text:
Cite NumPy in BibTex
How to cite NumPy in BibTex?
The Scipy citing page recommends:

Travis E, Oliphant. A guide to NumPy, USA: Trelgol Publishing, (2006).

Is it correct to use:
@Misc{numpy,
  author =    {Travis Oliphant},
  title =     {{NumPy}: A guide to {NumPy}},
  year =      {2006--},
  howpublished = {USA: Trelgol Publishing},
  url = "http://www.numpy.org/",
  note = {[Online; accessed <today>]}
 }

Or should I cite just SciPy?
Research Gate
On Research Gate, the citation suggested is:
@book{book,
author = {Oliphant, Travis},
year = {2006},
month = {01},
pages = {},
title = {Guide to NumPy}
}

Or cite as a book?
Update on Scipy
The new Scipy citing page recommends the following for Scipy. For NumPy see the accepted answer.
@ARTICLE{2020SciPy-NMeth,
  author  = {Virtanen, Pauli and Gommers, Ralf and Oliphant, Travis E. and
            Haberland, Matt and Reddy, Tyler and Cournapeau, David and
            Burovski, Evgeni and Peterson, Pearu and Weckesser, Warren and
            Bright, Jonathan and {van der Walt}, St{\'e}fan J. and
            Brett, Matthew and Wilson, Joshua and Millman, K. Jarrod and
            Mayorov, Nikolay and Nelson, Andrew R. J. and Jones, Eric and
            Kern, Robert and Larson, Eric and Carey, C J and
            Polat, {\.I}lhan and Feng, Yu and Moore, Eric W. and
            {VanderPlas}, Jake and Laxalde, Denis and Perktold, Josef and
            Cimrman, Robert and Henriksen, Ian and Quintero, E. A. and
            Harris, Charles R. and Archibald, Anne M. and
            Ribeiro, Ant{\^o}nio H. and Pedregosa, Fabian and
            {van Mulbregt}, Paul and {SciPy 1.0 Contributors}},
  title   = {{{SciPy} 1.0: Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific
            Computing in Python}},
  journal = {Nature Methods},
  year    = {2020},
  volume  = {17},
  pages   = {261--272},
  adsurl  = {https://rdcu.be/b08Wh},
  doi     = {10.1038/s41592-019-0686-2},
}

Pauli Virtanen, Ralf Gommers, Travis E. Oliphant, Matt Haberland, Tyler Reddy, David Cournapeau, Evgeni Burovski, Pearu Peterson, Warren Weckesser, Jonathan Bright, Stéfan J. van der Walt, Matthew Brett, Joshua Wilson, K. Jarrod Millman, Nikolay Mayorov, Andrew R. J. Nelson, Eric Jones, Robert Kern, Eric Larson, CJ Carey, İlhan Polat, Yu Feng, Eric W. Moore, Jake VanderPlas, Denis Laxalde, Josef Perktold, Robert Cimrman, Ian Henriksen, E.A. Quintero, Charles R Harris, Anne M. Archibald, Antônio H. Ribeiro, Fabian Pedregosa, Paul van Mulbregt, and SciPy 1.0 Contributors. (2020) SciPy 1.0: Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python. Nature Methods, 17(3), 261-272. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-019-0686-2.

Why is there a publisher if it is an online resource?

Also, there is a spurious "Numpy" in the title, and the capitalization is inconsistent.

As a formatting suggestion, rather than misc, maybe use manual?

@RichardErickson Could you give an example as an answer? And A guide to NumPy is a Book, maybe cite as a book? or manual?

@FedericoPoloni On the BibTex doc, the Misc entry has a howpublished field: How something strange has been published.. I thought that the Online Manual could be on that field.

@danieltakeshi, You have the fields correct. A books or manual may be formatted differently than misc. It depends upon your style file and where you are trying to publish. That venue's specific requirements may prefer one method over another.

Also, @cag51 has the correct answer to your question about what to cite. Please consider re-marking that answer as correct. My comment is only about formatting.

Based on the update, it seems the question is about acknowledging and citing SciPy, but the title remains about citing NumPy. For the latter, I would go with the approach in PerroNoob's answer.

@Anyon I changed the update

In 2020SciPy-NMeth, the title field is incorrectly put between double brackets, so case conversions will fail. It should be title   = {{SciPy} 1.0: Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in {Python}}

As to 2020, Numpy now has a Nature paper https://numpy.org/citing-numpy/
@Article{         harris2020array,
 title         = {Array programming with {NumPy}},
 author        = {Charles R. Harris and K. Jarrod Millman and St{'{e}}fan J.
                 van der Walt and Ralf Gommers and Pauli Virtanen and David
                 Cournapeau and Eric Wieser and Julian Taylor and Sebastian
                 Berg and Nathaniel J. Smith and Robert Kern and Matti Picus
                 and Stephan Hoyer and Marten H. van Kerkwijk and Matthew
                 Brett and Allan Haldane and Jaime Fern{'{a}}ndez del
                 R{'{\i}}o and Mark Wiebe and Pearu Peterson and Pierre
                 G{'{e}}rard-Marchant and Kevin Sheppard and Tyler Reddy and
                 Warren Weckesser and Hameer Abbasi and Christoph Gohlke and
                 Travis E. Oliphant},
 year          = {2020},
 month         = sep,
 journal       = {Nature},
 volume        = {585},
 number        = {7825},
 pages         = {357--362},
 doi           = {10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2},
 publisher     = {Springer Science and Business Media {LLC}},
 url           = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2}
}

And if you use the new biblatex-software package, you can replace @Article by @Software

+1 from me. The biblatex-software's @Software field is probably the way to go. You can include the actual versions or module, as well as the license.Highly recommended!

The author field is formatted incorrectly. When dealing with multiple-word surnames, you should use the surname, name format or they will be initialized incorrectly.

Looks right to me. That's how they ask to be cited, and it seems reasonable. Indeed, this discussion also agrees that citing the user manual is the right choice.

Note that this answer refers to the first option ($Misc{...) as correct.  The second option was added to the question after this answer was posted.

The proposed citation seems correct. I found the same at http://www.citebay.com/how-to-cite/numpy/.
@book{oliphant2006guide,
  title={A guide to NumPy},
  author={Oliphant, Travis E},
  volume={1},
  year={2006},
  publisher={Trelgol Publishing USA}
}

Answer edited. Thank you for feedback.

The title line should be title={A guide to {NumPy}}, so that case conversions work properly.


text:
How does an Erratum on one's own paper affect one's career as a researcher?
I'm still early in my scientific career, with only a few papers published. However, I've discovered a typo in a non-critical equation of my paper, and one of the graphs in the same paper should have smaller values (but exactly the same trend). It's important to say that it does not change any of the conclusions drawn in the paper. I've requested to issue an erratum to fix these errors.
At the moment, I am feeling extremely stressed and saddened thinking about how bad this erratum would reflect on my CV and in my integrity as a researcher... I would like to hear some opinions of people who have been through this process... Did you notice editors becoming more harsh on accepting other works from you because of a past mistake? Was it possible to still get grants and partnerships in projects even if you have a 'flawed' record?

If anything it shows strength of character and will help your career along. But more realistically nobody will notice.

Possible duplicate of Will I destroy my career if I published a paper with a serious mistake?

@NateEldredge: no, this one is a minor mistake that does not affect the conclusions

Why do you even bother? Just release an up to date "post print" on arXiv.

In Mathematical Problems for the Next Century, Stephen Smale said: Mistakes happen frequently in published mathematics; I certainly have made my share. Even so, everyone knows that he is a great researcher. I suspect that the same is true in other fields: what you published and is correct can (and probably will if it is relevant enough) affect your career more than the errors.

I don't want to belittle your feelings, because I can understand where they're coming from. But coming from industry, do you know how many projects were cancelled or torpedoed because of people who couldn't admit they made a mistake? I'm sure academia is the same. Admitting your mistakes is a positive quality, not a negative.

Like having a typo on a tweet or stackexchange post.

It will not affect you career. You'll be fine.
An erratum is not a bad thing, per se. Errors happen, and if you fix them it's fine. The error you describe are totally normal and I would even guess that a large fraction of published paper contains this type of error and does not have an erratum.
Even a more serious error that invalidates some of your finding will not necessarily have any impact on your career (but in this case you should write an erratum!). A retraction would be more serious, because retraction are associated with misconduct.
Another point is, that most people will not even notice that there is as erratum for one of your papers.

"most people will not even notice that there is as erratum for one of your papers." That seems to be a problem if the idea is to correct errors in the paper.

@JAB - I don't know about the research field, but if it's anything like standards documents for tech then there are normalized procedures for declaring and validating erratum.  The original document remains untouched for historical purposes.  If someone depends on the information enough to care about erratum then finding it is simple.

Many thanks for your answer. I believe that the hardest part for me is when I compare my track with other researchers that don’t have a single erratum in a very long career. I can’t help but think that this is not a great start for me... Nevertheless, now I will double my acuity and avoid mistakes as such to happen ever again.

Let's put it this way: An erratum describing a serious flaw in the paper may (or may not) have a negative effect on your career, but withholding knowledge of such a flaw will have a much worse effect when people find that out.
Also - it's only a problem if the error is such that you should have noticed it and not published the paper at all. Most errors are only seen as an unfortunate coincidence and do not reflect seriously (or at all) on the authors.

