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Possibly manipulated recommendation letter - inform alleged author?
I am a young faculty member and have recently started hiring for my first PhD vacancy. Among my pool of applicants, there was one candidate whose recommendation letter stood out. Allegedly written by a professor at a university in an English-speaking country, who taught a course this student took, this letter included what I would deem excessive praise ("...of all my students, I would rank [student] as the best in terms of creativity, hard work, and breadth." [sic] and "I believe [student] would be one of the most promising students in your university.") and flawed English ("[Student] has very ambitious pretentious [sic] in his field"), which I would not expect from faculty in an English-speaking country. The praise also doesn't align with the grades the student submitted, which indicated that they had to re-take about half of their courses and graduated with a barely passing grade.
Taken together, these factors make me suspicious that the recommendation letter may have been manipulated. However, the recommendation letter was also not written for my vacancy but apparently a prior application to an international M.Sc. programme, and the alleged author and the student both hail from the same non-English-speaking country.
Now my question: Should I inform the alleged author of my doubts regarding the authenticity of the recommendation letter? On the one hand, I myself would like to know if a student ever were to impersonate me in such a manner. On the other hand, voicing my suspicions could be an affront if the recommendation letter is indeed genuine.

Edit / Follow-up: Following the recommendations, I have reached out to the alleged author to confirm the authenticity of the recommendation letter without voicing specific concerns. The professor responded that they "did not approve the letter", which suggests that it was indeed a forgery.

The fact that the university is in an English speaking country does not mean that it's personel are all native English speakers. Have you checked that? Probably the easiest way is to go to their website, look at the CV and look at where they did their undergraduate. That is not perfect, but does give a first indication.

Presumably you have received the letter from the student, rather than directly from its (purported) author. Perhaps you can email the author a copy of the letter and ask them to confirm its authenticity, without needing to particularise your doubts.

For the future, consider switching to a system that requires "blind" submission of recommendation letters, directly from the professors' academic e-mail addresses and without the students seeing them.

Thank you for the suggestions! MaartenBuis, the professor and the student do indeed hail from the same non-English-speaking country, and seemingly shared a university affiliation once. FedericoPoloni: we do - the recommendation letter was submitted unrequested as an "additional document"; we only requested contact information of potential references. avid: That may be a good way to proceed - thank you for the suggestion.

"Excessive praise" is a bit of a tradition in recommendation letters in places like the US and I wouldn't use that as a criterion for suspicion. In my experience people find it both ridiculous and also feel compelled to follow suit when they want the person they recommend to be successful.

The praise also doesn't align with the grades the student submitted, which indicated that they had to re-take about half of their courses and graduated with a barely passing grade. -- My suspicions would be VERY HIGH if a letter of recommendation highly praising the student did not address this apparent mismatch. For example (U.S. based, math), if such a letter were written for a student with a sub-3.0 GPA in their math courses, I would expect to see mentioned things like top 30 Putnam exam score, took many graduate level classes and outperformed graduate students (continued)

on assignments that interested the student, has studied X & Y & Z independently and has given MAA and/or AMS talks in W, etc. along with an explanation such as the student tends to spend too much time on independent projects and independent learning at the expense of course work. Of course, this also is a bit problematic in light of having to take and pass Ph.D. exams and other things before actually getting to work on a thesis, so ideally this too would be addressed in the letter, perhaps by saying (if true) the student has gotten much better with course work in the past year

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly. The third sentence of your first paragraph says "Allegedly written by a professor at a university in an English-speaking country..." but the last sentence of the second paragraph says "the alleged author and the student both hail from the same non-English-speaking country." Is it the case that the alleged author is originally from a non-English-speaking country, but is currently a professor in an English-speaking country?

@Shoover: Indeed. The author is faculty of a university in an English-speaking country, but the author is originally a native of a non-English speaking country, so the author moved for work.

Thank you for the followup. Will you follow up with the student, telling them what you discrovered? They may well be using the letter in other applications.

@EthanBolker: I likely won't follow this up with the student myself, as I see little to be gained in doing so. Given their willingness to forge such a recommendation letter in the first place, I doubt they will change their ways after being accused. At best, they might simply ignore my message. At worst, they might take it as an incentive to revise or improve their forged letter, which might make it less obvious to spot in future applications. Rest assured, I'll reject the application. I'll leave any follow-up to the professor who the student impersonated.

For a greater chance of the student changing their ways, consider following up with legal action against the student. Forgery is a serious crime after all. Both you and the alleged author have cause to pursue this, considering the potential harm to both of your reputations done by this criminal forgery. Your institute may want to pick this up as well, for the same reason.

@Servaes: Thank you for the suggestion - I have informed my institution's recruitment services of the forgery. It will be difficult for me to pursue legal action, as the student hails from a nation that is currently being sanctioned by several western nations, including the one my institution is located in. Given these tense diplomatic relations, I suspect that there is little chance of a unilateral judicial decisions going anywhere, and the matter certainly isn't big enough for international courts. I suspect the professor - who shares the student's nationality - might have a better chance.

@J.Galt Thanks for following up. That does indeed sound like there is not much you or your institute can do. A cold reminder that many people in the West are comfortably outside the grasp of Western systems.

When I receive a recommendation letter via the student, my policy is to email it to the alleged writer at their institutional address with a note saying, “[Student’s name] has applied for a position with me and has provided the attached letter from you. Can you confirm your comments and do you have anything you’d like to add? If you’d prefer to discuss this via videoconference, please let me know and we will find a suitable time.”
That way, I am not accusing the student of any wrong-doing, but I am making sure that it will come to light if the letter is not legitimate or if the writer simply did not feel free to give an honest reference, given that the student would see it.

I do not think that there is anything wrong with asking the faculty member whether (s)he wrote this letter. It is becoming common to be asked to verify recommendation letters.
Since you are committing quite a number of resources, it is also possible to ask the letter writer whether they are willing to talk to you on the phone (i.e. Skype, zoom, Google meet, ...) at a day and a time of their convenience. You might have to get up in the middle of the night, though.
I would not bring up the discrepancy between the transcripts and the letter, at least not at first.

I am not sure whether investigating this matter is worth your time.
Generally, if you do not know anything about the author of a recommendation letter, the recommendation does not help you very much in determining a future PhD student. So you can mainly look at the grades (which seem to be bad) and your personal impression of the student.
Having a mediocre or bad PhD student can be very time-consuming and frustrating.

Here's the key thing:

The praise also doesn't align with the grades the student submitted,
which indicated that they had to re-take about half of their courses
and graduated with a barely passing grade.

Why would you even consider such an applicant when there are so many talented graduates eager to join a PhD program? You need a dedicated and well-organized PhD student, not someone whose traits allow graduating only with a barely passing grade.
And if you are not hiring this applicant, it doesn't matter whether the recommendation letter is manipulated or not. While it might be tempting to address a perceived wrongdoing, it's wiser to focus on your own success.
The likely truth regarding the recommendation letter is this: the student asked the professor for a recommendation, the professor requested a draft, and the student provided it. The professor then signed it with minimal or no changes. This practice is relatively common in some countries.

None of the othe answers seem to address the "recommender's" perspective, but if it were me who purportedly wrote the letter, I would certainly appreciate a heads up that there was a possibility that a potential forger might be  doing something that might be of harm to my reputation.

Both in deciding what to do with this letter and as part of considering all the other letters, I would start by asking yourself:

Would you have reacted the same way to the letter without the botched English?
Would you have even detected the likely forgery if not for the botched English?

If the answers are no, then in singling out this letter for informing the alleged author, you're potentially creating a situation where students for whom English is a second language get punished for this forgery while ones who write slick-sounding letters get by with it.
If the student is already not a good candidate, you might just want to leave this alone (they're not getting any advantage from it anyway) unless you're prepared to spend the effort to subject all letters to the same level of scrutiny. And in any case you may want to think about whether others are getting by with doing the same thing, and whether that's leading you to potentially pick unscrupulous and less-qualified candidates over more-qualified ones.

I think there should be a presumption of innocence until you confirm whether this letter of recommendation has been manipulated by contacting the author of the letter in question. The reason is simple: if there is even a 0.0001% chance that this letter is authentic, the student in question should be treated fairly until this is confirmed.
Moreover, in some countries, people may tend to overpraise their students when writing letters of recommendation. As far as I understand, the professor did not mention anything related to the student's grades. Additionally, it is not unusual to encounter cases where a student's motivation or hard work is not always reflected in their grades.

I disagree with this answer. The question author is a new faculty member who is likely to be highly resource constrained. Their success or failure in academia depends substantially on the trajectory of their early trainees. Recommendation letters, in my experience, rarely express overt criticism. Therefore, to protect themselves, the question author is wise to question any discrepancy they find.

@Ian What's the disagreement about? It merely says that the student needs to be treated fairly. The reference can be enthusiastic and an honest reference by the referee even if the student isn't good, that's why references (good, but sometimes bad) are quite weak indicators, unless they come from someone whose judgement you have reason to trust.

