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How might a lecturer go about inspiring women to consider a career in physics/engineering?
I saw a job advertisement recently with this line:

We are looking for candidates [for this teaching position] who are able to inspire women undergraduate students to seriously consider careers in physics, engineering, and related professions.

I'm aware there's a large gender imbalance in physics/engineering, but I'm not sure how one might attack the problem at the lecturer level, unless (very cynically) this is code speak for "we are looking to hire a female candidate".
How might an individual lecturer go about inspiring women undergraduate students to seriously consider careers in physics/engineering?
Related: How do some institutions attract so many female computer scientists? which gives some ideas for what can be done at department level.

This is not an answer to the question how to inspire, but: longitudinal diagrams by the Leopoldina (in German, https://www.leopoldina.org/publikationen/detailansicht/publication/frauen-in-der-wissenschaft-entwicklung-und-empfehlungen-2022/ ) indicates that (in Germany) in biology the proportion of females stays ≈constant till the Master, then starts dropping for the doctorate (but is still > 50 %) and seriously drops for habilitations, roughly similar patterns are observed for other fields. ...

... BUT for engineering, where female proportion is very low, the fraction of habilitations by women now (2017-19) corresponds to the fraction of women starting engineering studies 2001-03. I.e., they seem to have had made up their mind as much as their male colleagues to have a serious carreer in engineering. Iow, undergrad students in engineering may not be the audience you need to convince. This UNESCO report for Asia (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000231519) indicates that a relevant drop in interest/participation occurs much earlier, around 9th grade.

It may very well be that the relevant drop where you are does occur during undergrad studies. But I wouldn't take it as a given (and I could easily imagine such an ad here in Germany, despite the Leopoldina longitudinal results). And, totally different line of thougt: IMHO the job ad insinuates that women do not take their carreer choice seriously. Which I do consider sexist.

My best advice on this is actually to provide numerous successful role models. This is also true for other underrepresented groups in a field. If a faculty is "unbalanced" this is difficult, but can be remedied to some extent with guest lecturers and speakers.
Conscious mentoring is also a factor, whether by faculty or by outside professionals. Mentors provide a role model, but also encouragement and career advice to mentees.
One can also form discussion and support groups that might cross fields when numbers are small. This requires some discussion across departments by interested faculty to keep it active.
Over a longer term, work to assure that people are treated fairly and can attain positions of authority. And, fair treatment doesn't always mean the "same" treatment. Child bearing, for example, should not be a block to a woman's career development.

provide numerous successful role models How would you do that? Talk about well-known physicists/engineers during class? That seems like inappropriate use of class time.

Invite them to class or evening talks, perhaps. Start a seminar series.

My professional society organizes also online talks by people from industry describing their work to students. Also there, you may make a point of having a wide variety of speakers.

It is rather easy, actually. The candidate just need to show that they are able to not reject women undergraduate students, as it has been done until now.
How? just go to your uni's library or other collaborative space, look how the median male students discuss between them technical topics, and how they discuss exactly the same topics with some fellow female students. Listen to the jokes they make. Have a look at their posture.
It is very easy to see the gender-discriminating (demeaning) behavior ... it is really hard to undo it, because we have been imprinted all our life with "rejecting" behavior... realizing what not to do is easier than having to do something.

Can you give cultural/regional background? This description does not match my  experience (regional: Europe, Germany, Italy, lots of Eastern European colleagues. STEM field: I'm chemist, have been working also in physics, material science and agricultural institutes)

@cbeleitesunhappywithSX My background is not relevant. I do not know your specific case, nor is relevant. Good for you if you had positive experiences. Your experience however is just an anedoctal point. In Europe, practically in all country, in STEM there is a dramatic shrinking of the female/male ratio: the ratio goes from 1:1 at student level, to 1:4 at the decision-maker (in research) level. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_6217

How can the regional background of your answer on an international website not matter when some countries such as Tunisia, Argentine, Latvia or Serbia have more than half of their reseachers women, and others such as Germany, Netherlands or Luxemburg are barely above a quarter? (your source).

As for my experience - it's just as relevant as your unsourced claims. I phrased it experience, btw, because I (also?) do not have relevant publications at hand. However, in case you read German, I invite you to have a look at the German Chemists' Society stats: https://www.gdch.de/fileadmin/blaetterkatalog/index.php?catalog=statistik_2021 (I'm acutely aware that the female proportion in first semester students in chemistry is declining  or at least stopped increasing)

since OP asks about "We are looking for candidates [for this teaching position] who are able to inspire women undergraduate students to seriously consider[...]" it is evident that this ad is coming from the societies that have a gender imbalance problem (a probelm that arise because the ratio of women to man is constanctly reduced, not because there are "few" women ... and the ad seems misplaced, but this is not a theme of my answer, I don't have so much time to spend on confuting top-down cosmetic measures created to preserve the power in the hand of current holders).

the most recent advancement and discussion from empirical evidence:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-technology-companies-alienate-women-during-recruitment?sf175874077=1 the world is years beyond where it should be ....


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If the government pays universities for graduating students, how does that not lead to "predatory universities"?
From an answer to another question:

Unsurprisingly, both of these "jobs" cost money. Education needs teachers, research needs researchers, and both need administrative support staff. Buildings and other infrastructure need to be maintained, and many other small and large costs accrue. Sadly, neither of these "jobs" actually generates substantial money directly - in Sweden education is free (students pay no tuition, even at our private university), and with the exception of the rare patent- or spinoff-generating research, even world-class publications do not pay salaries or utility bills. At Chalmers, just like at most universities (at least in Europe), all our core functions are substantial loss leaders.
Hence, Chalmers needs income streams. The government pays us for graduating students, which is sufficient (more or less) to cover the "education job" at least on bachelor and master level.

This sounds suspiciously like the conflict-of-interest that is regularly levelled at open access publishing - publish more papers (even if they're terrible), get more revenue; graduate more students (even if they're terrible), get more revenue.
How does the government prevent this conflict of interest from turning universities into "predatory universities"?
I'm tagging this question with sweden, although it should also apply to other countries that pay universities for graduating students (are there such other countries?).

Does Sweden have some concept of accreditation?

@BryanKrause I think so (https://www.uhr.se/en/start/recognition-of-foreign-qualifications/enic-naric-sweden/List-of-HEIs-in-Sweden/) but there is also some concept of accreditation for journals (OASPA, SCI, COPE, etc).

This seems like a politics question, isn't it?

Are you concerned that your local high school will become 'predatory'? The society, through the government, wants to educate people. The universities do that. The government supports them to do so, and oversees them. The rest is just an analogy gone wrong.

@whoisit Somewhat, though many questions about the organization of higher education are on-topic here, presumably including ones about mechanisms for accreditation and upholding quality standards.

@JonCuster hits it on the nail: The government and the university are the same institution. The latter is just a branch of the former. The executive officers of the university are state employees, and can be directed by the government to not turn the university into a free-for-all.

@JonCuster I actually did have some concern that my local high school will become predatory. They have been graduating some students of um, questionable knowledge. But then, it's a private school that runs a net loss per student and relies on donations & charity to stay afloat, so whatever it is that is causing the weakness is not similar to predatory publishing.

In Sweden the quality of higher education and research is evaluated by a government agency called Universitetskanslersämbetet (UKÄ), or "Swedish Higher Education Authority". Reports with results for various institutions can be found here (only in Swedish, as far as I'm aware). If a program or institution fails to uphold quality standards they may lose accreditation for the specific field or even degree. Note that this is true both for public and "private" institutions.
It's also worth noting that Riksdagen (the parliament) sets a ceiling or upper limit to how much money a given institution can receive for, e.g., graduating students and "full year achievements". Basically, a university that admits too many students is on the hook financially. This naturally limits the potential revenue, and negotiations to raise this ceiling probably take into account factors like demand and quality. For places like Chalmers with typically more applicants than spots, education quality and employability have long been selling factors that they are incentivized to keep in place. But you can also find institutions that have a reputation for having (some) watered-down programs. This is the case in most countries, I suppose.

In addition to Daniel Hatton's answer, in the UK we also have the concept of External Examiners. At the end of each semester a leading academic in the same field from a comparable university will come to the university. They will look at our syllabi, check the exam papers, read a selection of the exam answers, read some dissertations, talk to students, examine our administrative processes. Only with their signature can the marks be made official and degrees be awarded. As they are from one of our "competitors", it is in their interests to be rigours, but not unfair (because someone will be external examining their degrees).
In addition, there is idea of accreditation, as outlined in the comments. Universities must be accredited by the government to receive funding for giving degrees. The difference from OASPA, SCI, COPE etc is that you are still allowed to publish in a journal even if it doesn't belong to one of those organisations. In the UK you are not allowed to give a degree unless you are accredited by OfS. There are additional, voluntary accreditations in some subjects that might reassure students that that course is particularly high quality (generally things like Engineering, accounting, journalism, medicine etc).
However, the final thing to realise that teaching undergraduates isn't that profitable either. Generally the only activity that brings in income substantially above what it costs is educating overseas students. And here there very much are accusations that standards have been lowered to make more money.
Its not clear to me however, how the government paying universities to graduate students is any more open to corruption than the students themselves paying.