Thanks for your answer. Do you think that the error I described could be seen as a serious flaw? Which mistakes would you consider something that “you should’ve noticed and not published the paper at all”?

@J.Doe: Come on... you know the answer to that. You're a big boy/girl, you don't need my confirmation.

Hint: typos are not "serious flaws" which mean you should have "not published the paper at all." Pretty much every paper published has at least one typo.

A "real" erratum (of the form "this part of my paper was wrong") will not affect your career unless it is about your most important work being all wrong, and all our prestige depends on that single paper.
This may depend on areas, but I would say that an "erratum" of the kind you mention would not  (and should not) be accepted by the editor. There are more important things to use the journal's pages for. If it bothers you a lot, include your "erratum" in your list of publications in your web page.

source: Stack Exchange

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sort: votes


text:
Is it right for a conference to demand proof of purchase of flight tickets?
After I have been accepted to present a paper at a conference, the organisers are asking me to fill in a registration form (participation and attendance are free) AND to produce proof of purchase of flight tickets. I find this bizarre and intrusive. Anyway, my travelling would happen between two capital cities in Europe (plenty of flights) and they demand the proof of purchase to include people in the first draft of the programme. It is a 3-day conference, so I would have to make travel and accommodation arrangements for 5 days many months in advance.

I don't think I've ever been asked to prove that I purchased flight tickets except, of course, when the conference was reimbursing me for those tickets.

Sure, more people might cancel if there is no upfront registration fee, but their countermeasure does seem excessive. Do they insist on flights as well, or any proof of travel?

I'm guessing they've had a lot of trouble with people signing up before they're sure they want to come, and then backing out or not showing up.  It's unusual but perhaps understandable.  The other obvious way to make sure people are serious is to have a registration fee, which actually costs attendees more money.  Anyway, you can probably game the system by booking refundable tickets.

Where did 5 days come from?

@NateEldredge gaming the system is a strange suggestion. Why should OP need to use dishonest measures to achieve the simple purpose of attending a conference? Personally I would sooner give up the “pleasure” of attending a conference organized by such unreasonable people.

Can you book a cheap bus for $30 that you have no intention of taking? Send them the bus ticket and say I've booked my travel to your conference.

@DanRomik: Perhaps his point was that it's not a foolproof measure because it can be gamed, not that people in general would want to.  But I don't think that holds up, because saying "I maybe want to do that" and then backing out is much different from saying "I actively want to fool you into thinking I'm coming when I'm planning not to".  Of course, if you're actually unsure about going but still want you name in the program in case you do go, then refundable tickets sound like the way to go.  Or maybe "fool" them by booking a flight then taking the train?

@NateEldredge Every time I have booked flights, there was a 24 hour window to cancel the booking without penalty.  So I would book first class tickets from some city to the conference city, send the proof, and then promptly cancel the tickets.

@NateEldredge "The other obvious way to make sure people are serious is to have a registration fee" -- Most conferences in my field (electrical engineering) do not include your paper in the proceedings if it is not presented by one of the authors. I think that is a very effective and reasonable measure to ensure most people attend the conference.

This is completely the opposite of my conference experience.  I paid a lot of money for the conference.  The conference is crowded.  I doubt the conference organizers would notice or care if I blew it off.

@ASimpleAlgorithm Probably a travel day preceding and a travel day following the three conference days.

What do they expect people travelling by train or bus or bicycle or unicycle or car or horse or stagecoach or camel or foot or flapping their arms or whatnot to provide?

Is this by any chance some kind of legal requirement in that country? To have information on the precise travel plans of foreigners before issuing a visa or something?

I do not think that the conference organizers have made good decisions about how to handle things.  However, it is understandable that they should want firm confirmation that people are actually going to show up.  Since they are operating a conference with no fees attached, it is unfortunately too easy for people to sign up, hoping to attend, but then cancel when it turns out the the time or funding are not available.  This is a regular issued for conferences and meetings without any direct fees attached, and there are several ways to deal with it.
Some conferences rely on personal relationships with the people who will be participating and presenting.  If the people who are going to be giving talks are known acquaintances of the organizers, these connections can be leveraged to ensure that the registered participants will indeed show up.  (The day after tomorrow, I am leaving for a free conference, which I am attending even though it conflicts with a family event that I might like to attend.  I know the people running the conference, and if I bailed out, it would cost me in terms of my professional relationships.  Since I committed to attend many months ago, I am sticking to my commitment.)
The people running this conference are taking a different approach.  They are not willing to put people on the presentation schedule unless they can verify that they have made travel plans.  While I can understand the motivation for this decision (they do not want people who are slated to give talks to cancel, leaving gaps in the program), I do not think that it is a good approach to take.  Asking for verification of flight information seems intrusive and unprofessional.  I see no reason to believe that the organizers are acting in bad faith, but I suspect that they may not be very experienced in running academic conferences.  So whether you feel like complying with their request for flight information depends on how you feel personally about this unorthodox request.

Thanks. I understand their request but it is unrealistic to expect people to commit a minimum of five days of their time without knowing when they are scheduled to make their presentation. It is a shame because tickets are fairly cheap now!

People will game this by buying fully refundable tickets and then canceling them after registering.

@user93850 Are you also concerned about having to stay for the entire conference rather than just the session at which you'll be presenting? If so, you should discuss that with the organizers. Some might expect all participants to stay for the entire conference, especially if only a limited number of people can be permitted to attend because of capacity constraints.

This seems like an unreasonable request. Given that the conference is many months in the future, you may consider just telling the organizers that you have not purchased plane tickets yet, and will be unable to provide proof of travel arrangements until you actually decide on your mode of travel and precise dates of travel, which will not happen for some time.
While anything is possible, so I do not claim to predict the outcome, all I can say is that the organizers would have to be mildly insane to not allow you to register in such a situation.
Finally, even setting aside the lack of practicality and common sense of the request to provide detailed travel plans so far in advance of the conference date, asking for such details any amount of time in advance of the conference is a violation of privacy and in rather poor form (given that the organizers are not reimbursing your travel expenses, are not your friends, and have no need or right to know your whereabouts at any moment in time other than while you are presenting your paper at their conference). I think it would be completely reasonable for you to refuse to disclose such details on principle, regardless of whether you have already bought the tickets or not.

The organizers are definitely on the wrong foot here. I recommend contacting them and discussing the situation. If they refuse to talk or be reasonable, don't attend. In addition to being "bizarre and intrusive" (to quote the OP), it's also unreasonable for the organizers to dictate your mode of travel. If you wanted to drive to the conference, would you have to prove you own a car?
Although the conference is nominally free, perhaps the organizers should consider the concept of "earnest money" as an incentive for registrants to show up. They could charge some moderately painful amount up front as a registration fee, then refund the fee if the registrant actually attends. No-shows forfeit the fee. This begs the question of what to do with the forfeited money, but there are many options: it will be left, in the best academic tradition, as an exercise for the reader.

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text:
How can I manage the time of my research project under uncertainty?
I don't know if this is the right place (or the right tags) to ask this question or not so please tell me.
I am doing a research project related to computer science in my university. This is my first research project and it's really hard.
How can I manage my big research project? I have a lot of ideas and in each one there are a lot of issues.
The problem that I am facing is the uncertainty, I don't know the specific required time to finish something (because I don't really know it)
for example : I can't say "I will finish A thing in 3/12/2018 and then I will finish B thing in 17/12/2018" because I don't know those things(I have to learn them)
How can I put a time plan for such things for my research? and How can I manage it?

I feel this is everybody's problem, who want to do a task. But this may not be the correct place to ask.

Maybe reducing granularity from days to weeks would help.

Unfortunately, this sort of uncertainty is just part and parcel of the life of a researcher. I've been doing research for 15 years now, I run my own research group and this is still a problem for me.

With this in mind, my first piece of advice is not to feel alone in this. The uncertainty is not because of your inexperience. We never know how long research will take because, by definition, we don't know the answer yet, thats what makes it research.
Keep a notebook (real or computational) for each project/idea category and write your thoughts in them.
Celebrate any concrete progress however small.

+1 for "Keep a notebook". Serious researchers keep (and always carry) a notebook in which they write down ideas as they occur. They date them. Never erase or remove pages. Get a colleague to sign and date each entry. This can provide verified proof of the primacy of ideas if you need it later, such as for a patent application. It is a journal of ideas, often called a "patent book".

@Buffy I've never heard of this practice

@AzorAhai, I learned of it from researchers at IBM. It is important that it be done with unalterable media - pen and paper.

If it is truly a research project then for most of it you can't manage time since you are, in the nature of it, dealing with the unknown. Somethings can be managed, such as obtaining necessary equipment or software, but not the core of it.
Development projects can be managed, up to a point, since they deal with things that can be estimated, more or less. But getting insight into the core issue in research may come instantly or not at all. Some problems in CS have been around for a long time and are still unsolved.
What you can manage is how much of your time you devote to the project and how you deal with your other tasks in that context. You can also manage, up to a point, how effectively you use that time.
One thing you can do, perhaps, is to work on more than one aspect of the project at the same time. Whether this is feasible or not depends on the project itself, but if it can be done, then work on one aspect may give insight into others, and may also permit some of the work to be completed even if the overall thing is intractable.

