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Is it acceptable to ask an unknown professor outside my dept for help in a related field during his office hours?
Would a professor find it strange or be irritated if an unknown student asks him a question during his office hours that is related to his field but either is or isn't related to any class he is teaching?
Sometimes I encounter a math problem in my engineering class where I'd find it helpful if a math professor could explain a concept to me when I don't have any satisfactory answers. Another example is if I am working on an outside of class project and would like to ask a CS professor what an apache log is?
Is this acceptable?

Just a comment, but when I was teaching, I almost always enjoyed these kinds of distractions. Just (a) ask first, and (b) don't think you'll get priority over the professor's actual students!

Asking is usually not a problem.  I recommend establishing contact by email first, both to allow the prof to prepare for a meeting in advance, and to offer a non-awkward out.

@ScottSeidman I have to agree. Email is a great way of establishing first contact- in fact, while I was getting an AA at a community college, I wrote a couple professors at the uni I would be transferring to within the year with a few questions about their department and for some advice. They answered within the day with well thought out, generously informative replies. Note to OP: I wrote one email and one reply, nothing more. Respect and value their time.

A professor is a domain expert in a very specific field.  I would be extremely careful about using them as fodder for a bad help-vampire habit, especially with general questions as trivial as: "What is an apache log?".  If you're not their student and aren't asking about something specific to a class they are teaching, then it had better be a question that they, and very few others, would be able to answer effectively.  If Siri or OK Google could have answered your question they are probably going to be rather irritated.

The answers address the general issues you raise in your question, particularly in the first paragraph, but I am a bit unclear why you would be taking a math problem from your engineering class to anyone except your engineering professor/TA - they know math too, and could easily know a lot more about the type of math in your course than a math professor with different interests.

@BryanKrause For example if I am interested in the proof of it.

Have you tried to look up the proof of it?  I mean tried hard.

That might be more appropriate, but come to think if it, there might be some site where you could ask questions you tried to answer yourself but are still wondering about, that might be better if you have a question about one part of a proof. A more appropriate question for a professor might be, "I'm interested in the mathematics behind a proof like this - could you recommend a course that would help me understand things like this?"

Since you mention math and CS specifically, at many schools there is a math lab where students with math questions can go and have their questions answered by a TA. I think a few places have a CS lab and/or forum where TAs could answer questions, too. If something like this is available, it would be far more appropriate, especially if your question does not require knowledge/insight beyond what any TA would be able to provide.  If you're living at a university, I would also recommend asking a random math/CS major before going to a professor.

@BryanKrause: Math.SE is not necessarily some site where you could ask questions you tried to answer yourself but are still wondering about. You can only ask specific questions with well-defined answers. You can't ask broad, general, high-level, introductory or multi-domain questions e.g. "What's the point of Fourier analysis?" or "Does task X need a 24-bit DSP?"

OP, does "ask for help" or "explain a concept to me when I don't have any satisfactory answers" mean advanced stuff or elementary stuff? Does it mean you're curious, or working far outside your field, or that your professors and TAs are crap, or that you don't read manpages, documentation, O'Reilly books, use Google, etc. For example, even asking a CS TA what an apache log is, is IMO lazy and annoying. Now if you read the documentation and had a specific issue about Apache logs and you couldn't solve it through the usual resources, and they were ok with helping you, that might be different.

@MarkS. indeed, and actually sometimes it's interesting to ask the same question of the undergrad and the professor, and compare the delta. Like, "Does technique X have applications in my field?", you'll tend to get more unbiased answers from someone who hasn't devoted 10+ years to it. For example, see if you ever find someone who will admit that most AI or NN literature in the 1990s was bullshit, or that NN, fuzzy logic, rule-based systems were massively oversold.

In general, yes. Personally I've been pretty open to answering questions about my field of expertise from "random" students during my office hours. But:

Ask first: "I was working on X and am wondering about Y. Do you think you would have time to answer a few questions?" Be prepared to hear "No, I'm sorry, I don't."
Ask the right person. Don't assume that a CS professor who teaches machine learning will know anything about Apache logs.
Come prepared with a specific question - don't expect me to explain an entire topic to you from beginning to end, or spend an hour walking you through a tutorial on some programming concept you want to learn.
Don't abuse office hours as a substitute for doing basic research on your own (e.g. "I know I could easily find the answer to my question online, but it was quicker to come ask you during office hours.")
Professors may want to give "priority" to students who are actually enrolled in their classes. If the office hours are busy, try not to monopolize the professor's time - or come back at a less busy time, like the week after the midterm exam instead of the week before ;)

In general if you are polite and use common sense, you will not do anything wrong in this situation.

@Falco: that’s true, but the trouble is that almost everyone thinks they’re being polite and using common sense, even when they’re not.

I think the problem is not so much polite/impolite, but there can definitely be undergraduates who misunderstand the relationship between themselves and their professors/TAs, and what questions are appropriate to ask of each. This site is a good source for considerate but uncertain students to help navigate those issues.

Although I certainly do aim to be civil to students who  "drop in", and, yes, am able to gauge earnestness... : the point is that anything that comes up in undergrad engineering or undergrad math classes or first or second-year grad courses is (almost surely) standard. That is, many sources exist for it, on-line and off. That does not entail that an experienced expert can't add any insights to the standard sources, but it does mean that a student who hasn't looked at (or found...) the standard sources is asking (probably inadvertently) for tooooo much help. That is, very likely looking at any one of the standard sources would instantly resolve the question, and truly expert insights are irrelevant and unnecessary (and a waste of an expert's time).
One advantage of on-line sites like MathStackExchange is the asynchronousness: I only look at them when I'm in the mood, and no one is offended if I don't respond at all, and, indeed, I can give whatever response I want and then I'm done.
In that regard, I almost prefer drop-ins to appointments, since, in fact, appointments consume more mental resources than spur-of-the-moment things. Nevertheless, of course, all my time is planned out for nearly every day. Thus, "drop in" questions by email are preferable to in-person. But/and, yes, my email response may be that this is standard and one can easily look it up... e.g., in notes I've written that are on-line.
The worst-case scenario is non-math people (e.g., engineering students, sorry) vastly under-estimating the effort often required to really prove things, if that's what they believe that they want. It is a happy miracle that mathematics works so well, especially at "modest scales" in the physical world, and, mostly, it is easy to obtain physical corroboration for heuristic mathematics. That is, plausibility arguments are often straightforward, even if requiring some wishful thinking. Part of the "miracle" is that, historically, it has often proven difficult to distill a physical narrative into genuine mathematical terms that no longer depend on literal physical intuition for their sense or proof. (Sure, for physical scientists, there may indeed be no reason to even attempt to abstract mathematics from the physical.)

"anything that comes up in undergrad engineering [...] is (almost surely) standard": in engineering, at the undergraduate level, there is a lot of stuff that can be non standard or difficult to find if not properly directed. Take also into account that different professors or universities might have different expectations on what level the undergraduate level is.

"The worst-case scenario is non-math people vastly under-estimating the effort often required to really prove things": on the other side, there are a lot of math people who underestimate the experimental effort needed to accurately verify models and theories ;-)

@MassimoOrtolano, surely you do not mean to claim that in undergrad engineering there is mathematics that is not well known to mathematicians? Sure difficult-to-find if badly directed or mis-directed, but that applies to nearly anything. And, sure, historically, some highly innovative mathematics in physics (Heaviside, Dirac, et al) was slow to be understood and assimilated in mathematics.

I didn't speak specifically about mathematics: in undergrad engineering there are many different subjects and for many of them there are subtle problems, even at the undergrad level, which cannot be easily found if not properly directed. I'll give you two examples, taken from two answers of mine on EE.SE and Physics.SE: this one (look at the OP's comment under the answer) and this one. You won't find that stuff so easily if you don't know where to look.

And questions like the above pop up sometimes in my courses, although I teach different stuff. And so it's not uncommon that students come to me asking questions not related to what I teach.

Honestly, how much of your time is taken up by engineering students dropping by asking for proofs?

@ScottSeidman, currently, not so much, but when I taught a crypto course regularly, and a coding-theory course, each with 100+ students, this generated a population of people in engineering depts who knew me and did often-enough turn to me to answer their math questions. Also, when I was younger and more informal-accessible-looking, and was always in the math bldg (no internet...) and had my door open, I'd get quite a few walk-ins, if only by default. I thought I was doing my duty to be helpful, although almost universally it was about homework, nothing more serioues...

@ScottSeidman, also, by this year, I have the impression that many or most people believe that the internet can answer their questions, so they'd not walk across the street to the math bldg, hence, few literal walk-ins anymore.

