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My advisor wants to publish my final year project; what will this involve?
I recently finished my final year of a Bachelor of Science degree in Web Development at university in the UK. As 3/8ths of the final year credit, I was required to create a Final Year Project, including ~40k word report and a software artefact, guided by a university tutor. At my graduation ceremony my tutor approached me to say he (and another advisor) are looking at getting it published.
This obviously sounds like great news, but as someone with no experience of advanced academia stuff I have no idea what this actually entails. Will this look good on my CV? Is it a frequent occurrence? When they say publish, who exactly will want to read 40k words about my final year project?
While I am proud of what I produced, I'm not entirely sure it is something I will want to brag about in the future as my skills develop.

Please ask just one question at a time. Which of those four questions do you want answering here?

@EnergyNumbers What does "publishing" involve in this context?

Have you tried asking your tutor?

@Kimball I intend to, but he won't be at university for a while now due to holidays and my curiosity got the better of me

I think the development of skills is normal and expected, nobody would expect any reasonable professional to remain with the skills of an undergraduate. Therefore, everyone should assume that you are at least as skilled as those 40k words imply and probably more, which should put you above anyone whose minimum skills cannot be estimated (and could be zero). If anyone in management or human resources considers that people don't develop any skills after graduating those guys and their companies deserve being out of business, you probably don't want to work for their profit.

I will talk about publishing as an undergraduate in a general sense. This may change depending on your field of study, where and how the work is published(journal, conference, workshop, etc) and what your level of contribution to the end product will be.
Let's start with the easy question. "Is this good for my career?" I don't know of many fields where having published work, perhaps especially as an undergraduate, is a detriment. As an undergraduate with two publications as first name (in my field the student/person who contributed the most / drove the ground level work is first name, the professor is last name and the names in the middle can range from "was vital to the success of the paper" to "they pushed a button a couple of times") and several acknowledgements having those papers gave me a definite leg up against my peers when it came time to search for jobs. Having publications under your name can be invaluable if you choose to apply to grad school but companies are often very interested to see what high-level, field-acknowledged work you have completed. It definitely makes you stand out in a crowd.
It may seem like nothing but puppies and rainbows but there's a darker side as well. Academic publishing is a lot of work. Depending on your level of contribution this can mean weeks of brutal work rerunning experiments, tweaking inputs/outputs, editing and documenting. Most of the people I know, their first paper was a brutal experience because Academic writing is unlike any other writing you have done and there can be a steep learning curve in both the technique and the tools. So, unless you have a burning desire for a publication for publication's sake, the deciding factors for you should be:

What is my expected contribution?
How and where will I be credited?
What are my obligations if the publication is accepted?

Let's break these down.
What is my expected contribution?
In my field a couple of professors coming up to you after the fact and saying "We are looking to get this published" is a bit weird. I'm assuming that these professors were in some way involved in the work as mentors or that this an extension of their work. It is unlikely that this work is fit to be published in its current state. That's not meant as a slam towards your work, rather it's a response to the specifics of publication. Academic publication is often fairly stringent in style and method. It is likely that parts of your work will need to be tweaked or polished for publication(this really depends on your field to be honest) and, in some cases, completely redone. It is very important for you to demand, in a nice way of course, a roadmap for what needs to be done to get this work published and what you will be expected to do. At that time you should also try to find out how much of the final publication will be your work vs work from others/the group at large. If you have graduated and are starting a new job or heading off to grad school you may have other demands on your time. Writing an academic publication, especially your first academic publication, can be a serious time sink. This will play into the next part...
How and where will I be credited?
Is your work going to be placed, whole cloth, into a template and submitted? Then you should expect to be first author(or your field's equivalent) and be given an appropriately large share of the credit. Is your work going to be used as a subsubsection, comprising all of 2 lines in the final publication? Then the credit to you should be, appropriately, smaller. But that's simplifying things a bit - author order and credit/acknowledgements should be explicitly discussed early in the process. Get it out on the table and nail it down because differences in expectations can definitely damage professional relationships which, to be honest, is probably the most valuable thing you will get out of this. Things like original contribution level, publication writing/editing contribution level, and time/effort commitment to the project should be taken into consideration. Additionally consider your future plans - are you planning on publishing again? Are you looking at going to grad school? Depending on the answers to these questions you may find that the most valuable things you get out of publishing are the experience of publishing and the strong network connections you forge with your coauthors.
What are my obligations if the publication is accepted?
This is the final piece of the puzzle. If your publication is a conference or workshop piece then someone will have to present at the conference/workshop. It should, ideally, be one of the primary contributors. If that person is you, will you be able to attend? Who will pay for travel and fees? Even beyond traveling for conferences/workshops - Who will pay for submission fees? Recently one of my papers was 3 pages over the limit (the conference accepted longer papers at a fee for each additional page up to 5 additional pages). This cost almost $400 (on top of the original submission fees). If this occurs who will pay? If the publication is accepted what does that mean about your ownership of the results of your work? If additional work is done on the project how will it be funded? It is likely that your professor(s) or your institutions has grants for all of this. But you need to find out before you agree to anything. Finally, the question a lot more people should ask, what happens if the publication isn't accepted? Will you be involved in making changes and attempting a different venue? How will the group handle revisions (which, with finished work, can be brutal as you're coming back to the submitted work several months after it was submitted  and making changes)?
All of this might seem like a bunch more questions to ask than answers but, really, that's the point. There are plenty who will disagree with me but, in my experience, the research was the easy part. Publishing is the hard, nasty, and occasionally obnoxious part(though it is pretty awesome too). In order to make the publishing part easier you need to have a clear plan for how you will turn this work into a publication and what everyone's expectations are.
I both love and hate my publications. As an undergraduate they gave me a definite edge over my peers in both grad school applications and the job market. I ended up with some very strong connections in my academic community that I can still leverage today. I am still involved as a researcher in my lab. On the flip side my first paper was a special kind of hell. It was two straight weeks of 20 hour days as we pushed to turn finished work into a publication before the deadline. I didn't sleep at all for the last 3 days of the push. My second paper was still brutal, but overall much better as I had passed the worst of the learning curve. I actually got some sleep leading up to that one. I'm incredibly proud of my work but, to be honest, doing those publications pushed me away from graduate school. They were a valuable experience in the world of academic publishing which, it turns out, is not something I enjoy enough to make it my career.
TL;DR: Make a list of questions, email/meet with your advisors/mentors, and flesh out the answers to those questions. If they're largely satisfactory - go for it!
EDIT Given your additional information. Unless they mean publish it on webspace they(or the university) controls OR as a book there is almost no way I can see a 40k word transcript being published as is. My rough estimates put that to be about 100 - 120 pages. I've not seen more than a handful of published papers (etc) over 20 pages long and most are under 10. This may mean they want to publish a portion of it or an heavily edited version of it. This adds a new question for you to ask, what do they mean by 'publishing'?

That's a huge reply and I can't thank you enough :) I'll read it all a few times to ensure I fully understand it. The reason i was approached is because my project made heavy use of NFC (Near Field Communication) and I went to the university's "NFC expert" once or twice and he is one of the people pushing to publish it (along with my actual FYP tutor)

As for further education, no real plans at the minute. I certainly wouldn't decline doing so, but I've recently started working full time. (I suppose this also means I don't really want to do a ton of editing to what I thought was a finalized document)

I can't speak to your field(my work was in Robotics and Computer Science) but as a final bit of ancedotal information. I found that my contributions to projects that were physical were much easier than my contributions to projects that were ephemeral or heavily experimentation based. With a thing, once I built it the 'work' was done and most of the work for the publication was in documentation and polish. With publications based on experimentation - oh boy being asked to redo your experiments 2 days before the paper is due(while also writing) to try and tweak something is... fun. But, ymmv.