Planning research projects can be hard and you are not the first one to face this problem. One method to plan is to break your work down into smaller steps. Even if you do not know how long each step will take, just seeing smaller steps can be less intimidating than one large project.
Graduate students (and experienced researchers!) also face this challenge. To help students, the University of Minnesota offers a Dissertation Calculator. This calculator would be a starting point for a planned timeline for you and help you explore uncertainty in steps.


text:
Academic Progression via Promotion vs via Recruitment
I'm currently a postdoc at School A at a certain university in Australia. On another campus of the same university, there's a vacant assistant professor position at Shcool B. I was intending to apply for this position, but the HR is telling me that I cannot and that my application should go through the academic promotion procedures.
Is this fair under the equal opportunity principles? I checked the policies available online in this regard but didn't find any explicit interpretation of cases like mine. Why should be disadvantaged just because I'm already employed by the university?
Edit: The academic promotion round takes place once a year in March. So I'll be missing out on this opportunity if I wait till next year.

What makes you say you are disadvantaged? It's not obvious to me that internal promotion is harder than getting recruited on the open market.

Have you contacted the department (the chair or perhaps the head of the search committee if this person has been identified) at school B to ask about this?  It's possible that they might disagree with HR about this.

In many universities in Germany you are not allowed to get a professorship at the same university as the one you are currently in. So from that perspective, the fact that there are promotion rounds at all seems luxurious... (If all involved really want it, then there are ways around it, but the hurdle is very large; a single person at any stage in the process can block it.)
As I understand it, such policies are there to avoid a situation where a department mainly hires "its own" people. After a couple of generations, such a department becomes completely sealed off from the outside world. I think it is plausible that such a process could occur (without bad intent of any of the participants), and apparently there are historical examples of that actually happening. Having rules in place to avoid that is a good thing. You could argue that that should not apply to moves across departments, but apparently they did not think of that when writing those rules or they thought that that would invite to many loopholes. Anyhow you can't change the rules once the hiring process is set in motion. So you just had bad luck.


text:
How do people claim precedence with their unpublished scientific theories?
Say for example a physicist (person A) came up with a theory and sent it to a journal. But it was rejected. (As an example, maybe person A came up with the idea for the Higgs particle).
Then 10 years later the same theory was published by someone else (person B). And this time it was published. And maybe they even went on to win the Nobel prize.
Can person A then claim precedence? And then what will happen to the Nobel prize will it go to person A instead?
This must happen quite a lot that papers get rejected but later someone else has the same idea and gets published. What happens in those cases. How do they claim precedence? Or is the polite thing not to make a fuss?

One approach nowadays - at least in some fields - is preprints.

Yes, but I mean what if someone published a paper and it said "I am the first to discover this new result". But person A had already published it. Would they write to the journal? Or what if the Nobel prize was given to person B because they forgot to look in the ArXiv?

@Ben Yes, but arxiv doesn't let everyone publish papers on there. And it even rejects some papers. Especially in the theoretical physics catergory. So it's just like another journal really. Also, what happened in the old days?

In spirit, this is a duplicate of: I believe I have solved a famous open problem. How do I convince people in the field that I am not a crank?.

Again, I'm not saying it's a duplicate, but it's a duplicate in spirit. The worries you have about advances in theoretical physics are very, very, very well-trodden ground. There are possibly over a hundred duplicates in spirit of your question on this site alone.

@knzhou I'm not worried about anything. Merely curious about how these things work. There's also a well trodden ground of people thinking they have read things in a question that aren't actually there. Mostly they are called consipracy theoriests. But I appreciate the link. I will have a look.

Moderator’s notice: I fail to see anybody being accused or implied to be a crank here. Please adhere to the Code of Conduct.

User's notice: I see why anybody can feel accused to be a crank here when linking to that question (especially if that user is not yet used to the "Stack Exchange style").

If the paper was rejected the journal still should have the archive where the manuscript and all communications are preserved. If the paper was rejected and was actually a good paper ahead of its time it will be of great interest to investigate why it was rejected. Of course the more time passes the greater risk that this archived information may be lost but in 10 years it is unlikely.
It is likely that both persons will be mentioned in the history books. The person B may be still considered more important because it was his/her work that actually influenced the scientific community. There were a lot of examples in the history of science when even published work was unnoticed and only later independent work attracted interest. Concerning Nobel Prize... Well, it will be decided by the Nobel Committee that will not surprise anyone by surprising everyone.
Nowadays one can easily share the work placing preprints into a public repository like the mentioned arXiv (where some subjects like gen-phys have a reputation of having quite a low bar). One can also put a preprint into some sufficiently trustworthy repository like one owned by the institute. In the old days before internet preprints existed too. They were sometimes printed as small booklets by the author or printed by the institution. The problem with preprints is that while in theoretical physics it's almost strange not to publish a preprint and journals often encourage and sometimes even require that, in other fields journals sometimes may treat a preprint as a prior publication.
Some priority may be claimed if the work was presented at a conference and something like a presentation and numerous witnesses are available. However this is really unreliable.  Because often much less evidence can be provided there are a lot of instances when people claim that some of their unpublished work was stolen and of course no one can prove anything. On the other hand if the work was published as some sort of proceedings (that often have no real peer-review) this claim may be quite solid.
Then there are personal notes and letters that are used by historians. However it is really hard to use it to claim priority when actual interest of living people are involved. Though I remember a smart trick in the history of aluminium electric extraction - one of the authors sent himself several of letters safekeeping the unopened envelopes with official mail stamps and then successfully used those in court to prove his priority.

Your scenario seems pretty improbable, especially in today's world of published scholarship. If a claimed result for an important problem (worthy of Nobel consideration) were submitted it would receive tremendous scrutiny. If it was rejected, then that wasn't a random or accidental outcome. There was some flaw.
The later paper would also receive tremendous scrutiny and if published, no one found an error or hole in it. So, it is most likely sound. Not necessary, of course, but likely.
The new paper is published. Time passes. More time passes. There is a lot of scrutiny. Much of it is in public, not just private letters of a few academics. The result is eventually seen as so important that the Nobel committee awards the prize. It is extremely unlikely that it would ever be withdrawn if someone else claims priority. "Where have they been all these years?"
In mathematics, for example, proposing a theorem but not having a proof, or providing an incorrect proof is worth very nearly - nothing, though it might spark some inquiry that results in later success.
The Higgs Boson story is instructive. Higgs and Englert won a Nobel, but there was actually prior art on some of it.

I don't know of any field in which there is a formal mechanism for claiming priority after some other work is accepted.
That said, some fields are "hot" and there is a lot of parallel research. All the researchers are working with the same base of knowledge (papers, etc). Priority is almost a random situation.
I know of one example in CS in which two students solved exactly the same problem in the same way at the same time at different (high prestige) universities. It took the community a year to determine that both should get their degrees and share the honor on an important problem in language theory. But the process was very ad-hoc. The underlying reason for the simultaneous result was that there was a lot of interest at the time in answering that question.

OK, here's an example. Newton invented Calculus but didn't tell anyone. Then Leibniz got published. But Netwon calimed precedence.

Another example. Susskind sent a paper about string theory and it got rejected as too obscure. Later other papers about string theory got accepted. How did Susskind claim precedence as the father of string theory?

Another example, Newton sent his theories about white light is made of colours to the Royal Academy. Hooke (his rival) rejected his ideas because he had his own theories. So Newton went into hiding to write a book about gravity.

Yes, and they share the glory. I'll also note that it was Leibniz' formulation that has stood the test of time. They argued about it publicly for years. But claiming precedence (today, at least) requires evidence, And Newton couldn't adequately provide it since he put it away. But two great men fighting in public had to be acknowledged.

That's exactly my question. What is the precedure for claiming precedence these days? Instead of publicly arguing which doesn't seem very productive.

Actually, anybody can claim anything. But for precedence you need to have the evidence in order for your claim to be recognized. Susskind actually depended on prior art as well, I think. I don't know of a field that provides a formal mechanism for this. I've had a lot of thoughts that I didn't write down, and others have subsequently published. My thoughts are nice for me, but I can't claim precedence, since I didn't develop them or present them publicly.

Yes, exactly, appart from being famous, who does he claim this too? Like if he doesn't tell anyone then history will show he didn't think of string theory first. It's only because he's famous that we know otherwise. So wouldn't he write the journal a letter and say "you just published a paper but rejected my paper with the same results? Will you publish mine too?"

The scenario as outlined is extremely unlikely for reasons already outlined in other answers.  If one did have a substantial priority claim of this sort the most obvious evidence would be (in no strong order) a) the presence of a preprint b) the presence of a copy of the result on a personal/academic website c) the email records that one sent a copy of the paper to a specific journal and d) the records of the journal. Many journals keep records of all submissions as a general policy. And if one does have strong evidence of priority, people will likely take it seriously.


text:
ChatGPT-alike for local abundant PDFs
I have a lot of PDF files collected using such tools as Mendeley or Zotero (thousands of files). I want to use ChatGPT-like to ask questions based on these PDF files (for example: "What is the biggest challenge in multimodal affective computing?"). I know I can use a tool like chatPDF, ChatGPT AI PDF extension, privateGPT, local GPT, or the similar. But none give local access to abundant local files (as long as I know). Some can only retrieve from one or several (not large numbers) PDFs; some need to upload PDFs (not offline).
I like elicit.com and used it, but I must upload my PDFs to get answers from my files. Their answer/reply is also almost as good as without uploading a PDF, but again, it is not local/offline.
Is there any ChatGPT-alike that we can use to ask from the given large PDF files? I believe this kind of approach will speed up academic writing from the current workflow (I used control+F in Mendeley instead of asking to chatGPT, or maybe Mendeley/Zotero could build their AI assistant inside the app in the future).

