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On scientific questions and proofs
For what purposes do scientists make questions and prove them? What questions are allowed in sciences? If a person proves a question and they want to publish it, what are the criteria for the acceptance of their work from the journal? Personally, I think I have a wrong view of what is and what is not allowed to ask as a question in the sciences and what is accepted from scientific journals.
What are the criteria for evaluating the value of each scientific work, perhaps in comparison with other scientific works? If a person's scientific work is rejected from scientific journals, could they keep it at their house somewhere, so that it will not go to waste?
If it is allowed you could add some links at your answer to help me read the answers to these questions.
I am an undergraduate math student, I do not have any scientific research experience but I read some papers sometimes that are more advanced than what is at the undergraduate courses. I also read some pdfs from the internet or other scientific books.

"If a person proves a question" A question cannot be proven.  Do you mean "if a person proves a statement"?

@JRN, I mean answering a question by proving or proving a statement or a conjecture.Otherwise in sciences if you don't prove or at least have evidence for your answer how can it be accepted?

Some rough ideas about what you are asking can be obtained over time by attending some of your department's social activities (afternoon "teas", Friday afternoon gatherings -- 2 of the 4 graduate math programs I've attended had this, etc.) and attending some of your department's seminars, and in doing so you may also begin "getting to know" some of the graduate students and the more approachable faculty. Also by reading various autobiographies/biographies such as "Adventures of a Mathematician" by Ulam, "Genius" by Gleick, "Random Curves" by Koblitz, "Birth of a Theorem" by Villani, etc.

Thank you Dave L. Renfro for your comment and help.

First, you say you study math, but you are asking about science. They are not the same. In math we seek proof, but in science it is evidence that we are after.
One consistent view of math is that it is a completely human creation and works with well defined assumptions (axioms) and methods of proof (logic). That makes it a closed system, where "proof" means provably consistent with the axioms using agreed upon proof rules.
Science is very different, since it attempts to answer questions about the observable universe, which doesn't have an agreed upon definition. It just is. We observe gravity. We attempt to measure it. We make hypotheses about it and search for evidence that our hypothesis is correct. But that isn't proof. Einstein comes along and changes the game, with new hypotheses and new evidence which is "hopefully" more accurate than that which Newton supplied.
At one time the universe was (thought to be) composed of atoms (indivisible units). Now we have quarks and such. How do we explain those. We can't actually prove our hypotheses, but we can supply evidence of various sorts. But a scientist will always admit the possibility that someday someone will supply a more accurate (closely measurable) understanding of "stuff".
But that isn't like the Pythagorean Theorem, which, once proved, stands for all time, unless we change the underlying axioms, in which case we are studying something fundamentally different.
There are no questions that are "off limits" in either math or science. But there are questions that are more valuable when asked and proof (math) or evidence (science) is provided.
The valuable questions are those that provide insight into their domains. Special Relativity did that. The Derivative did that. They help us ask the next question in both math and science.
To build a math or scientific career, however, you need to value "answerable" questions so that you don't get stuck. For that, a novice, perhaps an undergraduate, normally needs a guide to lead them to the edge of what is "known" in either field. But the meaning of "known" also differs. In math, it is something provable from the axioms. In science it is something with sufficient evidence that it becomes generally accepted (for the moment) by experts. Note that Special Relativity wasn't immediately accepted in the scientific world. It took time to gather the evidence.
In both math and science we seek a kind of "truth" though it is different in the two domains and approached in different ways.
Journals seek to publish novel work. That is, work that is new in some way and beyond the ordinary. They have no interest in publishing proofs of student exercises, for example, as the techniques are well known and the results unlikely to provide new insights to experts. Similar, in physics, a new theory might seem "interesting" and the methodology of providing evidence might provide insight into other problems of the day. In science, even something new but as yet unexplainable, might be interesting enough for publication. If something unexpected pops up at CERN, for example, folks want to know about it even before a coherent explanation is found.

so, in my case how could I make answerable questions that are accepted from scientific journals if they are provided with evidence or proof?Should I try to answer questions or problems that are already stated from others? Is insight the only criterion that makes a question valuable or are there other criteria? Should i wait until I get my degree, then get  a master's degree and then a doctorate degree or try and start from now to make questions and answer them?

That isn't something to be answered in general. Find an advisor/guide with more experience and background and ask them for a problem to attack. If a question is open (stated by others) it is probably very hard. Take small steps at the start to build up your own insight. I got some insight into math (especially calculus) by solving hundreds of standard problems by hand (no computer or calculator) at one point so I began to see the relationships in real functions. But, true insight into the very nature of math didn't come until I already had a doctorate.


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How to cite from a website using Mendeley properly?
Today I try to cite the news about the first person getting vaccinated all over the world from this link.
When I used the Mendeley extension from Google Chrome to cite the article in my word document, it shows as:

After one year since the beginning of the pandemic, since a UK
grandmother receiving the first COVID-19 vaccine shot in the world
(Anon n.d.).
Anon. n.d. “Covid-19 Vaccine: First Person Receives Pfizer Jab in UK -
BBC News.” Retrieved August 19, 2021
(https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55227325).

In another academic paper, I saw the same paper being cited as (BBC, 2021).
I am wondering whether the way that Mendeley cites the newspaper in my case is correct?

This has nothing to do with Mendeley. The correctness of the given citation depends on the citation format you are using.

This difference has to do with the referencing style, the reference type, or the fields that have been inputted in Mendeley. If your website reference is not being displayed as you would like it to be, you may have to adjust the reference style within the MS Word Plugin. In addition, Mendeley does not always recognize the correct 'type' for a reference. You can adjust this by going to the 'Details' tab on the right side, and selecting the 'Type' dropdown menu. Here, you can change the type to 'Web Page' or whichever is most fitting, and this may change how the reference appears. Lastly, you may have to manually input information into fields such as 'Authors' or 'Year' (e.g. BBC and 2021) to fill in any missing information that Mendeley may not have automatically extracted from the article. I find that Mendeley is much more accurate at pulling metadata from journal articles than from news articles or websites.

Great answer! A screenshot or two illustrating where various menus/tabs/etc appear on the screen might be helpful as well. I know you've described it, but a visual might be useful for some.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Am I allowed to post screenshots of tables/figures of my paper on Twitter?
I always share my research on twitter and like to summarize my results in a short thread. In these threads, I usually add screenshots of figures or tables showing the results. However, I was wondering: what if my paper is not open access - am I still allowed to share these screenshots?

A workaround for next time is to submit the manuscript to a preprint service before submission to the journal. A majority of journals these days have provisions for this. Then you just share the figure / table from the preprint.

@Ian, not all journals will publish something that has appeared previously in preprint form. Be careful.

This may be explicitly addressed by your agreement with the publisher.