@Ian so since he is a young scholar, he should immediately presume that the letter of recommendation is not authentic, without confirming it ? What cost ? What resource constraint ? It requires a simple a email (probably written in 10 min) to confirm it.

If you only asked for reference contacts, and you got the letter unprompted, I would essentially treat it as if you hadn't received it. Even more so because it wasn't tailored to the position.
Then, if this student makes your first cut based on whatever other criteria you rank all other applicants on, you can always ask them whether this is the reference they want you to contact.


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How is it possible to get into PhD in a different institute than Masters when publications take so long?
Usually to be accepted by a PhD program by a reputed university the admission committee looks for candidates who have made research contributions to the desired field (specially through publications). A Masters student however only starts his/her research work in the last semester and even if something substantial is done during that time, getting it published would take a fair amount of time. How is it possible then for a masters student who's applying for PhD showcase their publications in the application?

You make a list, write (submitted) after each publication, + link to arxiv, if it is in math.

Some masters degrees are not taught so the student will spend one or two years just on research.

Yeah.. The question was about taught masters.. Not for the research oriented ones..

@PerAlexandersson Are submitted publications also given as much importance as ones accepted. Specially for conferences where the acceptance rate is really low.

I’m not sure if this is entirely accurate, but I won’t list it as answer because I’m not certain. While have publications certainly helps your odds, it isn’t a requirement for a Ph.D applicant. Many fields offer Ph.D programs directly out of your undergraduate degree which certainly doesn’t always lead to publications. Programs are looking for students that have the capability for research. That is, they might see a student whose CV includes many side projects with professors and projects that extend beyond the scope of a course to indicate that they are prepared for higher research.

@ryan you should write that as answer. I would add that the best evidence for research potential if you have no publications is a strong reference letter from your supervisor/ professor/ mentor or similar.

You are forgetting that not everybody jumps from a Master to a PhD, so it's not always an issue what you describe.

There are two ways to look at this question, both of which are answered in the comments. The first of which is just you asking, "I have submitted for publication, but they haven't been accepted yet." As Per Alexandersson said, make a list, write submitted, and if it's in mathematics, you can even link to Arxiv.
But addressing the implication of the question that it is required to have publications to matriculate, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Many Ph.D. Programs accept students directly out of their undergraduate degree, and so to expect them to have published research would be generally unfair. It makes more sense for Ph.D. programs to be looking for students who have the capability for research. This capability can be shown through projects that go beyond the scope of the classroom, research with professors that didn't necessarily result in publication, or as astronat mentioned in the comments, by strong references letters from supervisors, professors, etc.

You're making two false presumptions here. The first of these is:

You can't start doing research until your thesis during your master's degree.

Most applicants for PhD positions start getting involved with research projects in some capacity well before their final semester. Many will start doing research toward the end of their bachelor's programs, which will give them time to get a paper or two into the pipeline before then.
The second problematic assumption is:

Usually to be accepted by a PhD program by a reputed university the admission committee looks for candidates who have made research contributions to the desired field (specially through publications).

Admissions committees look for students who have the potential to make research contributions to the field in which they apply. Somebody can start in one field and move to another one for their PhD program, if they can convince the admissions committee that the move works.

Submitted manuscripts do not carry the same weight as accepted publications (you can submit almost anything that you want). However, submitted manuscripts backed by strong letters of reference from people the admissions committee trust (preferably your advisor) are very important.
If a reputable member from their field declares that you have done work that is paper-worthy, the committee will generally trust their judgement even if the paper has not been published yet.

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Supervisor/advisor ignores me regarding my paper
I did an honours degree last year (4 year undergrad study with a research  thesis). My supervisor shafted me towards the end of that year when I was coming up to submit my thesis by being absent with his own life issues and barely communicative, and gave me back drafts literally days before it was due. End result was I fell barely short of the requirements to get a PhD scholarship. So I discussed with my supervisor and he said I could write a paper with his assistance about my work, to bolster a future PhD application.
So we agreed on a date to catch up, the time came and I sent him an email. He has not responded at all, it's been 10 days at this point. Normally he would reply back quickly. I'm getting the strong feeling he's got yet another excuse, but I really need to do this for my professional development/future PhD application. What should I do next? Would it be possible to write the paper myself without assistance (I have all the data).

Is your undergrad thesis supervisor currently working with you in an official supervisory role right now? (If not, then your paper is probably not a priority to your former supervisor.) Are you looking to continue your PhD studies at the same institution? (Alternatively, do you plan on continuing to work with your former undergrad advisor in an official capacity in the future?)

There are many reasons why people can miss an email; a likely possibility for busy people is that your email simply got buried under many others. So, don't assume he's trying to ignore you, and you should first bug him again (politely) about that.
It is also a good idea to start writing the paper on your own: your supervisor will be much more willing to help you improve a first outline or even a draft than to start from a blank page.

Would it be possible to write the paper myself without assistance (I have all the data).
If you are going to submit this to a journal without the person knowing or being a co-author, they are going to be displeased, and for good reason!
However, it this is just a fix-up of your "project write-up" that you submit along with your CV, then from an admissions point of view I would rather be perusing a good version that showcases your capabilities, than the rushed version that, in the story as related by you, was less good than it could have been due to circumstances beyond your control.

The typical approach of a well-seasoned academic when getting a typical (esp. pre-PhD) student paper is: keep the results and figures, rewrite it all. A typical (there are some geniuses out there) BSc student is not able to write a competitive and concise research paper text. I mean-- yes, they can. But simply not good enough and in most cases too long. It would probably need to be edited so heavily that almost any merit is lost.
To me, personally, it's much easier to write the paper from scratch than to rewrite someone's text.

Notice that this answer does not weight in the previous email "absence" behaviour of your would-be-supervisor in any way.

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Defer TT start date before offer
I'm currently halfway though my interviews for tenure-track computer science faculty positions in the US. I've been offered a really great postdoc opportunity. I want to take up the postdoc and defer the start date of my faculty position by a year.
The trouble is that the postdoc wants a definite answer from me soon and they have said that I should get approval from the places where I have interviews. I feel like it is premature to discuss deferring an offer before I even have one. Potentially it will look bad.
How do I delicately raise this issue with the places I am interviewing at? Or should I simply accept the postdoc and deal with the deferral problem later if and when it arises? I assume this situation is pretty common and someone can tell me how this is usually dealt with.

R1 or undergraduate schools?

@BeauGeste I'm interviewing at research-focused departments.

It's normal and good to tell places you're interviewing about any deadlines you face, that way they have the opportunity to move up their decision process in response.  If I were you I would tell the places you're interviewing something like

I have a deadline to decide on a postdoc offer at location X by date Y.  If I accept their offer I would still be very interested in taking a job at your school with startdate of year+1.


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Etiquette for contacting potential advisors after submitting application
I have applied to a bunch of PhD programs in computer science but have not heard back from several of them, and my top choices are among those schools. I am thinking about contacting a few professors at those institutions about their progress in the graduate admissions process, as I already have other questions that I want to ask them (questions about their papers, current projects, etc.)
Is it OK if I ask them about the status of my application and/or the admissions timeline after I ask my real question? Will the answer differ if I do/don't know them in person? Or is it best for me to just refrain from asking such questions in any case?
In addition, if I mention offers that I have already received in the email, will that be considered rude?

So, questions about their current papers etc are not the same as asking about your admission progress.
Yes, ask the about the papers and projects but not about your admission status.
You should address questions about your admission status to the admissions department and, they may have already published a link, or email, for such contact.
As for mentioning other offers, if you are border-line case for them and they know you have other offers that may help their decision...


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How to prevent deletion of my Google Scholar profile flagged as a duplicate of a colleague's?
My Google Scholar account is scheduled to be made private on 25th July as it is flagged as a duplicate of a close colleague's. We have worked at the same department, we share the first and middle name, and we share a number of papers, but we have separate spatial locations, passports, brains, hands, etc. I promise. Like many scientists, Google has us confused.
Edit to add: Google seemed to sort itself out and maintain both our profiles. It seemed like a bug in the display, but the system had managed to separate our identities.

Is having a Google scholar profile and touting your own h-index the norm in your field?  In pure math, the former is common but not expected, but the latter would not be well received, I think.

Yes it's pretty normal in our field (unfortunately or otherwise). I am advised to mention it on proposals. But of course, it will look a bit silly if the webpage is gone after a proposal is submitted. I am curious though, how difficult is it to get funding in pure maths?

Not seeing a change in "an hour" would seem normal. A human might need to be involved in a fix.

@Helen Large grants are quite competitive, but we don't rely much on citation metrics to determine the merit of someone's work.

@Helen Suggestion separate from answering the question: You might consider to establish a profile on ORCID or a similar  where you may identify your work, and curate your list e.g., via the publication's doi without delay until a body like Google correctly identifies yours. There is nothing wrong to use multiple ones, too (example John Kitchin). Databases like Scopus / Web of Science may facilitate this task, some services cross-link each other, too.