Are you willing to pay money for such a product?

If it is a one-time payment, yes; if it is subscription, no. But prefer open-source if it is available.

Why do you rule out solutions like privateGPT? As far as I can tell, it can ingest large numbers of local PDFs. Is the issue with restricting the scope of the search to only those documents, or just with the quality of the embedding?

Good dreams, I hope they become true. right now, any tool that does that is unreliably if you are looking for factual information. Chagpt is a stochastic parrot that spits things that sound correct and are most of the time not.

@Anyon, I tried privateGPT, yes, it supports multiple file. But processing two files only is very slow there.

@sugab The related h2ogpt is probably more performant, but I doubt it would be fast on reasonably priced hardware.


text:
How useful is a third language for a Engineering scientific/academic career?
I am a PhD candidate in Teleinformatics Engineering and, during my academic career, I was required to learn English in order to write articles, communicate with partners around the world, read books, and so on. It has been a quite useful language. I suspect that it would not be mandatory to learn a third language, though. Some friend of mine learned a third language due to a situational case. After that, that knowledge seemed to become obsolete (I'm not sure, actually) since they came back to my country (Brazil).
I wonder whether learn a third language is really useful for scientific purpose in Engineering, or it is superfluous and it is better to concentrate on Mathematics only. If there is a third worthwhile language, what is it? I've heard that there are many books in German but, honestly, I've never needed to read anything written in German, it is always in English.

I came here expecting to hear about R, Python, C++, and Julia. Left disappointed. =P

Also depends on which languages papers in your field are published in.

What part of the world are we talking about? The linguistic situation in Mongolian academia is probably quite different than that of the US.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

There might be a lot of reasons to learn another language (love of poetry, say) but for purposes of work, I'd guess that it is probably a waste of time and effort to do so speculatively. After all, you might choose the wrong language and spend time and effort that might be better spent elsewhere.
If you have a need that can't be otherwise met, then yes, learn the other language. For example, auto translators seem to do a terrible job on math papers, not being able to deal with either the symbols or the specialized terminology. In other fields it is probably not so much of a problem.
And, I'll guess that translated poetry isn't very poetic in the result.
But don't let a "hobby" interfere with your mainline pursuits. There is no reason not to have a bit of fun in life, of course.

The most sensible answer. No doubts. Thank  you for confirming my impression.

Unless one is specifically into contemporary poetry, professional translations often exist. But, sure enough, the same work of art sounds different in different languages.

I agree with EarlGrey's answer but have a few points to add. (Caveat: English is my fifth language.)

The answer very much depends on the effort you need to make to learn the new language: if languages (or at least the specific language you intend to learn) come easily to you, the win/cost ratio is very good and you should go for it. If you had to make a huge effort to learn English, then you are in a very different situation.

Beyond the advantages listed by EarlGrey, there can be subtle benefits to a third/nth language: it is easier to make connections and build your network. People often think of others who speak their language as more similar and likeable, it can start conversations. Obviously, speaking only English will not exclude you, but in my experience, other languages can make new opportunities appear.

You do not need to be proficient for the benefits to appear: sometimes even being able to read an abstract or have a short conversation during a coffee break in a different language can be an asset.

+1 (this is personal and may not apply): for me, thinking is language-dependent: I think differently in different languages (because of the vocabulary, word associations, grammar, syntax, etc.), so I sometimes gain new insights and inventions when I translate ideas back-and-forth.

about the +1, I don't think it's just you that thinks like that

In addition to the answers already given:

Governments and universities may be keen to grow links with specific countries (e.g. China, as a lucrative source of students, or developing countries as a form of economic support). If you speak the relevant language(s) and are willing to invest time on networking and building the desired links, this can be an effective route to promotion and (one flavour of) career success.

Certain research fields may benefit from knowledge of a specific language. For example, in many social sciences and humanities fields it may be helpful or even essential to be able to interact with people (and written sources) in their native language. More prosaically, with many telescopes being located in South America, it may be advantageous for an astronomer to learn Spanish in order to make visits easier and more productive (even if academic colleagues speak good English, one needs to interact with taxi drivers, hoteliers, facilities staff, etc.).

I see... Regarding you South America example, a more suitable country would be Brazil, which is a Portuguese-speaking country, btw...

@RubemPacelli Well, I was thinking of Chile.

If you want to see it from the purely pragmatical point of view, there are few languages that are worthwhile because of the heavy investment in R&D from the respective cultural area: French, German, Spanish, Chinese (mandarin) or Japanese (no offense to the not mentioned ones, feel free to add in the comments).
Please note that Spanish (South America, Central America, Spain) is much more heterogeneous than let's say German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).
If you learn one of these languages, you will realize how many technical and academic positions are available having prior knowledge of the language. Instead of competing with the "open to foreign applicants" excellent openings, you will be able to compete also with the "open to who can understand the language" very good openings. It is a fine balance between demand and offer. There are many more of such opening in Austria (offer larger than demand), with much less competition than similar positions in California (the demand is an issue: even if there are more openings, there are too many qualified potential candidates) or in Morocco (the offer is an issue: there may be few candidates, but openings are even less).
Of course then you can be perfectly proficient by relying only on "english knowledge", but you may end up in trouble when you have responsibility role and the language defining duties and rights is the 3rd language and no reliable informations can be obtained otherwise.
Final remark: please note that the discussion is quite abstract. although we are immersed in an English speaking world, it is very hard to learn English without an emotional bond. Learning the languages mentioned here above only on the basis of potential career: it is basically impossible. You need an emotional bond (for example, but not limited to: the country is hosting you as a refugee, your relevant other is mother tongue from one of the languages, you love the culture expressed by that region...)

I love German, but I am being rather pragmatic here. I am not up to learn German if it won't open possibilities in my career. That is the central point. You mentioned job opportunities once I get proficient in a third language. That is interesting since I didn't see motivations in my academic life so far, except the cases that you move out...

@RubemPacelli : a new language can also be learned after you got a position in an industry and at a place you can see yourself staying long-term. Then, if your institution or company deals heavily with a specific other country, it can be worthwhile to learn that language in order to have better chances for advancing to higher positions within.

"Spanish is more heterogeneous than German". I don't think so. Spanish is mutually inteligible all along the world which is often hardly true for German even within Germany.

@Miguel Apologies, I was unclear. I mean that the chances that Spanish languages open you are more heterogeneous: you may be in a country of extremes in South America or in a post-colonial country in Europe still having all the farces related to king & the chrony oligarchies related to the dictatorships (well, the last part is a common trend across Spain and South America, even portuguese-speaking Brazil).
Swiss german is unintelligible for a german, but the swiss society and politics are (wrt to spanish cultural area) more homoegeneous.

@EarlGrey Ah... I see. Yes, with that view Spanish coul be extremely useful even in USA

It depends on how easy you find the language to learn, whether you have people around to help you, how much of a struggle it is and how much benefit you will get from it.  If you find the language extremely easy to learn and it is beneficial to know it, I really see no excuse not to learn it.
If it is genuinely painful for you to try to speak the language and you genuinely don't enjoy learning it, I guess it's forgivable to skip learning it.  For example, I studied Arabic as a third language to live in an Arabic-speaking country and did not find it that difficult, as my natural ability to pronounce it seems to be quite good. Also, learning Arabic wasn't that bad after studying both English and Spanish, as Arabic has a lot of sounds which transfer over quite nicely from those two languages.
Other people truly struggle to learn Arabic or find it impossible, and if it's not strictly necessary to use it at the university where a lot of staff are foreigners who don't speak much Arabic any way, then it's forgivable to not expend a lot of time and effort learning Arabic which could be put into research.  I still know for sure that those people who do not learn must run into problems quite a lot when they travel around the country outside academia without knowing the language.  I personally think the effort put into learning the language outweighs the problems which occur if you don't speak it.
I have put a lot of effort into learning Spanish in the past and I have to admit that it has not really had a big (or even any) impact at all on my scientific career, as an extremely small number of articles are written in Spanish and I don't even travel much to Spanish-speaking countries.  The main benefit has been that I can read famous novels from those countries in the original language, listen to podcasts and radio shows in Spanish which offer different perspectives from those which I usually hear and that I have made good friends from those countries.