"My rough estimates put that to be about 100 - 120 words." Sorry, I'm confused. What are we talking about here? BTW, generally good answer, and good overview of the publishing process. Though it should be said that if you are working with a group of reasonable, competent people (easier said than done, of course), the work gets spread out over multiple people, so it is not so bad. If you are doing it alone, it can be pretty hellish.

"That's not meant as a slant towards your work". I changed this to "That's not meant as a slam towards your work", though if this is correct, "towards" should probably be "against".

@FaheemMitha, I fixed my mistype. What I meant to say was that 40k words is about 100 - 120 pages and the places and types of publications(as used by researchers in fields I am familiar with) that are 100+ pages long are limited(in my field at least). Additionally the publishing experience will absolutely vary depending on the field, team and individuals involved. I can, of course, only speak from the experiences of myself and those I know well and that is, of course, a biased sample of hellish publications.

Publishing your work means sharing your contribution or discovery with the larger community; if your advisor or tutor thinks that your work is publishable, they must have seen something in your work that they think is worth sharing.  This could be a new algorithm you've discovered, a new technique you've described particularly well, or a collection of lessons learned that might be valuable to another person.  It could also be customary for your program to publish final projects in a school journal or archive; in this case, it's less about the contribution and more the fact that you completed the program of study.
Typically, the journal or conference (or other publication) you wish to submit to has guidelines that you must follow: page limits, formatting, required sections, etc.  As a result, you may be required to reformat your paper in order for it to be accepted.  The flip side is it certainly doesn't look bad on a CV or resume, and can make a positive difference depending on your career goals.  It shows you can document your thoughts, processes, and results effectively, which is what employers and grad school admission officials want to see.


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Should I put my papers which are not written in English on my social-media profile?
Is it OK to put my non English internal conference or journal paper on my social media profiles such as Google Scholar, Academia, Research Gate, etc? and also, should I translate their title and other information into English?

You can't "put" your paper on Google Scholar. It's an index that lists papers available elsewhere.

You can "manually" add papers into Google Scholar.

Yes, it is. English is a lingua franca, but that doesn't mean that all scholarly literature must be in English. Make sure your paper is in a institutional or disciplinary repository, if you like the idea of your paper to be open access. Translate it, as Davidmh suggests, to make it even more available.
Regarding indexing in Google Scholar, that depends by the site you archive your paper into. You can make some arrangements to be indexed, but in my experience even if you suggest resources to GS you cannot be sure you'll be.

It is your work, you can of course take credit for it. Translating it will help the international audience to get a feeling of what you do; nevertheless, in the interest of archiving, you should keep the original title next to it. In case it is not clear, indicate that the original paper was in another language.

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How to deal with a student who insists on getting a higher grade?
Student presentations were a part of my grading policy in one of my classes. I had a student who tried hard to get a higher grade in the class. But after his poor presentation, he persistently asked me to give him full credit on his presentation. I told him that his presentation was not good enough to get full credit. But he has persisted and persisted in asking for full credit.
The student told me that this is what he does in all of his classes. How should I deal with this behavior? He does not deserve the full credit he says he needs.

A similar (not necessary a duplicate) question What to do about "grade grubbers?".

Have you given the student a fair chance to present his case?

Repeat after me: "No."

May find some help from How to explain a bad grade to a delusional student.

Does your institution have some formal system to appeal a grade? If so you should probably point him toward that and be done with the matter.

Would it be too unprofessional to respond with "And I want a Pony"?

When you say he does it in all classes, do you mean the appeal for a higher grade or that his performance is seen by others to be much better and he feels you're being stricter/harsher than other professors?

There are multiple issues here.
The first is a student persisting, pushing for higher grades. For this, you should see the link scaaahu left What to do about "grade grubbers?" If you continue to entertain this student they will keep pushing. Why would they stop? There is no cost and a chance for a gain. However, you need to be strong and clear. "You got this grade because of your performance. You want a better grade then give a better performance."
Second issue, which I think you mentioned (but I might be mistaken here) is students needing a higher grade than they deserve. I just dealt with this issue (again) this past month. The student (and even an admin on behalf of the student) were practically pleading with me saying "I really need a higher grade, I know the semester is over, and I know I did not do a good job, and I know I misbehaved in class, but could you pleeeaaaase give me a higher grade?"
When you encounter this second kind of issue remember that you are acting as a judge. Because of this, your decision is going to set precedent which will be held against you (and perhaps others) in the future. So, if you really want what is best for all students (including the one asking) then you must hold steady and show that students must do the work for the grade they want. Otherwise, they will think there is a way they can avoid the work and still get good grades and that is clearly not the signal we, as educators, should be sending.
In short, tough love and make sure they respect the educational process (don't allow them to badger you).

If you want to find a way to be forgiving, perhaps some sort of extra-credit assignment which will test whether they DID learn the material more thoroughly than their scores to date suggest. Or offer to give them an incomplete and let them retake the class next term. One of the things students have to learn is that decisions have consequences.

If it isn't publicized at the beginning of the course (e.g. announce that you can bump your grade up by doing projects that show understanding), I don't think giving the student an opportunity to get a higher grade is fair to the other students, even if that opportunity requires work.

I suppose the second issue varies based on where you are — my experience in the UK was that one almost never needed a higher grade for something, one could just waive the requirement for that thing.

@Dtseng These students will soon be in the business world, where many things are said but not supported. If they just let go of potential contracts or sales leads or policy changes because "it wasn't in the initial memo" they won't last long.

@corsiKa I agree that students (and I) would benefit from learning to take initiative to find hidden opportunities, but I think there are better times to learn this skill, such as looking for a research project under a professor or finding and doing internships in industry.

I agree with the other answers: "No!"
I want to address specifically grading of presentations.  That can look very arbitrary to students, and the appearance of arbitrariness in grading leads directly to whining of all kinds.
Have a rubric for grading presentations, and supply the students with a copy of it early in the term, before they start preparing.  A Google search for "scoring rubric for presentations" provides a number of useful examples from which one could start.
Make yours as granular and concrete as you can stand.  So, instead of writing, "Information is presented in a logical sequence: 5 points," try something like this:
Organization of the presentation:

All parts of the presentation were in a logical order and build on one another: 5 points
Most parts of the presentation were in logical order: 4
Presenter "skipped back" to include points not mentioned: 3
Presenter skipped back more than once: 2
Order of points in the presentation was difficult to discern: 1
The presentation appeared to have no logical order: 0

This is a lot of trouble, but you'll only have to do it once in your entire teaching career.  Have a rubric sheet for each student, mark the rubric sheet, preferably with comments, and return them as "graded work."
You may still get questions, but they'll necessarily be of the form, "I deserved a 3 instead of a 2 on organization."  These are much easier to deal with, and quickly reach the level of de minimis.
Once I get to that level, I say to students, "If, at the end of the semester, but before I turn in final grades, you believe this item will change your course grade, I'll look at it again."  No one has ever come back to me at the end of a semester with such a question.

This is very solid, actionable advice. +1

It seems like the student has learned that "persistence" leads to success. Unfortunately, instead of learning from prior presentations on how to continuously improve his presentation, he learned to get a good grade by pestering the instructors. Given that your colleagues have given in, you are in the unfortunate position of disabusing him of this notion.
But I would not try to outlast the student in endless discussions, but inform him that you will not discuss this grade with him any longer. Because there is nothing to discuss. You have your reasons, you have stated them. A good student can learn from them to improve his presentations. His persistence in the wrong issue is not your responsibility.

If you have explained the ways in which he has failed to reach the standards required for a higher grade, then he should be mature enough to accept your professional, dispassionate assessment.
College is where childhood ploys of appealing for leniency should be discarded: hard work and rigorous application are more appropriate behaviour.