You can certainly ask a professor politely if he/she would be willing to talk to you about some research topic that might be of mutual interest to you.  Don't be too surprised if the professor isn't interested in discussing it with you though- what's interesting to you might well not be interesting to that professor.
Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect a professor to help you with a class that you are taking from some other professor or in a different academic department.  You have an instructor for that other course, and you probably also have access to a tutoring center where you can get help from people whose job it is to provide tutoring.

Made one small edit -- please roll back if I misinterpreted your idea.

Ordinarily, I'd say go ahead and ask, but both the examples you cite sound like you should not need to ask an outside professor.  The first is clearly the responsibility of the prof of your engineering class -- AFTER you've done all you can do to learn the math on your own -- and the second seems like enough time in front of a search engine should do the job.
To expand a little bit, for the question about the apache log, it doesn't sound like you're anywhere near prepared enough to even ask the question.  Spend an hour trying to find your own answer.  Do some prelim research to better inform your question.  If you haven't found the answer, you might consider looking for the appropriate Stack Exchange group, and asking there.  If you still haven't gotten the answer you need, now would be the time to try to find an expert to talk to.

If you send email to a professor, introduce yourself properly and politely,  compose it nicely, and don't be offhanded about it. Otherwise the professor might not take you seriously and ignore the email. I had an otherwise very smart student doing research on land use who wanted to meet professors working in the field. She'd write something like, "hey, could I come meet you?" and then wonder why she got no reply. I had to teach her in etiquette as well as the subject.

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How to find a gap in knowledge, for my PhD?
I just started my PhD and this is my fourth week. I understand that as a PhD student, my main aim is to find a gap in the knowledge and then trace this gap by using scientific approaches that I might choose later.
My question is: How can I find this gap?
I can think of two options:

Reading, which is the ideal option and we all know that. However, it might be frustrating to read a lot because maybe you
will get lost in the final stage due to information overload.
Just jump to the conclusion of any paper in your field and see if they provide any recommendations about a potential gap and choose it as your hypothesis or the starting point for formulating your question.

Seems like the sort of thing that Ph.D. advisors are for. As a beginning grad student you are not expected to have a good knowledge of where the research frontier is.

@JohnColeman, there are some Ph.D advisors though, who actually the only thing that they say (and is generally true) is: " is your personal research and you are the leader of it". Reading I think is really important on this stage (I am also a new PhD student).

Perhaps reading some review papers on your research area might help!

@geo_dd It is probably somewhat field specific. When I showed up to grad school in mathematics, almost all of the math that I actually knew was discovered before I was born (and often by a century or more). It never would have occurred to me that I was supposed to figure out as a first year grad student what I intended to do my dissertation research on. I didn't have the background to understand what the relevant knowledge gaps were about.

I am not a PhD, so I can only comment rather than answer, but the most important discoveries in science are not announced with a loud "Eureka! Eureka! I have found it!" followed by a mad dash through the town without one's clothes.  Truly the most important discoveries are marked with a "hmm, that's kind of funny."  (Citation unknown)

is your personal research and you are the leader of it — Sure, but there's a difference between "take the lead" and "Here's the deep end; I hope you like sharks! [shove]".

(Purely for humor) "gap of knowledge" not found. https://www.google.com/maps/search/GAP+of+knowledge/@35.5891243,-118.5195591,4z/data=!3m1!4b1

What field is this? The answer is math is very different from that in cultural anthropology or electrical engineering.

Related to: How to come up with research ideas?

Also, even when you have a focus, a research gap, often takes at least a year to get your head around how really to tackle that problem. A PhD is a long run, not being very clear in your 4th week is OK. Anecdotally my project meeting to define my PhD thesis focus was after 3 months of PhD.

Too short to be an answer, but: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Don't over-read and don't gap over-search. Just get an under-researched dataset and take it from there. Gaps will stare at you. Read only after referees complain that you didn't quote this or that.

I would not suggest starting by looking for gaps at all for a few reasons.
Some gaps are left gaps for a reason. Some are not relevant enough to be bothered with, some have not enough data to work with, some lack technology to work with. In any case, even if you find a gap, the follow up question will be why do you want to spend time and resources trying to fill in that gap? That is a pretty hard question to answer.
Instead, try to start by finding a problem. Look for a problem that is relevant, that is worth solving, that is even conceptually solvable. And the most important thing, look for a problem that you are passionate about because you are about to spend a good chunk of your life trying to solve it and will probably fail for the most part. So every bit of success you have should be meaningful for you and for others who are affected by this problem.
Once you found the problem you want to help solve, then you can look for gaps within that narrow area. That should be a piece of cake because chances are you will bump right into them and later find yourself surrounded by them.

I like the warning that gaps may be gaps for a reason. But the rest of the answer makes me wonder what the difference between a problem and a research gap is. I think there's a valuable observation somewhere, but it needs some fleshing out.

A gap concerning a gaps.

@Abra Sure it is. Read paragraphs 3 and 4. The answer is "find it later (implicitly using either/both of methods 1 and 2) after narrowing to a specific problem".

"later find yourself surrounded by them" this is very very true (at least in my subject)

As someone coming out the other side, I'm not going to give you two answers.  The easy answer is to just ask your advisor and have them give you a project.  I've seen plenty of people try this and the problem is that if it doesn't really grab your interest then grad school will be a grueling frustrating boring experience.
The alternative is the far better solution, at least in my opinion.  That is simply, don't look for it.  As counter-intuitive as that sounds.  Most programs don't expect you to have your project figured out the first semester or even the first year in many cases.  Take that time to really dig into the parts of your field that interest you.  Really dig deep and learn all you can learn.  As you learn you'll have questions.  If you're doing it right, they'll be the kind of questions that keep you up at night.  You really need those answers to satisfy your mind.  Go look for those answers.  When you come to the question that is vexing you and you can't find the answer and nobody around knows where it is, then you've found your gap in the knowledge.  Only this time it will consume your mind and you will be able to think of nothing else.  And grad school will feel like this beautiful opportunity to have all of these resources behind you while you try to answer your question.  It will almost be fun.  It will be rewarding.  And it will keep your interest.  And when you get done, you won't just have the degree, but you'll also have all the other stuff that can come with it when you really do it right.

I wish I could double upvote this answer. By becoming an expert in your field, you will gain a good understanding of where there are significant gaps.

I agree with "Really dig deep and learn all you can learn." Another thing to keep in mind, while doing that digging and learning, is that there are often alternative ways to view some material, ways that others might not have noticed yet. I've found that following such an alternative approach to known material usually leads to a clearer understanding and often leads to new ideas that can become a good research project.

Reading available literature in your field is the best place to start finding what has not been researched in the recommendation portion of research dissertations.This should point you in finding a gap.

You should expand this answer as it currently looks more as a comment.

There is some good advice in the earlier answers. To find the most suitable one you must know yourself of course: For some people it works to not focus too much (as user82540 suggests: just read and let your curiosity do the magic), others can be given a question and take it from there all alone (the supervisor must have the topic all sorted out), while others need something introductory to get their hands on before they get any sense of orientation (often that's an assignment at grad school). It is ideal if you have all options, but usually one doesn't.
Therefore, beyond the already good answers (including your own), I have the following to add, which may be especially useful if your university has no comprehensive grad course in your field or if your supervisor is not very helpful (and in the understanding that it is not always easy to change supervisors or universities): Attend a relevant summer school (or winter school) early in your studies and don't hesitate to ask the lecturers the same question, i.e., about hot topics in their fields. This is not to say that you will get specific topics from them necessarily (they have their own students), but you are bound to get some direction. Be prepared to 1) first show them what you have been doing (anything: masters thesis, what you read that interested you...) 2) sit back and hear them brainstorm (some are exceptionally good at that) and 3) understand maybe 1/10 of it.
Such schools often offer hands-on experience too (e.g., in physics you get to use somebody's computer program and see science at work) and for many people that's very illuminating.

Something which worked quite well for me (in maths, that is), was combining several (sub)topics of your field. At the beginning of your PhD might be the last moment where you have enough freedom (in terms of time) to look at different areas you know nothing about. So try to gain some breadth of knowledge.
Even by the end of your PhD, you will probably not know as much as the experts on topic A or on topic B. However you can be one of the few with both good knowledge about A and about B and thus the only one to realise, how to apply some method from A to something from B in a novel way.
In other words, instead of only looking at the cutting edge, the gap of knowledge you need might just be a gap between two subareas.

This is good general advice about life.  You'll never be the best in the world at X, but it is very possible that you have a combination of W, X, Y, and Z skills that nobody can exceed.

if you feel your advisor is not helpful, then change advisor.
The advisor should tell you at least the area to look for (the topic) as well as a sound hypothesis (that may not be extremely fine tuned but can be a starting point). Very rarely the advisor will actually give you a discovery.
Your role as a PhD student is to make a discovery, this will happen when you will put the results of your experiments (made to address the initial hypothesis) in the context of the current knowledge (which you have to acquire by reading, going to seminar, ask more experience people, etc...)