I am bilingual and have been using English as my main written language for 20+ years (not that it makes me a better speaker of English, but it hopefully adds specific vocabulary).
The main advantage I get from these languages is that I often know a word in one of them but forget it in the other(s) (having known it before). A quick trip to Google Translate resets my memory. Since GT is good but not excellent, checking both "Language_I_know_the_word_in_1 → Language_I_want_to_use_the_word_in" and "Language_I_know_the_word_in_2 → Language_I_want_to_use_the_word_in" sometimes helps to identify/recall the best match.
This works best when you actively use all of the languages, ideally in different contexts (professional, hobby, family, extended family, books, TV, ...). Your brain is then wired to some words in some languages and you can afford to temporarily forget them in others.
The key word here is actively (or proficiently). I also somehow speak two other languages I was forced to learn at school and, well, apart from helping me to buy bread (when I am lucky) it never really made any difference.

If you ever intend to move to another country earnestly (i.e. to actually live and work there for a significant time, not only for a few months or a year), I certainly do recommend to learn the language as well as possible. Definitely well beyond the level required in the coffee kitchen.
I work in a German IT company (but a subsidiary of a global concern), and we have a great many employees from abroad; both as employees locally, as well as frequent partners in mixed-shore projects. Yes, we use English wherever necessary, but at some point there always are situations where failing to have  a rock solid grasp of the local language is difficult for all involved. In IT, with our skills shortage, it's not really an issue, but in an industrial sector with less splendid job chances, this might just be the tipping point where your favourite company takes the other applicant who may not be as great as you, technically, but who has a firm grasp of the language.
Regarding when to learn that language, I'd say as early as possible - so as soon as you know that there's a certain chance that it may happen. The effort you would put in should of course scale with the certainty of you ever needing to actually use it. But starting early means you'll be younger (everything is learned easier when you're young), have more time until you need it, and can learn with less pressure (which is very valuable). You might simply start viewing movies and reading books in the language; things like that.
If you just want to open up possibilities, you can also simply pick any language of a country you like for vacations - even just chatting with the locals can make a stay that much more enjoyable.
Finally - after 3 or 4 languages, learning even more seems to get easier and easier, as you can transfer knowledge from one to the other to some degree. So even if you don't actually need that additional language now or ever, if you ever should come into a dire situation where you must learn a further one, you might be very thankful.
All of this assumes that you find something, even if it's just a tiny aspect, that is somewhat interesting to you. Do not waste effort on learning something you're not interested in whatsoever - that would just be futile anyways.

Thank you for you contribution, but I am restricting it to academic career.

Recently on the job hunt as a manager \ Lead engineer. I got disqualified in one case because I didn't know Hindi and in another because I didn't know Spanish. So a conversational level of a language may help a lot later in your career. World's getting smaller by the day. Employers are looking world wide for talent and find it all over. The more languages you speak the more potential talent you can tap. The reign of English I fear is coming to an end. Might want to consider Mandarin.

Thank you for you contribution, but I am restricting it to academic career.


text:
I have sent the following cover letter to several scientists but I haven't gotten a single reply. Can anybody please help me in correcting?
I have sent the following cover letter to several scientists but I haven't gotten a single reply. How can it be improved?

X
I am writing this letter for a postdoctoral position in your reputed
laboratory. Presently, I am working as manager at Z limited. I have
completed my doctoral work at A, supervised by Dr. B.
I will be submitting my thesis on A in August of
2022. My Ph.D. work on A has helped me develop skills relevant to the postdoctoral position. My article published in Journal X in 2021 discusses B. I have further mentioned about my findings.
I studied your recent research projects on A
in mice, and I am interested in the ongoing topics. I liked your
article, "P," published in M in 2016.
Therefore, I want to pursue my postdoctoral studies in your lab.  I
have attached my CV for your perusal. Please look at the CV and let me
know if you need some more information about my research career and
interest. Thank you for your time, and looking forward to hearing back
from you at your convenience.

You need paragraph breaks.

There might actually be paragraph breaks (attempting to edit the post reveals at least line breaks), but the markdown system removes them.

yes, thank you. I have incorporated paragraph breaks.

@mini I tried to change the existing line breaks into paragraph breaks in my edit attempt. Hope I didn't miss any, or added some, on the way..

Sorry, we only take questions that could potentially be useful to others in the future; we don't offer individualized editing. That said: my advice to you is to count the number of words, divide by two, and rewrite the entire letter to contain only this number of words, but don't remove any of the important content. For example: almost all of the things you wrote in the last paragraph go without saying -- you can reduce this paragraph to a single sentence without removing anything important.

Also: why do you want to work with this professor? As it is, you just say "I liked your article P" -- this is so vague as to be meaningless.

This question is probably too specific for this site, but here is some advice: insert several paragraph breaks, cut "reputed", make it clear whether you are applying for an advertised position or not, make the description of your research shorter, cut obvious points like "Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide", and say something more interesting about their research than that you found it "interesting" and you "liked" it.

Yes, delete "reputed" at the beginning. More paragraph breaks.

On top of Oliver882's suggestions:

explain why you want to work there (many people do something "interesting", especially if you don't explain how the interesting stuff relates to your own stuff)
explain why they want to work with you (what can you bring in they are lacking, or at least need for the project)
explain why you are (one of) the ideal candidate(s) for this position

... and don't write the same letter to "several" scientists with just a different reference you "liked" (which is 6 years old) - people notice that.

so, i cant mention 6 year old letter or should I mention latest one

you should explain WHY you like their work, ideally spanning several papers..


text:
Visa to attend conference in Canada - Shall I contact the conference organisers?
I have submitted an abstract to attend a forthcoming conference in July 2023. The decision on my abstract is still pending. Is it okay to contact the organizers and inquire about the status of the application since I don't know how much time the visa process will take?

In which country will you be submitting your application

India. I have to apply for research grant also, requesting the indian government for conference registration fee, travel fare etc. The conference is in second week of july

Your second question depends only on your individual details and is non really relevant for here. However your first question (whether you should contact the organisers) is still useful.

Sure. Edited the question as suggested

Yes, it is OK to contact the organisers. They may or may not give you a helpful response.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted - it answers the (trivial) question.

[Visa process]
The processing time varies

the visa type
the place (country) of application
personal circumstances

See Government of Canada's site for approximate processing time for visa type and country of application.
For instance, the median for application from India might take around mid of 2 and 3 weeks, while from China is almost double at between 4 to 5 weeks.
The UK comes in unrealistically close to a year and South Africa at about 187days.
Regarding whether to request or not, a starter is

what are the important dates (deadlines) for the conference.
Most conference will give approximate dates for
submitting abstracts/manuscripts
acceptance: outcomes to authors
revision, camera ready paper... (this can be single or two or three iterations)

decision on my abstract is still pending

Is the pending decision within the published timelines or past.
If past, you may safely contact the organisers, respectfully so. If within, you might have to walk circumspectly taking into consideration the approximate visa processing times.
NB: the conference organisers are not obligated to write you visa support letter if your abstract has not been accepted.
PS: Above assumes that abstract acceptance is all that is required for the conference attendance. It assumes that abstract acceptance is not the first step (requirement) for submitting a (full) paper that must also go through review.

Unrealistically close to a year : Untrue, it is quite logical, immigrants in the UK have way more reasons and financial will to go to Canada than applicants in India, for ex.

@NicolasFormichella : I find it unrealistic: I even thought it's a glitch in the system. However, what I posted came from the Canada Gov site. I had a hunch to post the screenshot, but decided against it. The extract is ... {Visitor visa (from outside Canada) | United Kingdom | 337 days}

Yes, sounds about right. It is far from unrealistic. Like I said, when you're an immigrant in a first-world country, you are much more likely to want to visit other first-world. And you will have many more grounds (financial means, work ties...) to get a visa to those countries. Which makes for way more applicants, and therefore lead times are huge (from the UK, US visa is 100 days, from France it's 140 days)

Due to an edit to the question, this answer no longer answers the question.


text:
Authorship issues and postdoc
My supervisor and I wrote an article and submitted to xyz journal. At that time she didn't give me first authorship. I discussed this with other faculty members in my institute who also agreed that she should have given me first authorship since it was based on my phd work.
Since I couldn't gather courage to discuss this with her, I decided to write to journal. As per their guidelines, student should be the first author. The journal replied to resolve the issue within two days.
Unfortunately i was travelling and couldn't revert. After two days editor in chief rejected our paper stating that it is beyond the scope of journal and carbon copied it to me.
Now, I am applying for postdoc in editor in chief's collaborator lab. Will this ruin my chances of getting a postdoc position? My guide doesn't know any of them and will give me a good recommendation letter.
Ps: my guide had previously removed my name from author contribution section of my first author paper because of her favorite student. I requested her to mention my name. She felt offended and said that she never had student like me.
Tried getting first authorship . Landed in a problem.

The circumstances of the postdoc in question aren't clear. Are you asking if the authorship issue will impact your ability to get a postdoctoral position in the lab or one of your supervisor's collaborators?

Your question is about "whether not having a first authorship paper ruins your chance of getting postdoc position"? or it is "whether your previous supervisor can ruin your chances of getting postdoc?", you still didn't make it clear, are you a Ph.D. student? during the problematic paper, have you been her student and now graduated?

Guidelines: rules or instructions about the best way to do something.
Guidelines are what the authors should do to correctly submit a paer to the journal, not what the journal will do on the submitted paper.

