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Where is your line with students on social media?
I will be giving lectures for the first time this semester starting in 2 weeks (online due to covid), some students already started to add me and follow me on social media (LinkedIn mainly for now). I rarely use LinkedIn, and really %99 of the people there are people I know in real, collaborated with, from college etc. It is already a messy jungle. I see sometimes an overly passionate kid who made a request and I don't mind accepting their request, but I also want to be fair to all so I don't. I recently began to enjoy Twitter and although most of my followers are professionals I sneak in personal likes, comments, tweets and I enjoy it that way, but with students following I don't know if I will be able to 'act human' (which I wouldn't mind if I were already an experienced, confident, accomplished professor (those are the best of the people) but at this time I am not comfortable with it). Do you change your name to not be found easily (I want colleagues to find me though)? Do I go private? I post during workshops/conferences (which makes most of my new connects) and often like/comment on others as well.  Do you accept their requests? Where is your line with social media?

Don't publically participate in things you don't wish to be public.  It's quite simple.

Does this answer your question? Is it okay if a professor friends a student on social media sites?

@reinstate Monica, thank you but no, I have absolutely no intention to add them or accept their requests on Facebook. Facebook is off the table. Though, I see some of my social sciences friends keeping their professional network/students on Facebook as well. Not for me, no thanks :)

I'm generally reasonably open with social media with my students (as you can see also here, where I use my real name). On Linkedin, I accept all requests from students. On Facebook, I accept all requests from students with whom I had a longer relationship, like my PhD students or students who I supervised for their bachelor or master's thesis. Also students who took with me several classes. The point is, I don't behave in social media any different from how I'd behave in a class.

I have tiers of social media and things I will and won't say on each platform.
So,
LinkedIn: I will accept a connection from anyone I have a genuine professional relationship with. This includes students from my department who have taken my classes. I say no to people who I have no connection with, or I know socially. I don't really post anything on LinkedIn.
Twitter: I mostly use twitter for professional, and professional adjacent content. I don't vet who can follow me, or who can see my tweets, but people who know me socially are going to get bored of the academia talk pretty quick. I will follow students I have a significant relationship with: graduate students in my department who work on things in the same area as me, people I've co-authored papers with etc. I never say anything on twitter I wouldn't mind saying at the top of my voice in the middle of campus with my boss watching. I generally keep away from national/party politics, but do comment on academic politics (e.g. I post quite a lot of union content).
Facebook: I have my Facebook completely locked down so people who aren't my friends can't see anything. People on here are almost entirely non-professionally related to me — I don't even really have other academics from my department, who I would normally think of as friends. I'm much freer about what I say on Facebook.

My line:
On the first day of classes I tell the students that I don't want to be contacted by social media or by any means other than the school e-mail. The school also gives students a nice way to provide anonymized feedback, which no one has ever used so far.
If students send me friend requests on Facebook et al (which I don't really use), I delete the requests (it's happened a few times).
If students send me friend requests on LinkedIn anyway, I accept the requests after the end of the semester. (I can imagine a scenario where I might want to delete the request, but it hasn't happened yet.)
On at least 4 occasions I remember, former students messaged me via LinkedIn about recommendation letters for graduate school, advice regarding internships, etc. I don't know, maybe they don't have access to school e-mail anymore. I'm a little ambivalent, but so far nothing bad has happened.
I have no doubt that some students create class-related social media discussion groups. I also trust that if something happens that needs my attention (e.g. many people not understanding the material), they will contact me by school e-mail or make an appointment for office hours.

I love this idea. On the first day of classes, inform everyone that you don't want to be contacted my social media. I would blanket refuse any social media requests on anything but LinkedIn; but also keeping these requests pending until the end of the year is a great idea. After all LinkedIn is for professionals to connect.

It can be a lot easy to find a contact on LinkedIn then to find a email address's someone gave you same time ago.   Also the ex student does not know if you have changed email address.

In regards to student emails dependent on institution they do one of the following:

Shut down email at midnight on day of graduation or soon after (more popular in schools than universities)
Leave the students with there emails for about 5 years (maybe less) and then shut them down.
As such, they probably no longer had access to their student accounts.

Years ago I used to accept student friend requests on the Facebook platform, but I came to regret doing that. At some point I stopped accepting student friend requests on social media.
Steven Krantz in How to Teach Mathematics makes the point that you need some amount of social distance from your students to hold their respect, and to not do that is a common mistake for younger/newer faculty. I've certainly walked that path myself. (U.S. system here, maybe that varies by institution and/or country.)

As far as social media goes, especially Twitter in your case, you should be very careful about who can see your activity. Particularly if you find yourself gravitating towards any type of "controversial" conservative political content, the stuff that you do on social media can be incredibly consequential as is evident by the University of British Columbia Board of Governor's Chair 'voluntary' resignation for liking a tweet from Donald Trump. Keep in mind, you might not gravitate to that material now, but Twitter has a way of dragging people into the fray.
You should always be aware of the fact that what you think is reasonable can be completely taken out of context and weaponized against you. Unless your contacts are people that you trust on a personal level, you should really practice keeping your social media network tight. I understand your want to 'act silly' on the internet, but you need to be aware that the enjoyment that you get out of 'acting silly' could be weaponized against you by your own students that view the world and your actions from a very different lens.
Besides, what do you get out of having students on your Twitter feed? If you want to maintain some type of social connectivity with students, particularly after classes, then LinkedIn might be the best bet given the professional themes around it. Ultimately, you need to weigh the benefits you get from your own social media activity with the real possibility that you could lose your career over something as juvenile as liking a tweet.
https://tnc.news/2020/06/21/a-ubc-exec-liked-conservative-tweets-now-he-has-apologized-and-resigned/

This answer provoked some political and other discussion; this has been moved to chat. Please remember to be nice, avoid taking a condescending tone, and consider whether your comments are likely to lead to the answer being clarified or improved.

Correction to your source: Yes, the UBC exec resigned after liking a Trump tweet, but not because of it. He resigned because he was criticized for publicly supporting ("liking") much more "controversial" stuff (to use an euphemism), quite unbecoming for a public figure. According to CBC, "the chair of the University of British Columbia's board of governors has resigned after liking posts on Twitter that promoted conspiracy theories and disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement".