I don't know if they will reply to you, but you should try contacting Google scholar.  Here is their email: scholar-support@google.com  (found on this page, under the court opinion question).
Some other ideas are:

make an academic webpage with all the relevant info, so people can check that
try recreating your profile after it gets deleted
in addition to mentioning your Google scholar profile on your application, you could mention another one (e.g., Web of Science, Semantic Scholar, Microsoft Academic) which will hopefully not disappear

That said, I don't know how it would be viewed in your field, but if your profile gets deleted/merged with another person's, and someone looks for you on Google scholar,  hopefully they will at least be able to find your papers, which should be sufficient evidence if they're just trying to verify citation metrics you state.

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How do I reply to a potential advisor without being too enthusiastic?
I heard back from a potential PhD advisor from University ABC saying that I am accepted into their program and he also stuck his neck out for me for getting a fellowship as well. I am still waiting for results from the other universities (some of which I might choose over University ABC).
His tone from the mail was very happy and I feel I must reply back to him in a nice way. Is just saying "Thank you very much for your support and the great news!" enough?
Edit: I do not want to be too enthusiastic as I might have to turn down this offer based on the results from other universities and I am afraid it might come off as me leading him on when I might not even accept the position.

Welcome to Academia.SE and Congratulations on your results. However, I voted to close this question because it is vague. You either want to accept a program or not. Not being honest about your decision will be problematic. Postponing accepting a result for making a decision on another program, this is another story. I do not find this constructive.

Postponing accepting a result for making a decision on another program, this is another story. This is exactly my story.

@enthu I do not believe that honesty is being debated here. The OP should be honest that they are excited about being accepted, and they should not (and do not need to) say anything about whether they're accepting now. In my field (poli sci) in the US, programs understand that students apply to multiple programs, wait to hear back from other programs, and then choose one and decline the others. Telling a potential advisor that they're excited to be admitted to one program doesn't provide a guarantee that they'll accept after hearing from other programs.

@Dr.Beeblebrox good information and sounds convincing to me. You correctly separated the points of being interested in a program and the right to hold an offer to compare all the options. Retracted my closure vote. Thank you.

Firstly, a huge congratulations on your acceptance. That's wonderful news. As a faculty member, I can say that I don't think you need to worry about being too enthusiastic. I would encourage you to say a bit more in your response and let them know that you are very excited. Also, don't worry too much about the content of this email, you're in! For the time being just enjoy it, and when you begin a program, focus on doing great work (and remaining enthusiastic hopefully)!
Edit based on your edit: I would not temper your enthusiasm because you might go to another university. That's a given in any PhD admissions process that all advisors are aware of.

Rather than tempering your enthusiasm, I'd add to your message (after all the enthusiasm and thanks/appreciation is shared) that you plan to compare offers and respond with a decision once you've gotten responses from your other applications. If you know a date that you'll have those other responses by you can include that date, if not it's fine to be generic (and anyone should understand that a student applying for grad school does not control the timeline of other schools). You could ask if there is a deadline to respond if this isn't already clear.
It's possible this will sadden the professor a bit if they're very excited to have you, but frankly, they have no ownership over you no matter how much they've "stuck their neck out". You owe them an appreciation for their efforts, not to deny all other offers. Most likely they will understand this; if they are the kind of person who is deeply offended by this, though, I would urge you that you do not want this kind of person as a supervisor if you can avoid it. Therefore, you do not need to worry about their reaction too much; if they have a normal person reaction, they will completely understand that any applicant should consider all their options before making a decision. If they react badly, well, you now have dodged a situation that would only get harder and harder to get out of if you found out later in your studies what kind of person this professor is.
A final caution would be that at least where I am from in the US, official offers need to come from the institution, not the individual professor. An individual professor may very well have strong sway, but you need to have an official institutional offer in hand before you accept it and reject any others. It's possible things work differently if you are applying elsewhere and I can't speak to that.

Thank you very much for your awesome advice - my head feels much clearer now. And as for your word of caution, yes it is from a US university and the professor added on in his mail that I should most likely expect an official acceptance letter from the institution in the coming weeks.


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On acceptance of scientific paper
Questions: what is the minimum requirement for a scientific paper to be accepted? How will i know what quality should my paper have to be accepted in a scientific journal? If i read the scientific papers of other scientists will it help me know the quality needed and how will i know?
Perhaps i have set as requirement for the acceptance very difficult and of very high quality papers. What should i do? If the paper is not accepted or is not suitable for acceptance could i keep it somewhere in the house and continue working on other papers and should i do the same for other papers that will not be accepted perhaps?
I want to make scientific contributions but perhaps my expectations for quality of the work and paper generally are too high.
I am an undergraduate student at a math department at a university.
Thank you.

That's why students have advisors or mentors. Find an academic who is happy to mentor you on this, they know this much better.

Thank you for your post Captain Emacs. I have tried to talk to my professors, but perhaps it is difficult to approach them and talk with them in a more free way expecially about making scientific papers and publishing them. In my first year at the university, i found that i had an academic advisor, i talked to her but perhaps i did not say the right things regarding my studies and making scientific papers. It is difficult these days to find her and talk with her, what should i do? Should i try to talk to other academics?  Academics know these things better than me. I need help i think,

please note that in very many cases people have the slightly different problem of overestimating the quality of their contribution. One does not simply want to “make a scientific paper”.  If you cannot get someone in your university to discuss your work, this is not an encouraging sign.

You need to cite three of the reviewer's papers. Good luck, because the reviewers are anonymous. - Serious answer: Most journals and conferences have some description of the requirements. They usually boil down to contributing something novel, which has worth for others and can easily be understood by the target audience.

Thank you for your post ZeroTheHero. I want to talk to persons who know about acceptance of math and physics papers from journals but it is difficult to approach and talk to them. It is like i am scared of what might happen if i talk to them. They have published papers in the past so they know i think.

Thank you allo. Novelty can be done i think if someone finds an open problem or open question. The part about the worth is where i do not know. Could you write some examples or one example so that i can understand what is needed?

An important criterion is that you think it is an interesting and/or useful contribution to the field.  There is no real point in publishing papers if they are of little interest or importance to anybody (and novel does not imply interesting or useful). The purpose of writing a paper is to communicate an information/understanding, but there has to be an audience.   Quality is much better than quantity in the long run, and publication is only the first step in acceptance by the research community, not the last.

I should add I have a large directory on my computer of half-baked papers (in both senses ;o) and a fair few papers in my publication list that might have been better left unfinished (not wrong, I hope, just not interesting or useful).  Choosing which topics to work on is an important skill to develop.

@plants In my view it is hard to talk about these things before some actual research work that may merit publication has been done. You write you are an undergraduate student. Are you already doing research/projects that potentially could lead to publication? If not, chances are that it's very hard at this point to get a qualified idea about what's required. Also you should have in mind that there are journals with very different levels and consequently very different requirements for publication.

Thank you Dikran Marsupial and Lewian for your posts. I know that if someone gets his degree, then a masters degree and then goes for a doctorate degree, while doing a doctorate degree he tries to do scientific research. I still do not have a degree in math. I want to try to learn what is accepted because if i try to answer a question which is considered not enough of value for publication or acceptance, then all that time i tried to answer it will be lost?

The best work by undergrad students I have seen were students who did not think it was publication-worthy.

If the fields or topics that are of interest for me are not those my professors work on, could i communicate with professors from other universities if they want to talk with me ,help me, advise me on makiing scientific papers? Or perhaps with professors from universities from other countries different than mine? Perhaps by sending them emails?

@CaptainEmacs indeed, it is not easy to learn to have that judgment, it needs both self-confidence and self-skepticism, I'm getting better at it after thirty years ;o)

@plants, the time isn't lost, especially at the start of your career you gain valuable skills and experience from the work even if it doesn't end up being published.  Aim to be as good a scientist/mathematician that you can be and the papers will follow.  Reading papers is a good way of finding out the requirements, but don't just look at top journals, sample some of the second-tier and some of the bad journals.  Even good journals publish obvious nonsense now and again, so look out for those as well, it helps understand the process.

@DikranMarsupial Indeed. If you enact robust self-confidence in carrying out the work and meticulous self-skepticism in publishing, you will not go wrong.

Read existing papers.
In general, the first thing you need to do is to conduct a systematic review of the scientific literature, to make sure that you gain a solid understanding of the state of the art of the field, as well as any openings where more research can be conducted. One of the most fundamental tasks you have as a researcher is to convince your reader that your paper contains novel research; if you fail to do so, your paper will not be accepted to by a journal.
Additionally, reading lots of existing papers should give you an idea about how papers in your field are typically structured. Often, this is something like "Abstract, introduction, methodology, results, conclusions" but this might be different for mathematics.
Furthermore, if you're doing any human subjects experimentation, even something as innocuous as giving people a survey, you must obtain ethics approval from your university's IRB. Only the most predatory of journals would be willing to accept a paper that has not obtained ethics approval; again, this is the bare minimum for a paper to be accepted.
Finally, I would recommend that you work on improving your spelling and grammar. The point of a scientific paper is to communicate your results with the scientific community at large, and errors in these aspects will work to impair understanding, and a paper that is difficult to understand because of spelling and grammar is unlikely to be accepted.