I am sorry. Question is that editor in chief and that professor whom I wish to apply for postdoc are collaborators.  My supervisor doesn't know any of them and she will give me a good recommendation letter. But can the editor in chief tell his friend that I wrote their journal an email stating authorship related issues. Do they consider me a bad student who wants authorship desperately or mean one. My supervisor has tortured and abused me a lot. I fell into depression because of her and those people have no idea about this. Hope now my question is clear

carbon copied it to me --- This confused me at first, then I realized (and google-double-checked) that "cc" for email ACTUALLY IS an acronym for "carbon copy". Brought back memories of my Aug 1973 - Jun 1974 typing class in high school, in which some of our in-class assignments involved having to use carbon paper for carbon copies. Much of that class involved learning all sorts of spacing, letter headings, margin widths, salutations and such for different kinds of business letters, things I strongly suspect are entirely absent in today's school keyboarding classes!

To answer your main question, I don't see how/why you would be the topic of conversation between an EIC who handled a submission (which is confidential), and a collaborator who you wish to join as a postdoc.
However, your behavior with your current supervisor is extremely problematic, and I would strongly suggest you do not ever do that again.
#1 you said your advisor will give you a good recommendation so your relationship cannot be that poor.
#2 rather than speak with your supervisor, you went around speaking with other faculty (this would be called airing dirty laundry), which would have been fine to do if speaking with your supervisor did not yield a fair or reasonable outcome (you chose to skip the first part to avoid conflict).
#3 you contacted an EIC about a submitted paper behind your advisor's back - honestly if you were my student and I found out you did this, I would fire you on the spot.
I hope you understand this is unhealthy behavior and very unprofessional conduct. It seems you got away with it this time without your advisor finding out, and I doubt there is any chance your prospective postdoctoral advisor would either. I would not make a habit of doing this again.

I committed suicide because of traumatic marriage, abortion,  and bullying by my 2 lab members. Before this incident I was my supervisor's favorite student. After I got discharged from hospital and resumed lab. I realized that she spread in the whole institute that my marriage failed because of my fault. People starting hating me. She removed my name from author contribution section of my first author paper. I was a hardworking and sincere student who would always respect her. But she treated me with cruelty. My legs would tremble. I would eat one bread per day or one meal.

I am sorry to hear that these things have happened to you. However, your response to the situation really only hurts you because you are at the bottom end of the power dynamic. I would have suggested to you to leave as soon as you felt these problems occur, but the real issue here appears to be the need for support for your mental health and wellbeing, before you end up creating a worse situation for yourself, which will surely impact your mental health further.

The student committee decided to remove me from the hostel since my supervisor favorite student complained about me that she heard me crying at night and people are terrified. My supervisor told the committe negative things about me. They asked me to vacate hostel after I got discharged from hospital. The committee gave me few days time to vacate the hostel and  hostel warden used to shout at me. While searching home, I ended up giving rent to place where prostitution was going on. Later that night I realized that something was not good about that place. Had I shifted to that place.....

Despite all this, I  never gave up.science is my passion. She would pass comments that my sad face was spreading negativity among lab members. One year later, I discovered something novel. I was awarded young scientist award, best poster award, and travel grant to attend conference in Canada. I did meditation, and I decided to heal myself. And today I am no longer in depression. I have scars that are deep. I cry but that's ok. I believe that something good will happen. I consumed 15 anti depressants and my body took a long time to recover. Despite this, she delayed my viva by 1 year and now .

She suddenly called me and asked me to apply for postdoc. She will give me a good recommendation letter. If somebody would tell her that I had used 50ul of chemical in one day , she would believe and insult me without seeing any evidence.. my article would have been published in nature communications, had I completed  one experiment and that experiment was done. Another lab scientist didn't allow me to use his instrument because rumors were spread about me in the institute. This all is not to gain sympathy. But ... its not always student's fault.

editor in chief rejected our paper stating that it is beyond
the scope of journal and carbon copied it to me.

Editor in chief smelled issues among the authors and politely rejected it. Do not think about the two days you could not revert (?).
You basically set up a big red flag on your paper (even if they literally state "student should be the first author", this means that the paper should be submmited with the student as a first author, not that the editor will change the author order!).
For the rest of the question, it is quite difficult to read into the mind of people. Surely if the lab where you are applying is actively collaborating with your former advisor it may be difficult for you to get in, but you cannot know until you apply.
If you are granted an interview, you have the possibility to explain in a concise manner your relation with your supervisor, if asked.
Based on your answer, the interviewer may make up their mind to understand if you can be a good fit in their lab or not, but it depends mostly on (inter)personal evaluations specific to the people involved, I suspect there is no general rule, although they may ask your supervisor and get a not-so-positive feedback (no, you cannot do anything with respect to that now, be assured that in life there are more paths than burned bridges, although you have to loook for them).
tl;dr: Sometimes people do not go well along. Lack of communication may grow the disagreement from a "we agree to disagree" to a "never ever I will work with that person".
Depending on your culture, there are various way to communicate, but I am quite sure escalating problem to external organizations without having an internal discussion is bad in 99% of the culture.
To work with a collaborator of someone you already had a bad relation may not be the optimal thing, or it may be wonderful because collaborator went through your same experience, who knows.

My supervisor doesn't know either of them. She will give me good recommendation letter also.i am asking whether those people think of me as a mean or bad student. And if I apply for a postdoc in their labs, they may reject thinking if I can complain about my supervisor, I can do with others.


text:
How are non-academic (eg. industrial) reports cited in publications?
This question pertains to peer reviewed journal articles in materials science/metallurgy.
In my upcoming research article, I wish to use some statistics from an industrial report to highlight the relevance of the material being studied. Said report is not academic or peer-reviewed, as it is based on business numbers and forecasts, aggregated by a forum.  It does not have an author/list of authors (only a foreword by the secretary-general of the forum).
How can I cite this article? Is there a strong reason not to use this and stick to only academic publications?
Thank you!

It is common in Economics to cite reports from institutions/lobby groups/banks, e.g. to motivate one's research. These reports may be more or less academic in nature and they are typically not peer-reviewed (they likely underwent some type of internal review process, but I would not compare that to peer review).
I typically cite them as (pseudo bibtex syntax below):
author = {[name of institution]}
title = {title}
journal = {[type of report]}

If possible it is also nice to add a link or available at if the report is not easily found. You will likely be able to find a similar solution.
As an example, this article is published in Journal of Finance, a top journal in its field, and includes at least 4 such citations:

Source: preprint version of the article linked above. The blue text are clickable links in the original document.

Thank you! This is very relevant. In your opinion, are these controversial because of potential bias?

@user153812 how controversial these are depends mostly on how you cite them. When citing, you should have an understanding of how the report arrived at its results and how realistic these are. Also keep in mind who you are citing and what their interests are. I would treat a Bank of England report differently than a study by McKinsey. Language helps, e.g. you would write industry reports [citation] suggest that potential savings are in the ballpark range of ... instead of reports prove without doubt that savings are 3.14 USD cent per piece. I.e. address potential controversy preemptively.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Is it common that you can't finish the exam questions during PhD study?
I'm a first year student and twice now I have been unable to finish all the problems during the exam, which had never happened before I became a PhD student. And to be fair, even if I had been writing without stop, I might still have failed to finish the exam questions. Is this common? I believe my professors are trying to push us beyond the limit, but it is frustrating.
P.S. I'm not complaining, I just try to cope with it with right attitude.

Are your exams graded on a curve?

Remember that your professors are aware of grad students needing to maintain a certain GPA to stay in the program and aren't in the business of throwing people out. As long as you're putting forth a decent level of effort they tend to adjust grades so that most people will pass.

@Superbest no it's not.

@user137 I don't worry about passing, I just hope to do better because that way faculty would like to spend more effort in advising me in the future.

This is completely dependent on the course and instructor.
Yes, I have taken exams where it definitely wasn't possible for anyone to finish. The professors either gave us more time or only graded the problems we attempted.
Talk to the instructor about your concerns!

I have taken such exams as well (and as I recall, usually came out near the top of the class).  The point was that the exams were supposed to be open-ended, and also test judgement in picking which questions to answer.

Depending on the situation and the exam designer, it may well be that to "finish all the questions" is to prove oneself exceptional, at least in quickness and/or cleverness. The idea, which I don't necessarily endorse, is that it is worthwhile to give "impossible" exams, to give exceptional individuals the chance to show how far they transcend the merely-very-able, or something like that. So, instead of being a diagnostic of whether students have picked up the usual, standard ideas, such exams may pretend/aim to be detecting "geniuses". Based on observation, facility with timed exams is not a bad thing at all, but it is of limited significance in the larger scheme of things (where, for example, there is no real time limit...)
So, you have discovered that you are not ultra-fast in getting what you know onto paper. Doesn't matter much.
... tho', still, being fast is generally a good thing, if it is combined with competence. In fact, sometimes very-quick people are misled by their own successes in exams on low-level material, that is, thinking that quickness and cleverness is all there is, and not believing that the vast accumulated technique is of much significance in the face of that quickness and cleverness. (I think that is an unfortunate error of perception.)

I'm a first year student and it has been the second time I can't finish all problems during the exam, which had never happened before I became a PhD student.
  I believe my professors are trying to push us beyond the limit, but frustrations come with it.