So the question is, would he have had to resign if he was in full support of the Black Lives Matter movement? The answer is no, because it’s become politically salient for the political left (getting into the nuances of the BLM movement is not for this forum though). I looked at some of those tweets personally, they’re pretty run of the mill posts. The point here being that some political activity, even as juvenile as liking a tweet, is acceptable, while others are not, and OP must be cognizant of that.

I certainly agree with your last sentence.

It should be added that some people use twitter for posts related to their field: science news, conferences and so on. This actually makes it useful in academia. Maybe it is an option to have more then one twitter account?

This is what my account is actually all of the people are academic connections, but say I like "academic memes" etc. which is more "personal". I wouldn't think of sharing more personal things. Still you can easily be drawn to politics, even your silence could be taken out of context.

I think there is no general answer regarding all social media, but that the answer should depend on what you do on that particular site.
If you use LinkedIn for building a professional network only and do not post or like anything, than accepting students there seems perfectly fine. There may even be benefits for you (seeing what graduates become or leading to direct contacts to companies). If you use an account (like Facebook or Twitter) for private stuff, you probably shouldn't accept invitations from students. Also you need to be aware that some platforms are asymmetric in the way that people can see what you are posting without your need to allow that. Using such a site and actively blocking students can be a hassle (and may look strange).
Finally, there are "social media" channels that can be temporary and partly anonymous (e.g. I created a channel in a chat app dedicated to a specific course and students are invited with a link but can choose to be anonymous or not - apart from that channel, no information about accounts is exchanged). I do not see any problems with that.

Good point about LinkedIn. I would delete my LinkedIn if it weren't for the recruiters connecting me there (really useful if you set your profile to -looking for a position-).  Twitter is not very private though, I like being able to comment on other people's tweets, and I have made new professional/academic connections on Twitter, if I go private (none of my colleagues do) it would be a lot more difficult to connect with people. First thing I check is what a person has posted, so I know if I want to follow them or not.

My university recommends that faculty never interact with students on social media.

This sounds a bit too simple (one point: the "learning management system" at my place, something similar to moodle, has a lot of features like a social media platform and the university certainly encourages that we engage with students there).

@Dirk: I assume the recommendation is about general-public "social media", like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. , not internal systems which are "social-media-like".

It is good to know what other unis have recommended on this matter, however I don't see this working on Twitter for example, unless it means -never have a Twitter account- I mean I can ignore the students, but they can follow me without needing my approval

@dusa The advice is only to faculty.  Students can follow whoever they want.  Oddly, posting on social media is part of my performance evaluation.

That is interesting indeed! What do they measure? I read that if you have a certain number of followers and your paper is tweeted, it is likely to be cited more. Having a Twitter really helped me getting more connections, increased participation for the events I organize etc.

@dusa "if you have a certain number of followers and your paper is tweeted, it is likely to be cited more." Correlation is not causation, and it's a pretty weak correlation.

Well there was an article on this, I am not going to argue what you are saying is not correct, obviously why would anyone cite a paper just because? But if your research is in machine learning, I would say the correlation is significant. Just keep track of the number of papers uploaded to arXiv in machine learning and you will see why.

I get LinkedIn requests constantly from current and former students. I ignore them unless I have significant additional contact with the student outside of the classroom, such as if they work for me as a research assistant.
No one ever asks why I didn't add them and, to my knowledge, no one has ever taken offense.

Good to know. They visit multiple times after they send a request, so it feels awkward

We created our own in-house social media that is under our control to solve this exact problem. We created our own Discord server with channels for specific courses and some general, fun and support channels. The students come in with their own discord IDs but have to supply the administrator with their student ID to unlock access. So for the teaching staff they can be de-anonymised and poor behaviour dealt with.
This leaves any out-of-work social media out of the equation as it attenuates the need to link  up with other media and also give us control over the messages and deal with "shit storms".
We have separate mechanisms for "in-class" chat which takes place in MS Teams, Canvas VLE and other tools. Students now have more channels than they can ever need!
This of course is a departmental approach that may not work for individual academics.

I don't think having an in-house social media platform solves the Linkedin problem though. Students will still be motivated to add their professors on Linkedin, because building a large "network" is everything that site is about.

(Also, you can create all the in-house social media in the world, but I am ready to bet that your students will still create their own private Whatsapp, Telegram or Facebook groups outside it, so that they can discuss assignments, cheat, exchange course memes, talk shit at professors and make fun of them).

@FedericoPoloni. Yes, they will do their own thing, as they have always done, probably since Socrates at least.

@FedericoPoloni Indeed they add just for the sake of it, networking perhaps, but I am not sure if they have a specific reason - it is not communication.

@Brian Tompsett Thanks, I like the in-house social media, actually I will open a Slack channel, but they don't add me on social media to communicate, they do it just because :)

Why was discord chosen?

Our experience showed students were already using it every day and it had the APIs we could use to integrate with it. We are a Computer Science department. We just shmoozed into what the students were already doing. I might edit my answer to say more about linkedin at a future time but did not want to pollute the answer-space.

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩 We used Discord for organization of a conference, it can be useful out of the gaming domain as well. Did you start this in-house approach with the pandemic/online learning or earlier? In my whereabouts people use Whatsapp instead, but I can't stand the clutter, Discord pins might be more helpful. Do you think there is a lot benefit to it compared to a more structured/formal medium?

I understand since students already use it, they might be benefiting more on e.g. announcements, but I don't see it working with more content. Then again, I am not keen on deserted Moodles that student forget about after they register and check on the first week (if they do).

@dusa It was covid crisis management that brought it into use, but we have found it so useful that it will continue alongside MS Teams. We just keep the chit-chat on Discord. We already have VLEs for the announcements and other stuff.

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩 Ah well, then you're lucky. I can't see Discord getting much of a hold outside of CS. Its interface is baffling to people not used to it.