@DanielHatton Does the Archbishop of Canterbury use those powers for anything other than maybe running Anglican seminaries?

My perspective is the US, but the ideas are, I think, pretty common. Note that such things as "paying for graduates" doesn't happen in a vacuum. I can't start up a university, claim to graduate thousands (thousands, I say) and send a bill to some government.
There are several guardrails, both regulatory a repetitional. Universities who get public funding are also subject to public regulation at various levels. In the US it is mostly (not all) from the state level.
More broadly, however, reputable universities strive to have qualified faculty with advanced degrees. The reputations are public. When bad things happen, they are likely to be revealed since people are allowed to speak up and complain both inside and outside the institution.
In short, there is pressure to "do the right thing" at all levels of institutions that must operate in the public sphere.
In the US, some private, usually for-profit, institutions are less bound, but they aren't likely to directly feast on the public dole. Student loans are a problem, however, as they are too loosely regulated and the system is open to abuse. These institutions can (and sometimes are) predatory.
In general, though, the reputations of too many people depend on the reputation of the university they work at or attend. That, in itself, generates the pressure to do the right thing, though perhaps not the "perfect" thing.

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How is a new department born?
I can think of two possible ways in which a new department is born: one, the university decides to start teaching a certain subject, and in the other, an existing department splits into two (e.g. department of physics and astronomy -> department of physics + department of astronomy). If the answer in these two are different, please say so and I will split this question into two.

Clearly the initiative must come from a senior university administrator. Who though - the chancellor? The vice chancellor? The dean of the faculty?
Starting a new department is presumably very expensive. Where does the university find the money? Do new departments usually only start when there is a sudden source of funding (e.g. ___ big new discovery leading to a massive surge in student interest + external funding in the field)? Or do universities spend years saving money before starting a department?
Once the decision is made to go ahead, how does the university go about it? Do they hire a new professor who works in the field, provide her with a budget, and let her hire everyone else? Or do they decide on every individual hire by committee, which is not always made up of people expert in the field or affiliated withe the university?

When a mommy department and a daddy department love each other very much...

There's no standard universal procedure for this.  Probably all the possibilities you have listed (and many others) have occurred somewhere at some time.

If this question is off-topic because of "individual factors", most questions would be off-topic. E.g. as of time of writing, we have questions "Can I upload journal articles to a private git repo?" - depends on journal policies of course. "What quantitive metrics would reviewers need to do in order to be classed as an expert?" Depends on the journal that needs reviewers. "How to enter a completely new research area as a 3rd-year Ph.D. candidate?" Depends on what you know + what field. Yada yada blah blah ...

When accountants and the Dean need to hide a large amount of excess funding....

@Allure: The central criterion for this close reason is whether we can answer substantially more than “it depends”. The existing answers demonstrate that this is the case here and thus I disagree with the closure.

In all of the cases I have heard of, existing departments split. Sometimes not one, but sometimes faculty from several existing departments split to form a new one. For example, faculty from mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry, and maybe math may form a new department of materials sciences.  Or faculty from math, statistics, computer science, biology, and a variety of engineering departments may form a department of computational science. Oftentimes, such departments are born after there is already a graduate or undergraduate degree that exists in this area and to which the involved faculty members have previously contributed.
In the cases I know of, the initiative has always come from the bottom, not the top. Typically, this has to do with faculty members feeling that there is a critical mass of faculty in a variety of departments to create a new degree program, and they later realize that they may as well build a department around it. The other reason is that the members of such a group may feel that the department they are in does not value their work -- this is, for example, how many statistics and applied math departments started as forks of mathematics departments dominated by pure math faculty who did not appreciate the work or style of the stat or applied math researchers.
In all of these cases, new departments consist of existing faculty. So at least as far as faculty salaries are concerned, this is often not substantially more expensive than the existing structure. Where things get more expensive is that departments typically duplicate support structures as well, such as staff, web site maintenance, etc. But it is not necessarily true that this is "very expensive" as you state.

Thanks for answer. Do these faculty have to get approval to start a new department, and if so, from whom? There'd also presumably be some conflict of interest, e.g. someone has to be the head of the new department and from other threads here, HoDs are paid more.

That is really country and university specific. For example your assumption that HoDs are paid more isn't true for my institution. However, they have to teach less, but not much less. So being a HoD is more of chore than something desirable. Sometimes the structure of the univerisity is part of State or federal law or regulation, and you need approval from appropriate ministries, etc.

Of course you need approval from higher up to start a new program. In fact, typically even from outside the university itself, for example from the Board of Regents. As far as conflicts of interest are concerned -- maybe, and that's why you need approval from higher up to certify that there really is a need for a new department. But it's important to stress that in many cases heads of department are paid more as compensation for pain and suffering, not because it's a badge of honor to be HoD.

All of these things happen, obviously. What Wolfgang mentions is probably the most common case: vastly oversimplified, a new department gets forked off from existing departments when enough faculty from 2+ existing departments feel that they would rather work with their colleagues from other departments than with their current ones. This process is not so much expensive as politically difficult, as the existing departments will lose money and influence and hence are not unlikely to opposed the plan.
However, I have also seen other cases.

Sometimes, a department is formed by joining two existing departments, presumably in an attempt to reduce support structures and create new collaborations. When I have seen this it was always driven by senior university management and not by the faculty, who are generally not thrilled about the disruption. My current department came to life this way, and 10 years later there is still a noticeable rift between faculty coming from both original departments.
Finally, there are also cases that look more like what OP had in mind, where there is an executive decision on university level to build a new department from the ground up. This is indeed a very expensive and long-running process (we are talking about many years to maybe a decade), as new faculty needs to be hired on a running basis. Given the strategic nature of such a process, there really isn't one person who "decides" to do this - instead, discussions will be had, committees will sit and provide recommendations, and ultimately the university leadership (rector, vice-rectors, university senate, maybe even sponsoring bodies such as the government) will make a formal decision that closely represents the outcomes of these political processes. The implementation of this decision will then be the responsibility of whatever is the next-highest organisation unit after departments - school, faculty, or directly the university leadership team if departments are already top-level structures.

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Do prizewinners use prize money for academic purposes?
Suppose Alice wins the Nobel Prize and $1 million. Does the prize money go entirely to personal matters, or is she likely to use some (most/all?) of it for academic pursuits? If the latter, how does she go about it? Does she just "award herself" a grant similar to grants that academics apply for?
I'm particularly curious about the Fields Medal since it has a stated purpose to encourage awardees for further achievement, which can be interpreted as saying that awardees should use the prize money for academic purposes.

I’m particularly curious about the Fields Medal well, the monetary component of that prize is only $15000 CAD, which doesn’t buy a whole lot either for personal or research use. Regardless, AFAIK neither the Fields Medal, Nobel Prize or any of the other really major scientific prizes (Wolf, Breakthrough etc) have conditions on the usage of the prize money - it becomes the personal property of the recipient (after applicable taxes) and they are free to spend it just like any other part of their personal money.

Well, if I were to win the Nobel prize, I'd certainly dissipate the money in gorgeous vacations in distant places, spas, good food, and good wine and beer. That's why they don't award me a Nobel prize! :-p

Any prize is a way to promote healthy competition - where the winner wants to stay on top, and the runner up wants to catch up. Not sure whether this is what actually happens, just finished a book on Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that seems to suggest differently.

Historical footnote: Richard Feynman spent his Nobel bucks on a Mexican beach house (after his wife pushed him to).

I see you're asking about big prizes, so I'm just adding this as a comment: I've quite often seen best paper award money being spent on something (socially useful) for the whole lab: i.e. we got a smashing (and low-energy footprint) coffee machine a few years back that way :)

I suspect awardees do not use the award money to do research in the majority of instances. My opinion is not judgemental: in most cases, it would not make much sense to spend that money for research purpose.
In fact, the average Nobel (or Fundamental Physics Prize, probably the largest sum awarded as prize to scientists) is shared among several people, and amounts to a few hundred of thousands of US dollars each. While that is a large sum for personal purpose, it is not necessarily a large sum for research purpose.
More importantly, a Nobel medalist is certainly in the league, and with much better prospects of success, to obtain research grants that range in the millions (European research council grant for  example). If you can fetch millions of research money every 5 - 10 years, what difference your ten times smaller, once-in-a lifetime Nobel prize sum would make? Of course the argument above is even stronger for the Fields medal, given its relatively low monetary value.

Other have noted that it depends upon the Award. In the case of MacArthur "Genius Grants", popular press articles have examined how recipients spend this prize.
This New York Times article describes how most recipients used the money for things such as their charities, own research, debts, and other causes.
This Time article examined how 6 recipients used their prizes.