@Buffy The question as posed: "what is the minimum requirement for a scientific paper to be accepted? How will i know what quality should my paper have to be accepted in a scientific journal?" I believe that I addressed these points. Perhaps I could make it more explicit, however.


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What hypothesis should I raise when literature goes for two sides?
I am a finance student.
I am learning the impact of bribery laws on dependent variable Y. The literature supports both sides: some studies support that Y will increase after the laws, others support that Y will decrease after the laws. I am wondering how to generate the hypothesis in this case?
What I did so far is:
"Hypothesis: There is an association between bribery laws and Y".
Update:
I appreciate all suggestions so far, so I try to clarify the question more.
For example, in my case, there is a variable called Y = A - B. In literature, A and B are supposed to decrease after the law. That is why I have such a type of confused hypothesis formulation.

Maybe you can distinguish under which conditions there will be a rise, and which conditions there will be a drop, if this is applicable. I am not aware of your particular context so it's hard to say more.

Thanks @YiFan for your suggestion

So, both A and B are expected to decrease? If so they Y depends on which decreases more. Is that the right interpretation? And, of course A and B need to be "measurable" in the same terms. Simply different scaling would change the interpretation of Y.

@Buffy . Yes, you are correct that " Y depends on which decreases more " and  " A and B are measured in the same terms "

At least in my field (one of the social sciences) there are two (and potentially a third one, as per the comment by @YiFan ) options:
(1) Pose "competing hypotheses" and write sth like: "Because there is conflicting evidence on the relationship between X and Y, I pose two competing hypotheses: H1a - X positively influences Y; H1b - X negatively influences Y.
(2) Pose a question instead and write sth like: "Because there is conflicting evidence on the relationship between X and Y, I pose the following question: RQ1: What is the influence of X on Y?"
I personally prefer (2), but that may be a matter of taste.
(3) And of course maybe the literature isn't as inconsistent as it seems first, and you can rather specify a hypothesis on the condition under which X influences Y in a specific way, as per @YiFan 's comment

Thanks @damian, I learnt three ways of making hypotheses from you and YiFan, personally I will use the method 1 because I have a couple of hypotheses and it seems to be a list of hypotheses together

This seems strange to me. Your (2) doesn't have a hypothesis at all. There is nothing to "test". I think instead, that the entire question is premature for any answer and more needs to be examined first. In particular, why is it that two studies came to different (vastly) conclusions? They aren't both correct, so something failed in at least one of them. Look at that first. If a student came to me with this sort of outline, I'd send them back to work to refine it.

I hate to jump in to this because it isn't my main "lane", but I have supervised theses based on statistical reasoning, though mostly about learning outcomes of pedagogy.
But, I suggest that your question isn't ready for prime time and you need to look at those prior studies to get a better idea about what is going on. They can't all be correct if they can be compared. But perhaps they can't be compared at all.
In particular, I'd ask if the background is the same in the various studies. An outcome in one region of the world might be different than in another. Are the definitions of terms in the studies the same? I have my doubts.
I'll suggest, also, that you first need to examine why those other studies might have come to different results and also examine any assumptions that were made. The next step, before you could form an hypothesis is to look to which set of studies has an underlying structure most similar to yours.
And, of course, the very nature of the question is a bit suspect. Were these before-after studies of the situation (before the laws, then after)? Or are they just guesses/opinions and not true "studies" with a scientific basis. This suggests that you need to get a really firm grasp of the methodologies of the various studies and whether that affected the outcomes in some way.
Something is wrong. First figure out what. Then you have the basis for making an hypothesis that might be tested and finding a methodology for doing so. Otherwise it seems to be nothing more than spinning wheels; going through the motions. That gives you only meaningless "answers".
Sorry to seem harsh, but social science gets a bad name when it is done poorly.

Replying to the changed question. I'd suggest that you make hypotheses about A and B separately, not about Y. If you can properly test those, perhaps quantitatively then you can, perhaps form conclusions about Y from the results. For example "H: Given treatment T, A will decrease by at least 10%" or something like that.
If done carefully you avoid the dilemma, but it still requires figuring out why the previous studies diverge. That might help you quantify the hypothesis also.

Thank you so much for your comment, I just edited the question to be more clear. Please let me know if you think what I need to do to improve this question, I am willing to learn and improve. Yes, and I am examining the before-after studies of the situation.

I am happy to listen to the hash notice because it is a good way for me to improve myself. Thanks a heap.

Actually, I wasn't "harshing" on you, but another answer forced me to jump in. I was only howling at the moon as us old "dogs" sometimes do.

thank you for your updated answer.


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Write to professor or secretary?
I would like to contact a Professor to ask if he might be interested in my research project. I can find his email contact and also the contact of his secretary from his personal website. I would like to write him directly, since I am not asking for something bureaucratic.  Do you think am I right?

Trying to schedule a short appointment via his secretary might be worthwhile, if you are confident enough to have an in-depth discussion about your proposal. However, I'd be hesitant to do this if you're expecting the professor to also provide funding.

Professors still have "secretaries"?

My co-supervisor, the director of a 200-strong research institute, has a secretary. I presume his secretary also has other duties. Donald Knuth also has a secretary. I suspect that any prof important enough to have a secretary (there aren't many!) will probably be far too busy to pay much attention to an email from an unknown person, unless it is jaw-droppingly brilliant.

@moriarty I think JeffE's "secretaries" comment had to do with the fact that the word "secretary" is becoming somewhat outdated in the US, where the term "Administrative Assistant" is currently more common.

If a professor has posted their email publicly online, then it is an invitation to contact them directly on technical matters.  In my experience, very few professors are unwilling to be contacted directly, and those who are unwilling typically clearly state who is the appropriate alternate contact person on their personal website (the institution may, of course, still list them in their directory).
You might not, however, get any reply.  Just because somebody is willing to be contacted doesn't mean they'll respond to everybody who does so.  If you don't get a response within a few days, then contact the secretary instead, and if you still don't get a response, then it is best to assume disinterest and move on.

It should also be mentioned that professors are typically very busy and might be interested and willing to reply but if they didn't find the time to do so right away lots of income email might quickly pile up on top of yours. When I was last applying for a job I sent an email to a guy I wanted to work with, with no answer whatsoever so I assumed disinterest. The guy sent me an email almost 2 months later saying he was really interested in my application but I had already found something else. One doesn't know when a second email won't be welcomed but it might be worth trying sometimes.


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How to write research results when some study participants dropped out?
The research (Delphi study) started with NN study participants in Round 1 (gathering demographics). Ten percent of the participants dropped out and did not complete Round 2 or (of course) Round 3.
I'm unsure how to report this.
Do I report the demographic results and then add a note to the Round 2 and Round 3 results ("Note: Of the NN people who completed Round 1, only Nn completed Rounds 2 and 3.")
Or do I remove from the Round 1 results the data gathered from the drop-outs?
Or ... ?

Read a few longitudinal studies, you will know how to report this.

From the, title I thought you meant some of your coauthors dropped out, not respondents. I think 'respondents' might be a better phrase than 'study participants'.

Or, actually, an explicit 'study participants' would also help. As it is the title is quite ambiguous - particularly for people whose fields of study don't include studies with participants.

"Participants" is an APA style guide approved and extremely common term in psychology. No psychologist would search for "respondent". Unless "respondent" is really common in some other field, I'd recommend that we stick with "participant" here so later generations will more easily find this question.

Would it be helpful for future searches if I rewrote the question as "... study participants (respondents) ... "?

You should present demographics for every round available for accuracy, completeness, and your own personal sanity. Drop-outs and people lost to follow-ups, are still data points, especially in medical/psychological/sociological studies. They may not have any associated data, but they were recruited and participated at least during the initial phase of data collection (demographics), and not counting them can imply other things.
Anyways, I like using an example to show why it helps present a clearer image.
Let's say 100 animals sign up for a study at Round 1. The demographics are as follows: 50 dogs, 50 cats.
However, when Round 2 rolls around, 20 cats are nowhere to be found. The results are collected from the remaining subjects; 25 dogs are peanut butter lovers, and 15 cats are peanut butter lovers.
If you only say that 20 animals dropped out, the information presented here doesn't mean very much, since you don't know what animals dropped out. In actuality, both dogs and cats had a 50% split based on the population of data collected, but presenting information only partway can be misconstrued as perhaps it was 25/40 dogs and 15/40 cats, because you haven't provided any. In addition, neglecting to mention that you originally had 50 dogs and 50 cats and only presenting that you had 50 dogs and 30 cats in the final results could indicate selection bias or a lack of interest, as opposed to losing cats to follow-up exams.
So you would present in a nice table or summary:

During Round 1, 50 dogs and 50 cats were recruited for the peanut butter study. However, 20 of the original 50 cats (40.0%) dropped out before Round 2 testing and could not be replaced. During Round 2 testing, it was found that 25 of 50 dogs (50.0%) and 15 of 30 cats (50.0%) preferred peanut butter.

Your answer and example were helpful because it illuminated for me the importance of traceability of results from one round to the next.