Coming from a current student and grower-upper of this new era of information, once a three-letter agency employee, who has done very personal tutoring, coaching, etc- I strictly keep a social media account (a pseudonym so to speak) separate from my real life identity. I hardly use social media with my own name. It may come from a lack of written qualifications yet (working on it) and my rather contrarian writing, but social media is not a good place to use your real identity unless it is strictly for friends and family unrelated to work or school.
I will often, even just in the process of citing works, look for the author's social media accounts. I like to get an idea of whether I feel I have, if I disagree with them or find their work too easily criticized, tinted them poorly when perhaps they have changed their mind, seem to be in a different state of mind now, etc. Be aware that if not protected (which I will also explain below) they can find everything you have ever posted, done, or liked. There's no guarantee even if protected they can't. Twitter is not incredibly safe.
Protecting your tweets on Twitter gives an air of elitism, and I mostly regard those folks as having something to hide (if you don't want to be seen, why bother with the website?), whether it be opinion or just not realizing the point of Twitter is some measure of social exchange. I agree fully with protecting your messages from anyone.
Following this, I would keep one for my real-life identity (or my expressed published name/identity) that is strictly for professional use. Example: speaking with another professional colleague, making a declarative statement on a subject and needing my qualifications available, announcing papers I release, announcing awards, generally just a portable resume and new-age LinkedIn since LinkedIn will become a joke as soon as people realize it's mostly falling out of favor with the newest generation of workers. All I get are scammers.
Students may add this account, but this would be the account where there will be no interaction with them whatsoever. Sneak in likes if you would want, but remember: everything you do that is against the grain they expect, whether it be liking a snarky contrarian comment, will be taken much further than you predict it to. The passionate kid will take the like as confirmation he's right when he should likely be challenged and helped in making his argument/belief stronger. An exception would be a graduate after the fact whom I may want to promote in some way (assuming I have such clout if it were a professional account).
I would protect the DMs of absolutely from everyone, and give a contact email for questions that is officiated (@overpriceduniversity.edu) (maybe even a separate one) since a lot tends to get filtered from non .edu emails if they were to contact you (not always true ofc). There is certainly a good deal of information exchange happening on social media, aside from the social part- much of it is nonsense, but to see and understand the honest, kneejerk reactions of individuals to certain topics can help one understand the general public opinion, even if the topic is fabricated.
I hope my perspective helps a bit, since in these coming decades, this integration of life, the internet, schools online, and our coming pandemic of total information access obfuscated by FUD is going to be much more difficult to navigate for those who did not grow up in it.
In summation: my line is in bold but italic. No underline. /

There is no problem with using Twitter if you use the proper privacy settings. Under the tab "settings and privacy" you can select: "Protect your Tweets: Only show your Tweets to people who follow you. If selected, you will need to approve each new follower."
And the "Receive messages from anyone" option is unchecked by default, so you should make sure this is indeed unchecked.

Thanks, I know this but having a private account means I won't have new academic connections.

Simple solution: I do not have, and have never had, an account with any of the major social media websites.

The only hard and fast rules I keep to in regards to social media are:

I don't conduct any school business whatsoever over social media. If students have questions about class material, grading, etc. it needs to go through official (FERPA-compliant) channels.
I don't add any students myself (current or former) on any social media.

On the other hand I won't deny requests from students either.
From the perspective of minimizing your political liability, I agree with the other answers here that the best policy is to keep social media on complete lockdown. But to be frank: life's too short to live it locked away in a deep, lightless room of the ivory tower (obviously, other reasonable people might disagree). Of course using social media as a public figure carries risk and I accept that risk and its potential consequences.


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How to provide English translation of non-English words scattered in a thesis
I hope this is the right place to pose my question.
I'm writing a thesis in English, but it's based on a project aimed to Italian native speakers (and so am I) and therefore I have often to refer to Italian terms.
Since its main language is English, I want it to be completely understandable by English speakers, without the "gaps" due to Italian words. What is the best way to address this problem?
My current solution is to write translations in parentheses or footnotes, but I don't like it very much.
Is there a better solution?

If you provide a glossary of terms at the end of the thesis, then you only need one footnote, at the first Italian word, to point readers to the glossary. If the first usage of any Italian term is also written in italics, then the reader is prompted to consult the glossary if needed.

I already wrote a footnote at the first occurrence of an Italian word, warning readers that several others will appear later in the text. Unfortunately I don't consider the glossary solution suitable because I'm also including Italian sentences (as they are sample questions posed by real users) in the thesis.

Harder then. Would it be suitable to put the English in the main text with the original Italian in footnotes, rather than the other way around? Endnotes is another solution that might be possible (rather than footnotes).

Switching the languages of the examples as you suggested (English for the main text and Italian in footnotes) would probably seem to imply that the project has been developed in English and - more importantly - that the application is able to understand English utterances, which is untrue. Endnotes would probably make the reader lose the train of thought. I know it's a tough case...

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How/should I modify my ethics review proposal when asking questions not stated in the original application?
We submitted an application to our HREC (Human Research Ethics Committee) and received their approval to conduct the study. In our application, we submitted a base questionnaire with some of the questions we were interested in asking. However, we want to conduct a study with semi-structured interviews following a grounded theory approach. That is, as we interview participants, we want to adapt our questions to explore emerging topics. For context, we are in Europe. However, I'd be surprised to find that there's much deviation across the globe.

How does the ethical approval work in semi/un-structured studies in which you don't know about all the questions you might ask in advance?
How much freedom do we have to deviate from the original questionnaire?
Should we constantly keep the HREC in the loop after each interview? SOLVED

UPDATE1: Question 3 answered (for this case, at least). Our HREC is currently asking us to share with them any changes to our questionnaire. It is unclear yet whether we have to report ALL questions that we asked that were not originally part of it.

The simple answer here is that if you go outside the scope of what was approved in your ethics clearance, then you are doing something for which you do not have ethics clearance.  Thus, the answer to your question depends on the specifics of what you have described in the application that was approved.  If your approved application represented that you would use the specific base questionnaire that you submitted, as written, then you will need to amend your application if you now wish to deviate from this.  If your approved application merely represented that you would ask questions within a certain field, with the questionnaire serving only as an example of the type of question, then you probably have scope to deviate a bit while remaining within the scope of what you described.
For this reason, it is a good idea when you draft an ethics application to anticipate possible adaptations you may wish to make as you progress your research, and describe your proposed activity in a way that is broad enough to allow you some "wiggle room" within the scope of the approved research application.  This is a balancing act --- if you give too little detail then it will be too vague to be approved, but if you are too specific then you are imposing constraints on your research that you may wish to change later.  In my own field, of statistics, it is common for an ethics application to give some information about the proposed model/method for analysis of data.  In this case you need to make sure you frame this broadly, to allow yourself the discretion to adapt your method of analysis to the features of the data when it comes in.