This is a quite interesting question. I have to admit I do the same thing (as do many others) and never really considered the copyright implications until now.
Practically speaking: yes, you can almost certainly do it. Many people do it, the administrative staff of publishers is often aware and frequently openly encourages any talk about your paper on social media, including the posting of snippets or figures (especially if accompanied by a link to the published manuscript). In the grand scheme of things the free marketing value almost certainly vastly exceeds any potentially lost business from paid article downloads (which aren't even the primary source of income for most publishers to start with). What I am trying to say is that even if posting outtakes of your paper is against the copyright agreement with the publisher (which is not entirely clear, see below), the publisher doesn't have much incentive to take action against it, and I am at least not aware of any case of a publisher taking action. Doing so would also be spectacularly bad marketing for attracting future contributions.
Purely from a copyright point of view: it really depends on what agreement you have signed with the publisher upon paper acceptance, and what you are sharing.
In my (non-lawyer) opinion sharing summaries of papers has to be ok all the time, since ideas cannot be protected (only the specific words and representations in the paper). For figures, tables, screeenshots, or long direct quotations the story may be different.
As for the agreement: the agreements of different publishers vary, and some publishers even let you select among different copyright models. For example, ACM offers (next to their open access model) two different closed-access models, one where you transfer copyright to them and one where you retain copyright but offer them an exclusive license to print, distribute, and sell your article free of charge. For the latter, you are definitionally in the clear, since the copyright for your article stays with you (and you are free to do whatever you want with your material, except give some other entity a similar license to the one you have given ACM). For the former, it's a bit less clear to me, and will depend on whether what you share could still count as fair use - small quotations and key results should be ok, but entire tables might be stretching the fair use argument.

I think the first part of this is too facile and possibly misleading to the OP. And the (not lawyer) part may not apply to figures, which are complete in themselves and are particular expressions covered by copyright. They aren't "small quotations" if they convey a lot of information - which is their specific intent. A figure within a larger work can be construed as a "complete work", independent of the containing work. I advise caution.

Information is not subject to copyright, minimally creative expression of information is.

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


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When do I know if a conference is predatory?
I have just started my PhD in Biomedical Engineering 2.5 months ago and started doing some simulations.
My hope is that I at least have some publishable preliminary results, and have at least one publication of any sort (be it in a conference or journal) by the end of the year.
I do understand that at this stage it is very likely to be preliminary results, and as such I thought it appropriate to submit to a conference rather than a journal. However,
the major conferences in the field I am interested in have deadlines very soon and I definitely won't have time to finish anything to submit by then.
Fortunately (?), I did find another conference much later in the year that I think I will have time to submit something for, but my supervisor did not know of it.
I am worried if it is a predatory conference.
However, it is still a conference organised by a branch of IEEE-EMBS, and it has been recurring within the same country every 2 years.
Could I see any other signs that it could be a predatory conference, or just a smaller conference?
It doesn't have 'International' in the name.
Their previous conferences mostly have papers submitted by people from the same country, but do seem to have a few papers from researchers of reputable universities from their neighbouring countries.
TIA!

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9362/how-can-i-determine-whether-a-conference-is-reputable Does this answer your question?

Congratulations on securing a PhD position. You just started with your PhD, why the rush? There will be plenty of opportunities to present your work in the next four years. It is good to have goals early on, yet they should not overwhelm you.

@Allure yes that's really helpful. Thanks!

@Dr.M Very true!

but my supervisor did not know of it. I am worried if it is a predatory conference.

Putting aside whether it is predatory, this is probably not a good sign for publishing there! :)
Conference quality varies, and is very field-specific. The best thing that you can do at an early stage, before you are aware of the major conferences or journals in your area, is to trust your supervisor's judgment on what conferences they would usually publish in.
From that perspective, I think that "predatory" is a very low bar. Given the situation you describe, you rather want a conference that is not necessarily top/competitive, but which is respected and which will reach other readers who are interested in your work. Often, this can be a workshop or a smaller conference, but it should be one organized by someone you or your supervisor knows, or that you otherwise have good reason to believe is a beneficial venue for your work.

The only major caveat to that is that if you're working at the intersection between your supervisors fields and another field, there may be good conferences in the other field that they don't know.  I'd hope in that case you have academic support from the other field, giving you someone else to discuss with, but not necessarily.  A lesser factor is small conferences that tend to attract attention from a fairly limited geographical area where you're not.  They can be very useful, but could escape your supervisor's attention; they're more likely to lead to interesting discussions than citations


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Which countries allow you to become an Assistant Professor (in CompSci) with just a Masters
I am a PhD student in Computer Science currently ABD, hoping to become an Assistant Professor.
I'm concerned that I might be unable to complete the PhD (for reasons unrelated to my ability).  I've heard that in certain countries (namely Argentina) only require a Bachelors to teach at a University.  Which makes me wonder:
Where can one (realistically, not in theory) teach at a University (as a tenure-track professor) without a PhD?  (Straight out of graduate school at a U.S. institution)

Are you asking about the "trivia" of what's theoretically possible, i.e., no law against hiring non-PhDs as tenure-track professors? Or are you asking about places where this is a realistic option? Either way, such questions are tricky because it's hard to prove a negative, and also because most of our user base is only familiar with North American and European academia.

Not to mention that some people get promoted from lower positions to assistant professor after being at their institution for a while.

If you get an answer here, be sure you understand what the terms university and tenure mean in those systems. Places that don't require a Ph.D. for Assistant Professors may have different ideas about those concepts too. I am not saying "worse", just "different".

Not exactly the question you asked, but: some universities may be quite happy to hire someone who has a Masters and substantial relevant industry experience. (Especially if a department sees itself as focussing on 'training students to go into industry' rather than 'academic study for the sake of study'!)

I don't think it's country dependent, I think it's university dependent. Also, it depends on other qualifications. E.g. there is no law in the USA that you have to have a PhD to be a professor (of any rank). I have had professors who did not have PhDs.

@CameronWilliams: promoted from what position?  Adjunct?

@cag51: I'm talking about what's practically possible, not theoretically.  I edited the question to make that more clear.    And yes, I'm wondering about places outside of North America/Europe.

@BenjyStrauss Typically not from adjunct, but I know people who got promoted from full time instructor to assistant professor.

Since it is not a direct answer to your question, I am posting it as a comment. In the USA, try checking out job postings titled "professor of practice". Sometimes, the minimum requirements for such positions assume master's degree. For instance, my department has recently posted such a job opening. My department, however, is not related to CS.

Just curious, why might you be ABD (which I understand as "all but dissertation"), but not be able to complete the PhD?

Hypothetically: trouble finding a suitable advisor, with some financial reasons.  (But mostly the former).  Keep in mind this is strictly hypothetical.

The question is impossible to answer because it is "possible" to become a professor without a PhD in nearly every country. In the US, for example, many job adverts for professor positions require "a PhD in X or comparable qualification". A comparable qualification may be having a Masters and many years in industry. It's just not very common for this to happen, even if it's possible.
The question for you to answer is whether you are so outstanding that a university (in the US, or anywhere else) would hire you at your current stage in your career when there are plenty of others that are at the same stage but have a PhD. The answer is "probably not", unless you are truly special (which almost all of us are not), and that has nothing to do with whether it's legal or not to hire someone without a PhD: Pretty much every university in high- and middle-income countries has a sufficient supply of candidates with a PhD to choose from. (I suspect that that may not be true for countries in the developing world, but don't have enough insight there).
So in the end, when you say "I might be unable to complete the PhD (for reasons unrelated to my ability)" then I would say "You're dead in the water for faculty positions". I will also say that pretty much everyone (myself included) will not believe when you say "unrelated to my ability". You have to have exceedingly rare extenuating circumstances that would justify not finishing a PhD; in practice, all cases I know of where someone left ABD was very much about the abilities and priorities of the person in question, and that will definitely call into question your qualification to become a professor.