Interesting articles. However MacArthur prize awardees are not restricted to academics - and academics are actually a minority there.

@famargar Good point. Also, many Nobel Prize winners are not academics as well.

Approx 2/3 of Nobel are academics, about 1/3 of MacArthur are academics. But I agree with you, my point was mostly academical...in the pejorative sense

Unless there is a particular criterion requiring that the money be spent on research causes, there is generally no restriction on how the prizewinner spends the money. It could certainly be used for things like travel on sabbaticals, donations to charitable causes they support, or even personal expenditures.

Another important factor to consider is the tax policy of the country the winner is a tax resident of, and issues of international taxation.
I personally know of someone who was wealthy enough and living in a country to be in the tax bracket that a large portion of a monetary award to that person would have gone to tax. That tax was avoided by using the money for research instead. It funded a few PhD students for several years, and sufficient lab resources.

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How does doing PhD studies with an interpreter work?
From this article:

According to Jiupai News, Wei also turned down an offer from Harvard to study as a PhD candidate, even though the school promised to waive his English competency test and provide him with an interpreter.

I can't imagine doing PhD studies with an interpreter. One can't possibly rely on an interpreter for lectures, for example. How does it work?

I would think it would not work well long term, but could bridge the time until the person's English improves.


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What should be done if a paper's decision is accept, but the copyeditor identifies a potential technical issue?
This question has been in the back of my mind since it happened many years ago. A paper was submitted to a not-very-good journal, and the process was:

Paper shown to editorial board member, who says she is too busy to review it, but recommends her postdoc instead (she possibly confused the role of the editor and reviewer).
Paper shown to postdoc. Postdoc recommends revision.
Paper revised.
Postdoc recommends acceptance, paper accepted.
During copyediting, the copyeditor comes to you (a senior editor in the publisher) with the following issue. One of the plots has four data points, through which the authors have drawn a line. Problem is, with only four data points, the authors could have drawn any of several lines through the data. They would fit less well, but they would still superficially fit the data (see image below; the blue line is the line the authors drew and the red one is the one pointed out by the copyeditor). Given that we know almost nothing about the subject of the paper, what do we do now?

The obvious possibilities are:

Ask the editorial board member. Problem is she didn't make the decision.
Ask the postdoc. He has already recommended acceptance.
Ask the authors directly to revise the paper. It doesn't seem like a particularly difficult issue to address - just add more data points. However, we have no topic expertise to judge the revision (or to even tell if "add more data points" is the right way to handle the issue). If the authors say "we do not need more data points because ...", we are stumped too.
Do nothing and proceed as normal. This avoids the issue of potentially rejecting an already-accepted paper, which is unpleasant for everyone. On the other hand, if the paper actually should be rejected, then this seems irresponsible.

We wound up doing #3, the authors added a couple of sentences explaining why there are only four data points, and we didn't encounter any problems after publication. Still, I'm wondering if any of the other options are better.

For number 3, perhaps you should have asked the authors why they draw that line, and why not one of the other possible ones. For example, is it linear regression?

@gib I think so yeah. It's presumably some kind of least squares fit. The original line is the best-fitting one, it's just that the other lines seem at least plausible (or not conclusively rejected).

There are always many plausible lines one could draw. I would expect every reader to know that, so I don't see the problem with showing only the best fit. "Just add more data points" seems to me very easy to say if you don't have to pay  for those extra data points (in time, resources and/or money). Assuming it is even possible. I think the authors did the best they could have done with that somewhat unreasonable request.

I am on an editorial board for a journal. In my experience, the editorial board is like a team, trying to make the journal as strong as possible. This involves helping each other make correct decisions, advertising the journal, encouraging good submissions, etc.
In a case like the OP describes, I would say it's perfectly fine for one member of the editorial board (with permission from the one who officially handled the submission) to get in touch with the authors and ask them to clarify the issue that was found, i.e., option (3). In this case, the authors adding a sentence explaining that they want the best fit line (identified by residual sum of squares) would probably be enough.
I can't imagine the authors being too upset at being asked to do one last thing at the "proofs" stage of the process. They are already going to be asked to check typo fixes, etc. I think authors also understand that editors seek to make the paper better, and take their suggestions/questions accordingly.


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Is US scientific output decreasing (as of 2022)? If not, why not?
Inspired by this article in Nature.

After a steady increase, numbers peaked in 2016, when more than one million students — undergraduate and graduate — were enrolled to study in the United States. The number of international students then began to decline slowly: graduate-student numbers dipped by 1.3%, to 377,943, in 2018, according to the Institute of International Education, a student-exchange non-profit organization based in New York City. During the 2020–21 academic year, the first of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number sank by 12.1%, to 329,272 graduate students. That same year, numbers of international scholars in the United States (specifically, postdocs and visiting researchers) plummeted by 31%, from 123,508 to 85,528.

These double-digit decreases seem large enough that intuitively one would expect scientific output to decrease too. Is that happening?
Scimago's journal and country ranking gives these numbers for US "documents" from 2017 to 2021:

2017: 709480
2018: 718762
2019: 707258
2020: 700795
2021: 726552

So it doesn't look like it's decreasing. In that case, the next question is: why not?

Papers are a lagging indicator for one.

If one clicks on "United States" in the link, one gets a subject specific list which shows several phenomena that one can't see at the aggregated level: between 2019 and 2021, there is a sharp decline in publications in engineering and computer science (maybe due to the role of conference publications in these fields?), and a sharp increase in medicine. Between 2020 and 2021, medicine alone accounts for an increase of about 20 000 publications. There are similar effects for related fields such as biochemistry, etc. So one might guess that CoV19-publications cause a strong bias in the numbers.

(Probably this does not explain the entire effect, but it seems to have a strong impact on the numbers that one should keep in mind.)

@JochenGlueck - indeed, I suspect Covid had broad impacts on all productivity (except Covid-related medical research). Can't work in a lab, can't have coffee chats easily, etc. It may take 5 years or more to recover all the social connections that lubricate research activities.


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Why do some research topics seem to be confined to certain countries?
Here I'm not referring to research topics on that specific country (e.g. a study on high school in New Zealand would be very likely conducted by New Zealand researchers, for obvious reasons). An example of the kind of topic I'm thinking of is gravastars in modified gravity. (Gravastars are a hypothetical astrophysical object.) Google Scholar finds a thousand results, but every paper seems to be written by Pakistani or Indian researchers.
Why might a research topic like this be confined to two countries? Why might researchers from other countries not be interested in this topic?

"but every paper seems to be written by Pakistani or Indian researchers": Browsing through the list of papers behind the link you provided quickly lets me find authors from other countries than the two you mention. Have you investigated any further how the distribution actually is?

@Snijderfrey can you link those papers? I did notice some, but they're very rare; the great bulk are papers written by Pakistani or Indian researchers.

Also different terms may be used early on, similar ideas can emerge simultaneously but independently and initially thought of as different. I think I've spoken to some people who work on something similar but don't call it gravastars. Also different countries will reinforce whatever they are good at, and a self-selection process where local experts examine proposals and see the ones related to the work already in the country as the best options to fund (either because of personal beliefs or because there are already a number of experts nearby that the applicant can collaborate with).

In the case of the gravastars, there is a founder effect, where a single influential person talked up the topic a lot during some visits to south Asia, and regional interest in the topic snowballed from there.  I don't know how much generalizes to other topics, however.

@Buzz do you know who the single influential person is? Are they also from South Asia?

It is an aspect of the Pareto Principle. That says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. (Different situations will have different ratios.) The idea is, some people in any organization will be much more productive than others. This is sometimes called the Mathew principle for a line in the Christian bible in the book of Mathew. Roughly it says, to those with much, all will be given. From those with little, all will be taken.
There may be a Great Person of Science there who is working on the topic. And around this person are a group of "pretty good" people of science. People are clustered around the GPS because they produce a lot of ideas that then produce publications. People are always hungry for publications. So if the GPS likes a topic, the people around will tend to write about it, at least some of the time.
This then feeds back. Granting agencies (and various other bodies that hand out research money) will look at the group and think they deserve more money next year because they are so productive.
There are other feedbacks. Once the group is established, any time anybody wants to know about that topic, they will find they are looking up papers from that group. So they will want to visit that group, or get people from that group to visit them. They will be sending preprints for review. Their own granting agencies will be looking at the big name group for examples of good research on the topic. If there's a news publication (Astronomy Today or like that) looking for a quote they will find this big name group and try to get it from them.
And when bright young students look for a place to study, or a PhD supervisor, if they know a topic they will naturally want to go where that topic is most studied. So the group starts attracting strong students and expands their name that way.

Adding to that, academia is not completely immune to the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, which may actually cause negative feedbacks: people may notice the GPS, but since they didn't do their research "here", they can't possibly that great after all.

