each chapter can be put in separate tex files. So, instead of putting the whole content in one big file, you make a master file containing commands like \include{file_1}
\include{file_2}
etc.
where file_r.tex contains the rth chapter. This allows you to work on the editing of the chapters separately. If one chapter requires some more studying to get the typesetting right, you can just skip that one and finish work on the other chapters. You can compile the entire thesis without that chapter, so it's not going to be an obstacle to finish all the other work that you can already do.
So, I would advice against hiring an expert. In case you get stuck, you can get help from experts here who help people free of charge.

Hello! The original post contains 2 questions. Please, how do you answer at least one of them?

@yo' I've included my answer to the second question.

I wouldn't say "Master" in one or two days. Become basically proficient in, maybe.

-1 - this looks like bad advice to me. Many "nontrivial typesetting tasks" require changes in the preamble; splitting the chapters into separate files does not help with that, and is an added complication (for a non-techie).

At my university there was an ancient latex class going around that had been used for years. Some of the comments date back to 1993!
If you know any other grad students it might be worth asking them if they have the appropriate style files and classes etc, with a bare-bones outline of their thesis. That's what I did for mine.
Even if you don't know any other PhD students at your university then I'm sure you could track down an email list and spam it. I think people will help you out because everyone knows that Latex can be a pain.
I would advise taking this approach or just trying to figure it out yourself. I did my PhD in Astrophysics and it had a lot of Maths in. After my viva I had a few corrections, most were very minor but involved fiddly corrections in Latex. If you pay someone it could be tricky to communicate exactly what the examiner is asking for.
If you want I could try to dig out my old classes/style files to get you started, but they are specific to my university.

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How to sort search results from SCOPUS or Web of Knowledge by number of citation in a specific field?
I use SCOPUS or Web of Knowledge to search papers.
What I need to do is to sort the result in a descending order of number of citations.
SCOPUS and W_of_K both provide this feature.
But I further need to confine those citations only in a specific field.
For example, statistics paper can be cited in another statistics paper or in a medicine paper. What I'm interested in is how many times this paper is cited in another statistics paper.
Using scopus and Web of science, I can see all the papers that cited this paper and then confine to a specific field. But I have to do this for all papers one by one.
Thus I wonder if there is any search engine that can to this automatically.

This is not a question about academia, but rather a question about how to use a particular piece of software. Voted to close as off-topic.

@JeffE - I disagree; this is a question about how to use a particular academic software tool. If this person found it confusing, it's likely others found it confusing as well, and as such this both academia-related (hence on-topic) and broadly useful.

There is no automatic solution to this - it is an extremely time-consuming labour, sometimes performed by bibliometricians - and often only by those with access to full editions of either database (not the web-interfaces, with strict limitations to download sizes).
It is also a tricky subject, as the defionition of e.g. a statistics paper may differ from what you are actually looking at: journal categories. Papers on any topic are also published in journals not directly related hereto, there are plenty of translational and multi-disciplinary journals as well - in other words, what may appear to be a trivial task is actually very complex.


text:
What factors does an admissions commitee use when considering a non-degree candidate in grad school?
I have an interest in taking some very specific engineering classes at my local (very competitive) university. I already have an MSEE. As it is not close enough to my current career path, I am trying to get a better background in some areas and stay up-to-date in others. Since I don't really want a PhD, I had applied as a self-financed non-degree candidate. But, I was not accepted.
I'm wondering, is any consideration given to degree status during admissions? Is the admissions process typically identical to MS and PhD candidates?

Not typically identical to MS or PhD but some level of relevant competency is expected of you before admission can be given in that field

Hello, Jeremy. Welcome to Academia.SE. Your answer is in need of some improvement. Please try to include some more details in your answer so that it will be of benefit to other users. Thanks.


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What are my realistic chances of doing a PHD in Criminology?
I'm 31 years old with a Bachelor's in Sociology and an M.A. in International Security and Conflict Studies. I finished my M.A. degree in 2015, and since then I have not been involved in Academia whatsoever - instead I have been working in Sales in the Tech industry.
Researching and writing is still something which really makes me tick and therefore returning to Academia to do a PHD has always been on my mind - those closest to me share the same sentiment and think a PHD would suit me down to the ground. My dream job is also to be a professor, and I'll talk a bit more about that below
The research topic I am interested in is violent extremism and radicalisation, specifically the rehabilitative methods that are most successful as well as the drivers in the first place.
Upon beginning to research PHD's, I have noticed that there is an abundance of Criminology PHD's in the UK, and that extremism is actually listed as one of the sub-topics in the course description (at least in some of them).
The more I have researched into these programs, the more I think I will find them interesting and engaging - even better, despite the tenure track job market for Humanities/Social Science PHD graduates usually being very rough, it appears Criminology based Professor roles are in demand (at least in the UK).
The part I'm curious about is, whether (1) The fact I have been out of Academia since 2015 greatly reduces my chances of being accepted into a PHD; (2) Whether my academic background, particularly my M.A in International Relations and Security, might not be overly relevant to Criminology and can therefore 'rule me out'.
Looking forward to your feedback on this - thanks in advance!