I see…  Well, whether you (or anyone) believes me or not, that's not part of what I was asking.  That's a given as part of the question.
What I'm talking about is in practice, not theoretically, (and I updated the question to say this) and I was wondering about countries less well-off than those in the western world.

In actual practice, you might have to go to 3rd world countries then. Places like Argentina have an infinite supply of PhDs interested in these jobs. Regarding the other question: if I don't believe that not finishing the PhD has nothing to do with you, it is likely that others don't either. The point I wanted to make is that while you perhaps think that this is not relevant, I do think that it is.

+1, but I imagine even 3rd world countries will probably have little interest in making a professor out of a random person who doesn't know the language or culture, and doesn't even have a PhD. As an arbitrary example, the University of Ghana Physics Department is staffed entirely with PhDs. Even for non-tenure-track positions, there is just such a surplus of PhDs that it rarely makes sense to choose someone who (for whatever reason) did not successfully complete a PhD.

@WolfgangBangerth I wasn't asking about getting people to believe me.  Rather, the notion that I was believed was part of the premise of the question.  I see how you would come to that misunderstanding, however

For reference, the notions of "first / second / third world nations" is a holdover from the Cold War (the first world is the US, western Europe, and aligned nations; the second world is the communist bloc nations, and the third world is everyone else), and are not really considered appropriate labels anymore.  I believe that "developing nations" or "nations in the Global South" are somewhat more acceptable.  NPR has an interesting discussion of this.

@XanderHenderson That's a fair point. Thanks for pointing it out.

@BenjyStrauss "Rather, the notion that I was believed was part of the premise of the question." You are asking: can I realistically do X, but also postulating an unrealistic premise as part of the question. This does not make sense. Part of the reason why this scenario is unrealistic is that many/most people will not believe this premise. Note that the solution is not "if I get a chance to explain at length my special circumstances and back them up with evidence, then people will believe me". It's very unlikely that you would get a chance to explain at length your special circumstances.

@AdamPřenosil: I can see why you're confused. However getting hung up on that detail is missing the point of why I asked the question, and results in answers that (to me) are entirely useless. What you believe about me or what my situation may or may not be is immaterial.
I did not disclose my specific situation so people would not get hung up on this detail, but people went and immediately assumed I was talking about my own situation, as opposed to, persay, a story I'm writing.
TLDR: please waive what parts of the premise you consider unrealistic and go from there.

@BenjyStrauss Perhaps part of the reason why people "went and immediately assumed" you were talking about your situation is that you do in fact phrase the question as concerning your own situation? You cannot ask "my situation is blah blah, can I do such and such?" and then say "oh gee, I wonder why people went and assumed that I was talking about myself". In any case, the same point applies to "a story you are writing", so I don't really see how it matters. Also, people are not hung up on this, it's just one additional thing among several things that make the scenario unrealistic.

Finally, you are very clearly misunderstanding Wolfgang's point as well as mine if you think this is about what we believe about you. It's not. It's about what the people considering your application will believe about you.

@AdamPřenosil: No, actually I'm not misunderstanding Wolfgang's point – I got it.  It's just not relevant to the question I asked.  (And I don't expect you to believe me, but it really doesn't matter.)  People sure seemed hung up on it, but that's part of the problem with communicating via text – a lot of the actual meaning gets lost.

While I don't know of their current practice, several top tier universities in the US (did) hire such people for special roles, though they aren't tenured. But, Duke, for example, and several others, have a position called something like "Professor of the Practice", and I know some masters only people that hold such positions. They work on long contracts but without tenure. They are teaching faculty in the undergraduate program. Research has value there, but it might be pedagogical rather than theoretical in nature. I believe that CMU and Stanford have similar positions - or did.
I don't think this is widespread but it exists. And you need to show some serious mastery of teaching to be considered for such positions.

Where can one (realistically, not in theory) teach at a University (as
a tenure-track professor) without a PhD? (Straight out of graduate
school at a U.S. institution)

This is not realistically anywhere. Even if possible, you will compete with PhDs and/or professionals with many years of experience. Professorships are competitive even in the Global South and the bar is high, do not fool yourself, we have good researchers too.

Where can one (realistically, not in theory) teach at a University (as a tenure-track professor) without a PhD? (Straight out of graduate school at a U.S. institution)

Technically, universities hire MFAs and similar terminal, non-doctoral degrees into tenure track positions, but I don't think these are degrees you're talking about.
So, what universities  will hire people without terminal degrees?
A university that cannot find people with PhDs to fill tenure track positions.
Historically (even as recently as the 1960s and 70s based upon the older faculty at my undergraduate university), many universities in the United States did not require PhDs to be on faculty, only an MS degree.
As the number of PhD increased, these hires became increasingly rare.
At the present, some small liberal arts universities might hire tenure track faculty without PhDs and community and technical colleges will hire people without PhDs, if they are good at teaching.
Some of these positions are tenure track like.
Likewise, professors of practice do not always need a PhD, but these positions require professional experience (something the Straight out of graduate school at a U.S. institution seems to suggest you do not have).
I think your key limitation is "Straight out of graduate school at a U.S. institution.

Thank you, your answer is helpful.  academia.stackexchange won't let me upvote, so I'm leaving this as a comment.


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Proper keywords before peer review
What are the correct terms for potential theorems and proofs before they have been affirmatively reviewed, do I use "hypthesis" or "proposition" for what would be "theorem" after peer review has confirmed correctness?
What about the proof part; are there any special keywords that could be used for what would be a proof if its correctness has been affirmed in a peer review?
As a concrete hypothetical example lets assume I think I have found a proof that general matching reduces to assignment and want to publish that on arXiv, should I formulate the result and a potential proof as a theorem/proof pair or should I use some other keyword pair until correctness has been decided upon in a review process?
The reason for asking is that I plan my first submission to arXiv and want to prevent readers from misconceptions about the reliability of the results.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

I think your usage of 'keywords' here is a bit unusual. That is often used for words used in the metadata (i.e. outside the manuscript) to tag your submission to journals and sort it among other topics. But here, it seems you're using it for what phrasing to use in the paper. On another note, why do you consider your results unreliable to the point you're unwilling to call them theorems?

If you are claiming that something is a theorem, then you should call it a theorem. You are misunderstanding the peer review process if you think that going through a formal peer review process is either necessary or sufficient for something to be a theorem (or even, which is presumably what you have in mind, for something to be accepted as a theorem within a mathematical community).
A theorem is a theorem even if it never goes through peer review. A false proof is a false proof even if it does make it through peer review (and many do).
Yes, part of the reason why peer review exists is indeed to prevent the publication of false results, but this in no way implies that you cannot call something a theorem unless it has gone through peer review.
Finally, note that "proposition" and "theorem" are roughly synonymous, the distinction being that a proposition is presumably less important or less difficult to prove than a theorem.