Are you confident of this answer? The papers in the OP's topic come from the same country, but not the same institution; it seems unlikely there is a GPS.

This answer reminds me of the following story:  I asked a colleague why so many Iranian researchers seem to 'like' fuzzy logic as a research topic.   Answer: its founder is Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh.

@Allure Why are you referring to the OP as if it isn't you?

@AzorAhai-him- I'm using it to mean "original post" - so whatever is written in the question.

At times, a research concept is born from a specific location. You might then have

local expertise built up
academic teaching in the topic in the locality (#preference)
methodological preference built up in the locality
slow uptake in other areas
national interest (dynamics)
regional agenda (political or research-politics)

In a global, fluid world as we have, some of this factors are not strong enough to force or warrant localities.
Regarding gravastars, I see well cited authors from New Zealand. I also see a strong pull around Pakistan (as you've indicated).
For gravastars modified gravity, there're diffusion towards Türkiye, Spain, States, Japan ...
Given what I see gravastars to be, is there perhaps a contending force of duality and alternative/replacement at play?

gravastars vis-a-vis black hole

A related factor, at least in the context of countries like Pakistan, India etc: some research fields rely on expensive infrastructure and equipment that are difficult to access if you're not from a wealthy country. Thus one might expect to see large, less wealthy countries focussing on topics where there is scope for substantial contributions to be made using only modest resources.

In my experience, big research funding agencies are often interested in developing infrastructure and knowledge in a certain topic that they feel like it worths being expanded in their geopolitical area.
Some examples:

In Europe, there is an interest in developing high-performance computing centers in the hopes that these centers might help economic growth down the line. Thus many research projects related to using HPC will get funded, and productivity in this research field will appear to spike in Europe.

In the US there was always an interest in nuclear physics because among all else, it can be utilized in energy production, and – okay, I'll say it – for national security. The same goes for countries like France and nuclear research.

Yet other countries are rich in a certain mineral or oil, and they'll fund research related to that natural resource.

Where I come from, solar panels are en vogue due to the generally sunny weather.

Finally, as mentioned by other writers above, sometimes it so happens that a big name simply lives in a location. Because they are productive, other researchers flock around them, etc.


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The academic lifestyle and climate change
I've got a friend who's currently travelling around the US visiting collaborators, attending conferences, giving talks, and building a giant carbon footprint. Considering our planet is on the verge of a climate apocalypse, a part of me is genuinely annoyed at him - there is no way the Earth can accommodate 8 billion people who lives like he does, which burdens the rest of us have to compensate for his lifestyle.
On the other hand, these things are kind of integral to the academic experience, and they are very helpful (necessary?) to getting a job/funding. In fact, other academics might very well expect you to do these things, e.g. Shinichi Mochizuki was criticized for not visiting other institutions to convince the world his proof of the abc conjecture is correct.
Is there a way to be an academic without also helping push our planet over the climate cliff?

Even if all your premises are all taken to hold, this does not seem like a predicament specific to academia (and hence likely to be closed).

@Ben most non-academic jobs do not involve heavy travel.

Related, different focus: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43387/how-much-travel-is-too-much-travel/43391#43391

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/125446/what-practicable-alternative-do-i-have-to-not-fly-around-the-globe-to-present-a?noredirect=1&lq=1

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/188809/im-not-comfortable-traveling-for-routine-events-anymore?noredirect=1&lq=1

see also e.g. https://www.space.com/astronomy-observatories-carbon-footprint-climate-change - travelling alone is not the problem

Have you heard of the "traveling salesman problem"? The traveling salesman was not an academic job :). In the end all of this depends on the transport infrastructure, like high speed electric railways.

I think this is a classic pitfall of ecology aware people: believing that it is them who can do anything about the real problem. This is equivalent of doing your job on cleaning the planet by grabbing 1 bottle of plastic from the streets. Yeah, its good you do it, but don't think that whatever you do will really, really make a difference. If all academics stop traveling, will it have a measurable impact in global warming? almost surely no. If instead e.g. most short trips are replaced by train travel, then that would make a difference.

So as an academic, what to do? I guess use cleaner modes of travel whenever you can, if your project pays for it. But honestly, the most impact you can do as an academic, is vote smart and campaign for cleaner society-level solutions.

@AnderBiguri People who reduce their CO2 footprint realize that their actions on their own will not make a difference, but they hope that it will show others that it is possible, and encourage others to do the same. They often do vote and campaign like you say as well. If they were campaigning to reduce air travel while using air travel all the time themselves, people would not be convinced by them.

@gib agree, but then that kidna fits more into campaigning for a cleaner society rather than actually having a direct impact. We should indeed do this, I don't disagree.

@AnderBiguri "If all academics stop traveling, will it have a measurable impact in global warming? almost surely no". Well, if all academic travel stopped tomorrow, it would certainly have an impact: not for the direct emissions, but for the media exposure and the other changes that it would inspire.


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Why is the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology rated so low on the ARWU?
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is heavily influenced by staff and alumni as Fields medalists and Nobel laureates. MIPT has graduated 10 Nobel laureates, a number that's greater than most institutions, yet it is only ranked 501-600 on the ARWU. Why?
MIPT's page on the ARWU website doesn't say (or I am looking at the wrong page).

Does this answer your question? Why do Russian and Israeli universities score low in various world rankings?

Not really, since this asks about a specific university and a particular ranking.

Why do you think it should be higher? The page you link clearly says that the number of graduates who win Nobel prizes counts for only 10% of the score. So even if they got a perfect score by this metric, once the other 90% is factored in, they apparently did worse than 500+ other schools.

How many Nobel Prize winners still work there?

@cag51 it's conceivable. In that case I would like to see some data showing how the rest of the indicators are worse at MIPT, to the point that they override the Nobel laureate effect.

Clearly all the other factors, making 70% of the score, don't work terribly well in their favor.

Given news stories such as this one:
https://t.me/ostorozhno_moskva/4262 English translation:

MIPT has changed the curriculum for foreign languages. As university students say, Chinese has become compulsory and is studied on a par with English. Spanish disappeared from the curriculum, followed by German and French. It is impossible to sign up for a new course, now only those who studied them before the reform pass these languages. Instead, students are offered 2 hours of English and Chinese. However, there is a shortage in the study groups, the university administration forcibly requires students to enroll for training.

Students oppose such innovations. “There is a feeling that a riot is indispensable. Students do not respond to verbal objections. They do not respond to oral objections from current teachers. This means that we need to stop talking and do something real: pickets, boycotts, letters. After all, this applies to everyone, ”the students write on social networks.

and this one: https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2021/11/commerce-lists-entities-involved-support-prc-military-quantum-computing

BIS has also added the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology to the MEU List on the basis of its production of military products for a military end-user.

I'm surprised that it hasn't scored much lower.

I like Spain and all, and this may be provocative, but: Shouldn't the introduction of mandatory Mandarin (I suppose) improve a university's ranking? It is probably the most useful language to learn, alongside with English.

@Peter-ReinstateMonica Not if you don't have the staff to actually teach Mandarin to that many students. And it may not improve their ranking that the foreign language department stops offering Spanish, German and French.


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Is a professor who's never had to write a grant application disadvantaged in the job market?
As I understand it, today's professors spend a large amount of time writing grant applications, many of which fail. As a result, I'm thinking of endowing a professorship someday with enough funds to remove this part of the job description - effectively funding the professor for as long as they hold the professorship.
One thing I'm concerned about is that this would also be removing a critical part of the job. For example this job advertisement for a senior lecturer/associate professor explicitly asks for "A proven record of attracting external funding for research". In that case, the professor would never pass this requirement since they would have no experience at writing grant applications, let alone actually getting the funding.
Question: is this a legitimate concern? If so, are there any obvious solutions? This should only matter if the professor leaves the professorship, and presumably that is not likely to happen, but I'd still rather the professorship not become a position which one can enter but not leave because it makes one uncompetitive on the market.

I think you need to add some information about the field and the country because the answer depends on these.

One can hardly get a postdoc these days without a proven record of (successful) grant writing.

@AlexanderWoo field is probably astronomy, if broader then physics and if narrower then cosmology. Country is not certain yet. Does it matter though? As I understand it, academics are very mobile, so it matters less which country as long as it's disadvantageous.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103525/donating-money-to-scientific-research-after-my-death

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/109636/is-endowing-a-professorship-less-effective-in-a-lower-ranked-university-than-in

Oh for astronomy you don't need grants you need access to facilities and collaborating network

Be aware that you may not be able to do this. You might have some influence with the university, but it is they who decide who can be a Professor, not the funder, and what the conditions of employment are. Funders don't get to control things.

@SSimon and what pays for the facilities and funds your collaborators to come and visit?

The title question and the body seem contradictory.  Are you really going to hire as an endowed professor somebody that never wrote a grant proposal?