This might bespecific to your discipline, but I think you do have a misconception about what your aim as a PhD student should be. The aim is to do research and provide new insights into your field based on scientific methods.
To me, the fact that you have started a PhD position without a topic is a bad sign. Your supervisor should either have given you some ideas or asked you what you want to do research on when you applied. Imo if neither of those has happened you should seriously reconsider whether he is suitable supervisor to your (or anyone else).
Now given that you are in this position anyway and you might not agree with my opinion here, I would give you the following advice.

If you are searching through literature for problems to solve, try finding out if review papers are common in your discipline. Those usually are very long papers which give a great overview over a field once there has been substantial progress and if there are known experts around. These are to my experience more likely to make you aware of open questions and unsolved problems than other types of papers.
If you are working in social sciences it might also be helpful to search your own head. What I mean is: Why are you interested in this field? Which open questions do you have? What did people fail to explain or prove to you during your studies?
Again for literature review I would focus on more recent problems and publications. Often you will find that you can use methods old methods and apply them to a new field which they have not been explored in. This gives you a quick start into a topic and once you start doing research on your own more interesting questions might pop up.

If you have done all this and figured out a general area of interest, go talk to your supervisor. You should do this either way. Again he does not necessarily have to come up with a very explicit suggestion, but anything that gets you to start working on a topic where he - or some of his close colleagues - have a good level of expertise might open exciting questions for you to work on along the way.
The same could also happen if you start collaborating on something with another PhD student or postdoc. I really advise against pure literature review for the search. Personally I couldnt keep that up for more than 2 weeks straight.

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In how much detail should one describe their past and projected future work for a junior scientist application to CNRS?
The competitive application process for CNRS jobs has opened this week, and part of the required documents are a report on past work, as well as a project for future work (together with a list of CNRS labs where this work could be done). There is not much information about what these are expected to contain; the instructions only specify "Report on research completed" and "Proposed research program".
More specifically, for a "chargé de recherche" (junior scientist, a permanent research position with no teaching), how much detail should be given in these two documents? How long should they be? Is there a typical structure that one should follow for them?
It is my understanding that the national committee members may not (and in my case are not, I checked) experts in the specific domain of the applicants, there is e.g. a committee for all of sociology, another for "brain, cognition, behavior" and so on. If this makes any difference, I'm looking for answers that deal with an application in a STEM field, not social science.

CNRS is a national research agency, more-or-less the equivalent of the American NSF. With a budget of 3 billion euros, it employs 11,137 tenured researchers (equivalent to associate and full professors but with no teaching service), in addition to 13,415 engineers and technical staff, and 7,085 contractual staff (postdocs etc). It fully runs 32 "proper" research units, but most of the employees work in one of the 952 "mixed" research units that are half part of CNRS, half part of an university, which can be anywhere in the country and whose members are either employed by the CNRS or by the university.
There also exists 36 international mixed research units and 121 "private-public" research structures. Viewing it as a "single institute" is quite reductive.
(For more info, read the 2016 activity report, in French.)
The competitive application process sees several hundreds people all over the country applying each year, so my question is applicable to a broad audience. A national committee evaluates application in a given discipline, and the committee is rather stable year after year, so "codes" and expectations about the application are bound to have developed over the years. Thus my question is about what in particular is expected in the reports on past and projected works.

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

It may be dependent on the field and even on who is in the jury. In particular, the jury changes every few years and they decide by themselves what procedure they will follow to judge the applications.
Two of my colleagues who have been on the CNRS jury in different STEM sections in different years told me the following:
Your file will probably be assigned to one or two of the jury members who know most about the subject of your proposal. They will have an in-depth look at it and initially defend it on your behalf if they think it is worth it. These assigned jury members are the only ones that have to read your file. The others can choose to do so if they wish.
Besides this I can tell you the following from applying for a CR2 position myself (several years ago):

I described my past research, point-wise per university where I worked. This was 2 pages in total.
I described my research proposal in 11 pages. It included figures, preliminary data and references (much like a research paper). I described a short-term (5 years) research goal as well the many possibilities to expand the research later on.

This must have been reasonable because I was invited for an interview. Of course there are surely many other ways to do it that may be equally good or better, but all I can say is what I know, and wish you good luck (you will need it. It is well known in France that the jury often wants to fund around 20 equally good proposals out of ~200 applications, but they only have the money to fund a couple).

Thanks, this is very helpful. In particular I didn't expect the research proposal to be so long.

I do think it is best to keep it as short as possible, but to make a convincing case with an introduction of the subject, description of planned research, preliminary data, figures, references, and maybe a short section about the laboratory, its equipment and your own background it will become long rather quickly.


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Do editors like having cumulative thesis papers published in the same journal?
I am going to submit a manuscript that, if accepted, will be included in my Ph.D. cumulative thesis. The cumulative thesis will be composed of two papers: the first one has already been published in the same journal to which I am going to submit the second one. So, in the best case scenario, I will end up with a PhD thesis having two papers published in the same journal. The papers are somewhat linked but different.
Now, I am writing the cover letter to the editor and wondering if it is a good idea to mention this aspect. Could it be good, bad or irrelevant?

Could it be good, bad or irrelevant? — Irrelevant, and none of the editor's business.

@JeffE Can you turn your comment into an answer?

It is always important to acknowledge past publication history in any paper or thesis.  For example:

If any portion of your thesis has been published in any form (such as a technical report, conference paper, working paper, or journal paper), you must acknowledge that prior publication in your thesis.
If any portion of a journal submission has been published in any form (such as a technical report, conference paper, working paper, or PhD thesis), you must acknowledge that prior publication in your submission.

In both cases, the later publication must acknowledge the earlier one.  Some publication venues impose restrictions or conditions on the later publication of the same result.  For example, in many fields of computer science, conference papers can be republished in journals only after the addition of significant new material; in other fields, republishing conference papers in journals is simply impossible.  In chemistry, even submitting your PhD thesis to University Microfilms may publication of your thesis research in a journal impossible [source].  Conversely, some publishers require that any thesis that includes results from a published journal paper not only cite that paper but include a copyright notice for the repeated text [same source].
But there is no similar expectation that you acknowledge future publications, because they don't (yet) exist.  It's really none of the editor's business what you might put into your PhD thesis—that's entirely between you and your thesis committee.

It's worth noting that there are some caveats to this - in particular, some conferences (notably CVPR) insist that you don't cite the technical report or arXiv version of your conference submission. Specifically, they say "Note that a Technical Report (departmental, arXiv.org, etc.) that is put up without any form of direct peer-review is NOT considered a publication and is therefore allowed, but should NOT be cited."

@StuartGolodetz Interesting. By a strict reading of CVPR's definitions, a PhD thesis is a prior publication, because it is submitted to peers (the committee) for evaluation and it can be rejected, and therefore thesis chapters cannot be submitted to CVPR after the thesis is accepted. Also, despite what the policy claims, arXiv submissions can be rejected. (I'm an arXiv moderator; I have rejected submissions.) But I'm sure the de facto policy is saner than my literal reading.

I guess I would argue that "peer-reviewed" tends in practice to mean something slightly different from just "reviewed by your peers". From a practical perspective, I'd have thought that it's rare for thesis examiners to peer-review an entire thesis in the same kind of detail that they might review a conference or journal paper, and in that sense I'd be wary about characterising a thesis as peer-reviewed (as far as I know, I don't think others would characterise it as that either). I don't know what CVPR's policy on republishing thesis material is, but I'd be surprised if they prohibited it.

In general it cannot hurt to state in your letter to the editor that you intend for your papers to be inclusions in your thesis. Some journals may even prioritise your paper higher in the review queue because of the time constraints on finishing a thesis.
I would check with the journal regarding any conditions in relation to re-publishing your papers in your thesis. I found this was usually somewhere fairly obvious (easy-to-find) such as in the author instructions or submission guidelines. Some explicitly stated that the author was free to republish in a thesis submission (provided the journal was was cited). Others advised that the author needed to contact the journal to obtain permission. What I found, and what my PhD supervisor thought, is that permission is usually given for a thesis along with instructions how that permission should be included in the thesis (so that thesis examiners know you have followed academic protocol).
I published most of my thesis as peer-reviewed papers in journals. I think I had eight chapters that were published papers, and another that only made it as far as a pre-print at the time of submission, but they were published across three or four different journals. The papers that had a common theme were published in (almost) the same journal. By almost I mean I had one published in the Letters edition of the journal and the others in the main journal.


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How to address in the thesis that the abstract is translated by someone
I have my thesis abstract translated by an Italian friend (from English to Italian). Therefore, I'm wondering if I should mention it somewhere in the abstract or acknowledgment that the Italian abstract was written by him. What is the common way in academia?
The whole thesis is in English, but I wanted to add an Italian abstract as well, since the the thesis is submitted to a university in Italy.