What do you mean "how to deal with it"? He's behaving like a child. Say "no" every time he asks. There is nothing else you can or should do.

I agree. And I'd even cut shorter: explain the motivations, say no a couple of times and if he or she persists, dismiss the student.

But when you say no, explain why so they learn from their mistake(s) and hopefully grow from them.

@jvriesem Indeed. My answer is predicated on what the question says which is that the explanation was already given in the first instance. Repeating it serves no value though.

Core message: explain why he received the grade and where he lost marks. Don't just refuse to budge. As a student, I remembered that I found fuzzy and indistinct reasons for lower grades unacceptable. If clear criteria and well-reasoned arguments were given, I would accept, and never argue, even where the marks were bad.
However, I remembered to have argued to the end with a marker about a downgrading my submission which fulfilled the requirements of the exercise but I happened to understand that differently from those who set the questions (which, in fact, led to a far more complicated, but equally valid, solution). I would not let no pass for an answer here. The marker wasn't interested in the topic and did not exert himself to look outside his immediate comfort zone to look beyond the immediate task. I ended up getting the marks. I didn't care so much about the marks as about the principle. Had he argued that my solution was far too complicated and had lost marks for elegance, I even would have accepted. But he didn't, he just said it's wrong.
In another case, in an relatively intricate problem, the marker did not see the complications arising in the problem and marked down my (again more complicated) solution. Again, I went to the Prof and argued about that, until he conceded; again, the mark was irrelevant to me (and of minor importance, anyway) - it was about the principle.
I do not have the impression that this is the case in your example, but one should be prepared to concede if one made a mistake. But if you have good reasons for marking him down and you are not handwaving anything, state them clearly and close the case.

Rather than answering the question and repeat what others have said better than myself, I'd like to add a few comments for when people apply these answers when they encounter similar situations.
1) Context matters
There's a big difference between a student who shamelessly begs/whines for a better grade in all their classes and the student who did poorly because of something outside their control (e.g. assault). Insofar as we know the context of a given situation and have the power to be flexible, we must not treat all cases identically; doing so would be an injustice to the student.
(It's important to note that the above case is different than many (most?) other cases in that the student admitted to doing this in all their other classes. We can afford less grace for such a student.)
2) The approach of your response matters
Your approach depends on what the student is saying or asking of you. For the students who are whining for a better grade without any justification, a simple, yet firm, "no" may suffice. Other students may be asking why they received the grade they did, and then you should explain why. (If you do, a brief explanation is usually sufficient.)
Typically, your response should be clear and concise. If they have questions beyond what you said in your response, they can ask in a follow-up email. Avoid being too standoffish or defensive when it isn't warranted.
Be professional. Don't be overly congenial (which students may mistake for favoritism, or worse), but don't be antagonistic, either.
3) Compassion matters, but use judiciously
Usually, teachers do not know what baggage their students are dealing with. Some students are more sensitive than others, and they may need a more compassionate response.
It's possible to validate some of their complaints but still be firm. For example, it might be okay to say that you know the student is smarter than is reflected by their grade, but that they didn't demonstrate their knowledge during the class. In other cases, you could say that you know how hard it can be to balance two jobs and taking classes, but that the grade they earned is a reflection not of their overall effort in life, but rather just their performance in this class.
Avoid making judgments about the student's situation. Avoid blaming the student for their situation. If the student put themselves in their situation, you can let them learn from it without heaping blame on them. (I've heard stories of teachers telling students that they're a failure and should drop their program or major. This can be very damaging to a student's psyche. Even when warranted, this is rarely a teacher's responsibility to say.)
Also avoid being too kind or soft, as the student may try to take advantage of this in further emails, or tell their friends to do so in the future. You don't want to have the reputation of being a pushover.
4) Fairness matters
Be very careful about making exceptions for one student that you are not able or willing to make for other students. Everything else equal, making an exception for one student is not fair to the other students.
If you are willing/able to let one student make up some work after the semester, be sure to allow other students to do the same (barring special circumstances).
5) Precedent matters
If you decide to be flexible for one student in one thing, realize that you are establishing a precedent that you may be held to in the future, either by students or by your institution.
This is partly why rubrics are so useful: they set a precedent and expectation for graded work. If a student claims you graded an assignment unfairly, you can point out on the rubric where they lost points.
6) Knowledge matters
Know the policies and options at your institution, and know what situations fit with these policies and options. For example, some schools allow teachers to give a student an "incomplete" mark rather than a letter grade for special circumstances.
If you know that it's too late to change a grade (e.g. institutional policy), you can tell this to your student and point out that if they were concerned about ____ that affected their grade, you could have worked out a solution if they had told you before the deadline.
If a student persists in pestering you, it's good to know whether you are obligated to respond to them (usually you aren't), and to know at what point to report them for harassment.
Finally, if you really aren't sure how to handle a situation, it is useful to know where you can get help.
SUMMARY
Be clear and concise in your response. Be firm, but don't be a jerk. Make sure you take context into account when responding. Know what options you have in a given situation.

Be forewarned, you may well find it all but impossible to dislodge said student from your office if they haven't gotten the "yes" they want. Even after telling them that you will not be entertaining any further discussions about re-scoring this assignment, and that any further appeals will have to be done as a larger conversation in conjunction with the department chair, said chair may have to be drafted to get them up and out of your office.
A colleague (/wife) believes one should go even further, advising recalcitrant students that if they cannot accept a well-meaning, legitimately-arrived-at "no" and leave, then an advisory that campus police will be enlisted may become necessary, but that has always seemed to me to be a bridge too far. (I know, I know, but I still love her.)

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What is the etiquette for repeatedly emailing questions to an author whose work I'm building on?
I am doing my master thesis on wireless networking. I am working on the source code, which the writer of one of the articles provided to me.
Initially, I sent him an email and I asked him to send me his C++ source code . So he did. But the problem is, there was no documentation for his code and he is the only one that knows anything about this codebase. As a result, I totally depend on him. Last night I sent him an email and I asked him a question about his code and he replied to me very quickly, only three hours later. Probably, I will need his help again.
Before my last night's email and after spending one month working on his code, I saw  minor progress to my work. But after  yesterday's mail and his guidance, my work was significantly accelerated. I will probably need his help again maybe another two or three emails in a week. But I am afraid he will become angry with me for sending him a lot of emails.
So what should I do? Assume you are the source code programmer. Do you think he will become angry about my emails? Or he will be willing to help (since I will cite his article)?

If you are writing a paper you could offer him coauthorship, which might serve to i) compensate his time spending and ii) motivate him to write back to you.

good approach , thanks, But I am far away of writing paper and I started thesis for not a long time to become ready to write paper. But I will set a plan based on you idea for future

@Miguel You should check carefully the conventions for authorship in your field before offering anyone co-authorship. Contributing background understanding is not normally considered enough for co-authorship. E.g., suppose that you write paper Y that extends my paper X. In my area, if all I did was explain X to you and answer your questions about it, I would not expect to be a co-author of Y because I didn't do any of the work in that paper (an acknowledgment would be reasonable). The extreme version is that you don't give co-authorship to your primary school teacher who taught you arithmetic.

@DavidRicherby I don't mean "offer authorship" as simply putting his name on the paper, but as getting him involved with it, preparing the manuscript, etc.

Putting myself in the shoe of the programmer: On a bad day (daughter wet the bed, dog bit his leg, wife accidentally dropped coffee in his lap, just to start) even the second e-mail will be two too-many. On a good day (just finished a project and got a raise, daughter graduated from kindergarten with top marks) perhaps even 10 is ok. My point being: there is absolutely no way what any of us say about your second or third question can be of any use to you. As to your first: the most profitable (though not necessarily the nicest) would be to send e-mails until he gets tired of answering...