Not an answer but a comment closely related to your question/intention. It may be worth contemplating that writing grant applications might not be a waste of time but might actually be helpful in improving a professor's research! I know academics like to complain about the process, and clearly the correlation between grant quality and funding is extremely low, but there's the possibility that even the smartest genius ends up improving their ideas by defending their proposed research against outsiders...

@DavidKetcheson why not? Endow the person immediately (or shortly) after their PhD, which simultaneously solves the problem of having to move around a lot + the difficulty of finding a permanent position, at least for one person. Is that a bad idea?

FYI: The usual investment for an endowed position in the US is somewhere between $500K and $1M.  The university keeps the principal in their endowment, and gives the chair-holder 5% interest per year to pay for research.  So a $500K gift pays for about $25K per year of research, which (in my field, at my university) is enough to cover one PhD student for about one semester per year, with no travel support or summer salary.  That's helpful, but it's far from enough to support a thriving research program.

@DavidKetcheson Are you really going to hire as an endowed professor — No, he isn't. Donors don't hire (or choose) endowed professors; universities do.

@Allure that basically describes my career, so I guess I don't think it's a bad idea.

@JeffE Sorry, by "you" I didn't mean the OP specifically but rather the proverbial you.

@JeffE right, which is why I'm going to need $5-10 million. (Also can the university actually guarantee 5% interest?! That sounds like an awfully good rate of return.)

@DavidKetcheson do you have to write grant applications?

No, I don’t have to.

Also can the university actually guarantee 5% interest?! That sounds like an awfully good rate of return — Heh.  Some universities have a history of being unreasonably optimistic about money.

Can you also name the first professor? Can it be me?

@SSimon You mean not every astronomer builds and owns their own telescope?!

@DKNguyen I assume your question was a joke. Yes most of them.

Question: is this a legitimate concern?

No. I think you misunderstand what kinds of people endowed professorships are designed to fund. This funding structure is not designed to fund a senior lecturer/associate professor in a department that doesn’t know how to spell “discrete mathematics” in its job ad, or someone straight out of their PhD as you suggest in a comment.
Rather, in the academic world an endowed professorship is considered a high honor and is given only to well-established researchers with a proven track record of producing top quality research. Those researchers, assuming they are in a field where grant funding is important, will of necessity have either already had considerable experience getting such funding, or (in a more unusual situation of a young superstar) will have such stellar achievements under their belt that they should be able to very easily get grant funding at any point in the future.
Another way of saying this is that successfully competing for an endowed professorship is a much more impressive achievement than getting grant funding, and can be thought of as being in somewhat the same category of achievements. The concern that you are raising is therefore nonexistent for such scholars.
If you want to fund early-career researchers in far-flung universities off the academic beaten path, that’s a noble idea and there are ways to do it, and in that case, depending on how you go about it the concern you have might be legitimate. But for an endowed professorship, it’s a non-issue.

No, this is not a concern.

Typically individuals who receive endowed professorships already have a long record of applying for grants.  You could, as the donor, attempt to negotiate some other situation if you wished.
Typically endowed professors only leave their job due to retirement or death.  If you have really endowed the professorship with enough money, there will be no desire to leave for another endowed professorship, if one could be found.  An endowed professorship does not make the holder uncompetitive on the job market.  It makes employers uncompetative to hire the professor.
Most endowed professors do apply for grants.

Assuming you really have that much money to give, my advice would be: Require the holder of the professorship to refrain from applying for grants.  This will free up a lot of their time to do something more productive.
If you want to make a positive impact on academia, you can achieve more for your dollar by endowing (or just spending all the money immediately on) scholarships at institutions that charge low tuition, like community colleges.

I don't think a funder could make any such requirement as to refrain from anything. An endowed professor isn't your employee.

If you offer enough money, most universities will not say no.

Also, "attracting funding" -- an endowed professorship is funding

@Buffy while it’s true that an endowed professor isn’t your employee (and most universities will not even let you choose who to give the professorship to), a professorship, like other sources of funding, will typically have certain restrictions and obligations attached to it, and I don’t see any reason why a prohibition on applying for funding couldn’t be one such restriction. At least there’s nothing unethical about it. At worst it would make the professorship less attractive to some scholars, but as AnonymousPhysicist says, enough money can make up for a lot of things.

@AnonymousPhysicist, but some such agreements would be corrupt, just as paying colleges (or funding building) so that they admit children. Not all, of course.

@Buffy Your comment is totally irrelevant to what I wrote.

Let me focus on the headline question: Is a professor who's never had to write a grant application disadvantaged in the job market?. I'll leave aside your admirable intention to provide funding.
To do their job, a professor needs many skills, but acquiring them takes time and effort. Not all of us are (in my case, were) excellent teachers or even researchers at the start of our careers and had to learn those skills and others over time. Obtaining grants is one of those valued and valuable skills.
But note that such grants aren't solely to provide salary and benefits to the grant recipient. Typically they fund many more things, the most important of which is probably support for students. But they also cover such things as travel, conference and publication fees, lab equipment (and maintenance). In some fields there are also technicians that need to be employed. Travel and the opportunity that provides for collaborative work can be very important. Grants are also highly valued by universities, since the "overhead" charged against the grant funds such things as lab space (including maintenance) and support staff, including the necessary legal and administrative costs.
So, yes, if a person never acquires this skill they will be disadvantaged in academia generally, though as Anonymous Physicist suggests, a person would be unlikely to leave a generously funded position. A "beginning of career" person can't, of course, be expected to have such skills, but, at almost every institution, would be expected to work to gain them. And failure of a grant application is just a learning experience, like falling off your bike several times while trying to learn to ride it as a kid. You often will get feedback on such failures that help you on the next one.


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Do universities favor experimentalists over theoreticians?
This question is based off the following chain of reasoning:

Universities employ professors, who write funding applications and win grants. The university then takes some fraction of the grant as "overheads" which counts as part of its "income".
Therefore universities prefer professors who win big grants (the number of grants matter less than the total amount of money won).
Experimentalists need more money than theoreticians. I would expect that theoreticians only need some software & computers, but experimentalists would need the equipment itself (MRI machines, vacuum chambers, etc) which are orders of magnitude more expensive than mere desktop computers.
Therefore experimentalists win bigger grants.
Therefore universities prefer experimentalists.

I'm wondering if this chain of reasoning is robust. It looks pretty convincing to me. Conceivably the university could have separate grant targets for theoreticians and experimentalists, but presumably some professors aren't easily classified into either theoretician or experimentalist, which would make this an easily-gamed metric.

This isn't an answer to your question, but: a big part of where grant money goes is to pay salaries. Theorists have to pay postdocs and students the same way experimentalists do. That is much more expensive than computers and software.

@MattReece: computers and software are nowhere near as expensive as chemistry, physics, and biology experiments.

Indirect cost recovery simply doesn’t work this way in the US, so the premise of your question is false. It’s important to understand that universities have to justify overhead rates by accounting for the indirect costs associated with federally sponsored research.  Thus, in theory, the added money in overhead on experimentalist grants gets spent to provide support for that research.

FWIW, universities generally do not get indirects on capital equipment.

Potential for grants is surely something that universities consider, but I think your analysis is too simplistic to lead to the conclusion "universities prefer experimentalists".
For one thing, a department typically needs to offer a range of courses involving both theory and experiment, so they need faculty who are qualified to teach them.  The decision to hire in a particular field is more likely to be driven by academic needs, and so the question of whether to hire a theoretician or an experimentalist probably doesn't often arise as such.
Another point is one you raised yourself: Experimentalists need more money than theoreticians.  This cuts both ways.
Suppose they hire an experimentalist.  First of all, she is going to need a big start-up package from the university in order to get her research to the point where she can get grants.  There's a risk that she won't ever get to that point, in which case the university's investment doesn't pay off.  And maybe she does bring in some big grant money for a while, but years down the road, maybe her funding dries up.  Maybe her research area just isn't as hot anymore, or funding agencies are preferring to go in a different direction.  Without major funding, she can't do her research at all, and now the university is stuck with an unproductive faculty member.  So hiring an experimentalist may be high reward, but also high risk.
By contrast, a theoretician doesn't need a large short-term injection of funds, and they know that she will be able to be productive regardless of what happens to her funding.

Sorry, but the question seems to imply some misconceptions about the nature of (most) universities. The use of the word income, rather than revenue suggests that you think of them as businesses generating profits and that overhead represents profit. This is mistaken. Overhead is charged to cover costs, not to provide "profit". Universities have no owners or shareholders. Every bit of revenue generated by university activities gos back into current and future university activities, though there is some redistribution of funds between those activities.
There is no financial reason to prefer one activity over another. Universities like grants so that the kinds of things they want to actually do can be adequately funded. You can't run a cyclotron on no funds and those funds need to come from somewhere. If you can't find the funds, you can't do the research in those fields. And that cyclotron has to be in a building that has to be heated and maintained and it sits on valuable real estate. That is what "overhead" is about: covering costs, not generating profit. If that didn't happen, and grants had to cover all their costs, they would need to be hugely larger. Ok, you have three million Euro for your new chem lab. Now, where do you want to put it?
A university is a public service organization, not a business. It exists to provide an educated populace and to do research that, hopefully, will benefit society as we move toward the future.