The reason for asking is that I plan my first submission to arXiv and want to prevent readers from misconceptions about the reliability of the results.

If you don't think your results are reliable, you should not publish them even on arXiv. By the way, if you are uncertain about whether your results hold, don't count on peer review to confirm this. If there is a mistake in your proof, a referee might spot it, if you are lucky, but it is equally possible that they will not.

And, to add to the last sentence, if the referee does not spot the mistake and the mistake gets published, then the readers of the paper will blame the author for the mistake, not the referee.


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Do rediscoveries justify publication?
I have found a new solution for a problem in Computational Geometry but after intensive research learned that the key idea was already known in a different field of mathematics but also hard to find in the literature of that field.
Question:  What are criteria that allow one to decide whether or not to publish results that are based on the rediscovery of a result that is known but not in field that the intended publication is targeted at?

Here's a relevant older answer: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/20024/17254

Please don't use quote formatting for things that aren't quotes.

Not a hard rule, but an illustrative example: The trapezoid rule for finding the area under a curve was initially discovered in Babylon, c200 BCE, was republished by Newton c1670, and again by Tai (1994). And as crazy as it seems that Tai thought this was original (and named it after herself), the fact that it made it through review suggests that the method was sufficiently unknown in her field that the paper served a useful purpose.

Since you asked if this can be publishable, and did not specify beyond that, I will discuss the possibility of publishing an expository article.  You have a new technique for people in Computational Geometry.  If people in your field have a hard time reading in the other field, you will do a great service by translating this into familiar notation and terminology.  This may not count in some scheme your dean uses to gauge productivity, but it might gather a multitude of citations.
Of course it might be publishable as a research paper, or part of a research paper.  If you are not about to apply for tenure, you have the option of sitting on this for a while.  See what problems you can solve with this that cannot be solved by the current techniques in your field.  Solve something not yet solved.  Then you have a section on the technique that is new to your field and can showcase the solved problem to get that "look at me mama" section in your paper.  If the new technique only makes a few existing problems a bit easier, then this is maybe not a eureka moment.

"If the new technique only makes a few existing problems earlier, then this is maybe a eureka moment." should this be "If the new technique only makes a few existing problems earlier, then this is may not be a eureka moment."?

A nice recent example of a successful re-discovery is https://doi.org/10.1090/bull/1722  - Terrence Tao and his co-authors found out that their supposed discovery of an identity about eigenvectors and eigenvalues is actually a re-discovery and then did the work to examine the context of the rediscoveries and unite the literature. I think there is a broad agreement that this was a worthwhile project.

@ACarter Thanks.  I think I fixed it now.

A "pure" rediscovery of known ideas (meaning, when literally the exact thing you discovered was already known) is not publishable, because it is not new knowledge.
HOWEVER. It is not uncommon for rediscoveries to be not "pure", where the researcher comes at a problem from a somewhat different point of view from the people who came before, and discovers some combination of "known" and "new" things. For example:

You found a new proof of a known theorem. That could certainly be publishable (depending on how interesting the theorem is, and how interesting and different from the original proof the new proof is).

You found a new application of a known theorem. (Bonus points: you found a new application in a different field from the field the theorem was considered important/well-known in.)

You found a new insight or point of view relating to known theorems; e.g., you noticed that known Theorem A is a special case of known Theorem B, where that wasn't known before, or some other previously unnoticed relationship between known results.

Etc.

It seems impractical to categorize all the possible ways in which a rediscovery can be argued to have sufficiently novel elements to make it publishable. The point is, there has to be something about what you did that you can try to "market" as novel. And your novelty argument has to actually be convincing to at least some people. In my opinion, "hard to find in the literature of that field" is not a convincing argument. (If you are bothered by something being hard to find, post it on your web page. Or translate it from French to English and post the translation on your web page, as I once did with a "hard to find" paper.) The argument "this was known, but in a different field of mathematics" is also a bit iffy IMO (although I can see contexts where it might offer a bit of support to your overall publishability argument). But even setting aside these particular arguments, it's possible that you can find some other way to argue successfully that what you did has some novel elements and should be published.

FWIW "hard to find in the literature" with a relatively low bar for what that means, can STILL be plenty of reason to post on to ArXiV so that at least other folks find the results more quickly.

The usual criteria for publication in math is novelty (something new) and significance (something worth knowing). But there are two aspects, since proofs, themselves, not just theorem statements, carry information and can guide future progress.
So, while it remains a judgement call by reviewers and editors, a known theorem might be worth publishing if the proof is new and results in some insights that help push the art forward. Proofs can be more valuable than the theorems themselves, in this way. Proofs are, perhaps, a methodology, and are especially valuable when the ideas in them can be applied elsewhere.
One way to think of theorems and proofs is that the theorems are the milestones but the proofs represent the progress made to get to that point. And there may be many "interesting" paths to reach a given milestone with things to learn along each path.
So, yes, but it is a judgement call as in most things offered for publication.

In other words, sometimes it's the journey, not the destination.

This also means that you would have to get the emphasis in the new paper on the aspects which are novel, which may be not so straightforward if it is not the final result. There has to be something novel, after all, and still convincing a journal to publish may be hard. It could be a nice exercise in scientific writing.

Also: expository works, for things that are not so easily found, as sounds like the OP's situation.

If you have a new application, it's still a perfectly good addition to the literature, especially if you've done significant work to demonstrate why it's applicable.
Our company (in conjunction with the UK National Physical Laboratory) recently did some work to apply Chebyshev polynomials to correcting positioning errors in 2D and 3D positioning systems. There was nothing new in the use of Chebyshev polynomials for a mathematician, but the engineering community were not familiar with them as a more numerically stable method of applying a nonlinear mapping. We also needed to demonstrate that this correction method was indeed supported by the data, and even more interestingly, that we could reduce the data required to a practical level for manufacturing.
All of that warranted publication of a paper with our results, even though the maths of it was nothing at all new.

A new application of a theory seems different than a rediscovery. I'd guess this is pretty common in applied fields.


text:
If a journal publishes my article against my will, do they have the right to request a publication charge?
Three years ago, I submited my paper to a journal. On their website there was an impact factor. After submitting my work, I discovered that the stated impact factor is not official and the journal does not exist on the PubMed database. So, I decided to withdraw my article from the journal. The journal refused to release my work. Even though I have not signed on author rights and not payed the manuscript publication fees, the journal published the manuscript by force. As I could not change the situation and there were no corrections and I knew that we might fall to learn more I left the matter be.
After about three years of forced publication of my work illegally in that journal, the journal send me a request to pay their money after the forced publication.
Is that logical? Please, inform me of the solution for this trouble? Does the journal that stole my work have rights?

Out of curiosity, did they review the paper( or claim to have done so)?