I'd include, in the "Acknowledgment" part of the thesis, a sentence like "I thank X for translating the abstract into Italian."  I'm not sure whether this should also be mentioned in the abstract itself.  Perhaps it would be appropriate to add, at the end of the abstract, a parenthetical sentence saying, in Italian, "Italian translation of abstract by X."

A small piece of translation like this should be clearly credited, but is not large enough that I think that it should be considered a significant piece of independent work.
As such, I think that a statement in the thesis acknowledgements would be sufficient.

I would strongly advise talking to the university you plan to submit the thesis to clarify both whether it is acceptable to include an abstract translated by another person and if-so how it should be credited.
They are the ones who get to decide what is and isn't acceptable in the thesis.


text:
Time between on campus interview and tenure track job offer
I would like to know how much time it can take for a department to make an offer after an on-campus interview for a tenure track assistant professor position? In my field the on-campus interview is the second interview that follows the phone interview. This is about universities in the U.S.

What type of position is this for (PhD, postdoc, tenure track etc)?

Tenure track assistant professor position

It depends entirely on the university. Also, note that they won't notify anybody of the decision until the first-choice candidate has accepted or rejected the offer. And, if they reject, they'll wait until the second-choice candidate accepts or rejects.  And, if they reject, ... So it can take a while.

Unfortunately, there is no clear and well-bounded answer.  In general, however, you should anticipate the time to be on the order of months.
To understand why, consider these typical components of process:

After your interview, a number of other candidates may be coming to interview.
Once all of the candidates interview, the faculty needs to decide who they want to hire. This may happen in multiple stages (e.g., first a search committee triages down to the top candidates, then the full department chooses between them).
A formal offer is prepared for the top candidate and negotiated amongst the department and any other involved university organizations (e.g., HR, deans, centers, etc.).
The candidate has some weeks to decide whether to accept the offer, possibly including more negotiations and revisions to the offer.
If the candidate says no, things begin again with offer preparation, negotiation, and decision for the next candidate.

Every one of these steps is likely to take on the order of weeks, so you can see how it can easily add up to multiple months.

The time frame can't be too long, because if the department waits too long, all of the candidates will have taken other jobs.

@PeterShor Oh, certainly (taking "all the candidates" to mean "all the really good candidates")---but between some interviews starting early and some choices resolving late, it's quite possible for the delay to stretch into the 4-6 month timeframe.

I'm currently witnessing a search for a new professor that has already taken well over a year (without anyone found yet, so it might still take a few more years...), because of this very reason: The whole process takes just too much time, it all has to be very official and the university is not allowed to contact the second person on the list until negotiations have failed once and for all with the first one (which might take months)... So as long as you are not top of the list, you should at least think in months, maybe even years.

Would a follow up email with the results of their search be helpful?

@Change I'm afraid that I don't know what you're asking: do you mean you want them to email you, or that you're considering emailing them?

I've already emailed the chair of the search committee and asked about the results. I was given a generic answer that they sent their recommendations to human resources and adminstration. The chair of the search committee stated that she is not allowed to say more than that. I will continue to wait for another week and then the answer will become clearer.

I am still waiting though. The search committee chair says that contacting references is the job of HR. My references are still waiting to hear from them. Is it common that HR contact references after the committee search gave it's recommendation about a candidate?

I'm baffled. The search committee should really have the references before they make any recommendations. They obviously do things different at this department than the ones I'm familiar with.


text:
Can I cite a paper published after the initial submission of my paper?
I wonder if it is allowed to cite a recent paper, published after the initial submission of my paper. In the revision phase I am adding some missing references and I would also like to refer to some very recent papers. Could this be a problem?

There is nothing special about the initial date of submission.  As such, it is entirely acceptable to add new citations, including for recently published papers, at any stage except for some journals' final proofing (where they really just want to confirm their formatting and copy-editing).
Moreover, in many cases it is not just acceptable but required, especially given that review may be a very lengthy process.  For example, I am in the middle of a revision right now of a paper that had an unusually long initial review for my field---from first submission to submission of the revision will be nearly 18 months.  In the revision, we will most certainly be citing new work, including some of our own other recently published work, as a necessary part of addressing the comments of the reviewers.
So, in short: yes, cite whatever is useful to cite, regardless of its publication date.

You even see it added after the final acceptance stage sometimes, but it's usually a special "note added in proof". See Note Added in Proof from the American Physical Society style manual, although it's seen in other disciplines as well. For additions like this before acceptance, no such special note is necessary.

"Disputable"? No, it's probably fine. Check with the editor of your article to be sure about the journal's policy for these kinds of changes after acceptance, but I can't imagine it would be a problem unless whatever the referenced paper concludes necessitates substantial changes to your own work. That being said, if the journal you have submitted to prints submission, revision, and acceptance dates, you're not going to get hammered for failing to cite it, unless, again, its conclusions are substantially at odds with your own or would indicate a need for a major revision.

Maybe I used inadequate word (disputable). I wanted to ask whether this is an acceptable practice.


text:
Theorem & Lemma In Short (arXiv Version) and Extended (Peer-Reviewed Version) Papers
I'm writing a short paper from my master thesis to put on arXiv that includes a Definition and a Lemma/Proof.
If I want to publish another extended version for a journal or conference later, can I include the Lemma and Definition directly in the new paper or do I have to cite my previous paper only (without writing them)?
(They are the beauty of my work and I'd like to include them into the extended version as well)

I've got a question: why do you write the short ArXiV paper at all? If you want to mark your "claim" on the result, your master thesis will do.

Thank you for the naswer @DCTLib :) Actually I wanted to upload my thesis on Arxiv but the latex environment errors killed me! so my prof suggested me to extract two main chapters and publish them in short papers for marking the claim.

So I presume that your department does not have an institutional repository that could be used for this purpose? Oh, and if you happen to know a very experienced LaTeX user, asking that person to help you with this problem may only cost you a coffee, whereas restructuring your material to a stand-alone paper that is good enough for you to want to have it associated with your name may easily cost you a few days.

@DCTLib: No, we do not have an institutional repository so I tried to split my thesis. Thank you for your comment :)

Essentially, what you seem to be doing here is to write an extended version of a paper that previously appeared in a different venue (here, arXiv). In this case, it is customary to include all of the relevant definitions, theorem, lemmas, and the like in the extended version.
The reason is that the longer paper - in a sense - replaces the shorter version. Thus, you would include them all. Nevertheless, you must state in your longer paper that it is an extended version of an earlier version of the paper (i.e., the short paper).
Note that you can just cite parts of your arXiv paper without including all of its results. It is probably not wise to pursue this approach, though. An arXiv paper is unreviewed, so the reviewers of your journal paper are more likely to question the correctness of the theorem in it. Since also most publishers do not consider arXiv papers to be a prior publication, there is no copyright or dual publication problem with just including theorems and proofs of your shorter paper.

In the US at least, arXiv papers are subject to copyright protection just like journal articles are. So as far as copyright is concerned, it does not matter whether the journals consider arXiv papers to be prior publication. However, when you write something and put it on arXiv, you retain the copyright ownership of the text you write there. If you want to later use that text in another paper, then, from the perspective of copyright law, there is no problem since it is your text to use as you like. (This changes if you transfer the copyright to e.g. a journal publisher.)

@DavidZ: Very useful comment David. thank you :)


text:
Are very small departments necessarily sub-par?
This college, which I will not name here, specializes in computer-related programs, which makes its other courses, like political science, unpopular among student applicants.  In one instance, the social science department only had three students who graduated with a degree in politics. Because of the very small student population, the school only had two political science professors who handled all the major subjects. Would you say that this is sub par college?

You are talking about Cal Tech or MIT?  No, number of factulty does not determine whether a college us sub-par.  Even small colleges (where every department is only 2-3 people) need not be sub-par.

Imperial College London, where I got my bachelor's degree, does not offer any general education courses. When I was discussing getting into a PhD program in the USA I was told that a degree from Imperial was a point in my favor.

@GEdgar Can you please turn your comment into an answer so that I can vote it up?

My impression is that usually too big educational departments are sub-par (as they admit almost anyone applying). And I know departments which are very small, but good.

If you're talking about MIT or Caltech, then the answer would be that their degrees in the humanities and social sciences are equally as respectable as those from any other colleges and universities in terms of graduate admissions (in social sciences/humanities).
Part of this is that we realize that folks who fall out of the mainstream at these schools merit some attention. It takes more of an effort and commitment to do sociology at MIT than it would at U-Michigan. For example, in order to get the credits to graduate, you've also undoubtedly taken courses in that discipline that were offered outside of that institution -- in MIT's case, you'd be taking classes at Harvard/Radcliffe. That takes dedication and forethought.
Finally, we realize that students choose their undergraduate institutions based on limited knowledge and choice. We weight their accomplishments based on what they were able to do with the resources that they had.