For a (slightly) more direct answer to your question, note that theory drives experimentation, just as experimentation drives theory. Balance is needed, and, I think, recognized.

I think that sadly many universities behave like businesses, with academic considerations a far second.

Universities have no owners or shareholders - are you sure? I'd have guessed private universities are owned by something (hence they are "private", e.g. Harvard is owned by the Harvard corporation and the Board of Overseers); public universities are owned by the government. Also, do universities not have a rich-subsidize-poor arrangement where the fields with the biggest grants effectively subsidize smaller fields via their overheads?

There is always some "board" that has formal ownership, but not in the sense that they take "profits" from the corporation. Board members are typically elected by other board members. They don't "buy in" to the corporation. There is some internal transfer of revenues between departments but probably less than you imagine. Grant overhead mostly services the grant and others like it, not the philosophy department. However, in the US, the philosophy is that you can't educate a scientist without him/her also knowing some history, philosophy, etc. So it is a sharing of resources not "stealing".


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Why do some universities shut down during December?
Examples: Newcastle University, Queen's University, University of Florida.
It seems weird to give employees free leave. The Newcastle University page gives an explanation for why this happens:

The Christmas closedown is important to reduce the leave accruals of all staff and it helps to ensure staff remain healthy and have a good work life balance.

But if this is their concern, they could simply give their employees more annual leave and keep operating the university during December. That's what the companies I've worked for do, and I'd even say it's preferable, since the employees get to choose when to use their leave. As for leave accruals, there are other ways to handle it, such as "use it or lose it" or "unused leave is converted to salary".
Also strange is that two of these universities are in the Northern hemisphere. December in the Northern hemisphere is a winter month, so there's less daylight. If I'm going to go on holiday I'd much rather do so during the summer. It could still be that Queen's University & University of Florida staff go on holiday en masse to the Southern hemisphere where it's summer in December, but that stretches belief.
What's the rationale behind the Christmas closedown? If the closedown is so important, why not have a summer closedown instead?

Because they match the schools cycle in the countries they are in... having a holiday when your family and especially your kids are still at school is not very interesting if you still have to get them up, do lunch etc...

Don't schools in these countries also usually go on holiday in summer?

Yes. And it's by no means unusual for catering, security or cleaning arrangements to be reduced or modified during the long vacation. Staff in this case is all staff, not academics who tend to be able to work anywhere.

@Allure so matching the school cycle ... if the schools have holidays Jul/Aug and Dec/Jan then have the same time not diffeent...

Moreover there are country (at least one) in which technically open (not for teaching but as research facilities) and the results is the same.  Unless one has the experiment of his/her life  or a phd students far away from home,    everyone is on leave.

"If I'm going to go on holiday I'd much rather do so during the summer.": And I love skiing instead. So what?

@MassimoOrtolano that's an argument for having flexible holidays, since different people enjoy different things.

Allure, in a university you can't have fully-flexible holidays, because holidays are constrained anyway by classes and exams. Moreover, students who study far from home want to have a longer vacation period, not just Christmas and boxing day, to rejoin their families.

In North America, there is a strong tradition of people wanting to spend an extended amount of time with their families around the Christmas holiday (which these days is effectively a secular as well as religious holiday).  It is likely that a large fraction of the staff would want to take leave during that period anyway.  Thus, if they were to stay open:

They'd have to deny leave to a significant number of employees who wanted it, which would be unpopular.
Many of those who did stay would be less productive without their colleagues who they might normally collaborate with.
They'd have to incur the overhead expenses of keeping the university open: lights, heating, cleaning, food service, etc.  But if they shut down completely, they can close up the buildings and dining halls and reduce maintenance staff to a skeleton crew, which saves money.

These factors also apply in industry to some extent, but in academia it is compounded by the fact that classes aren't taught during the December break, and students normally leave campus, so there is naturally much less work to be done during that period.

In the UK, Christmas day and Boxing Day (26th of December) are bank holidays. This means everything shuts down: schools, shops, banks attractions, many public services etc. Universities follow suit. The only things that remain operational over Christmas are essential services like hospitals and the police.
I expect if a university didn't close for Christmas, the amount of staff choosing to take their leave then anyway would necessitate it. Christmas is generally a time to spend with family, which is easier when everyone has the day off work. People aren't going on holiday, they're going home, eating a lot of food, playing board games or watching TV. As your quote from Newcastle says, it's about maintaining work-life balance.
That said, I'm off to eat some more chocolate.

It's just two days of bank holidays though. If you look at the Christmas closedown schedule, Newcastle University is shutting down until 7 January 2019.

@Allure If you live 100s or 1000s of miles away from your family, you're going to want more than 2 days with them. Why not give people a break? Mandated closures don't usually come out of your holiday allowance anyway, so you can still take time off in the summer too.

@Allure also note that the Newcastle you're talking about there isn't one of the ones in the UK (although reopening the first Monday of the new year isn't a totally surprising schedule anywhere).

Also, if any of you thinks most academics aren't going to work from home at all between 20 December and January 7, you probably don't know university well enough. :) In fact, it's one of the best periods to do research, without other obligations or time sinks.


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Why is peer review so random?
8 Scientific Papers That Were Rejected Before Going on to Win a Nobel Prize
Funding Analysis: Researchers Say NIH Grant Funding Allocation Seems No Better Than Lottery
The same paper resubmitted to the same journal after several years often ends up rejected due to 'serious methodological errors'
For people whose profession revolves around making order out of seemingly-random observations, scientists sure are inconsistent at judging the work of other scientists. Why? It certainly doesn't seem to be like this at all levels. For example according to the GRE's website,

For the Analytical Writing section, each essay receives a score from two trained raters, using a six-point holistic scale. In holistic scoring, raters are trained to assign scores on the basis of the overall quality of an essay in response to the assigned task. If the two assigned scores differ by more than one point on the scale, the discrepancy is adjudicated by a third GRE reader. Otherwise, the two scores on each essay are averaged.

This implies that it's uncommon for two assigned scores to differ by more than one point on the scale, i.e. GRE essay raters usually agree. Similarly, as far as I know, undergraduate thesis readers, MS thesis readers and even PhD thesis readers don't usually come to diametrically opposed judgments on the piece of work. Yet once it gets to research-level material, peer reviewers no longer seem to agree. Why?

This motivates publication shopping https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115080/is-there-anything-that-has-been-tried-to-stop-publication-shopping

Because the space is very sparse, untrodden, and thus there is little statistics in novel areas to judge how good the work is?

Its worth noting that in the case of the NIH grant allocations, the actual conclusion was that rank within the top 20% was random, but that reviewers did agree generally on which applications were in the top 20%. Thats more agreement than your GRE example.

We hear about only the few cases where peer review went wrong.  But in most cases it does what it is supposed to.

A fundamental issue is that both for peer review and for awards, there is no (good) objective way to rate/rank things---cf. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/103167/19607

Related: Is it possible for reviewers to mistakenly reject a quality paper?

Nature only introduced peer review in 1967, so the 1930s papers rejected by Nature were rejected by the editor, not as a result of peer review.

You must give consideration to the possibility that some peer reviewers are lazy.

A common problem is the lack of reproducibility. Open science and open data emerged as a response: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4898932/ Then there's the matter of non-academic staff making editorial decisions and the famous stories about nonsense machine-generated papers being accepted by "respectable" "traditional" journals.

How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals: «in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing removed more than 120 papers from their sites after a French researcher’s analysis determined that they were generated via SCIgen» https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

Related https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/33031/532

@GEdgar: Nope. The other cases include: 1. Those in which it is not trivially demonstrable that reviewing was inappropriate 2. Those in which reviews were sloppy/low-quality, but ended up accepting an acceptable paper or rejecting a rejection-worthy paper. 3. Those in which the authors did not have the time, will and wherewithal to publicize what had happened.

@CountIblis according to the source, before 1967, some papers were reviewed and others weren't (it was up to the editor to decide). Also, myth #2 effectively describes the gist of this question.

Another good example: NIPS (one of the top machine learning publication venues) did a scientific consistency experiment in 2014. The results were not great -- the accept/reject decisions were much closer to random than deterministic.