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Talking about works under submission without breaching anonymity
I work in a medium/small-sized field within Computer Science. In this field, there are three major conferences. I'm currently submitting my resume/statement to one of these conferences as part of an application. I want to talk about my current works which are under submission to other conferences because they are very relevant to the application. I also want to include where they are being submitted because it adds a lot of value to the quality of work. However, I'm afraid that if I mention what I'm working on + where the works are submitted, that it would be really easy to link me and my group as the authors. This I think could potentially breach the anonymity of our submissions (double blind peer review).
Is this a reasonable concern? Or is this still done?

I also want to include where they are being submitted because it adds a lot of value to the quality of work. No it doesn't. You can submit anything. I personally find it notably weird when I see this.

@Thomas Well, "submitted to <insert A* conference>" means "my coauthors and I think it's good stuff". Then, you are free to interpret this as you wish (in view of the quality and location of their other publications, and of those of their coauthors).

I'd be impressed by an undergrad's having two papers in FOCS (meaning actually presented there or at least officially accepted). But 2 other papers submitted to anywhere would not impress me any more than 2 other papers on the arXiv.

@FedericoPoloni If I see "submitted to X", I'm going to assume you submitted there solely to impress me, rather than because you think it will get in. This should be a separate question if you wish to have more detailed viewpoints.

@Thomas I find this to be highly unlikely. I have never head of anybody submitting a paper just so they could brag about it being "in submission." It is highly impractical even for this purpose. More often that not, you submit because, as Federico pointed out, you feel like the work has enough merit. Anyway, yes, this seems like good material for another question. As of now, let's focus on the actual anonymity breach question.

The point of blinding authors is to prevent implicit biases from influencing the reviewers' judgements. It's practically impossible to blind properly; reviewers are probably able to deduce your identity if they want to. However, a good reviewer shouldn't want to: they should judge your work by its own merits. Thus, in my opinion you should be able to simply mention the other conferences.
(Also: the value of your work is in the work itself - where it is submitted doesn't add anything to that, it merely signals the value you think it has. Not really relevant to this question, but it might help to sharpen your thinking.)

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When should we repeat a statement of a theorem before proof in a paper?
When should we repeat a statement of a theorem before proof?
Suppose we have a theorem in a paper at the introduction or at the beginning of a section. However, a proof is given, say, six pages later after a series of definitions, lemmas and propositions. It would be convenient for the readers to repeat a theorem before we give proofs to recall hypothesis and notations (especially those who read an electronic copy to see in a screen). Then, however, the paper becomes redundant. Should we repeat?
More pragmatic question: Are there any guideline/style of journal papers/books mention when to repeat or not?

Added: Although I asked when to repeat, how to repeat can be found, for example, in section 6.10.1(b) in this style guide.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about academia, rather writing SE.

Sometimes this will be helpful, sometimes it will be burdensome, and generally you'll just have to decide which approach works better. In the context of scientific papers you might try looking up some recently published and highly praised papers and see what they do.

@Coder I believe this is on-topic. Because the last question of mine asks not what general readers like but what academic publishers (and researchers community) recommend.

@Orat Yes, but there is more correct and dedicated venue for this. Visit writers.SE.

Consider starting the proof in a way that reminds readers of the statement of the theorem.  For example: "Proof: Assume the hypotheses of the theorem, i.e., X is a compact metric space an f is a continuous real-valued function on it.  To prove the required conclusion, the uniform continuity of f, let an arbitrary positive epsilon be given ...."

@Coder, it seems on-topic to anyone writing theorems and probably can't be answered by those that don't.

@Coder: but there is more correct and dedicated venue for this – that doesn’t make it off-topic here.

If you do repeat a theorem statement, then I strongly recommend defining the statement as a macro, because two distinct statements doesn't help anyone. (Without macros you might edit one statement and forget to update the other. Hence, it is quite easy to make a mistake.)

I can't say as I've ever seen this in practice.

@Coder I followed Writers.SE for a while and I'd say that there are not many experts about academic writing there. See also the answers to this meta question.

@MassimoOrtolano I have retracted my close vote. Thank you for that question on meta.

@Orat, section 6.10.1(b) of the style guide doesn't seem to discuss this. Did you mean another section?

@user2768 See 'The introduction may in this way contain identical copies of theorems proved later in the paper, ..." in the section.

The complete extract reads: "a statement may be reproduced from an earlier paper...and may not be in the number sequence...and sometimes authors give the paper's main result in the introduction...The introduction may in this way contain identical copies of theorems proved later in the paper...sometimes with identical numbering" (emphasis added). I don't think that provides a definitive explanation of how to repeat a theorem statement. It certainly gives hints.

@DanielR.Collins commented I can't say as I've ever seen this in practice. Has anyone else?

Unless, you are facing a particular nasty page limit, those few lines spent repeating the theorem should not be a concern to you. Thus, the only concern you should have is what benefits the reader. Here, redundancy is not bad as such, but only if it annoys the reader and wastes their time. Therefore, you have to compromise between the following:

Readers whom the redundant information helps. In most cases, you have to expect that readers have not memorised the entire theorem yet, and this is clearly information that is relevant to reading the proof. Of course, readers can flip back to the theorem, but that’s a major annoyance (even if you can put the pages next to each other).
Even if the theorem equals the title of your paper and is something like:

Every frasmotic contrafibularity is a compunctuous pericobobulation.

and you spend the entirety of the space between first stating the theorem and proving it with talking about the four terms involved, you cannot expect the reader to remember that, e.g., Theorem 2 was this titular theorem. Even if you refer to it as titular theorem, readers may need more time to understand this than to read the short theorem again.
Readers who are annoyed by the repetition. – In the situation you describe, I would expect that only very few readers do not need the theorem repeated to them. If the formatting is any reasonable, those should notice very quickly that you are restating the theorem so they can skip it.

Therefore, in most cases (including the one you describe), I would conclude that for the average reader the usefulness of restating the theorem outweighs the annoyance.