@Miguel In that case, you don't mean "offer him co-authorship". You mean "offer to collaborate with him on a paper."

@DavidRicherby Only if by authorship you understand "having one's name on a paper" rather than "having contributed to a paper". I understand being an author and being credited as an author as different things.

@Miguel I have never heard the phrase "authorship" used in the context of academic papers to mean anything other than "having one's name in the list of authors."

Although your intentions are probably good, you seem to take advantage of the creator of the source code. He is not your personal debugger nor he must be the one writing the code for your thesis (especially for free). He has written a paper and he has given you his source code. That is all the information you need to know. Read his paper (or his paper slides if they are publicly available) a hundred times, till you know every little detail of it and then look at his code (another hundred times) until you correlate everything between the paper and the code. Of course this will be slower than sending him a couple of emails but it is YOUR thesis not his. Only when you do all this and still there are unanswered questions, then collect all the possible questions you might have (including queries about his code and his paper) and then send it him ONE email, with all your questions. Anything more than that is exploiting his kindness. This kind of back and forth emails with questions is one of the many reasons why many people are unwilling to share their codebase.
Since he is probably a nice guy, you should consider that in the future you might collaborate with him or need his help. Being pushy or lazy (and delegating your work to him because you do not want spend 1-3 weeks refactoring or studying his code more carefully) is a sure way to burn bridges with him. And you really do not want to do that.
On the other hand, if after giving you access to his source code he understands (by your email) that you did everything humanly possible to understand his code and paper and just want some extra help, he will be willing to assist because: a) you seem to appreciate his work b) you seem to understand his time constraints c) you are also a smart, hard working guy worth collaborating with. And this is the message you need to convey.

I'm not sure you can conclude at this early stage that the asker is taking advantage of the code's author. A few emails a week forever would certainly be too many but a few emails a week for a short time might not be excessive. Also, you say that delegating work to the code author would be unacceptable but the asker never proposed doing that. I do agree with your last paragraph but I'd replace "that you [already] did everything humanly possible to understand" with "that you made a serious and sincere attempt to understand." "Everything humanly possible" is an impossibly high bar.

1st email: Give code. 2nd Email: Explain code. Why do you need a third mail, when you could gather all your questions on one email?

First, I don't see why you think that one email containing ten questions is better than ten emails containing one question each. I'd much rather have somebody request several small blocks of my time than one big block, since the small blocks are easier to fit into my schedule. Second, if part B of the code depends on part A, you probably can't even formulate sensible questions about B until you understand A. And if you can't understand A without asking questions, then you need two emails of questions.

@DavidRicherby If given a paper and the src code and after studying it for a month, you still have 10 questions then you might as well give up. Two mails with questions is also OK (after reasonable time between the two emails such as 15-30 days), but the OP suggests 2 - 3 mails at one week, which is not asking questions, it is called debugging.

@Alexandros thanks for your answer. But my problem is that is protocol stack. I have to know where to find what. How many times I should read his code. His protocol stack consist of 16 c files. and one of them is more than 10000 lines.

@alex. I know what you mean. But 16 files and 10,000 lines is not that big if it is organized per functions. You just use an IDE and check which function calls what. You do not need the details of each function you just need to understand the variables and what each function does at a high level

@Alexandros it is not always clear what things mean, specially when the code is not documented. Some functions may be abstractions, and some variables could be just bookkeeping or actual information.

@Alexandros Any statement about software that includes the phrase "you just" is patently false.  (The previous sentence, of course, is not about software, but about statements about software.)

Why not just ask him? He knows how busy he is, how interesting your project is for him, and how dumb (if any) your questions are. You can also offer to pay him back by writing a (partial) manual on his code, as you go on understanding it.
If I was to receive this kind of email I would see that you are acknowledging my effort and trying to be respectful with my time. And maybe this will be good for me, forcing me to rethink aspects of the code, and make a mental note of doing better documentation in the future.
Also, in that situation, I would greatly appreciate to be kept in the loop about your project. Even if I can't or won't help, I would like to see the the progress.
A quick answer is usually a good sign, it means that he finds your questions interesting and not something you should have been able to figure out by yourself. In any case, if you want to make sure, you can ask someone that is roughly familiar with that code (probably your advisor), and see if the questions are indeed something you should have been able to figure out by yourself; and if you are not, they should teach you the techniques you are missing to do it.
All this said, I have been given messy code to work with three times, and the three of them I ended up grabbing the paper and reimplementing it myself in a couple of days (and in two of them, the result was way better). Maybe your case is too big, but you should consider it.

"forcing me to rethink aspects of the code" or, as the case may be, responding that I no longer care about this code, never intended it for publication, provided it only because to do so cost me nothing, and do not wish to have to revisit it to answer difficult questions about it. The point is, by asking you find out one way or the other and don't occupy any time the author doesn't want occupied :-)

As someone who is often on the receiving end of such questions, my advice is:

First and foremost, understand the theory behind the code before you go ask questions.  Many of the questions that I get about my code reveal that the person with the question simply doesn't have basic background knowledge in optimization (e.g. "what's a Cholesky factorization") without which they couldn't possibly understand the code.
Make sure that you have the latest version of the author's code.  Don't use an earlier version.
Understand how the software is licensed (if at all.)  You will have to work within the terms of that license (e.g. the author might have put the code under the GPL, and your derivative work will also have to be GPL.)
Don't complain about the quality of the code or features that it lacks.  If it doesn't do what you need, ask ask the author whether this is possible within the current code, or by a simple extension or whether the algorithm fundamentally doesn't handle that case or whatever.  Do not assume that what you want will be easy or even possible at all.  Depending on the author's response, you might get a ready made solution, or you might get some information on how to modify the code, or you might get told that it isn't practical.
If you're getting errors, then please provide the input data and output so that I can recreate the problem.  Make an example that reproduces the problem as simply as possible rather than giving me all of your code.  I will attempt to recreate the problem on my machine.

thank you very very much. In case four, If I send you an email and then tell you, I want to expand your code in order to make your code to support "X" feature --how I should tell you this ? to make you more willing to help me,  by the way I read your paper more than five times and I understand all part of theory. and also my thesis is about the effect of "X" feature.

Well, for open source software, there's no way that the author can stop you from modifying their code and redistributing it with the modifications.  However, it's probably better for everyone involved if you and the author of the code can work together to incorporate your modifications to the code.  I'd start by explaining to the original author of the code what you're planning to work on, and then listen to what the author says, which might be "This has already been tried and failed" or "Hmmm.  That's an interesting idea, let me know how it works" or you might get an offer to collaborate.

To some extent I'm probably repeating what others have said here already. But in any case, here I go with my 2 cents.
First, the situation you describe is actually quite unusual. In most cases where code is used in a publication, the code is not published, and if it is not published, it is often unobtainable from the authors. If they do provide it, they are not very likely to answer questions about it. For example, often the code is written by some junior person like a grad student, and once that person has departed, the senior authors, who are also the corresponding author, don't know anything specific about the code, because they have not actually written any of it. They may also no longer have a copy of it, if they ever did.
So, you are already in a good situation, that someone is responding to you.
Another thing to bear in mind is that academics like people to be interested in your work. Since your correspondent wrote the code, he is probably the main author of the work; people who write the code generally are. So, he may not mind answering questions about his work as long as they are not stupid. Avoid basic/general language-related questions which are not specific to the code, for example.
As someone else said, if you want to know how he feels, why not ask him?
So, I'd suggest three concrete things.