A quick warning. You seem to like the fact that the labor market in for criminology in the UK is good. However, it is going to take time before you are on that market. At a minimum you will need to have finished your PhD, and in many fields there is a soft requirement that you have some additional years in a post-doc.
The problem with that is that there are only so many tenured positions for criminologists in the UK. Once they are filled with a tenured person, those positions are off the market till that person retires. So it is not uncommon for a particular field to for a short time have lots of positions open, they all get filled by people of that cohort, and than that field is "clogged up" by that cohort until they retire.
There is some movement possible in those 20-30 years of clogged up state: People move, unfortunately some die early, etc. But the competition for those rare places is going to be fierce. To make things worse, the number of free places is going to be smallest just after that window of opportunity closes: the people just started a job and are less likely to move and they are young so less likely to die.
So when the market is good now, the market is in all likelihood at its worst when you become eligible. This is something to consider, when you want to enter on this path. So look at why the market is good now, and if those conditions are likely to persist for say 10 years.
I am not saying you should not do it, or that it is impossible. I am saying you should make your decision knowing this. When you do choose to enter, have a plan B (and C, and D) ready. It is not just important to have those plans but also to have clear deadlines of when you are going to activate the alternative plans so you won't miss those windows of opportunity either.

If you have specific research questions that would be appropriate for a PhD and there are professors you'd like to work with, this would be a good indication you would be well suited to enter a programme.
It's difficult to answer specifically in your case without knowing more. First step is to find those professors you'd like to work with/learn from and reach out, a direct conversation about your interests and theirs is the best way to find a match with a supervisor.

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Are there risks in sharing a paper after submission and before reviews?
After submitting a paper for publication to a computer science conference,  authors are excited about their work and want to share it with friends, colleagues. Are there any risks in sharing the paper while waiting for reviews that might jeopardize its publication?
In Computer Science, conference submissions are usually subject to a double-blind review process.

Do you know how long is the review process?

Reviews usually take 4 months

I see. As long as the paper is submitted (I believe submission date is usually printed on the accepted paper (in my field we generally do not share unaccepted papers, not CS related), you trust your work (you do not wanted to be wrong or be over optimistic about it), you trust colleagues, I think you can share the paper. But, I'm interested to see what CS guys are going to say.

"Authors are excited about their work and want to share it with friends, colleagues". No, they are not always like that. I am glad to share my PUBLISHED work but not my work under review (unless this work is uploaded on arXiv as a preprint).

If you fear that somebody takes your idea, the better way is to publish it as a working paper under your institution's working paper series or send it to plateforms like arXiv, related to your field.

Related question:
http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/54185/should-i-be-careful-who-i-share-my-unpublished-results-with/54203#54203

I think it is important for us to know whether or not the submission was anonymized before submitting. Was it? That could be important because one of your colleagues may be reviewing the paper already as an anonymous reviewer of a paper that they are not suppose to know who the author is. If you send it to them, they may have to disqualify themselves as a reviewer, which could delay the review process.

@mikeazo good point, just added clarification... it is a double-blind review

I work in CS and know of no issues with distributing work to a small group of people. I know a number of researchers (myself included) who share their work with colleagues before and after submission. Sometimes it's to gather feedback, sometimes because a friend is curious about your work or working on something similar. It's generally understood that the research will not be distributed further without the authors' permission.

How do you handle submissions that are suppose to be anonymized? These colleagues may actually be reviewing your paper that they are not suppose to know is yours.

In my field, people in your department are disqualified from reviewing your work as are people you have recently published with. So there are no issues there. As to colleagues elsewhere, they can excuse themselves from reviewing your work. Most people I would call colleagues know what I'm working on and would recognize my work regardless of whether I've sent them my paper, so the anonymity is a little moot.

On @mikeazo's comment... That's why all these supposedly top conferences in CS with double blind reviewing are rigged.  It's a boys club with 'top researchers' publishing each other's papers.