Apart from externally imposed page limits and such, I think it makes mathematics papers much more readable to repeat key points as relevant, rather than requiring that the reader flip back and forth (even if this is made somewhat easier in certain computer-reading situations). For that matter, I'd advocate explanatory comments in addition to otherwise-cryptic internal cross references, e.g., not "by theorem [3.7]", but, perhaps, "by the long exact sequence relating X and Y from theorem [3.7]"...
The notion that redundancy is undesirable is, I think, misguided, although perhaps understandable. Ordinary language has substantial redundancy, and this gives it stability (e.g., in the face of most typos or grammatical errors). In contrast, highly-compressed (in the information-theoretic sense) but long-ish mathematical writing can be very brittle and sensitive to typos and/or mis-reading.
If we were all infallible logical automatons, maybe the information-theoretic issues would be different, and I do know that many people like the mythology (for mathematics) about behaving as though we were, indeed, immortal and infallible and so on, but, in practice, many of us aren't.

I remember asking this question once. The professional I consulted is very rigorous with his work (he was a book editor at Springer). He replied that, in general, high quality paper should be read from top to bottom without looking up, and be as accurate and austere as possible. His answer at first seemed rather vague to me, but believe me, that's practically what it's all about: communicating as well as possible.
As an early interpretation, if you need to give a theorem at the beginning and then prove it at the end, you must take care that the reader does not have to read the theorem again. The only thing that changes is the elegance with which you achieve it.
For example, if your paper deals with a problem you solve, it is better:

Initiate a brief introduction to the problem (taking the opportunity
to introduce references).
Formulate the theorem as a problem,
conjecture, or something unresolved: state things as you found them. Remember, it's not a good idea to rush through everything at first; the trick is to induce the reader to want to read your work to the end more than anything else in the world.
If your development is very long, you can also add an "outline" of how you have structured your paper to reach the solution, so the reader will not get lost in the tangle of reasoning.
In each development, explain in human words what you are going to do or the results you get; you can take advantage of this to show how you advance in the "outline" of the paper you gave before.

In this way the reader will be imbued with the problem and will keep it in mind. Then, after all the propositions, lemmas, etc., enunciate the final theorem with its proof.
Your question is ultimately about how you structure the paper for the best possible communication; whether or not to use a theorem or problem or both to enunciate and develop its content is pure strategy.  For the structuring of the paper, there are several interesting books. One that served me well is Writing Science.
To see more specific strategies, I strongly recommend that you decide beforehand which journal you will publish in, and review how the other authors have structured their work. Look at a lot of them, so you get the average idea.  It is also very good to review high-impact journals; although it is difficult for you to understand their content, focus on understanding the structure of the explanation, which is more important (of course, you can take advantage of this to read your references in detail).

If you still want to keep your theorem at the beginning and your proof at the end, and if you write in LaTeX then you can call the proof environment with the optional parameter [Proof of Theorem <enumeration-here>].

I don't think it is generally necessary to repeat statements of theorems.
The theorem has already been stated, so repeating it verbatim is unnecessary and not useful. I appreciate that proofs and theorem statements may appear in distinct parts of the paper. E.g., a theorem may appear in the main body and the proof may appear in the appendix. This isn't problematic for the reader, because they can simply switch between the two. (For publisher printed manuscripts, this is a little tricky. But, for other versions (electronic, personally printed, ...), this is easy.) Indeed, I regularly have multiple copies of the same PDF open for this purpose.
Sometimes, you might state a theorem, introduce some lemmas, and then prove the theorem using those lemmas. In this case, I advocate a style similar to that proposed by Andreas Blass, namely, recap some details of the theorem statement and explain how the lemmas.

so repeating it is just duplication – and why would this be bad? Every paper contains a considerable amount of unavoidable redundancy.

Duplication is bad because it is redundant. I contest that not every paper contains a considerable amount of redundancy and that well-written papers contain little redundancy. I accept that some redundancy is useful for emphasis. But, every statement should add value. Merely repeating a statement (e.g., a theorem statement) doesn't add value.

well-written papers contain little redundancy – I strongly disagree. Of course, you can be overly redundant, but I have rarely ever seen this in academic writing. Most well-written papers are well-written because they are redundant when they need to be and don’t require the reader to remember every tidbit. In my field, one of the highest-ranking journal has a very small character limit for papers and has often been criticised for papers being unreadable due to this, as the first thing authors remove is redundancy.

@Wrzlprmft, I completely disagree. One of the foundational papers in my field contains little if any redundancy. Some might criticise it. Others appreciate it. But, we're getting off-topic. We should be discussing whether a theorem statement should be duplicated verbatim.


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Dive into a paper using a reading course
I hope this question is appropriate for this site. Maybe community wiki might be a good option.
I was the TA in a course for undergraduates last term. I student approached me after the course ended and wanted to know how he could dive deeper into the subject of the course. I suggested him that we could launch a reading course, in which we would work through a research paper. I know the topic of the paper a bit, but want to use this reading course to learn about that specific subject myself.
Question: Do you have experience with such a format and can provide best practice?
What interests me in particular is: When I study a new topic on my own, that happens somehow in a non-linear manner. Together with another student, I guess it's necessary to give the whole thing quite a bit more structure and assign e.g. weekly reading assignments and specific tasks?

Is this an appropriate thing for a TA to do? Don't you need more, like a professor or department buy-in? I think it is a good idea, if you can manage it. (I removed the [tag:europe] tag as irrelevant.

In principle, it’s our private pleasure. I think in Europe the relationship between TAs and students is sometimes a bit different than for example in the US, this is why I included the “Europe” tag in the first place.

Seemingly. You can put it back of course. And I'd be interested to learn about the differences. But a reading course is actually independent of who runs it, so maybe it is still orthogonal.