I can't comment about the unnamed college you are describing, because you haven't given enough information to make a judgment.  But the answer to the question in the title is simply
No.

I think when you are talking about departments with only two permanent faculty that the teaching and research opportunities are necessarily sub-par. While even top departments have gaps in their expertise and some off-topic teaching is inevitable, with only two faculty members there are going to be substantial gaps in expertise. It is not even clear to me how two members of faculty can develop and maintain a complete curriculum.
Further, with only two members of faculty, a substantial amount of teaching will either be done by adjunct faculty, who will be essentially unsupervised, or in other departments. Both cases, I think reduce the quality of education.
With only two members of faculty, there will also be limited chances for gaining research experience.


text:
List of all the Universities/Colleges in USA
I am looking for list of all the universities/colleges in the USA. I read somewhere that there are around 6000 universities/colleges in US. Also, I want a list of the engineering colleges in the USA

Not sure this is relevant for this site. Also, surely there are at least some (broad) criteria that you can use to narrow down a search?

This list wouldn't be very practical. Listing Harvard alongside local community colleges like NVCC really doesn't benefit anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_engineering_schools#United_States

At  http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation you can download a list of all accredited US colleges, universities, and similar educational programs. I counted 9746 unique institutions.

The typical place for students to start looking, despite its flaws, is the US News university rankings.  This lists something on the order of 2000 educational institutions, including all of the higher-ranked institutions, both overall and in many categories such as engineering.


text:
In which case does PLOS ONE use a third reviewer?
We have submitted our manuscript 10 weeks ago to PLOS ONE and are still waiting for a first decision.
We sent an inquiry, and they replied that the paper is under review with a 3rd reviewer. Does it mean there is a split decision? How much longer can it take to receive their response?
It is my first manuscript submitted for me, it is on cancer biology (leukemia) and it feels very frustrating.
The email reply was:

"Thank you for your submission to PLOS ONE.
I would like to take this opportunity to update you with regards to the current status of your manuscript, as we are aware that it is taking longer than we anticipated for you to receive a decision on your submission.
As you know, we always strive to provide authors with decisions as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this is not always possible especially when it proves necessary to consult external referees. In regards to your manuscript PONE-D-15-0812 it appears that the comments from 2 reviewers have been submitted, and we are waiting for the other review which is currently outstanding. We are aware of this delay, and are following up with the relevant individual. Once all the reviews are submitted, the Academic Editor will be able to make a decision regarding your manuscript, and inform you of their decision.
We appreciate your patience, and hope you will contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Kind Regards,
  Tresa

Welcome to academia.se! For some reason, every single question on review delays seems to be about PLOS One, despite fairly average review times. If you search past questions, you'll find that 2 1/2 months is not unusual, and since you've already inquired once you probably want to wait at least 4 weeks or so before following up (3 1/2 months is still not unreasonable though). Good luck!

I'm not certain what PLoS ONE's exact criteria are for number of reviewers (and there is likely to be some discretion allowed for individual editors as well), but in most venues that I have encountered, there is a preference for having at least 3-4 reviews to increase both the breadth of opinions and the likelihood of "consensus" on a paper, and often a required minimum of 3 reviews.  So most likely 3 reviewers were invited from the beginning.
Moreover, the asynchrony of journal reviewing means that it is very easy to end up waiting for a final review.  The typically process for managing journal reviewing is something along the lines of:

Invite a set of reviewers, who have 1-2 weeks to respond to the invitation.
If some reviewers decline or fail to respond, invite more reviewers and iterate until a sufficient set accept.
Once reviewers accept, they have 2-6 weeks to return the review.  Many reviewers put off responding to the last minute, and some ask for extensions.
One or more reviewers may fail to return a review at all, at which point the editor puts a black mark on them in the system and has to start all over again inviting a new reviewer.

You can see how this can quickly add up to 10 weeks or more, and it can stretch even further if the editor isn't acting immediately upon events in the reviewing process (as often happens).
So take a deep breath and don't worry yet: there is nothing you can really predict about your paper based on the current timing, since you're well within the normal range of journal review time (unlike the request for revisions I got today for a paper submitted 14 months ago).

I have had papers under review (at one journal) for three years...


text:
How is an LOR presented when applying for grad school?
I am going to apply for grad school starting this December. I have heard that an LOR is pretty essential in the process. I have a few professors I can approach. But my question is: how do you present an LOR? By that I mean, should it be sealed in an envelope, giving the impression that I have not peeped into it, before submitting it for grad school?
What if my professor mails me an LOR instead of writing it? Do I take a printout and do the above?
Also is there a particular format I should be aware of? And what else should be there on the letter, apart form the content itself, college stamp/seals or anything of the sought?
Are there any other formalities that I should be concerned about?

Generally speaking, the recommender will send the letter directly to the admissions office.

The rules vary greatly by country and program. You should follow the rules as specified by each individual program.
For instance, in the US, the applicant should never see a letter of recommendation at any stage of the admissions process. Nowadays, this is circumvented by having the letter-writer submit the reference directly, with the applicant only "supervising" the process to see if a letter has been submitted. In the rare cases where everything is to be submitted together, it is usually required that the letter writer sign across the seal of the envelope, to ensure no tampering has occurred.
As for the format, it should again follow local customs—for example, in the US, being submitted on official letterhead is sufficient; a mailed letter in Germany would be considered suspect without a stamp mark. (An emailed letter would be an exception to this, but would still be expected to have an electronic or digital signature of some sort.)

I'm not sure that your never is true in the US. There are controls in place to make sure that the recommender wrote the letter and knew of its submission (i.e. controls on integrity), but there are, as far as I know, no rules requiring that the applicant not know about the contents of the letter. I certainly saw the contents of at least some of my letters years ago.

I concur with @BillBarth: although the custom is to not show the letter, in some cases an advisor with more relaxed personal boundaries will choose to show a student how well they've been praised.  Maybe a particularly vengeful advisor might choose to show a student how meanly they have been spited too, but that I've never heard of personally.

As far as I know, each school you apply to will have their own system for letters of recommendation. Most will have you put the recommenders' contact info into a form, and the school will contact the recommender to request the letter. It is always possible that some may have different methods (particularly outside the US which I something I'm not acquainted with).
For now, just start thinking about who you want to recommend you, and perhaps even begin a conversation with them to understand what they need from you to write a stellar recommendation. The administrative stuff will be more clear once the applications are made available to you in the fall.


text:
How to make sure that a conference is not a scam when you are invited as a speaker?
I received an invitation from Neuroscience & Brain Disorders (NBD 2021) conference to present my work as an honorable speaker. My research interests are related to the topics of this conference and I have some interesting contributions, however, I am still a PhD student and I still don't have that strong background in research. I tend to think that this is a scam. What do you think?

It is similar to spam in the sense that they send it to everybody who is in their contact list. Once you have a publication, you will get similar emails. If you were on a conference and you gave somebody permission to use your email, than you will get more. You might select your area of interest in the submission system of a publication, and they will send you similar emails. So it does not mean, that the conference is a scam, but it means that they feel the need to increase the number of submissions.

That particular conference appears to have been arranged by something called the Hazel Group. They've got quite a nice website and a real telephone number, but despite claiming to have been around since 2015, all of their listed conferences are in late 2020 (with no follow up documents) or 2021 in the future. I rather suspect that it's a scam but it could just as easily be a new entry into a legitimate market.

This specific conference is almost certainly bs. I checked a supposed Spring conference by the same Hazel Group, of the same name, and the first name from a top university they claimed to have had as a featured speaker. Turns out, the guy exists...as a program coordinator and student counselor, with a polisci/Econ background, but supposedly talking about “Spatial and frequency tuning of tremors.”

Don't we tag these 'predatory-publishers' (also for confs?)

If it says "honorable speaker", it is likely spam.

Clarification that is also implicitly an answer: Do you mean World Congress on NBD or International Conference on NBD?

[As per suggestion of user151413, comment converted into response]
A few sanity checks to run:

Ask them who else is in your session and with which topics, if possible.

Check the participant list or the confirmed speakers. I know established researchers that had been taken in by junk conferences. If a junk conference manages to get a lot of good speakers, though, it ceases to be a junk conference :-) Of course, they may lie, but that is usually less likely. If you know one of the other invitees, you could pop them a mail and ask them whether they go.

Check the topics. Does this look like there is a proper scientific agenda or just a jumble of buzzwords? Are the sessions organized by topic (more or less)?

Is there a program committee? Do you know anyone on this list (even just as an author, not personally)? How many?

If you know a person on the PC, 5a) ask them whether the conference is worthwhile (you may thereby find out on the fly whether they actually know that they are listed). 5b) If you don't, check whether the conference is listed on their CV if it is public.