Please don’t write answers in comments. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, as well as having other problems detailed on meta. Comments are for clarifying and improving the question; please don’t use them for other purposes. Existing answers in comments and other extended discussion has been moved to chat.

What part of the world are you (and the journal) located in?

The Journal is Indian Journal

It is just their "business model". I suggest that you ignore them. If they insist, then ask that the paper be retracted. Apparently you still hold copyright.
However, IANAL, and don't know what legal remedy they might have. If you can reconstruct the complete history of correspondence with them it would be useful.

+1, Just ignore them. No use to write emails asking for retraction. Your problem is only in that you cannot send it to another, better journal.

Can they just give the case over to a collections agency? Those are also prone to go to great lengths to try to bully money out of you, even if the debt has sketchy legal standing.

I don't know the law where you are, but they might try to do that. In the worst case you need to seek advice from a lawyer. But a collection agency needs to obey the laws. They can't just extort you.

@Buffy: They certainly can extort you -- they wield the implied threat of destroying your credit rating. I have had this happen to me (but not in an academic context), and it cost me a lot of time and worry to sort it out.

legal remedy probably includes suing them for unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work. Whether it's useful, I can't say.

@user253751, agreed, but suits can be expensive unless there is something like a "small claims court" that can be appealed to. And, the mere threat of a suit usually goes nowhere since it is often done, but seldom successful.

You're dealing with a predatory journal. Rights and logic don't apply to predatory journals.
You refuse to pay and tell them to retract the article if they wish.

Rights and logic still absolutely apply to predatory journals.  The journals will lie to you about rights, and justify it with faulty logic — but that makes it all the more important to be aware of what the rights and logic really are.

@PLL it's as if Allure has never heard of Bad People doing Bad Things, like threaten and lie.

I had a similar situation. I did not know it was a predatory journal.
As Allure wrote, refuse to pay even a penny and ask for a retraction.
Your only fault seems to be that you have submitted, as I did, without a thorough investigation of the journal.

Just what rights the journal has depends on the wording of the website and whatever terms you submitted your work under. A valid contract, at least in US law, requires meeting of the minds and exchange of consideration. If you agreed to terms as a result of a false belief (e.g. you believed that the journal has an impact factor that it does not in fact have, and/or you believed that the journal was in the PubMed database), that can be grounds for invalidating any contract between you, depending on how reasonable it was for you to have and rely on that belief. If that false belief was deliberately induced by the journal, that likely constitutes fraud. If the publication of your paper does not benefit you, that is another grounds for invalidating the contract, as that would mean lack of consideration.


text:
Can a *reviewer* ask for the status of the paper that is reviewing?
So, I was asked to referee a paper for a reputed TCS journal which I did. I wrote my report within 3 months from invitation but I was waiting almost 6 more months till I get Editor's notification for the decision (sent to authors but also to myself as a referee).
The authors of that paper prepared a major revision and submitted within 3 weeks this new version, and I was asked by the editor to re-evaluate this newer version. I did, again within 3 months.
Now, more than 6 months have passed since I uploaded my report and still no news from the editor. When I login as a reviewer into the system I see: Status under review and Status Date to be the date I uploaded my recommendation.  From this I conclude that no new referee was asked and simply the 2nd referee is, again, very late with their report (6+3=9 months at least since we were asked to re-evaluate the new version).
Now, this is a very interesting, difficult and somewhat controversial, paper and I would realy like the authors to see and answer my comments/suggestions/questions as soon as possible. The more time passes, the more I forget about the paper and I would have to read it again and again in a possible 3rd round.

Question: Does it make sense for me, as a reviewer, to inquire with the editor about the status of the paper stating my above stated reasons? What would be, most likely, the reaction of the editor? Did this ever happened? Or should I simply stay silent since this is not my paper?

Note that I do not plan to have time after September, due to many commitements, to dedicate myself on re-evaluating such a difficult paper so it is a matter of time (besides the obvious interest) for me and this is an issue that would affect my plan next semester when the other referee decides to send the report to go into the 3rd round.

One time I reviewed a paper for a reputed journal, where I found the paper very weak without any contribution and it should be rejected. I did not get informed by the editor after submitting my review with detailed comments. A few months later, I accidentally found it accepted and published without even contacting me to check whether my comments are responded. The problem is that the editor is keeping asking me to review other papers. What I want to say is that the editor has the full right to not asking you for reviewing the revised manuscript. Even if this sounds wasting of reviewer's time.

@John I understand. But notice that the Status of the manuscript, in my case, is stuck at Under review and the date is the one I submitted my review. So, the only explanation is that the 2nd reviewer is tardy. Anyway, the main question is: could/should I ask the editor what s/he plans to do with that paper, assuming my hypothesis is correct?

I did not to respond to your question in a direct way so that you can assess the situation from my example. Of course, you can contact the editor, but in your position, I do not want to hear that they just skipped my comments because they want to increase the acceptance ratio (You can not make sure that this is the case but you cannot neglect it as well). I would suggest you wait until you are asked to review the paper again and if you feel then that your review won't be as high as expected, you suggest to ask another reviewer for better assessment.

One more thing, may be the authors are asking for an extension. In my last paper, I asked for one and half months extension because I had other academic activities. The editor was very understanding, especially because reviewers asked for a really major revision.

Some journals allow you to mark yourself as "unavailable for refereeing" for a particular period of time in their online reviewing portal.  You might want to see if this journal allows you to do so;  even if this review process gets done on time, it'll save the editors the trouble of sending other papers to you when you're too busy to review them.

In my opinion, it is ok to politely ask the editors about anything, as long as you can (and do) explain sensibly why you ask, and as long as you don't demand it. Such requests shall be at worst considered odd or unusual.
In this case, I think it is in the best interest of everyone involved for you to let the editor know about your timing issue (and the sooner the better). The most probable outcome is that the editor will still wait for the second reviewer, because otherwise the authors could think answering your demands should be enough to get their paper accepted, and they could get pissed off if other demands arrive later from the second referee. Even if there is no such misunderstanding, they could prefer to dive in their paper to correct it once rather than twice.
However, letting the editor know might prompt them to push the second reviewer a bit, possibly speeding up the process. They might also decide to go with your sole report. In any case, once the editor has all relevant info on their hand, they can choose the most appropriate course of action.

Thanks for the answe. I am aware that such a request coming from a reviewer is unusual, I wanted to be sure how odd/unusual might sound and if anybody had any similar experiences. I will write a message to the editor to explain my situation. In the worst case, as you say, s/he will reply that s/he waits the 2nd report from the tardy ref.

I'm sure the editor is no more happy than you about the delays, so I'm not sure that your ping will help... but they can't hurt.   I think the solution is to decline to rereview in the event it makes another round.  Some journals won't do more than one round of revisions anyway.

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


text:
Do citations have to be put in context?
When citing, does it have to be obvious from the sentence or placement of the citation what exactly is being cited or why the citation is there? Sometimes I feel like people cite things such that you can only figure out why there is a citation after reading the cited article. Is that ok or should the purpose of a citation be obvious from the text?
E.g. should

In the field of bla {cite bunch of reviews} people do lots of cool stuff.

be instead replaced by something like

In the field of bla people do lots of cool stuff. For recent reviews see {cite bunch of reviews}.