My experience was primarily as a (math) student many years ago but the course didn't focus on a single paper, but on a topic of which the paper was only an example. Maybe this is something you could use.
The basic meta concept is that reading isn't enough to learn and that students need to be more active if what they read/see/hear is to actually be learned.
So, if you organize a group around a topic and select, not one, but several papers that refer to that topic. Each student (or perhaps each pair of students) is responsible for creation of a presentation on that to the others, giving key concepts and any insights they manage to develop. But, all students are responsible for reading the paper.
A session, with everyone present, has two parts. First is the presentation of one of the follows by an open discussion at which questions can be asked and further ideas developed.
If the group meets once per week, then you "cover" one paper per week.
After the presentation and the discussion, the student could be asked to then develop a write-up.
This idea can be adapted to chapters of a book, also.
Note, however, that undergraduates can be expected to be awkward at this, so you need to be pretty understanding if it is a graded/marked activity. It is a useful skill to have, but one in which they have little or no experience.  And not every suggestion here need be incorporated. There can be many variations.

Edited to add:
Suppose, however that you have a large and long single paper. Such is difficult to divide up, since understanding early parts may be essential for reading later parts.
In such a case, the paper can be read in "sections" by everyone. One student (or a pair) is designated to lead the discussion of the "next" section and develop a set of initial questions. When the group meets that student leads the discussion. Alternatively, each student must turn in a written question or two on the section of the week. Or perhaps an insight along with a question. But, again, but the emphasis on student activities beyond reading and just making up questions on the fly. Insist on some actual preparation.

Over the horizon. Bonus points.
The following is probably too much to expect from undergraduates but you might offer bonus points (in any grading scheme) for any student or group of students who can come up with a research question that might arise from the paper. You could suggest what might lead there such as "changing some initial condition" or "generalizing" or "specializing" or whatever seems appropriate for the readings at hand. It might even happen, even if unlikely.

I agree with most of what you say, but think the rate at which you should cover papers will strongly depend on their content and one should be aware of this before fixing a schedule. There are many papers that can be quickly summarized in a single session, but there are some that are long and complicated enough to take two, or even have a natural split somewhere in the middle. And at least in math there are some 100+ page monstrosities which can be worth spending a whole semester going through them section by section.

@mlk, yes, of course. I meant it only as an outline, but with an emphasis on the student activities beyond reading. There are a lot of variations. But a big paper is hard to "divide up" among inexperienced students unless the study is really drawn out since understanding the early part is essential to working on later parts. Let me add an addendum.

Thanks for your perspective! I think for a general reading course with students (as part of their regular studies) this is very suitable. However, my specific situation seems to be a bit different: My “group” could equally consist of some PhD students who want to explore a “new” subject using a longer paper. I mentioned that it is together with undergrads because this moves the burden of structuring the material and giving guidance to me.

I did it several times with individual students rather than a group. What we did was just to meet once a week and go one logical unit a time (could be anything from a section to a single lemma, depending on the length and difficulty). I asked if the student had any questions first, then I let him to present the piece on the board (closed book style, but I gave hints if he got stuck anywhere), and then we decided on what the next logical unit would be for the next week. The student was also welcome to ask questions between the sessions.
We have managed this way 2/3 of J.-P. Kahane's "Random series of functions", about 1/2 of L. Hormander's "Functions of several complex variables", Carleson theorem on the a.e. convergence of the Fourier series (exposition by  O.G. Jorsboe and L. Mejlbro) and a couple of other things (though I usually tended to choose books over individual papers), so I view it as a positive experience in general despite varying student's abilities and degrees of motivation.
IMHO, the main points are

to let the student do most of the work,

to thoroughly check understanding (the superficial knowledge of the first section of a long paper will invariably get you completely stuck by the fourth one, if not earlier),

to go reasonably slowly (so plan plenty of time for everything), and

to keep momentum (so for the hardest sections, the teacher has to participate in the discussion quite actively too; I usually tried to explain the general idea before I made a formal assignment for the next week in such cases).

I'm a bit wary of trying a group discussion (mainly because of point (2) I mentioned) but I'll not be surprised if some people managed to pull it through with more than just a short "one-session" paper.
The last but not least thing to mention is that you'd better read and understand the full paper yourself before assigning it. The only time I deviated from this rule resulted in a near disaster.


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Paid temporary job as research assistant
I'm a master's degree student. A professor of mine offered me work on some parts of his paper that I have good knowledge about, because of my background. He said he'll pay me in return, and acknowledge me in his paper. I accepted and suggested a 10 EU/h work and he accepted. I suggested that rate mainly because this is my first experience of this kind (and hence, I don't know the average payment rate) and I thought it would at least take 40 hours and the final money will be enough for me to minimally live where I live. Now it turns out that (I guess, unfortunately?) I was faster than I thought and the work was done in around 12 hours. At the same time, of course, I'm not going to lie about my work hours just for the money. What do you think I should do? I had counted on that money, and it seems that my speed is turning against me!
PS 1: He's friendly with me; I'm just thinking bringing this up might make him feel I'm overstepping my friendship with him, and that's the last thing I need him to think.
PS 2: The paper that he's working on is part of a big university project that he's here for. Accordingly, the payment will be done from the budget of the project, not his pocket (or maybe they're the same?)
PS 3: The contract will be prepared by the university in a few days. If I ask him to raise the money and he accepts, he'll probably be able to convince the university for that.

We need to know your country, because there are different regulations. E.g. in Germany, the salary for student research assistants are fixed and there is no way to negotiate them.

Off course it depends on countries and professors, but in most places academic research is not really evaluated by the hour. In other words your prof most probably has a given outcome / effort in his mind, when he ask you to work, which may also include help during editing, review process etc then specific number of hours. Maybe bring up the topic with him, in general, how much he intend to calculate hours, how much he estimates, and what happens if it is much shorter / longer than his expectation.

He will almost certainly agree to use your talents for the remaining time, and pay you the full sum. Take some additional time to check your work; speed and quality will matter. Then talk to him about your predicament, and request to be kept on for the agreed upon hours doing whatever it is you agree upon. He should be impressed that you do good work quickly. Do more, you may acquire an ongoing arrangement.
Note that this outcome is not guaranteed: humans can be strange creatures sometimes. That said, it is virtually guaranteed. If you have a good relationship, I suspect you can proceed without fear.

If he was pleased with your work explain to him that you have need of funds and are (more than) willing to work more - preferably up to the 40 hours you originally estimated if he can find something for you to do.
I wouldn't ask him for more money for the work you have done. If he suggests that you can accept, of course, but asking for more work and explaining that you need the funds would be acceptable. I've been to Estonia and found it a great place, though quite poor when I was there (It was a while ago. I don't know the current economic situation.) If the professor is visiting from a richer place he will probably recognize this disparity and try to help if he is able. But only for additional work.