Unfortunately, the often-cited killer criterion whether the conference is at an attractive place does not mean anything. Also good conferences like attractive locations. However, if the conference is running at a nice location while a pandemic situation is still going on, this is most definitely a red flag.

If they claim you are invited, find out whether they cover travel/accommodation and conference fees. If they tell you that you have to pay conference fees, this is a scam. If they say that the conference is free, but they do not cover the trip, it's an orange flag (but not necessarily a scam). Convince yourself that the expense of the trip would be worth your presence. Some high-tier conferences waive only the fees for "minor" invited speakers (e.g. speakers invited to special sessions or workshops, rather than all-out keynotes). For a keynote, you can expect to be fully reimbursed.

Note that sometimes sconferences (scam conferences) adopt names very similar to proper ones, sometimes even copying the precise abbreviation (which unfortunately is not protected, as a number of organisations share the same abbreviation). Some years ago, a sconference hijacked the abbreviation of a quite high-profile conference, located itself in a city in the same or nearby country (I forgot), showed similar-style entry page/photo and managed to convince the search engines for a period to put it on top of the search list. A colleague almost fell for it, but was wondering why all his usual colleagues would not appear.
So the list of invited speakers and PC is one of the best indicators of whether this is the real deal. Of course, if they outright lie, then it's just regular fraud, but usually sconferences live in the grey area of being formally legal, in that they do take place, but are worthless.
Good luck!
[List is extended as additional suggestions are floating in comments]

Session schedules are not usually available until after the registration deadline.  Bad conferences have fake participant lists and program committees.  3 is a pretty reliable test, though.

@AnonymousPhysicist If the PC is fake, either you don't know anybody there, problem solved, or if you do personally, you could ask them. Session schedules are not necessarily known in detail, but there could already be focus topics. The response will also tell you a lot. They invited OP? Who else was invited? Who was invited in previous years? Does the conference appear on their CV (some academics have public CVs or keynote talk lists)?

Yes, "ask a member of the PC if they know they are on the PC" is missing from this answer.

@AnonymousPhysicist I am adding this, thanks.

Regarding 6, it actually is a killer criterion in the sense of the question (negations matter!): If it is in an exceptionally boring location, you can be rather sure that it is not scam.  (Maybe the OP should specify what kind of error they are more likely to tolerate!)

@user151413 Scammers can adapt their practices; especially if everyone starts believing it's not a scam if in a boring place. And some sconferences are at fairly boring locations, close to well-known organizations.

@HansOlsson And I always thought their business model is that people know it is scam, just they have grant money to spend and this way get to spend some time in a nice location, plus get an invited talk for their CV!

@CaptainEmacs I finally figured out that the conference is a scam thanks to 6+7.  Thank you for your detailed answer!

If you are invited as an "invited speaker" or "honourable speaker" and the conference organizers still ask you to pay a registration fee to give your talk, that is likely a scam. The reason is that as an invited guest, you would expect some kind of preferential treatment over regular attendees. Otherwise, you are just another speaker for their conference.
Besides that, you can look at the conference website to check if the conference looks serious or not.. or if it contains some obvious problems (not always the case)? Who runs it? Is it a famous organizations like IEEE, ACM.. or is it some organizations that has a bad reputation? Has this conference been held for several years?   Who are the organizers? This is just some points that you may think about to help you evaluate a conference.  If you are still not sure, I recommend to ask your supervisor or colleagues about it.

Unfortunately, also many well established conferences tend to have awful websites...

Scammers tend to have awesome websites. Just because the bait is beautiful doesn't mean there is no hook.

I'd ask the supervisor right away.

"you can look at the conference website to check" - Sure, you can look, but do not believe anything listed on the conference website unless you can verify it. If it is indeed a scam, there is no reason to believe that they would be honest about (for example) who is involved in the organization, what previous years looked like, etc, etc.

Yes, I agree. My meaning is that looking at the website may reveal some problems with a conference. But the website is just one aspect. One should look at everything else like the reputation of the publisher etc. I edited the answer to make this more clear.

'still ask you to pay a registration fee' - does OP say anything like this? or is this just some (likely) sufficient condition you've thought of?

@BCLC It is from my experience. I received many e-mails from small conferences like that every year that invite me as a distinguished speaker, invited speaker, honorable speaker, etc. I often reply to ask if what that they mean is that they are looking for a keynote speaker and if they will waive my registration fee, pay transportation fee or else. But the majority of the time, they answer that there is no benefit! So everyone attending is a "distinguished speaker" or honorable speaker".  Not all scam conferences use this approach. But it seems like the one mentioned by OP might be.

@BCLC So although the OP did not talk about the registration fee, I think it is a good idea to ask what is the difference between an honorale speaker and a regular speaker for that conference NBC. Does everyone is an honorable speaker? Will s/he get more time for his presentation, a better time slot, or will they waive the registration fee or give any special benefit?

Judging them based on their website is highly unreliable. It makes more sense to try to find external references to them from reputable sources. One way you could use their website would be to see that it is, for example, run by ACM, and then check ACM's website to see if they have references to the conference (and the conference site didn't just lie about that). If they mention an organisation you haven't heard of, you should similarly look for external references to them, and not trust either website (if they can make 1 fake website, they can make 2).

@Phil After checking with them, they said that they don't cover travel and registration fees, all speakers will be given the same amount of time.. Yes, I think the term 'honorable' is just used to flatter my ego and attract more people.. Thank you for your answer!

How big is the conference? Has it happened before? Check your university library for proceedings of past events. If this is the first occurrence of this conference, that's a warning sign. If the proceedings of past events show similar things to your work, that's a good sign. If the previous events had several researchers close to your level, that's a good sign.
Conferences come in many sizes. There is a conference every year among 4 universities called MRST (Montreal, Rochester, Syracuse, Toronto). It's usually open to staff and grad students of those universities to present their research. So grad students, occasionally even master's students, can present. If it's like that then you probably can relax.
Some conferences get loaded up with world class folks and Nobel winners and the like. If previous versions of this conference had people like that, maybe you should be investigating more.

Not all fields have conference proceedings.

A good portion of reputable conferences are run by national/international "learned societies" (e.g. American Chemical Society, American Mathematical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), etc.). Although this isn't a sure-fire way to identify junk conferences, you can be reasonably sure that conferences organized by the well-known societies in your field should be reputable.
I mention this because

it isn't currently spelling out too explicitly in the other answers (@phil's answer does mention looking into the organizers),
the specific conference you mention in your question looks to be run by an organization that only organizes conferences, and seems to organize a slightly scattered selection of conferences (mostly vaguely "biology" but not a huge lot of focus). In my mind that's ringing alarm-bells.

The phrase "honourable speaker" is also ringing slight alarm-bells for me. It's pitched to imply some sort of prestige associated with it, while not really meaning a lot.

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


text:
Naming students one has supervised in a CV
What are the privacy implications of including a section in a CV listing information about students that one has supervised, e.g.:

PhD supervision
Jane Doe. Awesome thesis title (2020).
John Smith. Another awesome thesis title (2018). Received the Northwest State University Best Thesis prize.

Does the answer change for other supervision contexts, e.g. postdocs, masters students or undergraduate summer projects? I am interested in both the legal and the moral dimension (e.g. "You can do this, but you probably shouldn't").

In many fields the supervisor will likely be a coauthor on at least some of the student's papers, leaving a highly visible public trail for anyone interested to follow. That said, asking the student's opinions might be nice (and catching up with them even nicer). Personally, I don't care at all.

Indeed, it's a trivial amount of energy (and perhaps improves relationships a nontrivial amount) to simply ask supervisees if they consent to being listed. Still, the question in the OP stands as written.

Why would this be any different from citing someone else's work in a paper?

How about students who are submitting/about to submit/not finished yet? There could be an issue with disclosing either their title or expected graduation date.

Since theses are published, and since at all universities I know of the thesis contains both the title, the year, and a list of the names of the student's supervisor and committee members, it is already public information that you are the supervisor of a student. As such, there should be no legal implications to you repeating what is already public.

I think this may be very US-specific? I know my UK (Oxford) thesis had a title and a date of submission, that my supervisor had a mention in the acknowledgements, and the concept of "committee  members" is totally alien here. The thesis as such is not published. I think it may be possible to find a published university record of my thesis examiners, but nothing linking me to my supervisor.

@erstwhileeditor These days many UK theses are uploaded to the British Library's Ethos service.  The record for mine display's my supervisor's name without the need to open the PDF.

The comments are correct. Supervisor's name is not at all public information. But you can list your students in your CV just like they list you.

@erstwhileeditor Surely producing the library copy of the thesis qualifies as publishing it? Of course when we usually use the term we mean making it more widely available through a publisher, but producing the document and lodging it in an academic library seems to fit the term "published" in a more restricted sense.