I would go for neither nor. "In the field of bla, people do lots of cool stuff, including blub [citation1, citation2], bubble [citation3], bauble [citation4] and other foo [citation 5, 6 and 7]."

I would suggest reading paper in your field to see how people write.

For what it's worth, the first variant seems clearer to me, at least if the citation does what it looks like. Written like that, I get the unequivocal impression that the cited "bunch of reviews" will tell me what the field of bla is about, if I don't already know that. In the second variant, it is not so clear - will the reviews tell me what bla is about? Or are they just there to provide me with a representative sample of reviews in the field of bla? Or does the author always point out the latest few review article on any mentioned field (representative or not), out of principle?

@skymningen I have a whole section of that afterwards. I plan to write this in my thesis intro and wanted to set the context first.

@O.R.Mapper thanks! I think that would be an acceptable answer even.

Bonus suggestion: For those of us who use something like APA, in the second example, please don't say, "For recent reviews see (Ajayi, 1994; Barnes, 2005; Martinez, 2008)." That's not how inline citations work.

Every paragraph has a purpose. The answer to your question depends on the purpose of your paragraph.
Clarity in academic writing is always good, but you should weigh whether being explicit is clarifying or obscuring the important points. "For recent reviews see {cite bunch of reviews}," may be fine if you want to direct the reader's attention to the existence of those reviews. Perhaps you're doing a metareview, or for some other reason want to track development of the literature.
But the terser version is cleaner if the existence of reviews is tangential to your point. The reader can investigate further if she wishes--hopefully the titles of your cited works make their purpose clear, so she's not digging around to figure out what they're about!--but she can also breeze past the citations to your main point. Extreme concision in citations is widely accepted. I've seen citations to my work (broadly, in interdisciplinary social science) where I was not entirely sure why the authors thought it was relevant!
So what is your paragraph trying to accomplish?

The example you mentioned seems ok. You are referring the reader to those papers which you mentioned their topics. This is generally acceptable.

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


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How can I evaluate whether a school has developed a poor reputation?
I'm a father trying to help my son understand his college options.
My son is looking at a liberal arts school in the United States that used to be quite competitive. From the college statistics web sites, I see that it now has a very high acceptance rate (>85%; although around 30% of students who are accepted attend). (The acceptance rate is high relative to what I consider to be the college's peer institutions.) I also know that, in the past ten years, there have been two scandals large enough to make the regional or national news (one with a racial component, one with a sexual component). I personally don't think that the scandals reflect any systematic issues, and I have no reason to think that the quality of instruction was affected. But I am wondering to myself whether the school hasn't developed a bad reputation of some sort.
If it has, then I would have these concerns:

Morale might be low on campus.
If the school has become less selective, then presumably that will lower academic standards.
If the school has a bad odor, it might make my son less attractive to job recruiters or graduate schools in the future.

What sources or resources can I use to evaluate whether this school has developed a poor reputation?

Do you have historic information on the actual acceptance rate, say 20 years ago or more? In any event, if there are other, reasonably similar options they might well be better.

@JonCuster I don't; and that's frustrating, because the U.S. government surely has the older data. They just haven't put it online.

Universities are typically quite large institutions, with lots of students, so two scandals in ten years would not generally cause an observer to believe that there is any systematic issue that would warrant a loss of reputation.  There are various sources you can consult to look at university rankings and reputations with respect to particular issues.  I will give you some examples here, but they are the tip of the iceberg.
University academic rankings: For US university rankings you could look at the US News and World Report, the Times Higher Education rankings, the QS Top Universities ranking, the Forbes university rankings, and many others.  (Some of these are only rankings for top universities, but some will include complete rankings on all colleges/universities within a broad scope.)  These rankings typically incorporate information about research, teaching and other academic issues, some of which may be far removed from the quality of instruction for an undergraduate student.
Reputation and rankings with respect to particular issues: With a bit of search work you can probably find some ratings and rankings of US universities from various lobby groups, usually with respect to some aspect of their mission.  For example, the educational advocacy group The Fire provide ratings and rankings of US universities with respect their policies and practices on academic freedom, free speech and due process.  Other advocacy organisations might provide ratings or rankings on other issues of importance to them.
News coverage of universities: Another way to examine university reputation is to look at news coverage (with standard caveats on believing what you read in the news).  News organs that comment specifically on higher education include the Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, US News (Education), EdSurge, CampusReform, University World News, The College Fix, The Diamondback, and many others.  Most of these news organs should allow you to do a search for articles pertaining to a particular college/university of interest.  So long as you are able to read the news with a critical eye, this may alert you to any systematic issues relating to the university that might be a concern.

There's a world university ranking that relies only on reputation: the THE World Reputation Rankings. That might be the resource you're looking for. The caveat is that last I saw, once out of the top universities, it's hard to rank university reputation because the differences are not significant.

This is not a complete answer to my question, but this website has compiled the U.S. News and World Report college rankings from the past thirty years or so. That makes it possible to observe trends in a college's ranking from that one source, at least.
https://andyreiter.com/datasets/

Since 1983, the magazine U.S. News and World Report has been ranking
US universities and colleges. While I do not in anyway endorse the
specific methodology used to construct these rankings, I know that
many academic institutions and scholars use these rankings in their
research and institutional assessment. I was in turn frustrated that
historical rankings were not easily available anywhere online. The
spreadsheets above contain all of the rankings from 1985-present for
liberal arts colleges and from 1984-present for universities.


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UK Masters Application: UG Exams missed due to illness: concerned about low degree grade percentage despite first class
I recently finished my undergraduate degree in the UK and am now applying for master’s programs. I performed pretty well in my degree and was expecting a first. Unfortunately, I missed two of my final exams due to illness. My tutor told me I’d likely need to retake them in August, but the university ultimately decided to award me a first-class degree without requiring the retakes. They also gave me a departmental prize.
While I'm obviously pretty pleased about that, the problem is that, in terms of masters applications, while my degree classification is a first, my percentage grade is around 63 because of the missed exams being 0. Some of the master’s programs I’m applying to are pretty competitive, so I’m worried that the lack of a high percentage grade might hurt my chances.
Any advice on how to handle this? Should I email admissions teams to explain the situation? If so, would it help to provide the grade with the affected modules excluded?

Your situation is going to be confusing to anyone familiar with the UK system. The standard rule is that a "first class degree" means an overall average mark of 70% or higher. If you are unable to sit summer exams due to illness the usual procedure is that you provide some sort of medical evidence and are allowed to retake them later in the summer.
Since your university is doing something unusual you should make certain that one of your academic referees explains it prominently in their reference letter.  That's the easiest way to get the information to the people making admissions decisions.  You can email the admissions team but it's likely they don't have a way of adding the content of your email to your application.  It won't be helpful to provide a grade with the affected modules excluded because that's not the grade you have.

it's not a good idea to accept this answer straight away - others may have better advice and be put off answering.  You can the green tick to unaccept.