Express your appreciation for the time he is spending replying to
you. Don't go overboard; a sentence or two is enough. But it is
important to do so.
If you interested/willing to have him as a co-author, ask him if he
is interested in being a co-author. If he is not interested, or you
don't want him as a co-author, ask him permission to add him to the
acknowedgements. You should certainly add him, if he agrees.
Ask him if it is Ok to keep asking him occasional questions. Perhaps
outline what and how much you expect to be asking him, if you have
an idea, so he knows what to expect.
This is going above and beyond, in some sense, but since you say his
code is not documented, document it, perhaps checking with him first
about how to do so, in case he has preferences. Then, send the
documentation to him. That's a nice concrete way to show appreciation.


text:
Why should (or should not) a university have a policy of not hiring its own PhDs?
My university (in France) is having a debate about the relevance of taking rules for preventing too many of its PhDs to be recruited here, or asking them to have some postdoc outside the region before. The same rules are also debated about the promotion to full professor (from what is called maître de conférence and is a tenured associate professorship).
Many people have strong opinion on these issues (me included), and I would like to gather a comprehensive list of arguments (in both directions) on this matter, if only to clear my ideas.
Some arguments may apply only under particular circumstances or in specific fields, please say so when it applies.

Are you only interested in answers about the policy or are you interested in the pros/cons of hiring your own?

@Daniel E. Shub: I am interested in both, but for that matter I would have spontaneously taken the phrasing "pros and cons of not hiring your own", given that the policy under discussion is about limiting the inner hiring.

Related (if not a duplicate) http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8618/is-it-peculiar-for-a-department-not-to-have-any-of-its-own-phd-graduates-as-prof

I have not come far in my career but I have a family of academics, this question certainly came up a number of times over the years.
I guess the main point of having a formal requirement of foreign exchange/post-doc period is two-folds:

to avoid the drawbacks of academic inbreeding. Academia is partially built on a strong tutor-pupil, or rather mentor-protégé, relationship. While this is a great way to pass on the experience and good skills, it can also be the cause of conservatism in the form of sticking to what you know only. Likewise it's truly important for young academics to experience different cultures, and I don't mean it like a charter trip to a warm place, only to hang out with friends/family. To learn, adapt and eventually appreciate a foreign culture is beneficial for any person, let alone for those who are supposed to keep an open mind to the unknown.
going to a new lab somewhere else is also a fantastic way to improve on your professional skills. It's another reason why young academics are often expected to go somewhere else, learn something new and overall improve intellectually. In the corporate world this is encouraged in terms of changing jobs, those prodigies who are groomed for high level executive positions usually end up switching jobs every 3-5 years, often taking on a new but not completely unfamiliar role.

I should also note that our department has a similar issue, in the form of internal recruiting. A significant portion of the PhDs are recruited from those who have taken the course our department gives for undergrads in a particular program. What that leads to then is that the department becomes more or less an alumni hangout. While it may be nice for those new recruits to feel more "at home", for anyone else who does not have the same background it creates a BIG barrier to overcome in order to get familiar with the people in the department.
That was my two cents, I hope it helps.

It is the same rationale for encouraging students not to get their graduate degree from the same institution they earned their bachelor's from.

One con that hasn't been mentioned yet is confirmation bias.  Ideally, departments want to hire the best people and provide the best opportunities for their graduates.  Hiring from within skews the calibration of both of these goals.

How do we know we're doing a good job hiring? Well, just look at all these great people we hired! How do we know they're good? They came from a great department! And if they weren't good, we wouldn't have given them PhDs. And how do we know our PhD standards are high? Just look at how many of our PhD students get jobs in good departments! Well, sure, none of them get jobs in other good departments, but so what?

In my mind:
Pros:

A policy of hiring your own graduates is probably a good indication that you "take care of your own", making sure your graduates get jobs, etc.
PhDs from a university likely already have mentorship and support networks set up, there will be less time adjusting to a new place, etc.
Assuming they found an advisor to work with to get their PhD, their own research goals likely align with those of the institution - there are likely grants they could be made Co-PIs on, etc.

Cons:

You lose the opportunity to hire outside talent.
Hiring exclusively from your own PhD pool creates an echo chamber - it's hard to get novel, outside perspectives, or take things in interesting new directions if everyone does what's already there.
It may lock junior faculty into something kind of like a "postdoc+" status - sure they're faculty, but there's no big transition to make them take the leap into doing their own research, establishing an independent lab, etc. Instead, they kind of soldier along as some status above student but decidedly below the other faculty in the department, at least for awhile.

I do not know any place that has a formal policy of hiring its own, do you? Of course, there are some department that do it a lot, but a policy in this direction seems quite offensive to the equity of hiring.

@BenoîtKloeckner UK labor laws result in post docs often being eventually hired as tenure-track lecturers when their contract end. Right now our PhD students are not employees, so don't get the same redundancy protection.

@BenoîtKloeckner I don't know of any "formal" policies, but I do know of places that have an informal reputation of doing so.

A policy of hiring your own graduates is probably a good indication that you "take care of your own" — I find that argument deeply questionable.  A department that truly "takes care of their own" helps them land jobs wherever they want.

@JeffE It is questionable, but the university I'm thinking of has the problem of that university being "wherever they want". And while your solution is ideal, being on the business end of a job search right now, 'there's at least a job with us' would be a welcome safety net. Though that also raises questions.


text:
Is it bad to publish only in specialized math journals?
I work in the field of algebra (more specifically the representation theory of groups).  I published most of my papers in journals of algebra and another algebra journal of similar quality as journal of algebra and think about having some papers now in slightly better journals. (It would be good if the editorial board has some names close to my field of research, but this is optional.)
Here are some examples that come to my mind: Mathematische Zeitschrift, the Journals of the London mathematical society, IMRN.

Is it considered to be much better to have a publication in such a general journal than in a specialized journal like Journal of Algebra? I made the experience that sending my papers to Journal of Algebra, one gets a much quicker publication and the editors are closer to my field. So from my side I would just send all my papers to Journal of Algebra or another specialised journal, but I assume that this will look weird in my CV.  Does it harm me if I do this even when some of my papers could go into a slightly better journal like Mathematische Zeitschrift? I feel uncomfortable sending my papers to editors that are far away from my field of research.

Some secondary questions:

How bad is it to have a very good paper (that might be suitable for the best general journals) published in a journal like Journal of Algebra?
Can one give an approximate how much worth a paper in Advances of Math (or a similar or better journal) is compared to a paper in journal of algebra?
Like 3 Journal of Algebra papers = one Advances of Math paper and
6 Journal of Algebra papers = 1 Inventiones paper?

There are some typos and capital letter missing, so it's hard to follow the question properly

I think it is a legitimate question. Actually, one of the most on topic and legitimate questions an academic can ask.

Probably not even a partial answer to your first question: The Australian Mathematical Society ranks the Journal of Algebra among the best journals.

@Christian, actually it is a good answer. It shows the premise of the question might be false, which is helpful to the OP. This also shows why it is a completely legitimate question: if academic societies hold rankings, why should this forum shy away from such rankings?

@Christian Unfortunately, that list is outdated by now. Also, it seems that Journal of Algebra has been in a bit of decline in the mean time. Finally, while it it ranked the highest there, it is still not (nor was it at the time the list was made) anywhere near the level of journals like Advances (or even less Inventiones).

@TobiasKildetoft I completely agree. In addition, I think that even if the ranking was completely up to date it could not provide a complete answer to the question since I does not reflect how much a certain community values articles in "general" journals.

One thing which seems not to have been mentioned: J of Alg is a specialist journal, while Math Zeit, JLMS and IMRN are all general journals. This may or may not be a factor which affects likelihood of getting your papers accepted in these other journals.