@dbmag9 Up to a point, although there are undoubtedly embargoed theses deposited in university libraries. I think my own university would distinguish between "publishing" and "depositing in the Library".

I can't and shouldn't provide legal advice, especially because what is legal and not is highly dependent on jurisdiction. I'd recommend consulting with university administration if there is any gray area or uncertainty.
For the US, the most applicable federal law is FERPA. FERPA permits disclosure of "directory information" to anyone; my understanding is that it is a school's job to inform students what they consider to be "directory information". My own institution has a page here:
https://registrar.wisc.edu/ferpa-directory/
Some of those items include (selected those most relevant to this question and not comprehensive):

Name
Major field(s) of study, degree sought, school/college, and student type (e.g., undergraduate)
Enrollment status, including academic level (e.g., sophomore), full- or part-time status, and credit load
Dates of attendance
Total cumulative credits
Expected graduation date/term, and intent to participate in commencement
Degrees, honors and awards received (type and date/term granted)
Participation in officially recognized activities and athletics

Based on this list, I'd consider a graduate student's name, program, and advisor to be "directory information". Their thesis is certainly an officially recognized activity, and their graduation status including an expected graduation for students not yet finished is also explicitly listed. My interpretation, therefore, is that there is no problem in sharing this information in a CV.
Further, I think advisors should definitely be proud of their students and should credit their students for their achievements. I see no moral imperative against including this sort of thing in a CV. It's also common practice in my field for advisors giving research talks to name their lab personnel, including students, in all of their talks. Published papers and theses are part of the academic record and there is no reason to hide them.
I'd recommend care in consistently representing the work of different students, and consider carefully any requests to omit particular information at a student's request, but I do not see a need to get any prior permission to list advised students in a CV.

Man, some of those seem a little much (address?)

@AzorAhai-him- Yeah, that's one that seems a bit outdated, though addresses are pretty commonly found in public records they are omitted from others. I can remember when most adults had their phone number and address published in a book delivered unrequested to everyone's door, though.

@DanielHatton well, yeah, that seems appropriate. There's no need for a university to ever publish a student's address.

If you only list things that are a matter of public record there should be no issues at all. Presumably this is true for their dissertation titles and your advisory relationship. Universities regularly publish such things.
If you go beyond that, giving any personal information, for example, then you need to ask each person.
And I'd avoid listing students who are still in process and haven't completed unless you get their permission.

Here’s a slightly different perspective: in CVs I submit to a particular granting agency, I must report the name of students I claim to have supervised.  I am asked to obtain permission from the students to disclose their name as part of the application process (if student does not give permission, I can include details in some specific way - not sure as this has never happened to me that a student refused permission).
Clearly this was put in place because of past abuse: it’s easy (maliciously or not) to overcount the number of students supervised if the students are nameless,  but harder if you need to supply a name to each supervised student.
I have seen too many CVs where people claim to have supervised “hundreds of students” (never names) and I am now in the habit of openly challenging such assertions in my comments to grants I myself review.
As a result, I see the inclusion of student names on a CVs as something positive.  I do let students know their name appears on CV-type documents.

Adding titles of their works would be better. You could count that. And you can also see the spectrum. If an advisor hands out the same work or just with small variations to multiple students, that should be considered.

Where/what agencies is this?  In the US, I don't think I have ever been asked to get permission from students/postdocs when I am asked to list them.

@Kimball NSERC is one.

Disclaimer: This answer comes with the bias of a euro-centric perspective:
TLDR: Not all theses or even summer internships are publicly available and the answer also has privacy implications for the recipient.
As suggested by @erstwhile editor in a comment to another answer, not all theses get published. IMHO, it is more likely for PhD theses to be published online than bachelor theses or even the reports of summer internships. Therefore, disclosing this information may come with an inherent risk.
I would like to add another perspective on this topic. This question does not only include the owner of the CV and the listed student(s), but also the receiving person/agency. You should be aware on whether the recipient wants this information in the first place. It is one thing, if the recipient specifically asked for names (& possibly permissions) to be listed (as explained in @ZeroTheHero answer). Yet, it is a completely different question if the recipient did not. In this case, you are basically passing along the legal & moral hassles of possessing this information onto them, which they either may not like or, worse, not even be allowed to handle. If this is the case, they may delete this information (or the full document) to avoid any legal hassle. This in turn may have negative consequences on your end like a missed deadline. Please, be aware that this represents a worst-case scenario only.
(While you may be aware that you have permission to include the students' names, the recipient may not necessarily be aware of that.)
Therefore, if somebody wants a CV from you, why not ask about any potential preferences regarding style, information included & the like. Since the recipient very likely gets a decent number of CVs, they like them in a standardized format anyway.

Is this euro centric? In Italy master and PhD thesis are discussed in public, the same happens in Austria and France. In other countries thesis are published as books. Does not this indicate that supervisor/supervised names are in public domain?

"euro centric" was referring mainly on to the perspective on data-protection, not publishing procedures, I could have been more explicit about that.

On the publishing, I have seen that theses are often published with the library of the local university (w/o an online version); the students have to provide publication rights to the library. Therefore, I'd assume the library has the rights to the thesis.
Regarding the public defense, this is a good argument (excluding internships). Yet, during Covid many defenses have been online. While theoretically accessible, it is hard to access them without a link.
Yet, IANAL and I'm not exactly sure under which conditions information passes into the public domain.

I would not add a name of a student I supervised. It does not add anything to your CV. You are including personal data of third persons and considering a weighing of interests this is not justified (IMHO).
The one exception I can think of, is if they made a stellar carrier and are well-known in their field or even won a prestigious award.
If you want to show the actual number of supervised works, list the titles. That would show what kind of work was done and the spectrum of the topics you supervised.

I think it more proper to list them all than to single out anyone.

Single out names or supervised works? No names would be fine to me. Skipping works not so much. I have to confess, it is a western European / non-UK perspective.

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


text:
Knowing when the code is good enough, for research
My question is in a similar vein to this one.
My research requires code. I can write code and I know some things about writing good code. Both for readability, (e.g. standardised doc string, descriptive variable names, comments that describe the intention) and safety (assertions in the code, unit tests, sensible error messages). Adding these things takes me more time than omitting them.
At present I will typically do a bare minimum on my first attempt. So I will put a one line doc string in; use descriptive, but occasionally inconstant, variable names; and few comments. If the code doesn’t work first time I will go back and add unit tests and generally improve it's quality until it is functional.
If at a later stage part of the code needs altering significantly, (perhaps I realise I need it in parallel), then lots of the "polish" will need redoing. This does not make it enticing to polish more earlier on. Occasionally I will chase my tail over a fault that turns out to be originating in an older section of code, that I might have caught if I have been more thorough first time.
The code I write is almost always only used by myself.
Clearly there is a trade-off between doing things by the book and producing results fast. What would you look at to decide if you had found a good balance between these things?

"If at a later stage part of the code needs altering significantly, then lots of the "polish" will need redoing. " This applies to some aspects more than others. For example, comments: yes, they get outdated quickly. As for variable names, with the refactoring support by present IDEs, there's no excuse for using non-descriptive names. Unit tests are by far the most pragmatic way to ensure that you don't break something when altering your code, so there's a strong incentive to write them.

@lighthousekeeper agreed, not everything goes out the window. Often my planning has been sub-par though, and so I do have to change sections of the program and the associated unit tests. I'm getting better at not digging those holes, but it doesn’t happen over night. I guess other people do this too. This is the sort of situation where a fair bit of work is lost.

Write unit tests! At least in a very general way. Always have at least 1 example where you are 100% sure what the result should be and you can run from time to time to see if you screwed up. Helps with sanity. My opinion about code now: Make everything tidy, and put it in github. You are the only reason why you are the only user, you may have a huge amount of users if you make your code open. Plus its better science, more transparent. There are even ways of making your code citable as academic output.

Just remember, you write good code as if the person who has to maintain this code is a psychopath who knows where you live. Do you trust yourself six months from now to not be both of those things? If you don't, write good code from the get go!!

@AnderBiguri yes your right, unit tests do deserve more time than I give them. "You are the only reason why you are the only user, you may have a huge amount of users if you make your code open" Lots of researchers are writing their own code because their field is small and they are they only person who wants a program to do that thing.

@TheoreticalPerson Also lost of researchers replicate the same code again and again because no one shares. Often as a researcher I just want to test what paper A says, and 99.9% of the cases, the only way to do that is code it myself, which ends up being too much effort, and end up not doing it. You are probably (or shoudl be) using git, you just need to make the repo public. You seem to be in the UK, there is already a lot of support for this by the RSE community!

'for research' makes a difference (as opposed to 'commercial', or 'open-source submission'). Maybe you want to even edit it further to 'for research which is publishable and replicable'

The trick is to write the comments and documentation first (first figure out exactly what you’re doing...) and only then write the code (...then actually do it).