As others said, this is common and you shouldn't worry about it. Especially if this is a PhD-level course (as seems implicit, though I'm not sure).
But generally, to thrive in a PhD you'll need to tolerate setbacks better than you seem to be doing — they'll be normal, simply because being a PhD is harder (and must be). In non-graduate school you face carefully restricted problems that you should be able to solve — in a sense, if you can always finish an exam, it means the exam was too easy for you. Instead, a researcher pushes the boundary of human knowledge; while advisors help pick problems that are approachable, they'll still be hard.
So "feeling stupid" for no good reason is a common danger — almost an occupational disease, called impostor syndrome, common among PhD students and other professions. If you read up a bit on it, IMHO you should see you shouldn't be frustrated at not finishing an exam.
BTW, I'm not implying at all that you actually suffer from it; I've seen it a lot, on myself too, so if anything I'm biased to mention it too often ;-).

I failed to finish my Master comprehensive exams.  None of my cohorts did either.  No one in previous or subsequent classes did either.  It was not a good feeling, but I passed.  It may be normal and expected.

Some courses even have exams in which you are only supposed to be able to solve a certain percentage of questions (and this percentage suffices for full marks). There is a  name for this in German - "Auswahlklausur". This fact is generally announced before the actual exam, though.

I think it really depends. On the one hand, I've never personally had that issue. On the other, I know there every single first year student taking a particular stats course at my university this quarter who have yet to be able to finish one of the professor's tests. I definitely agree that if you're having concerns, that you talk to your professor. They may be able to better tell you if that's normal or not for their classes.

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Including Award Values on Academic CV When Applying For Graduate School
I am going to be applying to schools for a PhD in the not so distant future and I received a couple of scholarships in my masters degree that are worth over $10 000.00. I am not sure if it would be a wise idea to include the values next to the awards or just the actual award names themselves. Here are a couple of thoughts I have as to why I should and shouldn't:
Should

Including the award values could be a good signal for graduate committees that I am somebody who is proactive in seeking self funding.
Including the award values might suggest that I have potential to attract more money of the same magnitude

Should Not

It could be considered unprofessional to add award values - I have no idea
It could be potentially viewed as arrogant, boisterous, and off putting
Graduate committees don't actually care how much they're worth and can look the awards up if they're interested.

Question: Should a prospective PhD student include award/scholarship values on the academic CV? Why or why not?

I doubt that if I were reading the CV that I'd care one way or the other. If the award has a name or title, you should list that: Award/grant from IBM to support research in "glub-bending at the cusp". But adding the amount is also fine. My response to seeing the amount would be "interesting", but not "yay" or "nay".
But the important thing, to me would be the fact of the award, not its amount. Not a big deal, though. Others might have different opinions, of course.

It is common to include award values for research grants, including training fellowships, in a CV. Done with tact, I would see this as a positive and unlikely to be taken as arrogant.

Agreed. I'm not sure if I'd include scholarships in the same category, but I don't think it would hurt.


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Do Professors Get An Education "Allowance"?
One of the most common things I think any students has seen is walking into the office of a professor to a miniature library of textbooks and books geared towards disseminating research to researchers and practitioners. I am wondering how often these books might be paid for out of pocket or if it is common for universities to pay for these books as if they were something like an educational allowance.
How do universities (if at all) try to financially support professors in their continuing education?
I understand there are travel grants for conferences, but I am wondering if professors can take MOOC's or purchase books to help them explore new research areas and receive financial support from their academic institutions?

Sometimes there is funding for literature (some grants). Or they may be library books on long-term loan. Or sometimes they just buy it.

In two tenure track jobs and several postdocs, I always had access to at least several hundred dollars a year of funding I could use for miscellaneous research-related purposes, including books. (This is not counting startup fund and grants which were necessary to fund more expensive things like travel.) The bottleneck limiting the size of a typical professor’s library is not money for books, but time to read them.

You often have access to "books for evaluation", or can con the library into buying the book and check it out indefinitely.

This is probably as variable as the educational system generally. But I'd doubt that more than a few professors get special allowances for such things.
Some of the books you see are text books given to professors by publishers in hope that the professor will adopt them for a class. Some of them are "ancient" texts that the professor used as a student back in the ice ages.
Some quite useful advanced books might be given to a professor by some publisher when the professor adopts some elementary text. It is a form of bribery, I suppose.
When professors retire they sometimes open their own bookshelves to their colleagues (or students) who are free to carry away things that interest them. Some books actually wind up in boxes outside a professor's door and others are free to expand their own libraries with them. Sometimes such books actually have some educational value.
Some of the books are funded by grants also, but normally grants from funding agencies outside the university.
A few new professors will get some "start up funds" from a university department and while intended for bootstrapping research, books and papers are part of that.
I accumulated hundreds of books over the many years. Some were donated to educational systems in Kenya eventually. But I still have far too many. No one other than publishers ever funded them, however.
Generally, however, the salary of a professor should be high enough to support quite a lot of such things out of pocket. I paid for professional memberships myself, for example, which generated a lot of journals on my shelves.

I guess that there is also the question of ownership. If the books are paid for by the university, you might have to leave them there, when you move somewhere else. As someone who does not have a permanent position yet, this alone would motivate me to buy my own books with my own money.

Good list of sources for books. To add two more: Publishers sometimes offer books as honoraria for (thoroughly) refereeing manuscripts for future publications. Also, when some professors retire, they simply abandon their offices, books and all, leaving the distribution of the books to the department administration (in effect, to the chair's secretary); I once acquired quite a few books that way.  And a comment about using grant money to buy books: The NSF (and I suppose other funders) require that the books be directly relevant to the funded research.

In Canada, most universities provide a professional allowance that can be used with some discretion towards various costs (professional associations, cloud storage etc) including books.  The value is variable but even CEGEP teachers in the Quebec system have a small allowance; outside Quebec some school boards also provide a small allowance.
In addition it’s usually easy to get a desk copy of a relevant textbook.  I still do pay for about 1/3 of my books.

@FedericoPoloni Most Canadian Universities.  The amounts are variable.  Even in the CÉGEP system the instructors there have a small professional allowance.

@ZeroTheHero Please edit this information into your answer.

Every German university I know of has a part of the annual library budget earmarked for the chairs, like several hundreds of Euros per year for a chair. It is called the "Handapperat" and it is listed by the library. Students can borrow those books for a short time (overnight or for a weekend). The books are owned by the library, but their official location is the professor's shelve. The books are selected by the professor (or their team) and cover usually advanced topics.

Some universities have budget and programs to buy books for departments - for example, I know Barcelona University does. Books bought with funds from such programs, although university property assigned to a department, may end in the shelves in the office of a professor who is using them for their work at the university.
Furthermore, books can be bought with project grand funds, as any other item deemed necessary for the program goal.

It depends upon the specific department and university. I know some "teaching universities" where faculty get faculty development grants either formally through the university or their department for continuing education and professional development For example the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, offers faculty development grants to:

The UWL Faculty Development Committee (FDC) awards grants to support the professional development of faculty and instructional academic staff and projects intended to improve teaching and learning. There are three types of grants:

Teaching Innovation
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Professional Development

Conversely, many faculty at research programs are expected to fund their own needs through grants. Some research universities have "seed" grants that are designed to help faculty development, but these tend to be more research focused starter grants rather than continuing education. For example, Texas Tech
 offer faculty development grants described faculty development as

Faculty Development
The OR&I offers a variety of learning opportunities and internal funding programs to promote faculty success in research and creative activities, and to assist faculty develop successful external funding proposals.

You do not even need to be a professor, it is very easy to accumulate a huge collection of books at a university without paying a single penny.
As an undergraduate student I was already picking up several free textbooks from outside the used book store of our campus: many classes required students to buy the most recent version of a textbook, so the old versions would go obsolete and they'd be left outside the book store for people to take. The library might also have a similar system for damaged or obsolete books as they need to make room on their shelves for new books.
What about books for more specialized topics that are not covered at the undergraduate level? When a professor retires and moves out, books are often given away for free. This happens often enough.
More opportunities are available for professors, still without paying out-of-pocket:
- start-up allowance: when you are first hired as a professor, you get some money to help you get started, and this is usually enough to pay the salaries of some graduate students or a post-doc, so it is definitely enough to fill up a library of books (not that anyone would ever use it for only that).
- professional allowance: many universities give about $1000 per year, which is more used for conferences, laptops, printers, and teaching materials, publication fees, but sometimes also for books.
- many professors apply for and acquire research grants.

Despite all of the above, it is still common for some books to be purchased out of pocket. In my case I did buy a lot of textbooks for my undergraduate courses, and some of those books are still relevant enough for me to still have today. Many books were on sale for $0.99 at the used book store, and I bought them almost entirely because it was a great deal. Some books were payed for out of pocket because the system for getting reimbursed was too inconvenient for me.

It depends on the institution, but it's possible that some of these may actually be library books, or former library books.
Libraries have to regularly weed out titles that aren't circulating enough to make room for either new editions or other books that are seeing more use.  Some libraries will have an off-site archive, and will move older books there (until that too is full).  Others will dispose of the books -- sometimes they'll offer them to other libraries (and often in a consortium, they'll try to make sure that there's a minimum number of copies in their system), but I've seen at least one case where they offered them to the people who had previously checked out the book.
I've also worked at places where professors were allowed to check out books for an entire semester, so it's possible that a few of the books aren't actually theirs.  (I've also worked at a research institution where people could keep book out until someone else requested it ... I don't know if this is similar to what oekopez mentioned or not)

Something that hasn’t been mentioned much yet is the fact that many professors are given books for free by publishing companies in the hope that they will then cause others to buy the book.  In general, professors accumulate books from grants, university resources, book giveaways, free books from publishers, their own money, and many other sources over time.