It is a very bad thing to remove people who dropped out from your data set.  The problem is that you do not know whether dropping out is correlated with the effect that you are studying.
For an extreme example, consider a study on the effect of being shot at on soccer ability.  In round 1, people play soccer, then they get shot at randomly with a gun that might or might not hit them, then they play round 2 of soccer, then they get shot at again, and then they play round 3 of soccer.  Of course, anybody who actually gets hit when they are shot will probably drop out.  If you eliminate those people, you will vastly underestimate how badly soccer players are affected by people shooting at them.
This may seem like a rather extreme example, but things very much like it happen frequently in biomedical or psychological studies, just with less obvious causal connections.
Report exactly what happened, and take the missing people into account when you are computing your effect size.  If you need help on the technical aspects of that, you should ask on Cross-Validated.SE.

could the example be a bit less graphic, like Chefs using sharp blades and cutting a finger, instead of shooting people

@user1938107 Why? The current example makes the point well, and small finger cuts probably do not have a large effect on cooking ability.

@Potato Because i find it unnecessary to convey the point.  If the goal is an extreme example of user studies, it could easily be phrased as: A medical research project testing the efficacy of a pill formula to fix migraines on human subjects against the current leading brand.  There are 100 subjects, 50 have the new pill.  Out of the 100, 15 people are put into a coma from the new medication (or die, if you enjoy it so much).  Those 15 can not answer round 2 questions if it makes them sleepy.  You would not remove the 15 people.

The example is unnecessarily extreme - as most soccer players would dive on the floor in agony and be unable to continue playing if they were hit with a child's foam toy... ;)

There might be a slight difficulty with getting this study past the ethical committee.

I fully agree with the other answers that you should do statistical analyses on your dropouts, and report and think about the results. Did people who dropped out differ significantly from participants that stayed on? For instance, more women may have dropped out, or more men, or the less successful in initial rounds. If so, you may have confounding effects like selection bias, which you should discuss. (Or you may already have your next research idea right there ;-)
As others write, don't just drop data. Data is precious. Use all you have.
The CONSORT group (which stands for "Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials") has some materials. It also publishes a flowchart template (MS Word doc) that seems to be becoming the norm for reporting dropouts in the course of trials. I know of a few journals that require exactly this kind of flowchart for submission, which will usually end up in the online supplement of the article. I find such a structure enormously helpful, certainly more so than a free text description that one needs to wade through. I'd strongly recommend you include this kind of flowchart.

Although the research did not involve trials, the pointer to CONSORT was helpful for the flowchart and for two other items I found there: a checklist and an explanation of research methods for randomized trials. Collectively, the content has increased my understanding about research in general and solutions for presenting data.

Some time ago, we developed a work titled as Adaptive Q-Sort Matrix Generation: A Simplified Approach [1] to support our research. This work aims to implement a system related to the DELPHI method. In particular, the goal was to develop the Q-Sort method for information retrieval of an experts' panel. The reason why we did it was to provide a new and simple algorithm to generate the Q-Sort matrices that adjust to the size of a given survey. Therefore, we can have more questions whose weight is null for the outcome of the round. On the same hand, giving experts the need to prioritize some questions, above others, in order to reach a consensus in a more direct way.
[1] Oliveira, B., Calisto, F.M., Gomes, L. and Borbinha, J., Adaptive Q-Sort Matrix Generation: A Simplified Approach.


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Should an arXiv paper indicate the conference it was rejected from?
We have had a couple of papers rejected from conferences quite a while ago, and we now would like to post them in arXiv. We are considering indicating on the paper which conference it was rejected from, mostly to state when the paper was actually written (we are also writing a new paper with additional results). Is this an acceptable practice?

No, you should not do that. Rejections are not to be advertised. Everyone who will read the paper will be prejudiced against it and you simply do not want that. After all, many papers are initially rejected before being accepted at a suitable venue. You want other people to know when your work got finally accepted and not the other way around.
If you want to establish the initial date of the paper, next time I would suggest to upload immediately after rejection and after addressing the reviewers' comment that lead to your rejection. This way, you have a better paper uploaded, you establish priority before submitting to the next conference and you can cite your work in subsequent publications.

What would be the purpose to the reader to state which conference it was rejected by? If the idea of a paper is to transmit information to a reader, then what you write should be guided by this fundamental principle, and everything that is not relevant to the reader should be omitted.

The question says, "We are considering indicating on the paper which conference it was rejected from, mostly to state when the paper was actually written." So it might be best to include a footnote in the paper saying, "This paper was originally written in so-and-so," directly.

The purpose is to establish the date when the paper was written.

@AmiramYehudai stating when the paper was written directly seems like a better way to do that than naming a conference it was rejected from. You can use the arXiv comment field for that, if it was written significantly earlier than when it was uploaded.

There's no real reason why you can't. Unless the conference organizers explicitly asked you to agree to a nondisclosure agreement, which would be very surprising indeed, there's nothing stopping you from doing it. The conference organizers will probably be weirded out by it but little more.
There's also no reason why you should. Nothing sets negative expectations like you saying "Hi! Here's a paper that [respected academic committee] found unsatisfying." It sets a negative tone that will be very hard to undo with the paper, for no benefit at all.
Think instead of why you want to do this. Is it to associate the paper with the conference? That will simply not work. Is it to indicate the sort of area you think the paper belongs to? There's a much better way: say it directly, most importantly by your choice of arXiv category, keywords, and abstract.
If what you want is to indicate when the paper was written, simply say that! Add a single line, in small font, below the abstract (or a comment to the arXiv submission) saying

This paper was written on -----, with minor revisions before the arXiv submission on -----.

If you ever need to actually prove this, say, because of a priority dispute, you can then contact the conference so they can confirm it.
If what you want is some form of authoritative datestamp on the date the manuscript was written, it won't work and it is not the right metric anyway. It is not a credible way to establish priority as it is still your say-so; very little other than confirmation from the conference will really convince outsiders that your claim is in fact true.
More importantly, the date that really matters for the academic community is the date the manuscript was made public. If you write a result but then sit on it for a year, no one can make use of that result. As far as other researchers go, the result does not exist until you upload it, so even if you can prove that you discovered independently from some other group that published before you uploaded but after you wrote the manuscript, they still get the credit because they made the result available.


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Including my institution in a research paper
Consider this scenario:

I am a student. I ask my professor about possible research grants. He suggests applying for a research grant with 3D printing. He helps me brainstorm and incubate in idea.
I start doing research, get a proof-of-concept, submit the proposal. While waiting for the decision, he suggests I present at my university's research conference.
I register for the conference, include my professor as the advisor and give the presentation.
Get a good amount of my research done. My proposal was rejected unfortunately. I still did a tremendous amount of work, so I am going to write up a formal paper on my findings.

So the question: Is it appropriate to include my university as my affiliation in the paper? This is my first research paper, so I don't quite know the best practices on this. I should credit my professor. He really helped me to shape my idea and gave me a lot of advice. However, he did not have a formal role in the research.
I did do my work in the school's hardware lab. My professor did help me a lot in giving me advice. However, the tools, materials and 3D printer were all mine and it was all done on my own time.
So I'm writing this paper up, and wondering whether I should include my title using something like the following template:
3D Printing Stuff Title
John Smith
Advisor: Hubert Farnsworth
Department of Quantum Neutrino Fields
Mars University
fry@mars.edu

I think you may be overestimating the significance of listing an institutional affiliation.  It does not give credit to the institution in any specific way or limit your own contributions in any way.  It is mostly just a professional address, so that interested readers can find you later.  What makes you consider not listing an institutional affiliation?  (As a side note, I have never met an undergraduate student who owned their own 3D printer, so that's interesting.  Do I understand correctly that you brought your own 3D printer together with all the materials into the university lab?)

One more tip: ask your faculty advisor for help in formatting your paper.  It is very hard to figure out these kind of academic norms unassisted but not so hard to teach someone else once you know.

@PeteL.Clark Yes, its all my own equipment, I was running into issues while building it, my professor runs the hardware lab and suggested that I bring it in. I was just more concerned about intellectual ownership sort of thing. I don't have any problem including it. The research is novel and has potential value but it was not conducted under my university's supervision other than help from my professor. Could have easily done this in my apartment. So I just wanted to make sure it was appropriate. I will be sending it over to said professor for review. Thanks

As a student, your research affiliation is the university --- the professor is beside the point.  You should list your affiliation as:

Your Name
  [optional: your department]
  University Name
  [optional: university street address]
  City, Region, Nation
  email address and/or other contact information

The degree of detail requested depends on the requirements of the venue where you are publishing: the critical part is name, institution, city/nation, and durable contact information for you (since people may try to find you five or 10 years later).
Credit to your professor will likely be as a co-author: talk to your professor,
as the answer will depend on the degree of involvement and the conventions of the community you are submitting to---computer science 3D printing and biology 3D printing are very different.  If your professor is not a co-author, they should be recognized in your acknowledgements section instead.

I'd stress the coauthorship for the professor, as it seems the OP is not clear about the conventions in such a case. The statement He really helped me to shape my idea should be a clear sign for a contribution that merits coauthorship.