He's from the states and quite aware of here's situation (I can confirm the poorness still exists here). Anyways thanks for all your comments everyone! I'll write an update as soon as I talk to him.


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Is Google Docs an appropriate tool to write a PhD thesis?
I am quite early in my PhD program, and am deciding on what tool to use to write my documentation, principally my thesis.  My prefered tool would be markdown / latex, but my primary supervisor really does not like it, to the point that collaboration with this involves printing the document, hand writing notes on it and me transcribing these notes to the original.  My supervisors prefered tool is microsoft word, but I use linux and running a virtual box just to do my writing is a significant drain on the resources of my computer, I am often writing while running computations.
We are currently preparing a paper on the initial work of my PhD, and this is being done successfully through google docs.  Would this be an appropriate tool to use for my whole thesis?

LibreOffice will import and export MS Word format if you like.

I have used libreoffice to import powerpoint presentations, and it is no end of trouble to maintain the formatting.  I can imagine trying to maintain formatting of a large document that is frequently being converted between word and libreoffice being hard work.

Do you have a plan for handling references and citations?

I an using zotero which has a google docs plugin.  This is working well for the paper.

Actually, if you read a docx into LibreOffice the default save format is the same, so it isn't quite the same as maintaining two versions. Since you prefer latex I'd think you are already familiar with separating the writing and the formatting. Why bother to strictly maintain formatting until nearly the end? Your experience with powerpoint may not carry over to word, but I can't say for sure.

Does your supervisor use Adobe Acrobat and its ability to add comments/markups?  That’s how I use LaTeX in collaborations.  The PDF is returned to me, I make revisions, and we iterate. That said, a colleagues used Google Docs for the preparation and collaboration then converted everything to LaTeX just before submitting to the graduate school.

@Joel Kulesza - I have not known them to do so, but that may be an option.

Have you tried writing markdown and then "compiling" either to word or Latext/PDF, as needed, with pandoc-citeproc?

@henning That is exactly what I do.  I would rather not have to transcribe my supervisors hand written notes.

@Dave When I was working on my PhD, my supervisor returned feedback as hand written notes on a printed copy. The time I spent considering, analyzing, and adjusting to how I wanted to express things was a lot longer than the actual typing time.

Why not log into a Windows system on your university server, remotely from your computer, and then work with the MS tools?

@V-Red All our servers are linux.

You can run Word in a browser on Linux.  In my experience it is no more terrible than the Windows desktop app.

Any answer to this question is useless if your supervisor does not agree with it.

It's your thesis. Write in whatever makes you happy. You can always convert to another format later. Markdown and (basic) latex are easily converted to .doc or .pdf for your supervisor, and you can incorporate his edits directly in your source. You may also be interseted in my answer to a similar question about research papers here

My prefered tool would be markdown / latex, but my primary supervisor really does not like it, to the point that collaboration with this involves printing the document, hand writing notes on it and me transcribing these notes to the original.

This is an excellent way to collaborate!

We are currently preparing a paper on the initial work of my PhD, and this is being done successfully through google docs. Would this be an appropriate tool to use for my whole thesis?

Google Docs is as good as Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, etc. Personally I think they are all awful for academic writing.
Perhaps your supervisor can use Overleaf? You can then use LaTeX/git in the usual way.

Primary supervisor doesn't like LaTeX, though.

@henning Which flavour of LaTeX does the supervisor dislike? Maybe they'll consider Overleaf, especially in rich text mode (https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81-having-a-hard-time-convincing-your-coauthors-to-learn-latex-with-our-rich-text-mode-you-no-longer-need-to-dot-dot-dot)

Having been a tool fanatic in the past, I have seen the light and understood that falling in love with a particular tool is almost certainly wrong and one should always choose the right tool for the task at hand. In that spirit, Word is an awful system for longer pieces of work (I have seen whole theses being mangled irrecoverably shortly before submission; most unpleasant, even with backup), so if you can get your superviser to use pdf annotation, that would make it easy for him and easy for you. He never sees LaTeX source and you do never have to fiddle with Word.

I just successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis, which was written entirely in Google Docs.
But I was able to do that because it worked well for my particular situation. I'm in bioinformatics, and my thesis didn't include any complex equations. So LaTeX didn't offer much of an advantage. And honestly I've tried it in the past and found myself far less productive. I'd often spend more time fiddling with markup than writing. This is consistent with research that suggests LaTeX is less productive than a GUI word processor when you're not using LaTeX for its strength (complex equations). For a while I wanted to move to LaTeX so I could track changes with source control like git. But then I realized Google Docs' edit history takes care of that in an arguably better interface.
But perhaps the most important factor is that my thesis advisor uses Google Docs too. That's what really made it a good idea to use it to write manuscripts and my thesis. If your collaborators don't use the same platform, you'll spend a lot of time doing conversions back and forth, and lose out on a lot of the advantages your platform offers. So remember to weigh that in. Maybe your preferred platform offers so much that it's worth the cost, but if your coauthors don't use it, that'll really raise the bar.

The study actually says that LaTeX is less productive if you do not use it for its intended purpose.  "LaTeX users in our study attained better performance in the typesetting of mathematical equations, and it is not surprising that LaTeX users are typically in disciplines where mathematical formulas are frequent"

There are some issues with that research as well. When they work out the continuous text copy rate they don't appear to account for past experience transcribing text. For example it may turn out that what they broadly showed was that people who don't use mathematics in their scholarly work (and thus less likely to use latex) then people who use mathematics in their scholarly work (and thus probably use latex). I doubt my copy/error rate would change between latex and word, but (being a physicist) I won't be able to copy text as well as a lawyer, who needs to precisely copy options from book.

it's a very convenient tool.  You might use it for most of your drafts, work, and review.  There's many easy ways to get at the docs, and you can name revisions (so that you don't have a bazillion copies).
You may find it doesn't have the layout features needed for your work, or expected of people in your field in order to look professional and similar to your peers and predecessors.
In all cases, you need to make backups in various places, and make those copies regularly.  Set a calendar reminder.  Google makes errors with google drive.  I have lost files.  No one will cut you slack.  Google owes you nothing for a free service, and only marginally more if you pay them.