The biggest difference is that, up to PhD thesis level, the person doing the assessing is more of an expert than the person being assessed. In almost all these cases there is an agreed set of standard skills, techniques and knowledge that any assessor can be expected to possess and any assessee is being measured against.
This isn't so true of a PhD thesis, but in the end once a supervisor/thesis committee has green lit a student, almost all PhD theses are passed.
It's definitely not true higher up. In almost all cases the person being reviewed will be more of an expert in their work than anyone doing the reviewing. The only exceptions will be direct competitors, and they will be excluded. We are talking right at the edge of human knowledge, different people have different knowledge and skill sets.
I'm quite surprised that the GRE scores are so consistent. It’s long been known that essay marking is pretty arbitrary (see for example Diederich 1974[1]).
 Mind you 1 mark on a 6 mark scale is 15% – a pretty big difference. In our degree a 70 and above is a 1st class degree – the best mark there is, whereas 55 is a 2:2, a degree that won't get you an interview for most graduate jobs. Losing 15% on a grant assessment will almost certainly lose you the grant.
But even to obtain this level of consistency, the graders must have been given a pretty prescriptive grading rubric. In research, no such rubric exists; there are not pre-defined criteria against which a piece of research is measured, and any attempt to lay one down would more or less break the whole point of research.

"In research, no such rubric exists, there are not pre-defined criteria against which a piece of research is measured"... really? I most definitely feel like there are well-established criteria research is judged by: (1) correctness, (2) novelty, (3) difficulty, (4) usefulness, (5) reproduceability...

@NajibIdrissi: These aren't issues... you just evaluate anything inapplicable as N/A. As for giving numerical grades, I'd be even harder-pressed to give similar numerical grades to a GRE essay, so I don't get how that is a counterargument here.

The footnote expanding "Diederich 1974" is missing.

I believe [1] is "Diederich, P. B. (1974). Measuring growth in English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English." ( https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED097702 ) Another related paper by the author, with a slightly more useful abstract: Diederich, P. B., French, J. W. and Carlton, S. T. (1961), FACTORS IN JUDGMENTS OF WRITING ABILITY. ETS Research Bulletin Series, 1961: i-93. doi:10.1002/j.2333-8504.1961.tb00286.x (which says "free access" but may just be my university)

@mehrdad - your 2,3, and 4 are all extremely subjective.

@Mehrdad those are categories of criteria, not a rubric. Whether a particular piece of work meets any of your criteria is, as said above, entirely subjective. Meanwhile a GRE type essay will have very specific criteria: When we grad UG essays the essay comes with a 2 or 3 page list of appropriate content + a guide that says things like: Content - 5: Most taught content (some gaps allowed), plus some non-taught content, 4: Most taught content, but some gaps 3: Major gaps ... Strucuture - 5: Well constructed and logically water tight arguement etc

"The only exceptions will be direct competitors, and they will be excluded." - depending on the field, reviewing your direct competitors' work can be very common, for exactly the described reasons.

I've been reviewed by people who have less expertise than a grad student who's done their reading. This answer would explain some variation, not the extreme randomness we often experience. -1.

@einpoklum A grad student in a lab doing exactly what is being reviewed, and who has time to read (unlike any academic u know) is quite likely to be better informed than a reviewer.

With respect to the good papers being rejected problem, a factor that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet is that the consequences of accepting a bogus paper are much worse than those of rejecting a good paper.  If a good paper is rejected, it can always be resubmitted to a different journal. And if the authors first revise according to the reviewer comments, the version that ends up getting published may well be better written than the one that was rejected.  All that's lost is time.
But if a bogus paper is accepted, other scientists may see it in the literature, assume its results to be valid, and build their own work upon it. This could result in significant lost time on their part, as experiments that depend on the bogus result don't work out as they should (which at least may lead to the bogus paper being retracted if the errors are bad enough). Or maybe they'll avoid researching along a line that would have worked, because the bogus paper implies it wouldn't, or worse, they'll end up with inaccurate results themselves and end up putting another paper with bad data into the literature.  All of these are far worse outcomes than just needing to resubmit a paper, so false negatives are preferred to false positives when reviewing.

In addition, there is nothing to suggest that the rejected papers were bad at that time of the original submission, and that only after they had been revised were they clear enough for publication.  It would be rare IMO that an author would not substantially revise the writing/presentation after rejection: after all, the odds are that if you submit the same paper twice, the result will be the same twice.  I’m actually surprised only 8 such papers have been found.

This won't really answer your question, I realize, but I'd like to address your first example - rejected papers that later led to Nobel prizes.
Sometimes a piece of work is Frame Breaking and it leads to a Paradigm Shift within a field. This has happened many times in history, since at least Copernicus and Galileo. Einstein's early work on relativity was rejected among the physics/astronomy hoi oligoi as it was too different from the belief in the Aether at the time. The most prominent members of the field reject a radically new idea and their students, who are pervasively represented usually go along.
It has been said that revolutions in physics require the death or retirement of the most respected researchers so that the ideas of the young can get a fair hearing and come to the fore.
That is in fact an explanation of at least some of the eight papers referenced in your first link.
I don't think that many of us write paradigm changing papers, but it occasionally happens. The truly brilliant (not guilty) among us often must labor in near silence and obscurity for most of a generation. The next generation may celebrate them, or it may take even longer.
When a reviewer is faced with a truly frame breaking paper they, by definition, have no frame of reference in which to evaluate it. It is orthogonal to their entire way of thinking. "This must be nonsense", is the too-natural response.
Read, for example, the short Wikipedia biography of Ramanujan.

Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the classic reading on this point.

This is the most relevant answer to the direct question - Nobel worthy papers are radical or revolutionary by nature.  This naturally makes their review all the more sceptical an affair.

It's not just physics where revolutions require a changing of the guard. This happens in geology and chemistry as well.

@PeterShor, true, and not even just science.

Different tasks, different results.
All the GRE graders have to do is assign scores but they are doing so to dozens or hundreds of essays. They receive clear guidance and examples about what score given essays should probably receive. So it’s basically checking boxes to justify a small set of results.
A peer review analysis is fundamentally different since you’re asking for a much more technically difficult task. They have to evaluate if the analysis is accurate, not if it’s responsive to a prompt. There’s no set of examples to draw on either. So the focus of peer review can be very different for different reviewers who may have different sets of expertise and certainly will have their own points of view.

There’s no set of examples to draw on either what about all the already-published papers?

To compare academic peer review to GRE grading -- that makes apples and oranges look all but identical.  Let's step a little closer:

Similarly, as far as I know, undergraduate thesis readers, MS thesis readers and even PhD thesis readers don't usually come to diametrically opposed judgments on the piece of work.

That is certainly not always true and highly field dependent.  In certain parts of academia it is a standard grad student horror story that Committee Member A insists that the thesis be cast in terms of Theoretical Perspective X, while Committee Member B insists that the thesis be cast in terms of Theoretical Perspective Y, where X and Y may be intellectually incompatible or sociologically incompatible: i.e., each theory has rejection of the other as a central tenet.  This is more common in humanities where the nature of "theory" to the rest of the work is rather different, but it is not unheard of in the sciences either.
As a frequent committee member, I also happen to know that coming to a consensus judgment is a sociological phenomenon as well as an intellectual one -- i.e., some differences in judgment are limited only to the private discussion following the defense and other differences in judgment are never verbalized at all.
This is helpful in understanding the disparity in peer review: in peer review, the different referees are (in my experience, at least) never in direct communication with each other, and in fact may not be seeing each other's verdicts at all: as a referee, I believe that I have never been shown another referee report.  In fact,
Who watches the watchmen?
There is no aspect of the academic process that makes me feel like a lone masked vigilante more than being a referee.  Surely people who do GRE grading go through some lengthy training process of repeated practice evaluating, feedback on those evaluations, discussion of the larger goals, and so forth.  There is nothing like this for academic referees.  We get no practice, and there is very little evaluation of our work.  If I turn in what is (I guess!) an unusually comprehensive report unusually quickly, I will often get a "Hey, thanks!" email from the editor.  In the (thankfully rather small) number of instances where my referee reports were months overdue, I either heard nothing from the editors (I am ashamed to say that once I figured out on my own that a paper I thought I had had for a few months had actually been an entire year) or got carefully polite pleas for me to turn in the report.  I have never gotten any negative feedback after the fact.  Unlike GRE graders, referees are volunteers.
I find (again, in my experience and in my academic field of mathematics) that referees are almost never given instructions that amount to any more than "1) Use your best judgment.  2) We are a really good journal and want you to impose high standards."  I also notice that 2) is said for journals of wildly differing quality.  What does it mean to "impose high standards"?  I take that directive seriously and fire my shots into the dark as carefully as I can, but....of course that is ridiculously, maximally subjective.

On the other hand, your third link is pretty alarming.  It describes a systematic process of resubmitting papers that had been accepted and published by prestigious journals within the last three years to the same journal that published them.  In the majority of cases, the journals did not recognize that they had published the papers before.  I find that very surprising.