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What are the common mistakes PhD candidates make in their final defense session?
For a PhD candidate that has done a fine job in their PhD, what are the common mistakes to avoid in a defense session?

Being too worried about it.  I was pretty nervous, but in the end it was more of a stimulating discussion than anything else.

As @StevenGubkin says, the point of the defense is for the committee to understand what you did. You're just giving a talk to a willing audience!

@Steven Not being nervous enough could also backfire. I've seen it happen.

How the dissertation defense works varies enormously between fields, countries, universities, and departments.  Any guidance has to take into account what the expectations are.
For example, in the defenses I'm familiar with, there are no common mistakes at all.  In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone do anything worth calling a mistake.  Here, the defense is basically a formality: you don't reach that point unless your advisor and readers are happy with your dissertation and confident you will easily pass, and in practice nobody fails unless something goes dreadfully wrong.  That can happen (I know of one case in which a serious mistake was uncovered at the last minute, which was certainly embarrassing to both the candidate and the committee), but I've never actually been present when someone failed.  So if someone from my department asked me about common mistakes they should avoid, I'd tell them not to worry about it: making it to the defense is the hard part, and then passing it is really straightforward.  It's more of a celebratory ritual than an actual test.
But of course this depends on how the defense is handled in your department.

Where I did my PhD it was even further to the side you describe. Before the defense one gets an email with a formal letter attached stating that the thesis has been approved (i.e. stating that the work is worthy of a PhD). Essentially the only way to fail at the defense is if it turns out you did not do the work yourself.

I know one person who was flat out told "No" and another who was told to rewrite the thesis from scratch (he eventually passed). In both cases though it was not entirely a surprise.

@Calchas - In case you can afford the time, I guess people in this thread would be willing to hear about the reasons why that bloke got a flat out "No". What exactly did he do to deserve it?

@TheDarkSide From what I understand, it was obvious to everyone he was not going to pass, it is not quite as simple as he did no work but I remember vaguely seeing him always playing computer games in the office rather than doing any work. In his final year, I understand his advisor counselled him to change his registration to an MSci by Research and work towards that, but he didn't wish to do that. Actually the PhD examiners did have power to make that award instead of a PhD, but they decided to fail him immediately . I don't believe he appealed their decision. It was not a normal case.

@TheDarkSide Come to think of it there was another guy from my group who was awarded an MSci instead of a PhD after his viva. I am not sure what that says about the quality of our group!

@Calchas - Haha, no but what I meant was, if the writing was already on the wall, how did things get to the stage of dissertation defence?

@Anon: The case where you mentioned a serious mistake was uncovered last minute -- what kind of a mistake was it? Could you give any more info?

@TheDarkSide: maybe the university procedures don't really account for someone who wants to defend the indefensible, so if the candidate ignores all advice and insists, then they're entitled to submit and defend, and the only way to stop them would be to expel them first (which is even more hassle)?

@TheDarkSide This was in the UK so there is a hard limit of four years on the PhD, which cannot be exceeded in normal circumstances. Presumably he was entitled to insist on an examination, and I suppose he felt he had nothing to lose by trying.

@Mehrdad: I don't know the details (it was some years ago, and I wasn't directly involved).  As I remember it, during the week before the defense one of the readers found a serious mistake in a central part of the work, which everything else depended on.  It looked like it could plausibly be fixed, but it wasn't 100% clear whether or how it could.  The student was reluctant to cancel the defense, and he worked like crazy to try to fix the mistake before the defense, but he didn't succeed and didn't pass.  However, he passed on his second try, after spending a few months fixing everything.

Let me turn the question around and answer what I want a PhD candidate to demonstrate during a defense. There are in reality only 3 things:

Demonstrate mastery of the subject, i.e., understand where the problem you researched comes from, why it is relevant, what others have already done, and why their approaches are insufficient.
That you have made a creative contribution to resolving the question you worked on. The creative contribution may really have been only a single idea or insight, grounded in an understanding of the field. In reality, you will have likely developed it jointly with your adviser.
That you have followed up this idea with diligent, comprehensive work that explored the potential and consequences of the idea.

If you cover these three topics, you will be on the good side.
Now for the common mistakes: Among the bad or difficult PhD defenses I have sat through -- of which unfortunately there were a number -- the candidate typically covered only one or two of the areas above. I can think of defenses where a candidate demonstrated good, diligent work, but was almost entirely unaware of the scientific background of the work. I can also think of defenses where the candidate understood the field well, but all of the work was essentially applying existing methods to problems to which it had previously been applied. And I can think of defenses where the candidate had had an idea, but whether the idea was worthwhile pursuing or not had not been explored in any kind of detail through follow-up work. In other words, I've seen PhD candidates make all kinds of mistakes. In reality, I think that the problem was in all of these cases not with the defense, but with the candidate, as usually becomes apparent during the Q&A session at the end.

Just for my own sake so I don't screw up when it's my turn -- how do you want the balance to be between the presentation and the dissertation? For example, if a dissertation covers all 3 but the presentation is only supposed to be 30 minutes so it focuses on 1 or 2 of the areas, is that a mistake? It seems hard to cover any one of the areas in a short presentation while all 3 seem possible in the full text.

The mistakes you list also seem to indicate that the candidate's advisor has done a poor job.

@tpg2114 I guess it depends on the form the defense takes, but where I am i would see it as the examiners' job not to finish the defence until they are sufficiently satisfied with all 3. I guess you could mess up by de-railing all their questions, but I'd expect that to indicate one of the 3 was missing anyway.

@tpg2114: Have a brief introduction (maybe 5 minutes) of the field and the question you're looking at, and then spend the rest of your time on the other two points. Your mastery of the subject will become apparent throughout the defense and the questions.

@MarcClaesen: Yes. As well as cases where a student forced the issue because they had a job lined up and requested the defense even though the adviser was not convinced it was time yet.

IMO, the most common is being defensive (perhaps encouraged by the name of the ritual). For instance if a member asks "Why did you use Smith's procedure...", and the candidate starts backtracking and apologizing, saying "I suppose I could have used Jones' procedure, that would have been better", when the question simply asks you to explain why you used Smith's procedure.

You mean it's not supposed to literally be a defense of your thesis? That takes all the fun out of it! :(

@MasonWheeler: I was certain you're going to link this: https://xkcd.com/1403/

I'd thought for sure this picture would suit the situation if something ever did.

In the end, the person in the room who probably knows most about the work done is the candidate.

Don't get nervous
Make sure your slides cover what you did, in sufficient detail. Don't overdo it, your time is limited. Make sure (e.g. by rehearsing) you fit in the allotted time. Might have to only show a slice for this, select it carefully.
When asked about stuff outside your direct work, it can be better to say you don't know than to try to come up with an explanation on the spot.
Check possible questions (within reason!) and have answers ready

All due respect, but bullet 4 is easier said than done. You can't anticipate everything.

I have been to multiple defenses, some common/general mistakes:

Not knowing why they use certain methods as opposed to others. Meaning that you can answer what you are doing and how the formula works, but you can't answer why not use X method instead.
Not knowing the specifics of certain methods/formulas and their reasons. Ex: we take X from Y, and you can't answer why you can/should take X from Z. more realistically: we take a measurement from the center, why not the top or bottom?
Charts with too little information, and trying to make connections that "are there" in most datasets, but doesn't imply they will be in yours. Don't create curved lines if you are missing dots.
Not knowing what is the importance of whatever it is that you are doing. Can you answer the question: "How is this useful for someone else?"
Answers in the following form: why are you using "matlab?", you: because my advisor said so. Expected response: because my advisor has plenty of experience with it and we know it can solve the problem better than other software.

A common mistake to avoid is getting too nervous or defensive, and trying to cover up the limits of your knowledge.  The committee will try to explore the limits of your knowledge and keep pressing for answers to increasingly difficult questions until you say "I don't know."  Be expecting this.  It's OK to not know the answer, especially when the question is not core to your thesis.  If you can identify why a question is not core to your thesis, and articulate that clearly, you get bonus points for that (as long as you do it tactfully and don't imply that it's a bad question).  Also, depending on the committee, they may be looking for a better answer like "I don't know, but for X reason(s) I suspect the answer might be Y and I would go about finding the answer by Z."  If the question is core to your thesis, offer to find out the answer and get back to them (especially if they're on your committee).
The better your presentation, the more questions you're likely to get that try to expand outward into territory you haven't prepared for.  Take that as a good sign!

The worst mistake you can make is to insist on defending on a certain date, over your advisor's objections.  (I have seen this happen.)

If I may be forgiven a small anecdote:  My aunt was asked a question in her defense (physics) that she didn't know how to answer.  She said to the questioner, "Perhaps a sketch will help make this clear," and attempted to draw some coordinate axes... which didn't come out straight... and after several erasures and retries, the questioner got fed up and said, "It's okay, I know you know it, let's move on."

I'm sorry, but I didn't follow the point of your anecdote. Could you please make that explicit? It seems to give the impression that you are suggesting derailment.