It’s actually to the OPs advantage that their transcripts show zeros, this is an additional sign that this wasn’t a typical bad grade without extenuating circumstances (as might be the case for a 30 or 40 mark), and should mean anyone reviewing it is primed to look for additional information in references, cover letters or personal statements.

It's not THAT unusual.  Cambridge has always awarded degrees DDH (deemed to have deserved honors) in cases of missed exams.


text:
Career Development plan for university position
Certain academic job ads at the university request a Career Development Plan document. I have never heard about this. What should a document like this contain?

This is not an academic custom.  It's a corporate custom.

I think to answer this we need to know what other documents you are submitting.

Typical elements might be research directions, course development, grant writing ideas and such. Professional society membership and activity can also be important in some places.
Note that most universities have a three part expectation of faculty; research, teaching, service. Different universities have different ideas about the relative importance of each. Some will strongly favor research and others teaching. But the faculty expectation is normally closely aligned with what that university sees as its mission, which is normally multi-faceted.
Keep that in mind as you try to develop a plan for your "development".

Note that in my annual faculty evaluation (by the dean) I was always expected to give a plan for the coming year and my previous year plan was always discussed as to fulfillment. It had an impact on salary increments, mostly, but for those who don't produce much it can have other consequences. I think this may be fairly common.
But the advantage of such a system for faculty is that you can, with the dean's consent, pretty much define your own path.


text:
Applying to a Master's Program under special cirumstances
I know somebody who is applying to a Master's program in Computer Science. He has a learning disability and as an undergraduate, he got certain accommodations. One of then was extra time on tests.
He feels that when it comes to graduate school admissions, having a learning disability will help him get in. I think it will hurt his chances. Who is right?


text:
How to keep and organize a research journal/log/diary/notebook?
I have read in multiple places that it is a good practice as an academic to keep a research journal.
For example, Marie desJardins' paper How to Succeed in Graduate School: A Guide for Students and Advisors says:

Keeping a journal of your research activities and ideas is very useful.
  Write down speculations, interesting problems, possible solutions, random ideas, references to look up, notes on papers you've read, outlines of papers to write, and interesting quotes.
  Read back through it periodically.

My first attempt was to write my ideas in a log book.
I soon gave that up because the book would not always be with me when I wanted to write something in it, and because I knew eventually I would lose it and not be able to retrieve information from it.
My current approach is to write a huge LaTeX file which I store in the cloud.
In it, I chronicle my daily thoughts about my research project, to take notes of what is discussed in meetings with my adviser.
However, I simply feel overwhelmed by the volume of writing and the amount of repetition that I find in my research journal.
I also have other files which serve similar purposes.
For example, I have a file called results.pdf where I write out all my theorems and propositions and their proofs.

What have you tried and how has a research journal been of benefit to you?
Do you do all your "rough work" in a research journal, so that you can refer to it later?
What system do you use as your research journal?
Do you log all your experimental results into a chronologically organized research notebook? (Since I am not from a biology/chemistry/experimental background, I am curious as to how people who do lots of experiments manage to organize their results and ideas.)

Possible duplicate of this question-- http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/8002/7921

This is a very nicely written question!  But I think the answers to the other question apply to yours as well, and it would be unfortunate if new answers were placed here (instead of there), splitting the information into two places.

Thank you for your compliments. I didn't realize that there was a similar question. Since there is, it would be great if this question could be closed, but I can't do it myself.

Be aware that only you will ultimately be able to answer this question! Each individual works differently, so take the following cum grano salis.
As you've noted, a physical notebook does not always work well. Not only it is difficult to carry and easy to lose, it is also not easily searchable. (Despite this, I personally use a series of cheap notebooks and paper folders to enhance my thinking and contain random notes during the initial stages of research.) For many researchers, electronic files are the best alternative to paper. Your LaTeX file is a good beginning, and sounds like all you really need is a way to organize the huge mass of material now contained in a single file.
I would suggest breaking the file into several files, each containing a separate aspect of your current journal. How you organize this is ultimately up to you. Use the logic and structure that meshes with the way your brain works. Only one hard and fast rule: Never have a file labeled miscellaneous! This will end up catching all sorts of odds and ends and junk, and you will NOT be able to remember what the file actually contains.

I would say that each research project needs to have its own work log, and for a given day, it should have at most three lines to be manageable. Like A counter-example to the "green crocodile" theorem was found, see \input{counter_crocodile.tex}, with the actual work in that small LaTeX file (which you may get hundreds of, eventually, but as long as they are organized, and can be tracked, that would be OK).


text:
Having a paper in which the research question is not clear
As a young researcher in economics, I have already published 3 papers in decent journals. Is it sometimes normal to write a paper in which the research question is not clear at all, the motivation is lacking and also you do not understand where the problem in the paper is?
I have heard 2-3 times from various referee reports that my paper lacks motivation and I have already tried hard to handle these issues each time but I cannot see where the problem is. A paper of mine has been rejected several times and now I am questioning my ability to do research.

I think it's hard to comment without knowing your work - do you have an advisor to ask? Some categories of research without a motivating question are derided as fishing expeditions and can be a big methodological liability for a field. Or, maybe you're just having trouble articulating a question that's already part of your thought process.

I think the focus on research questions is misguided and of little use for publishing in high-level economics journals. You can take a look at papers published in top journals and ask yourself what the research question is. Often, it is unclear or irrelevant. Motivation is a broad and misleading term: Your motivation for doing research is irrelevant, the question is what motivates readers and referees. Why should they care?
Many papers have exactly the same research question: How does education impact earnings? Is there gender discrimination in wages? Under what conditions do Bewley models have recursive equilibria? How are financial shocks transmitted to the real sector?
If you want to get a paper addressing one of these questions published, you should convince referees and readers that you actually answer them in a better way; existing answers are unsatisfactory in some way: Previous econometric studies may not be able to control for some other factors, and your does. Other existence theorems require assumptions that rule out many popular function forms; your theorem does not. And so on. You have to connect your work to the existing literature and to how it falls short.
There is an excellent talk on writing academic papers by Larry McEnerney, long-term director of the University of Chicago's writing program, that addresses the topic of what motivates people to read papers and I strongly encourage watching it.

Just sort of a distinction, the research question being clear is a different idea from it lacking motivation. If I wanna study the impact of the minimum wage on employment, I could say this up front, but the study could still lack motivation if I don't justify why this particular case study is important or cool to learn about.
Even if the justification is small. Like in a current paper, I write at the end of the intro "The goal of this paper is to compare methods for donor selection with respect
to performance based metrics that SC researchers should care about...We believe these algorithms will be of use to policy analysts and statisticians who use SC more broadly."
Of course the meat of that justification follows from the preceding paragraphs, but either way, I say why the paper is worthy of econometricians to take note of. Honestly, I do this all the time. I model my writing style off papers that appear in my favorite econometrics journals (not completely of course), but I do seek to emulate that clear, concise, well stated style that top journals have. So I would read that if I were you, if it helps you write and organize better.