Submission overload
We write more and more, and the typical submission quality seems to be going down. This has various reasons, including bad incentives in particular in China. If your salary directly on the papers accepted, quantity beats quality...
IMHO we are close to a tipping point now. Many of the expert reviewers refuse almost any reviewing request - because so many submissions are so sloppy, that it's quite annoying to review them. It should be different: most submissions should be so high quality that you enjoy reading that and can focus on the details. So more and more experts are just annoyed. They delegate more of the reviewing to students, or simply refuse. But that now means the remaining reviewers get more requests, and more bad papers. This can tip quickly, just like most ecosystems.
So the editors need to find other reviewers, and we get less and less expert reviewers. This also opens doors to scams and schemes. Multimedia Tools and Applications for example seems to have fallen prey to editor and reviewer manipulation scheme.
So what's the solution? I don't know.

Make the handling editor and the reviewer names public and thus accountable on accepted papers - this used to be quite common; expert reviewers tend to stand publicly to their reviews if they accept the paper (this used to be an actual endorsement of the work in some fields). This makes corruption and scheming easier to discover with modern analysis. But this will likely just make it harder to find expert reviewers...
Do the first review only with one reviewer (to reduce the load on the reviewers), possible outcomes "early reject" and "full review".
Require authors to do 5 reviews per accepted publication (so the experts cannot just stop reviewing completely, unless they retire - first publication is "free", but you cannot keep on rejecting review requests)?
Actually pay the expert reviewers! Once you are confident that a submission is worth it, that should be an option given Elseviers absurd profit margin. I believe the main problem here is the bureocracy involved here (who decides if a review is high quality) and the different wage costs in different countries. Nevertheless, combined with above pre-review, this will increase the "worth" of good reviews. But this, in turn, increases the risk of schemes to make money from this...
Review reviews, and give out best reviewer awards.
Punish repeated rejects with a delay to make spamming costly.
Put a limit on the number of submissions per author and year (probably will just mean the submissions go elsewhere - so it may help a particular journal, but not the entire community)?
Ban financial incentives - if your country/university has such a direct financial incentive, you aren't allowed to submit to certain top journals. Then these bad incentives will be quickly abolished because they tend to also ask for top journals. But it may just make the payments become delayed or hidden... I don't know. I am not an expert on policy. These are just some ideas.

Contributing a point beyond other answers:
Different levels of effort going into the review leads to different outcomes.
Papers are often written such that on a first pass read, it's supposed to read "pretty good" even if a more critical deep read and/or check of references would expose gaping holes, serious methodological issues, and alternative explanations for the results observed.  Sometimes, an even more-effortful review can find that these issues don't actually matter in the particular case applicable to that specific paper (though the author should generally add this to the paper text itself).
While reviewers are incentivized to do a good job by the general knowledge that the system depends on that, specific instances are generally not incentivized and reviews sometimes get left to the last minute with a reviewer who's short on sleep and long on other tasks, who doesn't put in the effort for a good review.  Thus, the result could be very different than even the same paper getting reviewed by the same reviewer at a different time.  With no visibility into the factors affecting that outcome, it seems random.

The fundamental difference between grading GRE essays and reviewing scientific papers submitted for publication has been has been cogently discussed in several previous answers. The fundamental difference between reviewing grant applications and papers for publication has not.
Publications. When a paper is submitted to a journal it is usually supposed to be a finished product, or at least one finished step toward a defined goal. It is truly difficult
to find reviewers who are able to assess the importance of a paper and to
find every gap in reasoning or every imperfection in technique, but at least
reviewers of journal articles have the results of a piece of research at hand.
A potential Nobel paper may cover material so new or so far off the beaten track that it will be especially difficult to review fairly. A paper resubmitted after several years may have been based on procedures or techniques that have
been considerably refined in the meantime. So maybe they were state
of the art at the time of original submission, but are now 'seriously flawed' in terms of currently
available methods. So it is hardly surprising that reviewers don't score 100% on
those tasks.
However, even though reviewers are unpaid, overworked volunteers, working with no specialized training or feedback on the details of reviewing, I think it is surprising how well journal reviewing works in practice.
Grants. By contrast, making judgments about research grants is an entirely different
kind of activity. Some years ago (when US federal funding was available at a much higher level than it is now), I spent several years at a federal agency with a reasonably large budget for supporting basic and applied research in a variety of scientific fields. So I will try to address this part of the picture briefly. I will begin by saying that I am not at all surprised that a panel of research scientists would find the funding of NIH (or any other US government agency) to
be 'no better than a lottery'.
Generally speaking, if you know exactly what you are doing,
how long it will take, and how much it will cost, you're not doing research. Reviewers can often be useful, in assessing a proposer's track record of success and providing a rough idea whether the proposer is competent to
undertake research in a particular area. (I should add that most program directors are well aware of the standards, biases, foibles, and strengths of the reviewers they use. I was seldom surprised by the contents of a requested review, but the few surprises were extremely valuable.) However, reviewer input is only a part of the picture.
Going beyond reviewer input, program directors in granting agencies have to take other factors into account. To some degree they must consider
financial, political, and infrastructural factors. 'Political' usually means that that money was appropriated or donated
specifically to support a particular scientific goal. Infrastructural concerns
may center on developing technologies that are agency goals, training graduate students in fields where there are not enough researchers, whether the institution requesting the grant has the sophistication for adequate stewardship, and so on.
In the
US, agencies such as NIH, NSF, DoE, EPA, various defense agencies, and various privately funded foundations may have very different goals. However clearly these agency
missions and objectives may be spelled out in 'requests for proposals', they are often ignored by grant applicants, who might make a better case for their work if the
appropriate connections were made clear.
In spite of these constraints on awarding of grants, program directors strive to
support nothing but the highest quality science, and I believe they usually succeed at that. In my experience, almost all of them view themselves as scientists first and agency bureaucrats second.
Often their success is with the considerable help of reviewers, but sometimes not.

To address the aspect of:

The same paper resubmitted to the same journal after several years often ends up rejected due to 'serious methodological errors'

In about one third of the papers I reviewed, I identified fundamental flaws that could not be addressed by revising the paper (you would have to write a new paper instead). Some examples just to give you a taste:

The entire analysis was a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e., the result was an assumption.
An proposed characteristics was a roundabout way of measuring some much more trivial property. (This happened twice already.)
A proposed model ignores the dominant mechanism for what it is supposed to model.
The entire study was about understanding an artefact of a well-known beginner’s mistake (without identifying that mistake).

While I may have been wrong about these things, the authors never addressed my concerns, be it in a rebuttal or version of the paper published in another journal (which never happened in most of these cases) – which is something they should do even if I am wrong.
Now these issues may seem like they should have been easy to spot, but evidently they weren’t: I spotted some of these flaws only when writing up the actual review, and I witnessed (and performed) quite a few jaw droppings when discussing papers with co-reviewing colleagues¹ whom I knew to be thorough. Also, in some cases I saw reports of other referees who were otherwise exhaustive but did not spot the issues.
So, to conclude: Even fundamental flaws are difficult to spot. A given reviewer only has a comparably small chance to spot a given flaw in a paper. Therefore there is a considerable chance that all of the reviewers fail.

¹ Yes, that’s a thing in my field and fully accepted by the journals.

I am curious about the "discussing papers with co-reviewing colleagues" part, since (as I mentioned in my answer) that is absolutely not a thing in my field (mathematics).  (Although in fact, in my field the most common number of referees is one.)  How does that work?

@PeteL.Clark: Essentially, a referee is allowed seek the input of colleagues as long as they ensure that the reviewed material is kept confidential and name the additional reviewers when submitting the review (policy example). Typically, an advisor takes an advisee onto the team.

When I was in grad school in computer science I noticed a few challenges in the paper review process. Most of these things I observed through the experiences of others:

Journals and conferences use the community of prior authors to review papers. The people who publish the most are working very hard. They may not be able to devote enough time to review a paper well. If the material in the paper is novel, unfamiliar, dull, highly technical, or lacking clarity then those factors make it less likely to be reviewed carefully.
The reviewer who was originally selected by the publication may hand the review task off to a graduate student. The student may just be learning to read and digest research papers in the field. If the material is difficult then the inexperienced reviewer may not be able to review it adequately and may not have learned to qualify their judgements according to their degree of understanding.
The most qualified reviewers often have strong viewpoints about the subject matter and may have a very different approach. The cognitive and emotional dissonance one feels when trying to understand the application of unfamiliar tools to familiar problems can be too much to overcome. Of course this hard work can lead to benefits for both parties when the process works.
A successful new approach can even be felt as threatening to other researchers or to the community as a whole. Real breakthroughs will disrupt the lines of research that others are pursuing. That is one reason that strong claims will be held to a higher standard of justification.
Authors compete for limited space in journals and conferences. I've heard authors say they feel a paper was rejected due to an unfair review by a self-interested rival. Of course they usually can't know this for sure.
Sometimes reviewers make valid comments but the strong emotional attachment the author feels to their work causes them to reject the feedback. This can deadlock the process, making it difficult to get work published due to uncorrected flaws, even when the work is strong. I have read about this happening even to some famous papers.

Publishing papers is an essential professional activity for most of the authors, but reviewing papers is an act of community service. That sums up a lot of the specific problems.