@TheDarkSide - I don't understand what or who might be getting derailed... but the anecdote is supposed to give an example of a committee wanting to help the baby bird get out of the nest (i.e. the department).


text:
Is it appropriate to put conference volunteering on a CV?
From reading the many questions on here that relate to CVs it seems that some items are necessary on a CV and others are more appropriate at the persons difference stages within academia. As someone at the very early stage, masters student with no publications, is conference volunteering a plus or minus on a CV?
In my own situation I helped out at a 2 day conference that my department held. I assisted presenters with setting up their presentations and video recorded the conference for the university. As a smaller conference I was the only grad student that assisted.

As a general rule: anything which is clearly academically related can go on your CV.  As you say, there are certain things that are required or nearly required on your CV, but even these vary by discipline and sometimes people in the same discipline have divergent ideas.  (For instance, every once in a while I find a CV which doesn't list the candidate's undergraduate institution, or lists it without indicating the years that they spent there.  I would have thought that was strictly required.  I guess I was wrong.)
What to fight in adding "academically related" information to your CV is clear: if you put in too much routine stuff, you'll get a bloated mess of a CV that few people will actually read.  Drawbacks of a lengthy CV can be mitigated by very careful and clear organization.  Nevertheless, you can compare CVs of two absolutely cognate people -- e.g. who attended undergrad and grad at exactly the same time and arrived at their current institution at the same time and with the same seniority -- and you'll find significant variations, including up to at least 1/3 in the total length.  It's really your choice how much detail to put on your CV, and I would be skeptical of anyone who tells you too stridently what you must and must not do.
Having said that: yes, very early career academics (especially students) really struggle to have a CV that doesn't look unhelpfully skimpy.  Conference work sounds like a great thing to put on a junior person's CV -- and in fact, even on a senior person's, although a more senior person might be more selective about the kind of conference work that goes on your CV.
One tip: "conference volunteering" might be an undersell.  Most conference organizing is unpaid, hence is volunteer work.  "Conference assistant" sounds like your work was really on the level of secretarial work / technical support.  If that is an accurate description of what you did, great.  If you do such things more than once or twice, you should think about asking to be let in on some of the more content-related aspects of the work.  For instance, if you had a say -- however small -- in choosing or recruiting the speakers or attendees, then I would go for something like "co-organizer" rather than "assistant".

In general, it's a bad idea to put things in your CV that look like they are there exclusively to make it look longer. It gives the impression that you haven't done enough "real" stuff (teaching, publications, etc) and you are just digging for menial things to pad your CV up. The problem is that, as you pointed out, what counts as "menial" vs. "significant" depends to a certain extent on your career stage. If you are a grad student and your professor asks you to give a guest lecture in one of his/her undergrad classes, it's ok to include that in your CV, but if you are in a tenure-track job, you might want to only include courses for which you have full responsibility.
In the case at hand, I would say that it's ok to say that you helped at this particular conference, but keeping in mind that this line will have to disappear from your CV at some point in the future.


text:
Should we mention all the hypotheses in the results part in an academic paper?
Normally, in an academic paper, we can see that in the Hypothesis development section, researchers normally raise some hypotheses.
For example:
H1: A affects B
After running empirical regression, I am wondering if it is a must to repeat that "the result confirm the hypothesis 1 that A affects B" or if we just need to mention that "the result shows that A affects B" ?
I ask this question because:
I thought of not writing the hypothesis number because I do not want my audience to need to go back to the hypothesis development to see what I wrote, which may drive my audiences' attention away (suggested by McCLOSKEY, p.192). On the other hand, I thought if we do not confirm the hypothesis at the Result section, it means that we did not close the case we opened.

It doesn't really matter. Look up some papers in your field and see how they handle it. However, if you formulate your results like you did including the hypothesis number, readers do not need to go back since you already confirm in the same sentence what the hypothesis was.


text:
What do professors want to see in a letter of motivation for a PhD student position in France?
I am applying to a PhD program in France and they asked for a letter of motivation.
Is it okay if I repeat some of the information that is already in my resume in my letter?
Do you have any tips or helpful samples?

You might find this presentation by Boaz Barak, a CS professor at Harvard, helpful: https://www.boazbarak.org/Papers/howto_statement_of_purpose.pdf

PhD programmes in France (and the rest of Europe, and elsewhere) want a letter of motivation for the most obvious of reasons: to hear why you want to pursue a PhD at all, to hear why you want to pursue the particular PhD topic, and to hear why you want to pursue that PhD topic at their University. They want you to articulate your reasoning, your goals, and your plan. They want to see if you are a cultural fit for the university and a particular research team or supervisor.
All told this is an imperfect way to see if you are "PhD material". To see that you genuinely have worked out what a PhD means to you and your goals and you are not just trying to do a PhD because you can't think of anything else to do. As such, it is not a repeat of the contents of your CV**. While you might mention CV items, this is a narrative, qualitative, and contextualised piece of writing. It is a different thing.
**I note you say "resume". Perhaps that is a translation problem, but please make sure you are NOT submitting a working-world style resume, rather you are submitting an academic CV. A working-world one page resume is not correct for PhD submission. It is the wrong format.


text:
What's the difference between motivational letter and a cover letter?
I am applying to different PhD positions (biological science) and some of the applications ask for motivational letter and others ask for a cover letter. I am bit confused because I always thought that they are the same thing.

There is none. The term "motivational letter" emphasizes the idea that you should motivate your application in that letter, but this idea applies to a "cover letter" as well.

Okay. Thank you !


text:
Returning to academia - continuously rejected
I finished my Ph.D. in mathematics in 2016 and then worked at the same university (in Germany) and under the same professor (now retired) as a postdoc for the next four years.
I knew my contract would only last until the end of 2020, so I started applying for positions in academia around June last year without any success.
Late 2020, I eventually started applying for jobs outside of academia which worked better insofar that I am currently employed, working full-time providing for me and my partner.
In the meantime, I made several attempts to return to academia, prioritizing jobs with an emphasis on teaching in comparison to research, as I believe that I am more capable in teaching and I enjoy it a lot, in particular when it is teaching math students (especially undergraduates).
Unfortunately, none of my applications landed me any interviews.
I struggle to believe that I am not qualified for the jobs I applied to, yet I get told repeatedly that the amount of applicants better suited for them is so large that I get cut prior to the interviews.
I am aware of several issues with my CV, but I am not sure how to overcome them:

I have no real experience in obtaining funding.
I have not published a lot.
My research subjects seem to be not that popular nowadays (representation theory of finite groups and stuff).
During my time in academia, I, unfortunately, did not bother building a network, becoming a visible part of the academic community and now lack connections (and consequently letters of reference).
My contractual focus in academia was mainly on research, not teaching, and most of the teaching I did was not independent teaching, at least not on paper.

These are just the problems I am currently aware of but I do not know how relevant they actually are.
All these points are definitely somewhat approachable while working in academia, but since I am now outside, how can I tackle them? Is there anything else I can do? Or do I have to just keep applying and hope for the best?

Added (28.08.):
Given all the questions in the comments and answers (Thank you all for your input!), I guess I need to add a couple more issues to my list:

My affinity towards programming, simulation, data science, optimization, and the like is small at best.
I am currently employed in the finance industry (banking supervision) and am not going to have any leading role here in the foreseeable future.

From what you tell me, it seems that together, these points would make the 'Fachhochschule' path almost unattainable. Point 6. is also a reason for me to believe that it would be difficult to find something actually interesting outside of academia.
As to why I want to return to academia, the short answer is: Because I love teaching mathematics and there is no other place to do this properly.
But then again, I get your arguments and it is probably a good idea to stop dreaming and face reality.

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

There are lots of answers here with lots of different perspectives for OP. If others have covered your suggestions, you should upvote their answers and any others that seem useful to you. If not, the best place to put your views is in a new answer, or you can continue the conversation in the chat room.

Are you aware of the German Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz? It limits your time as a PostDoc to six years. You already spent four of them, so you can only work at German Universities for two more years. To get new six years, you have to get your Habilitation.

if your love of teaching math is your main motivator for this, did you consider a career as math high school teacher? There are much more positions and potentially more open positions...

Unfortunately, in any situation where the supply far exceeds demand, people resort to arbitrary and often irrelevant criteria to cut down the number of choices. So it's likely that you're being prejudged less on your qualifications than on your nonconformity.

@derptank: To those six years allowed for postdocs, you have to add another six years minus the times taken for your PhD, so in many cases you actually have more than six years as a postdoc. Apart from this, I don't understand your last sentence: I'm not aware that one would get "new six years" after habilitation, and I can't find information that supports this claim. Could you provide a source for it?

@JochenGlueck I have checked, I was wrong about the "new six years". I just wanted to mention the law, because I think potential employers might be looking for 6+ years of collaboration.