Some of my colleagues who are editors for various academic publishers do get copies of advanced texts and monographs. It's not at all a budget from their university.
In my experience, people who have lots of books have paid for them our of their own pockets. Yes, this can be a significant expense. All the more motivation to create "free/on-line" versions of things when one is in a position to do so.
(For myself, I estimate I have a few thousand non-elementary mathematics books, and fewer than 10 were not paid for by me out of pocket.)

Many universities have deals with Springer Nature and other publishers whereby a large portion of the books from those publishers are available freely for download by anyone with an account at that institution. Springer will even send a paperback edition for a small charge, of the book is already available for download to that professor.

Depending on the place, systems may be in place that allow faculty members to buy books without paying from their pocket. For example, in India, government universities have something called "learning resource allowance" (LRA) for faculty members which can be used towards anything which the faculty member can justify as "learning". Usually, these funds are accumulated through the year and faculties cash it in towards the end of financial year to buy stuff. I know professors who have bought things like cameras, laptops, printers, paid for publication charges, books, projector screens, software subscription, and what not. Depending on the institution policy, books purchased under the LRA may carry a stamp that says that this was purchased with LRA funds but the book remains with the professor.


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My Prof Does Not Know My Thesis Field Well
I am doing my MSc thesis research and it is becoming apparant to me that my supervisor does not have that much domain knowledge in the field that I am in. She has some idea but by no means is she even close to an expert in the field - I say this because I am reading papers in my field (Operations Research) and her papers are not published in OR journals.
I am curious if others have had this experience and had to essentially lonewolf their MSc thesis? It's unfortunate because I would like to have conversations with her about the field, but she doesn't know enough to talk fluidly.

I think it is fairly common, though not universal. My suggestion always, though too late for you, is to pick a topic that accords well with the advisor's interests. It isn't an impossible situation. But perhaps you should have taken the advice you got in your May question.

Possible duplicate of What should a PhD student do when he receives no feedback on his work except some reviews on his papers?

I've supervised a number of master's projects that were very far from my specialty. The master's supervisor is there to guide you as you learn how to do good research and then write about it, they don't need to be experts in your exact topic for that.

this is fairly common, and shows that you are capable of independent research (rather than simply following specific instructions). Try to find other faculty (in this school or others) that might be interested in talking to you.

I don’t think this is that strange. My PhD supervisor had almost no clue about the intricate details of my field, and no previously published papers in the field until we began to work together.
I was able to identify his strengths and use them to my advantage. For example,  he was a very talented mathematician and I was working on some heavy-duty equations which I struggled with. I knew he would be able to help, without having the slightest idea about what the equations physically represented.
In your words, I (and probably many other people) had to “lonewolf” the majority of my PhD with only little nuggets of help along the way. I think it is our own responsibility to read the literature, find gaps etc. then seek help when you have a real problem? Not just “what papers do I need to read” and so on.


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Making a Lateral Jump in Fields for a PhD
Currently I am an MSc student in Resource and Environmental Economics. In the pursuit of further graduate studies, I think that I would be a lot more interested in pursuing something along the lines of quantitative sociology or applied mathematics. But what I am not sure about is how often people are able to make lateral jumps to different fields.
I finished my MSc course work with a 3.8/4.0 gpa and I did my undergraduate degree (after having floated to different faculties in my earlier years) in economics with a minor in math while finishing my last two years with a 3.5/4.0 gpa. However, my early years of of schooling were pretty crappy (2.6-2.7 gpa), and so I bring these numbers up to both assert resiliency as a student and as merit to suggest I have matured in many faculties of my own learning abilities. Hopefully with those numbers, it would suggest to faculty from another field that I have the capabilities of pursuing studies in that area, although the area would be fairly different from what I did for my MSc.
Do you think it is possible to shift fields and directions or do people often find themselves on a similar track when pursuing PhD level work?

There are several related (possibly duplicate) posts including https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/64771/changing-field-for-phd-how-much-do-i-need-to-know-before-i-start-talking-to-ad

If you want an anecdotical evidence, I did my PhD in computer science after graduating in mathematics.

@OlegLobachev that is not at all a fair comparison

Sure.  After all many "sosh" and applied math programs take direct BS grads versus masters.
There may be some benefit from your masters econ work, but probably a lot won't carry over and you will need to take the regular grad curriculum for the new field.  I would expect to spend the regular amount of time to get the Ph.D. degree in either field as a direct from bachelors would.
There's also the possibility of some gaps from your lack of a bachelors in either field.  This can often be remedied just by taking the starter grad school classes.  Many other fields get people coming in off-normal track (e.g. physics to material science) and those students get up to speed fine.  Both of the fields you are looking at are reasonably "close" to economics.  It's not like English major to physics Ph.D.  Also, even if there is not a direct benefit from the econ masters, it will help your maturity and push you to get up to speed and done on time.
Note that the two areas you mentioned are rather different in math demands.  Stereotypically, applied math > econ > sosh.  Yes, I realize you said "quant" soc. problems...but still if we are talking a school of sosh, the professors/students won't have the same basic math chops that applied math does. Nowhere near.  Yeah, they have to do some basic stats and read Lieberson's Making it Count, but this is not their total cup of tea.
Conversely, if you are being pulled by the idea of special social problems and fixing society, a sosh department may be right home for you.  Note however, that you can do quantitative sosh analysis/research from many fields (econ, psych, education, jurisprudence, etc.)  So think about what is attracting you and what kind of colleagues you want.
In addition to the fields you've mentioned, I would also consider a stats department IF that is of interest (some places this is separately named, not "applied math").  Super portable degree.  But not the warm comfort of the sosh world solving society.  And of course...much stronger stats!
Finally, worth considering why you want to move from the current program or if you could get an econ Ph.D. and still do sort of problems you want.  Clearly there are social issues with respect to resource use by society.  Also econ at the higher levels can be quite mathematical (if that is more what is drawing you).  Not giving any strong opinion here and you know what turns you off.  But articulating it might be helpful in going forward.
P.s.  I wouldn't mention/worry about the high school grades.  That's ancient history.  It is normal for some bright students to mature later and then do strongly in college, after subpar high school career.

A PhD is, as my supervisor said, not your life's work, but the ticket to your life's work. So picking a topic that you are passionate about (PhD is a long haul!), with a view to a future somehow related to your topic, is way more important than what people think about your switch.
Do not switch for 'the hell of it' (read: "think I'd be more interested in"), and do not stay where your are if you are not passionate about your topic.
Now, CAN it be done, the switch? Well yes, of course. I came from a PolSci and Development Studies background, and migrated into Computational Social Science (Machine Learning for Sosh, if you like). In my case, I "taught myself" programming (I had never really coded before), plus the requisite math and stats and Machine Learning all using MOOCs (since my Uni didn't offer it as part of my doctorate). I had to convince and cajole faculty, and eventually had to change Uni to make it happen.
If you've done well at Master's level, and you're willing to work damn hard, you should be able to migrate to any field that has more than a 10% knowledge overlap (fairly rough guess) with your present field. And you can help create that 10% if it wasn't there before. But, as I hope I've made clear, your present test is, instead, whether you can first find a broad area that excites you enough for you to dedicate, at the very least, four years of your life to it. And that will guide the field. Good luck.


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Do physics grad school look for an undergrad math degree?
I am currently a second year. I'm thinking about going to condensed matter physics grad school, but I don't know what degree combination would be the best. Does physics + chemistry sound like a good choice? I saw that many people going to physics grad school have a math degree. But I already run out of class slots to be a math + physics double major. I'm also afraid that physics grad school would not appreciate a chemistry degree.
I do have an interest in math. But I somehow feel that the math for physicists/chemists(specifically physical chemists) is a little different from that for mathematicians. Does it mean that physicists/chemists just pick up math along the way in their own fields? Which means I don't need to major in math in order to do physics research in grad school?

Any kind of hard science or mathematics courses will be helpful to you in a physics research career. You don't need to have a background in "real" mathematics, but it can be helpful. I don't think there is a single path everyone follows to get to physics grad school, or it would be a very boring place. To be honest I would do what interests you most at the present time.

This depends entirely on the type of physics you would like to pursue. If you would like to be a theorist, especially in general relativity or quantum field theory, you should learn lots of math, and you will find advanced classes in abstract algebra, topology, and differential geometry quite helpful.
However, you say that you are interested in condensed matter. Certainly you will need lots of math, but it is mostly applied math, and you will be taught what you need to know in your graduate physics program. The admissions committee will look favorably upon any double major, but your statement of purpose in you application should speak to how your elective major has influenced how you think about physics, and helped you choose an area of specialty. You should also describe any cross disciplinary research you have done, as this will show that you know how to integrate ideas across fields and bring a new perspective to the department. You can do this with either math or chemistry as a double major, but it seems that chemistry is more closely related to your interests as a physicist, and a solid knowledge there will be beneficial in both graduate school and your career.