A separate point: it is difficult to answer questions like "will this course of action be detrimental to my career" because this depends on the academic and professional culture in which you work. For instance, the issues about "which journals do I aim for?" seem to be different in Canada from the UK (to name the two systems I have experience of) and if you work in Australia / NZ then your university may set much greater store by the AustMS journal ranking than, say, if you worked in Switzerland

I tried rephrasing the question so it is no longer a shopping question.  Apologies to the OP if I have misrepresented anything.

@YemonChoi, right. That's why we should ask the OP to clarify which system and country they work in.

I voted to re-open. So, now it's re-opened. However, I'd like to say something about the last secondary question: it's a "shopping question" - we don't do comparisons. Please remove it at your convenience.

@YemonChoi AustMS journal ranking <-- which have been deprecated for over half a decade. Not to mention the existence of newer top-tier journals with no rankings.

@DavidRoberts I have a coauthor in NZ whose university seem to care about these things, and therefore by transitivity he has to care about these. Not all of us have free-range luxury. (Also look up REF)

@Yemon I don't doubt there are places (and not just in Australasia) that treat the AustMS rankings as gospel. I will just continue to point out that the body that requested the rankings (the Australian Research Council) now disavows their continued use.

Advances was very good. However, it publishes 500 papers a year. Still, many mathematicians publishes very good papers in Advances, but there are already quite a few not good papers in Advances now. If it keeps publishing 500 a year, it will be worse.

I don't think that "generalist vs specialist" is the right question to ask.  Rather, I think that you should think of journals as being in various tiers of quality.  Notice that I'll express some opinions on specific journals below, and other mathematicians might disagree with them.  It is worthwhile to talk to a good number of senior people to help get a sense as to what tier various journals occupy.  I don't think that impact factors are what really matters here, but rather the subjective opinions of whoever will be evaluating your cv (at least in the US, this is mostly other mathematicians).
Some subject-specific journals are really excellent (e.g. Geometry and Topology, Algebra and Number Theory, Journal of Algebraic Geometry), some are decent but not excellent (I think that the Journal of Algebra fits this bill), others are pretty terrible (I won't make a list here so as to avoid starting a debate).
It is true that the very best generalist journals (Annals, Inventiones, JAMS, Acta, Publications IHES, Duke, JEMS) occupy a higher tier than even the best subject-specific journals.  However, it's not clear to me that the excellent but not top generalist journals (eg Math Zeitschrift) are clearly better than the best subject-specific journals.
You should try very hard to have your papers in the best journals that you can get to accept them.  Editors at strong journals are used to getting papers that are not directly related to their research, so you shouldn't stress out about sending your papers to them.
As to your final question (about how many papers in one tier are needed to get the equivalent quality of one paper in a higher tier), the correct answer is probably "infinity".  When I evaluate someone's cv, I am trying to figure out how good their best work is.  One paper in the Annals trumps any number of papers in lesser journals.

Could you expand upon why you are trying to figure out the quality of someone's best work (as opposed to median or most common work)? Although that's not strictly speaking necessary to answer the question, I think it would be of great interest to graduate students and non-tenure faculty reading this post. I for one was quite surprised to read that.

I'll let Andy speak for himself, but this is a very common attitude among mathematics faculty especially (compared to other fields).

Echoing @TomChurch, and echoing Andy Putman, I, too, want to see the best that a candidate can do, not their average. I think a reason for this is that "good/average" stuff eventually becomes trite or banal, as ambient technique improves, while the really unusual stuff involves truly new ideas, and is more creative and "generative" for other peoples' work.

@StellaBiderman: Any well-trained mathematician can crank out an arbitrary number of routine, mediocre papers.  It's much harder to do something genuinely new and profound, and these are the papers that really matter in the long run.  When I'm evaluating someone (for a job, grant, etc.), my goal is to figure out who really has the potential to make that kind of serious contribution.

(I should say that I'm probably one of those people who write too many papers, but I admire people who write fewer but more substantial papers)

Notice that I'll express some opinions on specific journals below, and other mathematicians might disagree with them. - A minor addendum: the reputation of journals (especially general ones) can vary quite a bit from field to field, so even rough "consensus rankings" will vary between fields.  (Yet another reason hard journal rankings are impossible, and many people think in terms of rough tiers, like Andy.)

One paper in the Annals trumps any number of papers in lesser journals. <-- what about Fields medal-level papers published only on the arXiv? :-P

@DavidRoberts: Of course, this only applies to candidates whose research I do not personally understand; for people in my field, I have my own opinions, which do not always completely line up with the journals where papers appear.  And even there, if I am trying to convince other people to support my favorite candidate, I will use phrases like "This paper could have appeared in the Annals."  Conversely, I always exhibit skepticism when someone says that about a paper that appeared in a non-top journal, so such a claim needs to be backed up with serious evidence.

If someone is skeptical toward your claim of an Annals-worthy paper, how do you justify your claim? Forgive my skepticism, but you seem to be holding a double standard, willing to let the journal be the nigh-definitive measure of quality for the vast majority of papers (I hope it is uncontroversial that no one at this point understands a majority of mathematical papers) and asking for strong evidence, but unless you convince me you have what amounts to a crystal ball (perhaps you have access to Annals editors and can ask their private opinion on a paper you suspect they may have accepted...)

It seems you are asking others to accept your say-so on papers. Clearly there might be cases where it's obvious (proving a well-known big conjecture in any case receives publicity after all) but how do you decide on borderline cases? Moreover, how do you know that a paper you think of highly hasn't already been rejected by the Annals? Maybe the referees and editors there sometimes have to make a hard call and decide against what people might have thought "should" happen. Just food for thought for others, my position in "the game" will

not cause a blip on your radar I am sure (and to be transparent, I haven't had a paper rejected from the Annals, I have no grudge there). Substitute any other highly regarded journal for the Annals in my above comment if you prefer.

@DavidRoberts: The Annals (which I am just using as an example; there are other journals at that level) makes mistakes, so I am using that phrase to indicate that in my opinion the paper in question is important enough to justify its publication in a top-level journal.  If one makes such a claim to other people, one had better be prepared to back it up by mathematical arguments: a discussion of the history of the problem, how it connects to other areas, why it is difficult and important, etc.  The same kinds of things you include when you referee papers for top-level journals.

I certainly don't make claims that I am unwilling to defend and explain.  I should say that I also know of examples in the other direction (where a top-level journal accepted a paper they shouldn't have), and I have made that case before as well.  It's how these kinds of committees work.  A bunch of people go in a room with evidence marshaled in support of their point of view and argue it out until they reach consensus.

@Andy thanks for responding. The system is noisy and prone to error all round, methinks.

I agree on the whole that quality is far more important than quantity, but I think Andy is overstating it a bit here.  First because there's a lot of luck (especially early in career) in terms of whether a great idea ends up turning into something Annals level or "merely" Advances/G&T level, and second because energy matters (especially in a colleague).  A good rate of excellent papers in my mind can be more important than one truly exceptional one.

As a senior PhD candidate, my opinion is as follows:

Is it considered to be much better to have a publication in such a general journal than in a specialized journal like Journal of Algebra? I made the experience that sending my papers to Journal of Algebra, one gets a much quicker publication and the editors are closer to my field. So from my side I would just send all my papers to Journal of Algebra or another specialised journal, but I assume that this will look weird in my CV. Does it harm me if I do this even when some of my papers could go into a slightly better journal like Mathematische Zeitschrift? I feel uncomfortable sending my papers to editors that are far away from my field of research.

This question has multiple aspects to be considered:

Type of study: As in, where does it fall between being a theoretical paper to applied sciences. Theoretical papers are already very hard to publish and they are often too specific. In this case I do not think it is particularly bad to submit to the same journal. On the other hand, application studies can go both ways: too specific or too generic. If it is too specific, it can be better to submit to a journal which is sector specific. (i.e. You do not submit a marine application to civil engineering journal.) If it is too generic, by which I mean you do not improve a theory or propose a new method, but instead illustrate a method's performance, you should submit to a journal with a higher impact factor.