At the risk of being a downer, here is a perspective you are probably not too fond of. Given your long list of self-identified issues with your CV, you have two options:

You work on these issues so as to be able to better compete against others who have CVs without these holes. This might be difficult: Others at your age already have teaching experience, more publications, etc., and furthermore have a support network that can help them navigate the process of finding positions because they are currently in academia. In other words, you are fighting an uphill battle because -- empirically, based on your past experience applying for positions -- there are people out there who have better CVs than you at your age, and there will always be. In other words, you need to catch up, and you need to do that quickly because you are not getting younger and you don't want to compete with people who have the same CV as you but are five or eight years younger than you. In any case, as you have probably understood by now, continuing to apply with the CV you currently have is an exercise in futility and, given that it didn't work in the past, is unlikely going to work in the future if the basis for your applications does not substantially change -- so don't waste your time on applications until you think that you are in a place where that's actually worth your time, energy, and emotions.
You make your peace with the situation and put your energy into a career doing something you enjoy and are good at.

This is not a forum for advice on personal issues, but I would nonetheless suggest that you take a closer look at that second option simply because the first, to me, sounds like a prescription for many years of unhappiness with uncertain (maybe unlikely) outcome. It is what it is, but you've now successfully landed in an industry job -- so make that work, find happiness in what you are doing there, and put your energy into something that you can see providing you with happiness. That may be being ambitious about your industry career, wanting to learn and grow. Or it may be considering your job a job, and finding happiness after 5pm when you come home, caring for a family or for your hobbies.

Agree on making peace. Maybe this also helps: It looks like you love doing slow paced research in  mathematics (which I think is great); most positions you can apply to (next level) at university do not have this luxury. Most likely your job would be the one of an administrator in the sense of writing grant application, getting 60% rejected, getting the grants let some post doc do the work, look that the reports look shiny and play departmental politics. I believe you actually do not want that job. Enjoy your industry work and keep it as a hobby.

I think this is invaluable advice that we don't give enough here. Academia is highly competitive. All anyone can do is give it their best shot. In many cases it won't work out, often due to factors outside of the applicant's control. The best advice advice then is to make peace with the fact that this particular life dream will remain unfulfilled, and move on.

@xLeitix Indeed. Also that, with a perspective from a bit later in life, we see lots of people whose life has not unfolded along a straight line or along the planned trajectory, and is still full, joyful, and satisfying. There are many paths through life, and at each turn (planned or not), there is an opportunity that when seized can be fulfilling and satisfying.

One alternative might be a professorship at a Fachhochschule. In Germany, these professorships usually require at least three years of professional experience in industry.
The pool of suitable professors is small, hence chances to obtain a professorship are reasonable. Be warned of the requirements:

Proven track record in industry, which might be shown through industry publications, patents, leadership positions, cutting edge projects, working in R&D or similar.
Teaching experience. While most mathematicians have this experience from their graduate study, it helps to get a Lehrauftrag, i.e. doing some teaching while being employed in industry.
Experience in an applied research topic relevant for applied research done at Fachhochschulen. Think rather about simulation, data science, cryptography (which might get public funding for research) than finance or insurance.

It furthermore helps to:

Have a wide network in industry. You might try to connect in local organizations, be active in online communities, visit events or have a job with many contacts.
Be able to teach different subjects than math, e.g. in computer science or physics.
Make believable to be able to acquire third party funding for research, at Fachhochschulen usually from federal or state ministries or the EU. It helps to work in R&D or have a track record of customer acquisition while being employed in industry.
Have a track record in leadership capabilities for your future working group. This can be demonstrated by leading people (interns?) in industry or perhaps student teaching assistants at universities.
Publish while being employed in industry. It does not matter whether old topics form pure math or new topics stemming from your industry job. (You do have a jobs where math is involved?)
Have supervised many student theses (bachelor, master, PhD), either while being at university or while being in industry.
Have experience in academic self-government or at least show motivation to help your future department in constructively working in committees.
Know current teaching techniques (online, asynchronous, digital, inverted classroom, …), perhaps have experience in them, and have an idea which of those might be suitable for your courses.
Come across as motivated and motivating person. You need to be able to motivate both industry and students to do research with you. And you need intrinsic motivation to be motivated while working with failure in grant applications.

If you want to try this route, I would

Look at openings for suitable professorships (jobs.zeit.de) and see what is in need.
Look for a jobs that is suitable for current (or better: future) research trends. You see current trends at these openings.
Show excellent performance at your industry jobs.
Do things that are visible and connected to your jobs.
Build a network.
Try to understand funding structures for applied research.
Try to stay connected to academia.
Start applying after 2 years in industry, be it to gain experience.

Most of these suggestions are also excellent suggestions if you want to have a career in industry and similarly you should follow standard advice for having a career in industry on this path.
Feel free to ask further questions here. You should also know how to contact me.

That's long-term planning, I would say, start with a Lehrauftrag somewhere and then keep looking.

Duale Hochschule or Berufsschule are an option as well. In Germany its even possible to teach at normals schools (you need to to a paedagogic course though) especially in areas where there is a shortage of teachers. If it is about the teaching irrelevant of university this could be a way to go.

This is advice that probably only works for the US. Here, we have a few thousand, primarily undergraduate, primarily teaching institutions, all of which have a need for a few mathematicians. Most undergraduate programs here require at least a bit of math or statistics since they are more general in nature than in Germany. These colleges normally have a tenure track for faculty requiring a probation period of six or seven years. I got a strong foundation for graduate school at such a place, for example.
At the other end of the scale, there are at least a few very top research institutions (Stanford, CMU, Duke, ...) that have a special category of faculty - Professor of the Practice or similar. These institutions have a large need for a lot of mathematicians for the same reason and the position is intended to free the research faculty from a lot of teaching duties. These tend not to be tenure track, but are quite secure and have long term contracts. The undergraduate program depends on high quality teaching from this faculty.
Both of the above sorts of positions normally require some research, but not at the same level as at a top research university's research faculty. It can make a nice life.

There are also many community colleges all of which also need mathematicians.  It should be pointed out that all these jobs are also quite difficult to obtain, and most successful applicants for a permanent job of this sort have teaching experience from previous temporary positions.

Yes, @AlexanderWoo, I counted only four year colleges. Note that the instruction at community colleges is only the lower level courses -- first two years of a four year BS/BA. Some of these are very high quality institutions.

This doesn't transfer to Germany at all.

@Arno, yes, I know. A US only solution, but open to an immigrant. The systems are very different. But jobs are also hard to find here as well. Tough times for young academics.

@Arno There's Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, and it's basically a small liberal arts college.

It is not a great time to look for academic jobs right now (Aug 2021)
My knowledge of this is only anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.  However, my understanding is that the COVID pandemic has been financially damaging to many universities (due to loss of students) and so they are downsizing to cut costs.  At my own university in Australia, there has been a pay-freeze for staff, a blanket rule of non-renewal of contract positions (other than grant-funded positions), plus voluntary redundancies for permanent staff.  The flow-on result has been that there are a large number of academics seeking positions, and not many positions available to absorb them.  Since labour supply is high, and labour demand is low, the universities are getting a surfeit of high-quality applications.
I do not know if the position in Germany is the same as in my own country, so it is hard for me to comment confidently on the job market there.  In my own country, I have heard a rule-of-thumb that ---in the current academic job climate--- people are getting positions roughly one increment below their normal level (e.g., a full professor would get a position as associate professor, an associate professor as assistant professor, etc.).  So for the positions you applied for, it wouldn't surprise me if there were applicants with many years of academic experience, probably even with good research records.  From what you have described of your record, I would expect that they are accurate in stating that they had better applicants.
The present situation is not necessarily permanent.  If the pandemic subsides (fingers crossed) and travel restrictions and lockdowns are eased, students will come back to the campus and some universities will then go back into an expansionary phase.  (Though for a countervailing take on the matter, at least in the context of the US, see Reynolds 2015.)  If this occurs then it is likely that there will be  a period where the volume and quality of applications for academic positions subsides, due to higher demand relative to supply.
In terms of trying to make yourself competitive for academic jobs, while working outside academia, the main thing you can do is to try to use your industry work as a spring-board for research ideas, and then try to convert these ideas into published papers.  If you can identify some research that would be likely to attract industry funding, all the better.  This is difficult, since it is something that will probably end up occurring on top of your regular job, but if you can get some research published and open up some funding opportunities, that will help bolster your CV for future academic applications.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Most of these comments were about the funding situation in Germany and explaining that this answer likely doesn't apply there; it might not be a great fit for Germany but it still might be useful for other people besides OP with similar questions that find this one.

That pretty much applies to the US as well. Thanks, your remarks allow me to make sense of my own job situation right now.

+1, the current situation is not typical at all. I got more interviews in academia as an unpublished third year PhD student shooting for the moon in 2019 than I did as a PhD graduate with three published papers in 2020/21.
However, while not typical, this doesn't mean that it won't last for many years. It could very well do so.

As you mentioned, it would be easier if you were in Academy, so one option that comes to mind is to come back to Academy as a researcher (Which is where you already have experience) and once you are in, start looking for opportunities to switch into teaching/lecturing. But this time make sure to work on what you described in point 4.

During my time in academia, I, unfortunately, did not bother building a network, becoming a visible part of the academic community and now lack connections (and consequently letters of reference).