As the

code I write is almost always only used by myself

you only have yourself to please. So the only sensible answer is to balance things to minimize the frustration to yourself. Don't do things you see as frustratingly slowing you down until you are more frustrated by the problems caused by not doing them.
However, the more strategic question is whether you want to continue writing code that will only be used and seen by yourself. If you want to advance your career through collaboration with peers, or by building a group of researchers to work on and with your codes, then it will be better to do more earlier.
You then know you've found a good balance when the collaborators you want to work with still want to work with you after they've spent some time with your code.

This seems very sound. It would be useful to find a good balance without burning bridges though. Can you think of a way to "test the waters" here?

If possible, find out how the collaborator codes, or what general codes they use, and follow as many of their approaches as seems feasible: I'd think of that as the academic version of the principle of least astonishment. If there's no information available (eg taking on new students) then look at conventions within your research field: if they're going to have to learn, make them learn an approach that's applicable more broadly.

And in the UK (where OP seems to be at) there is a lot of good support groups for helping researchers code properly organized by the RSE (research software engineering) community (as you probably know ;) ).

I would only modify this to point out you also want to please your future self. It's very common, but very discouraging, to come back to your code after some time has passed, and find it totally incomprehensible .

You said:

The code I write is almost always only used by myself

but I find this remark a little short-sighted.
In the moment, code may be used almost exclusively by the author/student-researcher, but eventually that student will graduate, and there may be some follow-on research to do. Woe to the next graduate student who inherits that mess, or the summer intern who gets hired to clean it up!
There are plenty of good reasons to invest a little time in writing better-engineered code:

You (and others who may join the research team) will be able to further build upon a well-designed architecture
What seems “self-documenting” now may be harder-to-follow than you think six months from now
A lot of code gets ultimately gets used for longer than the original author speculated
The more complex your code becomes, the harder it will be to debug later

Sure, there’s a tradeoff between immediacy of results and building for the future. But I’d cautioned against getting lulled into a false sense of security and churning out code as fast as you can with little regard to future maintainability and extensibility.

With respect, that's more of an observation on the question than an answer. I know there are benefits to good code practices. I know someone else may eventually obtain my code. There are also advantages to be had in generating results at a decent rate, and I want advice on finding a balance. Can you talk more about where you think caution becomes excessive, or what must not be omitted?

@TheoreticalPerson Repeatability is an extremely important property of good research. If you cannot reproduce the same results (and possibly preform new additional verification) say 10-20 years from now, then you have performed poor research. This applies to all research, with or without code. You should not underestimate how difficult it is to revive old single author, single one-off purpose code later on. And regarding almost always only used by myself: that should be utterly irrelevant. Or do you consider research that only you are able to reproduce to be good research?

As you would with any other document, write for your audience. That is, write your code to make it help, as best as possible (yet still at reasonable cost), those who are reading it. Consider:

Will anybody other than you be reading the code, now or in the future? If it's a one-off script that you will quickly discard you need not worry much about readability. If nobody else is likely ever to look at it, you need to think about how likely your future self is to remember what was going on at the time and understand the conventions you used.
If others are likely to read your code, how technically adept with that particular language and libraries, and in general, are they likely to be? Can you use standard conventions used by programmers experienced in that language? Do you need write things in a way that experienced developers who don't know that particular language can quickly understand what you're doing? Do you need to avoid standard things (e.g., list comprehensions) that inexperienced developers might not understand well?
How well will the other developers understand the problem domain? Do you need to provide a detailed explanation of what you're doing and why you're doing it, or do you expect that when they look at a line they'll, e.g., immediately see that it's a form of Black Scholes equation and understand how and why it's being used there?

Keep in mind that making things more descriptive and adding more comments does not necessarily make your code more readable; for some audiences that may even make it less readable. Just as mathematicians can more quickly comprehend a dense equation than a long description of the equation written in "plain English," experienced developers familiar with a domain will take considerably longer to read verbose code written for a beginner than they will tight code written for an expert that communicates exactly what is needed and no more. As an extreme example, read this:
def double_a_number(number_to_be_doubled):
    ''' Given a number, this will return twice that number.
        Parameters:
            number_to_be_doubled: the number to be doubled
        Return Value:
            The doubled number.
    '''
    return number_to_be_doubled * 2

and then tell me if you think anybody would find it easier to understand than:
def double(x): return 2*x

Also be careful not to fall into the classic trap affecting inexperienced (and, sadly, even many experienced) developers of putting slavish devotion to rules ahead of the readability that those rules were supposed to promote. "Inconsistent" variable names and the like are not necessarily a problem (except for whomever is writing your lint configuration files) if your focus is on communicating with other developers rather than satisfying arbitrary rules.
And my last bit of personal advice, since you mention docstrings, always remember that a comment is only there because you couldn't write clear enough code. If you feel a function needs a docstring, look first to see if you can't improve the function name, change positional parameters to named parameters, or use any other techniques to make the code state more clearly what it's about. (And if someone's telling you to put in docstrings anyway, refer them to my example above.)

I never thought about docstrings that way, but your example makes a good point.

How careful you are should be a pragmatic choice.
The point of the disciplines is to help you write working code (which you can keep working and extending).
This is not an academic exercise (Perhaps this is the wrong forum in which to make this comment).  There are "no points for box-ticking good practices" (perhaps there are in your environment).
The good practices are hard-won lessons from the commonality of programming practice.  In an environment where many programmers collaborate on code, which will often be maintained over a longer time than ever anticipated, they help to limit the confusion and re-work needed.
You sound like you are well on the way.
If you are near the beginning of your programmer-journey, I would recommend you explore the meanings of "DRY", "YAGNI" and "SOLID".  And I would put in a special mention for unit testing.
In my own experience, unit-testing:

helps you document what you intended the code to do when you sat down to write it, and it will let you check that it is still doing it, even when you make some apparently completely unrelated change miles away in your code, months later.  Including little details like nothing will be reported as null or nothing will be reported as empty-string.
winkles out your misunderstandings of your primary language or the associated framework and libraries you merely glanced over the documentation for, before adopting. These misunderstandings make for time-consuming bug-fixing if you have to find them out by debugging the consumer of your mis-implemented code.
will encourage you to write appropriately granular code: it is such a nuisance trying to write unit tests for code which tries to squeeze too much activity into each routine (method, subprogram, etc.).
is best begun before you actually create the code which it will later test. This might help you to focus more clearly on what your code ought to deliver.
will find out early for you, when your early code-design needs to be thrown away. This will discourage you from soldiering on with a wrong design which you've made too much investment in already to be willing to throw away. It's all about making working code, not about enshrining your first master-plan.

"will encourage you to write appropriately granular code" I never thought about unit tests that way but your absolutely right.

I think for the main question, "when is the code good enough?", the answer is simple: when it does what you want it to do, and you can be confident that the answer it gives you is correct.
There is definitely a trade-off for making your code nice, however. To me, that comes up in two places:

What if, six months later, you want to revisit your research results and see if you can come up with some improvements, or maybe you had hit a dead end so you are coming back to see if you can finish the work. Can you read your code from six months ago, and pick back up modifying it? Or is it too convoluted to follow and use? Ideally, you should be able to come back to your code in a year and easily understand what you were doing.
Your research does not exist in a bubble. Your next research project will probably be somewhat related to your previous one. Can your code be reused? Can parts of it be reused? Even if there are few benefits in your current project to making your code nice and modular, you may save yourself lots of time and effort down the line if you do this. Important functions and algorithms can then be moved over to your new setting with minimal adaptation. A side benefit is that you can replace certain pieces of your code with alternate implementations to see if you can get better results.

The code I write is almost always only used by myself.

This comment seems somewhat misguided and I should predicate this by saying I write a lot of research code myself as well. The reason why I think this statement is misguided is because the code is being used for something (e.g., prepare data for analysis, analysis, modeling, etc.) and is ultimately going to impact any manuscripts you prepare. As such, ensuring that your code is readable by others is part of ensuring that your work is repeatable by others as well. Furthermore, if your code solves a problem that others have (quite common in research as well!) others may as for part of it to use in their own research.
That being said, with practice it is possible to write fairly readable code the first time around and just requires a bit of discipline. Some IDEs will force this upon you by checking variable names (e.g., do they conform to camelCase?), function names, function length, unit test coverage, and so forth. This tends to be a lot since it is unusual for people to go back and spend a lot of time improving code - once you have the results the bias tends to be to move on to the next project.
So the bottom line is that you should try to write code that is good enough to share with others the first time around. You never know when a reviewer may ask to see the relevant source code.

You say:

The code I write is almost always only used by myself

Like others, I don't share this opinion.  The code is GUARANTEED to be used by at least two people:

You
You three months from now.

Good internal documentation doesn't take that long, and will in the long run save you time and effort.