Quality over Quantity: If you are required to publish a specific amount of papers annually for reasons, it should not matter in which journal you publish as long as it meets the standards. Since they are taking quantity over quality, then I do not think anyone would give a second glance to the papers. On the other hand, when quality weighs heavier, you should try to leave your comfort zone and submit to different journals too. Everybody has something to improve your work even if you get rejected. Even more considering that you may have submitted a paper to a better journal and was rejected, you can then use that information to improve your study and submit again.
More on comfort zones: I think that if you are bothered by this question and you have other alternatives, then you are not comfortable being in your comfort zone. Take your chances with other journals as well. At worst you receive a rejection. If you believe in your study, why not publish it in a journal with a high impact factor and prestige. (I have been trying to get a paper accepted for a journal for 4 years. I was rejected by 12 different journals so far, with reasons varying from we are too good for you, to it's not you, it's me. I have re-written the paper twice from scratch. With each rejection I improved something and now I am more eager to publish it because it has really improved. I am now waiting for an answer from the 13th journal.)

How bad is it to have a very good paper (that might be suitable for the best general journals) published in a journal like Journal of Algebra?

If you think that you could do better than this, then yes, it is bad to publish a very good paper in a mediocre journal. Also refer to answers above.

Can one give an approximate how much worth a paper in Advances of Math (or a similar or better journal) is compared to a paper in journal of algebra? Like 3 Journal of Algebra papers = one Advances of Math paper and 6 Journal of Algebra papers = 1 Inventiones paper?

I do not know if there is an exact formula about this. I would guess impact factor is what you are looking for. The higher the impact factor, the better the recognition you will get. Also check which index a journal is under.

Impact factor is highly debatable. Of course, this depends on whether one interprets the "worth" of a paper as "how much will it help my career prospects", which in turn depends on "do I work in an academic system where people who affect my career prospects care about impact factor"

In the U.S., it does not appear that mathematicians care about so-called "impact factors", currently.

I am not a mathematician but in Turkey quantity is more important if you want tenure at state universities. Which in my opinion is very very sad.

As in my comment above, echoing Tom Church and Andy Putman, if the metric is "maximum" of quality of journals, which is approximately the case in current mathematics in the U.S., then no number of lesser-quality journal publications is equivalent to a single highest-quality publication. In particular, from this viewpoint, "impact factor" is completely useless and misleading. E.g., 1,000 crappy papers, or 10,000, or 100,000, will not be "as good" as a single paper in The Annals of Math, for example.

... and, for that matter, a huge number of crappy papers is a damning indictment of one's lack of good judgement, in many ways.

where does it fall between being a theoretical paper to applied sciences <-- the OP explicitly said they work on mathematics of a theoretical nature. I guess you're trying to put a different perspective forward that might be more widely useful? Also, I respectfully say that maybe your background (not a mathematician, based in the Turkey) should be stated up front. Different fields and different countries have different standards.

@paulgarrett while at an abstract level I agree with your comment on "a huge number of crappy papers", I do think there is a danger on many online sites that discuss maths (MO, MSE, here, the SBS diaspora) of "let them eat brioche". Other people in other systems face other pressures and (dis)incentives.

@DavidRoberts Ofcourse standards vary across the world, OP asked an area specific question but I do not think question is so. I do not think quality of a work depends on the subject. Science is science. Neverthless, thank you for your comment. I will write my next answers more thorough.

@YemonChoi, yes, certainly, it is all too easy to over-interpret any numerical comparison of papers in top-status journals to low-status journals. At the very least, I'd certainly want to reiterate that "intending to write top-status papers" is a silly thing, since one does what one can, and it is what it is. "Scoring status points" is perhaps necessary, but I'd claim as a side-effect of an intellectually/scientifically more genuine activity that is not literally "aiming to score status points". Doing profound work is not a matter of volition or ambition.


text:
How can I do a literature review efficiently?
For a new project I want to compile a literature review to determine the state of the art and possible approaches to start with.
Last time I adhered to the following scheme, but it felt very inefficient.

Search scholar.google with relevant keywords. (3-20 papers)
Read this first set of papers and look for main publications most of these papers link to.
Use scholar and webofknowledge to collect all papers, which cite the main publications. (30-200 papers)
Go through all the papers ordered by assumed importance or newness and note used methods, results, strengths and weaknesses in a spreadsheet till running out of time or motivation.

What system do you have to do literature review and what would you recommend me?
[update]
After posting my question I found Am I reading enough of the scientific literature? Should I read for breadth or depth? which talks, as I see it, more about how to read scientific publications.
I am more interested in advice on how to make sure one has found all the important publications and how to prioritize one's reading list. One advice I got some time ago was to start with new publications fist and then to work yourself back in time. Is this a good advice? How do you do it?

On the basis of the update, what is the specific relevance of your question?

I hope my update of the update makes my question clearer.

If you know that the relevant literature is mostly in one community, then the approach you've described works fairly well. It may be "inefficient" if there are lots of related papers, but (to use computer science jargon), it's efficient in the size of the output :)
I have found that finding a recent survey helps a lot, because it taxonomizes the literature and provides many backward pointers (as well as forward pointers via papers that cite it).
But ultimately, the best test is if you start coming across the same papers in references over and over again. At that point you can feel a little more confident that you're converging.
Some specific tips:

Look carefully at how papers are cited. That provides clues on how to prioritize your searching.
Learn how to skim a paper really quickly to see its main contribution, which will indicate whether it merits further interest.
If certain researchers keep popping up, go to their websites to see if other papers might be relevant (or if they have a review article that Google search didn't reveal)
Look at venues where papers are typically getting published, and look at recent issues of those journals/conferences to see if you've missed something.

Apart from that, going across communities is trickier, and often requires some luck, or the right keywords. Again, some knowledge of the researchers in the area helps: odds are that if the topic spans disciplines, at least some of the researchers involved also span disciplines and can point (via their work) to new paths to explore (see the above note about conferences)

More of a tip than a full answer but worth adding non-the-less: try starting off by reading 'review articles' rather than 'papers of original research'.
The advantages of doing this are

They provide an historical overview in most cases, useful for getting context
They are more accessible (in terms of readability)
They are longer, containing more information, with more thorough explanations
They tend to be less biased


text:
Continuous article publishing
Is continuous article publishing (CAP) a good thing?
Many journals are making the transition to CAP.
It seems to alleviate costs for publishers. Also, I suppose it is a natural thing, in view of the fact that nowadays most academic literature is read online.
It is claimed to be a good thing to authors
because it substantially speeds up the final publication, with the correct citation.
However, in Mathematics, the dissemination of an article to the peopĺe interested usually
occurs much before the actual publication; in addition, in the case of application to grants, the acceptance of a paper is enough, as opposed to the final publication.
Edit: https://www.editage.com/insights/what-is-the-meaning-of-a-journal-moving-to-continuous-article-publication

I don't see how it would be a bad thing in particular. Just about all journals I follow incrementally add to issues. It does not seem to have caused any problems.

Perhaps add a description (or a link) so that those of us who are not familiar with the term "continuous article publishing" can catch up.

In Continuous Publishing, as soon as the final proofed version of the article is ready, it gets immediately added to the current issue. So no waiting around for it to be scheduled into a future issue.