If you do have a strong preference for Latex, you might have a look at Pandoc. It allows you to convert from Latex to Microsoft Word documents and back again.
It's not perfect (can get a bit tricky with bibliography etc), but I've found it pretty good for collaborators who refuse Latex. Best used if the conversions are infrequent (since it does require some troubleshooting), and if the person is commenting but not adding substantially new, formatted content. It sounds like this might match your use case though!

It is perfectly acceptable, if both of you agrees. My recommendation is to try to find a citation manager that can work with Google Docs, though. It makes life a lot easier.
On the other hand, you can also give online Microsoft Office (office 365) a try. Many universities provides free access, some Microsoft plans also. That could be a good trade-off as well.

This really depends on your stakeholders: it is more a people problem than a technical problem.   If your advisors / readers are set in their ways (MS-Word Client vs Web-Collaboration tools) then you are in all likeliness fighting an uphill battle that will prolong your tour in academia.
Only you know whether your advisor will support your bid to use Google-Docs or a particular tool.  If your advisor has said "no", you would be well-advised to either use the prescribed tools or find another advisor.


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Is academic collaboration overrated? Should one seek it or avoid it?
In our country, the first author gets most of the credit and the other authors practically fall much behind. While, the first author should really get more point as he does maximum work, I find the others contributions are not as minuscule as indicated by the weightage rule. To be clear it is 70 percent of the first author and rest gets 30 percent divided by the number of other authors of the paper.

Welcome to Academia SE. This could be an interesting question, but it needs a few changes to make it suitable for this site : (1) The body of the question is not clearly linked to the question title, please show the relationship explicitly. (2) There is no 'rule' of the sort that you mention, and the numbers seem baseless. If you have any evidence for these please indicate it, else if it is conjecture, mention that.

Your last phrase makes no clear sense. Are you talking about some monetary reward? Please rewrite it as it seems central to your question.

@DSVA Some cultures (countries) have a strong tradition of exchanging gifts and favours between family, friends, colleagues etc. Coauthorship is one such gift. This leads to the inflation and the devaluation of coauthorship. Not sure if that is what OP is referring to though.

@DSVA I was thinking about China specifically, but I guess other countries could also differ. Science is to some degree affected by local customs. Moreover, national funding agencies play a part in shaping science. From the question it seems like you can quantify a scientist total output by weighting first authored and co-authored differently. I guess the purpose of this is to decide if someone has qualified for a PhD, to make hiring and funding decisions etc. But that is speculation on my part.

In many fields collaboration is not only advisable but necessary because the expertise of a single individual is not enough to complete the work necessary. The days when one scientist can do everything themselves is long gone. People have specific areas of expertise and the work required to become a competent expert in every domain needed for a particular effort is too great.
For instance, I do modeling in a number of materials applications. There is literally no way I could do the experiments necessary to support all of the work in my research, so I need to rely on collaborators who have the necessary experience who can perform and guide the complementary experiments, as well as provide the experimental equipment!

This short question conflates multiple difficult issues:
The first is the value of authorship metrics. As Goodhart's Law notes (paraphrased), when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be useful. When systems use publication count to determine promotion and pay, people will pad their numbers by trading co-authorships, making second-authorships almost useless as a metric (hence they cease to use it). The publication-count metric also leads to more incremental papers for which the research effort is a proportionately smaller part of the paper, and authorship is proportionately more of the work for each paper. I suspect the rise of developing countries and their reliance on publication count is what has led to the explosion in micro-incremental papers all journals have been inundated with in recent years.
The second issue is that of leadership and the need for a "stuckee" or someone who has to be on the hook to be sure the job gets done, who also has the power to see that it does. Humans are just bad at staying in sync with each other, and I can't imagine much getting finished without a lead, particularly given academics' propensity for piling up multiple "top priorities" and leaving many of them on the back burner for extended periods. And unfortunately, the danger in taking on  that lead role is that you may find yourself doing disproportionate amounts of the work, as everyone else can just punch the clock and do the minimum to not get booted off the paper/project. All you can do is choose your collaborators wisely.
Finally there is the issue of division of labor and specialization. A group of people bringing expertise is different areas can accomplish far more, quicker, and more efficiently, than one person trying to do it all. This is true in research just as it is in industry. There's no question of the potential value collaboration can have.

This might depend somewhat on the field. There was a time when almost all papers in mathematics were by single authors, but no longer. There are some fields such as biology or chemistry where there are papers for which the list of authors is longer than the paper itself.
Generally speaking, though, collaboration is a good thing. Taking the numbers you cite, if there were no collaboration, then the "secondary" authors would get no credit whatever and it would be nearly impossible for anyone to move into the upper ranks of a field as they would likely be less known to peers.
There are brilliant people, of course, who need no help to formulate and develop an idea without help, but they are rare. If you are lucky enough to work in an collaborative environment, a lab or seminar, you swim in a sea of ideas. Some are better and some are not so good, but collaboration also allows the members to develop the ideas in a timely manner and to build upon one another's work.
Many junior researchers feel honored to have their name associated in public with that of a senior well respected person, though that has been occasionally abused. In the normal case, however, it gives the junior person visibility and opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise have.
And of course, in some fields, extremely expensive equipment is required and so almost all work is collaborative (CERN in particle physics).
It isn't widely known, perhaps, but even poets often work collaboratively using a peer review process to improve the work of all members in a Workshop. Authorship is seldom shared here, but the work is collaborative nonetheless. Some very famous poems have been developed in this way.
BTW, not all papers have author lists in order of "contribution" or "status". Some are listed alphabetically, or even randomly. In lab sciences, the grant holder/chief investigator is might be listed first (or last), but this is another example of junior members gaining recognition for their contributions, whether small or large.
In fact, in mathematics we now honor collaboration and co authorship. My Erdős Number is 4, for example.

In my experience, for papers from a professor's group (although likely field dependent), the last author is the professor (grant holder) and the first author is the grad student who contributed the most. Your mileage may vary...

@JonCuster. Yes, certainly for work based on dissertations it should be done that way. I edited to include your note. Thanks.