It is easy to understand rejections if your research question isn't clearly stated in the paper. The reader wants to know what to expect as an outcome.
It is easy to understand rejections if your motivation for the (well stated) research question isn't clearly stated in the paper. The reader wants to know why this question is important and what it will contribute to the field.
Perhaps you have just neglected to clearly state things that are actually clear in your head. You may be making assumptions about readers and their knowledge and motivations. You can probably correct that.
But if you are writing papers with no clearly defined research question or reason for asking it - doing unfocused research - then you may have a long way to go.
Expository papers are sometimes useful and may be publishable in some venues, but they aren't really research and are usually based on things known in the field, so don't tend to advance it.
Clarity is valued. Necessary.

Is it sometimes normal to write a paper in which the research question is not clear at all and the motivation lacks?

I'll echo @Bryan-Krause's comment ... maybe you're just having trouble articulating a question that's already part of your thought process.
At times, we get stuck in author-block mode. In that mode, we 'see' what we're writing but we are not articulating for the reader. However, in our mind, we believe we are. This is where advisor(s), mentor(s) or four-eye review comes in.
@Jared Greathouse gave a fantastic distinction between RQ and motivation in his answer.
Nonetheless, your RQ and/or objective should be evident even if blurry. I say either or both RQ and objective because in some discipline, the paper can have research objectives only, dropping the RQ!
When writing your manuscripts, you might want to consider templating. Essentially, outline the key areas and ideas/thought and  develop them afterwards. At that stage (writing), you get an opportunity to reflect on your 'why the research.
We get around by giving careful thought to

why is research necessary
what the research is about
why is the manuscript written
what is the manuscript saying (to readers/community)

and also you do not understand where is the problem in the paper?

Philosophically, I'm critical realism inclined (though I follow positivism or interpretivism when seldom need be). Being CR, there's the tendency to identify and describe iteratively.
Through the understudying process, demi-regularities (or underlying nuances) are brought to the fore. Through retroduction, explanatory causal mechanisms relationship are developed.
Unfortunately, you might rejections if reviewers in the journal venues are not exposed to CR or looked at one's manuscript through the lens of the manuscript's methodology.


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What to do after a paper gets accepted in a Springer journal?
I recently got my paper accepted in an SCI indexed journal published by Springer.
The acceptance letter reached me 10 days back.
However, the acceptance letter does not contain any information on what are the next steps that are needed for getting the paper published.
Can someone please guide me what are next steps to getting my published in a Springer journal. How long does it take to get the paper appear online? Is there any dedicated helpline of Springer which can help me in this process?  If yes, how to find it?
In other words, shall I just wait patiently for the journal to get back to me again or is it my duty to reach them?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55665/what-does-the-typical-workflow-of-a-journal-look-like-how-should-i-interpret-a Does this answer your question? It includes a section post-acceptane.

@Allure; I checked that question, but I am unsure whether I need to reach them again or the journal will reach me. Also the journal did not ask for the TeX files yet. So I am confused

Did you send your TeX files when you submitted your paper? If so, then the journal already has them. Typically as well, you wait for the journal to finish the first proofs; they will contact you if they have any problems.

@Allure; I did not send my TeX files yet, neither did the journal ask for it yet, They only demanded a PDF  while submission

Are you sure? That would be surprising, because the editorial management systems I'm familiar with would request the source files and then generate the PDFs themselves. They'd then ask you to verify that the PDF actually display what is supposed to be displayed. Typesetting also cannot happen without the source files - if you really did not upload the source files during submission, then the journal really ought to have contacted you for them by now; you could ask them what's going on.

Clearly you skipped the ‘celebrate’ step, so everything is on hold?

@Allure; The editorial system while submitting  said that  "though the author may upload the TeX files now but right now it is not mandatory, only a PDF is required"

Acceptance is determined by the editorial board, but production (copy editing, typesetting, etc) is usually an entirely separate department; the two are not usually synced up in any way.  So it is not at all surprising that there could be a significant delay between acceptance and first contact from the production team.

@NateEldredge; Thank you very much for the information


text:
How can I demonstrate academic success when undergrad scores are poor?
I am in the US. I have an undergraduate Bachelors in Computer Science from a top university in the US, graduated about 7-8 years ago. I am currently a software engineer at a large tech company. I am very interested in going to grad school either for an MBA or an MS. The issue I'm having is that my undergrad scores were poor. I barely graduated with a 3.02 and that my math courses were worse.
I could give reasons regarding mental health/enormous pressure/complete breakdowns about what happened during that time but ultimately the outcome was that I did not do well in my courses, Cs and B minuses even with some retakes.
I know that I can do a lot better if I were able to take those courses now. To bolster my application for grad school, I am looking into postbacc programs. The problem I'm running into is:

Many of these postbacc programs have a minimum undergrad GPA. On top of that, they even have minimum grades (B- or above) for specific undergrad courses.
Many of these postbacc programs don't offer the basic undergrad courses I want to take. I want to take Intro Stats and Intro Probability again, even Calc, because I don't remember those subjects and I didn't do great when I did them beforehand.

I feel like im in a deadlock because I want to go to postbacc to improve my scores/demonstrate academic ability, but the postbacc programs themselves require a demonstration of academic ability. I am frustrated with getting penalized continuously for mistakes I made in the past. I want the opportunity to demonstrate that I am capable of doing well in these courses.
What can I do? I have thought about taking online courses from Coursera, but I doubt that these would ever be considered as "post-secondary" academic success.

First:

Many of these postbacc programs have a minimum undergrad GPA. On top of that, they even have minimum grades (B- or above) for specific undergrad courses.

Yes, and it's also true that many (most?) postbac programs will admit any breathing body. I know, because I've taught at a couple of "top universities" (a term I dislike very much, but that rant is for later), and I've also taught at non-elite institutions, and in both cases postbac students have ranged from the brilliant to the barely breathing. So expand your search area. If you are set on doing a postbac at a highly selective institution (read below for more about that), then take a couple courses at a lower-ranked institution with good teachers, get good grades and then apply with those grades to the postbac program you have your eyes on.
Another common faulty assumption is that there are some standards for what is a postbac program. Most universities offer postbacs, but these range from full programs, e.g. pre-med, to outright cash grabs where the university finds someone willing to teach a class and anybody wanting to a take a class, puts them in a room, collects a lot of money from the students, gives a little money to the teacher, and uses the profit to hire more administrators.
So instead of focusing in finding a "top-rated", "highly-selective", etc. program, spend time looking for a good program, one with teaching standards, good support for the professors, and which hires (=pays for) good teachers. Finding those programs is hard, because all published ratings are manipulated by the institutions, but with some effort you should be able to find the hidden gems. Take a couple of classes, improve your grades, and use those grades to apply to an MS program.
Among my previous students, I can think of quite a few that had bad undergrad grades, took postbac courses, then went on to great things, including med, vet schools, law, PhD programs, etc.

Yeah I want to be one of those students who takes postbacc courses then applies to top MS/MBA programs. If the postbacc program is not from a top-tier institution im okay with that, so long as it helps bolster my application for Grad school.