"However, in Mathematics, the dissemination of an article to the peopĺe interested usually occurs much before the actual publication" -- well, mathematics isn't the only field, isn't it? Preprints are increasingly common across the sciences-broadly-construed, but there are only a few fields where it can be assumed articles exist in preprint form. In the humanities, they remain rare.
Given preprints are only a ~guarantee in a few fields, which don't include the particularly prolific fields of biology or medicine, one can't make a confident assumption that articles are disseminated long before their publication. Frankly, reading most preprints in PDF form isn't too convenient either, given their formatting/lack thereof. ("Tables 1-12 go here" -- yeah, thanks.) Accordingly, I can't see a way continuous publishing wouldn't be a good thing. In some fields it's maybe a little superfluous, but these are unrepresentative of scholarly fields as a whole.

I've never seen incomplete public preprints with placeholders. Normally they are put on a preprint server just before journal submission (and usually updated there after referee comments)

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


text:
Are there conventions for research paper flowcharts?
Other than obvious aspects such as being legible, clear, and understandable (at least in theory) are there any mainstream conventions for flowcharts in research papers? I'm talking about scientific based flowcharts which give an overview of the entire thrust of the paper.
For instance:

I have noticed, for instance, that black and white two dimensional layouts are typical, while individual items may have some sort of consistency (e.g. cylinders tend to represent data-storage or datasets in a lot of papers). Is this part of a larger schema that researchers might adhere to?

The answer to this question is actually not specific to research.
There is an ISO Norm on flowcharts that describes the basic elements and what the shapes represent. This is norm ISO 5807:1985.
The bad thing about ISO norms is that you can't simply download them free of charge. But the good news is that in academia, unless you are doing research on flow charts themselves, nobody will care if you do not adhere to the standard in the strictest possible way. The Wikipedia page on flow-charts is a good starting point, and a search on flowchart elements also seems to lead to some useful sites. Also, looking at the set of predefined shapes in drawing software that is also meant to be used for flow-charting (e.g., Microsoft Visio) gives you a good idea of what elements there are and what they represent.

Apart from the symbol concessions pointed out by @DCTLib, the uniformity of the flowchart is indeed important.

Same font size for all labels
Neat spacing between symbols
Same set of colours (if any). But sticking to black or light blue might seem more professional.

You may use a set of symbols that best describe your method, but make sure that you mean the same the throughout.
E.g., don't use both rectangles and rounded rectangles to denote processes in the same paper/presentation.


text:
How should a prof assign duty for a course with a discussion forum/board?
I am (with a few fellow TAs) helping a prof with an online course in STEM that has a discussion forum/board. However, it seems to me that this wasn't really thought through and now we have reached a very difficult situation in the course.

The prof assigned these duties to us on top of all the regular duties during the non-covid years, e.g., grading and tutorials. However, answering questions is a very unregulated task, which can easily go over-time depending on the difficulty of the more or less spontaneous question we get from the students.
We have 2 TAs answering question each week. However, my fellow TAs don't really care about answering questions (maybe they think it is a waste of their time?) and the bystander effect rans rampant among the course staffs (all waiting for someone else to answer). The prof do not enforce the TAs to answer questions.
All of us have to follow every minute detail about the course because the question can come from anywhere. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on us as compared to non-covid years, where all technical course related questions are assigned to one designated TA. Now all of us have to be experts in everything.
The students are not well trained on how to ask questions, and many questions essentially boils down to "my computer is doing the wrong thing, help!"
Aside from that, the students also ask a wide range of questions. TAs essentially have became personal tutors, online IT technicians, mental health professionals (to answer general grade-related concerns from stressed-out students), and career counselors.

As of right now, the discussion forum has entirely been taken over by questions left unanswered (and students do not bother to mark which question that has already been resolved, so we may be wasting our efforts). Where did things go so wrong and what can we do (in the future)?

Have you read your employment contract?

If students have mental health problem, you should refer them to an actual professional.  And it's quite likely they do have mental health problems.

@AnonymousPhysicist It has a vague section on "TA-student interaction time". It was something ridiculous like 6 hours in total, but we've spent way more than that already and its not even close to the end yet.

@AnonymousPhysicist Depending on the severity we might have to copy and paste these bunch of mental health links and hotline numbers. Fortunately all we had to do so far was to reassure them everything will be ok, there will be grade-adjustments, etc.

You are obligated to follow the contract; if you have done that, now you can do what you want.  Managing the course is the professor's job.

@AnonymousPhysicist I wish it was that easy. I've spent days/weeks grading poorly designed exams when I'm merely allocated hours and I was never compensated a penny extra, and I can't just say I don't want to grade anymore. Doing over-time seems to be the normal at my university. They just tell us to work faster.

"I've spent days/weeks grading poorly designed exams when I'm merely allocated hours and I was never compensated a penny extra,"  If it is required, that's a crime (in most locations).  Contact your union or local government.

You ask "How should a professor assign duty ..." which is really an unanswerable question.  I think the real question is "How can the team of TAs handle this workload in a way that is fair and not overwhelming?"
As other people have said in the comments, I think you need to set some boundaries about amount of time, but also that you will not answer all individual questions. For example say there are multiple questions about problem 8. You do one answer for all of them. That's one reason not to rush in immediately, rather wait until you see what the pattern of questions are.
It's a little hard to address this without knowing the subject matter or the kinds of questions. Also in covid times it is important to be kind to and understanding of  students and the way that technology challenges are now a hundred times greater.  Further, problems that used to be solved in 2 minutes during a live class now take hours, both for you and them.
I know you are limited by what your supervisor will allow but I'd like to make some suggestions.   But before that I will also say that it is okay for you to set boundaries on when you will answer questions and response times. Don't be mean, but explain. For example, maybe a TA will come in at noon every day and try to answer questions, and another will come at 6.

First, discussion boards are not really a great way to do questions
and answers, and definitely not for expert answers (and the TAs are
the experts).  They can be great for peer to peer support and
that's what I'd suggest you encourage.  Can you ask your supervisor
if you could give extra credit (or even credit) for students who
answer questions?  Or even without that, can you encourage students
to jump in and help each other?  (I've found that my students can
often answer the technology questions really well, maybe they have
the same brand of phone or computer with the same OS which I don't
have.)

Second, notice on how Stack Exchange -- which is a set of sites
devoted to answering questions -- there are well defined rules
including obsessive refusal to answer duplicate questions.  Get
yourself and the students in the habit of searching for an existing
answer first. Teach them how to search effectively.
Also, write up a document "how to ask a good question" and revise it
as you get better at managing this. Put links to it everywhere.

Third, build up your documentation and knowledge base. You could
potentially use other features of your LMS for this (e.g. Blackboard
has so many ways of doing things that no one can use them all).  For
example, if the class is not using the wiki feature, start using
that. Or you could use Google docs. Or a lot of other things. You
could do FAQ but you can also start other things. Again, you can also
get the students contributing if it makes sense. Also if you are
answering questions that are strictly informational, post the
information prewritten (or less good, with well described links) at
the top of every page or in your signature. Try to do this in a way
that it can be used again next semester.

Fourth, teach students how to answer their own questions by showing
how to find information online or in their textbook or syllabus.
Many actually don't know how to use the index or table of contents of
the text books. Or, for example, "I searched with keywords x, y, z
and found this useful video."   This gets to asking good questions,
but also, don't just answer, do things like say read page 329 and
then come back with questions based on that.

Fifth, once you have figured out how to actively sort questions where
students are really having complicated problems from the rest,
consider going into a meeting 1:1 or with a small group.  It's much,
much easier to answer the questions that way because you go back and
forth in real time.  If you record (and everyone involved is
comfortable) you can also post the recording of the answer.

Sixth, provide structure (and you may have to experiment with what
works.  For example set up separate boards for questions about
technology, questions about due dates and other syllabus related
issues, and then questions about each topic or chapter and then you
can have others like "careers" and "random."

Seventh, have some prewritten templates so you can just fill in specific information.

I'm sure that there are lots of other things you can do too.