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Complaining about an ISI journal's unreasonable behavior
I submitted one of my paper to an ISI journal in September 2011. While I was waiting for it, I inquired about its status (I needed the paper to complete my PhD), and the journal wrote back saying that my paper was under review and the referee was not answering. I was thus waiting.
But after more than two years (about 26 months), the journal sent me this:

By a QUICK view on your paper, it is not interested for our journal and so we reject your paper

I think they could have answered earlier. Unfortunately, now my work is still not published and some authors published my results in another journal. So, I want to complain to the journal, and possibly get them eliminated from Thomson's lists. How can I achieve this?

@golin I tried to make your question clearer, and edited some of the language. I hope (and think) the original intent is retained

To complain to the journal, you can just send them an e-mail.  On the other hand, you aren't going to get them eliminated from Thomson's lists.

I'd suggest taking this as a learning experience that if the wait time exceeds their reported duration by ___ months, you'll send a letter to retract and then submit to another place so that you're less likely to be scooped again. And my research team had one that reached 4+ years. I was done and left the team so not sure if it's published/rejected/undecided.

I do not see much you can do, apart from informing Thompson (not likely to be useful); but this story shows how open archives protect authors: had you put your paper in a repository before submitting, you would have a stamp of anteriority and the damage done by the journal would be less dramatic.

First, to quickly address your explicit question in boldface, here's the official words from Thomson Reuters regarding their journal selection process for Web of Science and annual review:
http://wokinfo.com/essays/journal-selection-process/
While they apparently take timeliness and peer review very seriously, my impression is that a single instance of slow external review is not a strong enough reason to remove a journal. As this recent blog post on Nature shows, they do ban journals rather aggressively when they feel necessary. But those dropped journals are serious offenders of abuse and are clearly hurting Thomson Reuters' business.
Every researcher experiences unfair rejection in some way or another once in a while. I understand that it is very unfortunate that this has happened at a very early stage of your career. But this seems to be a lost cause at this point. And if you are sure that it was unjustifiable and if you do want to take some action, the best you could do seems to be let Editor in Chief know exactly what happened by writing a letter from an objective viewpoint in polite language and in sober tone and ask them to consider what they might be able to do to improve contributor experience. If you do not receive a satisfactory reply from them, you might consider reporting everything to the publisher that owns the journal.
But before you take any action, you should ask opinions from experienced researchers in your fields, such as your advisor. This is very important because different fields have different cultures in academia.
I assume that you are enrolled in a Ph.D. program in mathematics; I saw your post on MathOverflow. If this is the case, you might want to take a look at the most recent yearly report by American Mathematical Society on how long it typically takes for a paper to get accepted:
http://www.ams.org/notices/201210/rtx121001473p.pdf
As you can see, the median time from submission to final acceptance varies greatly from journal to journal. You might want to notice how it takes a long time to get your paper reviewed by some of the most respected mathematics journals. For instance, Annals of Mathematics, which is arguably the most prestigious journal in mathematics, takes 24 months on average for review. The Memoirs of American Mathematical Society averagely takes more than 18 months from submission to acceptance. Granted that the practice of these journals is more of an exception than the norm, two years of review is certainly not unheard of in mathematics. So, while I tend to believe that your paper could have been reviewed much more quickly because a typical paper certainly does not require two years, it is impossible for us to tell if it was unjust or not without more context.
As for the priority issue you brought up, if it is in mathematics, I must say that you should not be surprised if you do not receive much sympathy. Reading your post, it appears that you did not make your preprint available to other members of the mathematics community before or soon after submission. Because mathematics has a much longer review process than other fields, it is quite common and, I think, very important to disseminate your results as soon as possible by, for example, uploading your preprint on arXiv or directly sending it through email to people you are sure will be interested. In fact, some journals explicitly encourage authors to upload their preprints on arXiv upon submission.
With that said, I understand that arXiv and other means of "pre-publication" are not for everyone. In mathematics, for example, one Fields Medalist mentions unpopularity of arXiv among East Asian authors he noticed during his little experiment on arXiv usage. As someone who was born and raised in Japan and received a Ph.D. from a Japanese university, I know how people may have their own valid reasons not to make their preprint public. You may have some strong belief or policy regarding science publication models as well. I din not use arXiv when I was a graduate student in Japan, either. However, you should not complain when someone "beats you to it" when you could prevent it by following the normal practice in the community.
Now, if you managed to read this wall of text this much, that means that you are the good kind of person who can stay calm and be in control of yourself in a tough situation. And, obviously, you have good math skills with which you proved new theorems worth publishing. So, if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that you have been heading in the right direction as a graduate student.
If you feel like the journal caused an unnecessary delay or "gap year" of some sort to your career, I guess you're right. But personally I try not to overthink, and try to think it's just another unavoidable glitch that often gets us out of the blue in our lives. (Notice the word "try." I fail very often.) You know, there are so many horror stories like yours out there in mathematics... (And never ask why I've been doing a postdoc for so many years!) It sucks for sure. But probably the best you can do now is talk to your advisor, who is there to give you advice anyway, and get back to your math life as soon as possible to prove more theorems. Good luck!

It can't be done (sorry). Clarivate Analytics is not related to the journal in any way. They do impose some quality criteria, such as not having excessive self-citation, but turnaround time is not something they use. One can hardly blame them for this, because turnaround time is not public info, because it is highly varied, and because it has no bearing on the quality of the work that's published. Besides, they're not going to arbitrate a dispute between you and the journal - it's none of their business.
To use an analogy, what you are trying to do is similar to getting the Academic Ranking of World Universities to delist a university because of how they mistreated a single student - short of you buying over Shanghai Ranking Consultancy and forcing the change through, it's just not happening.


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What is the preferred GRE Writing score for MS/CS student?
I am planing to apply to study in graduate school, major in computer science/engineering. I just took a GRE test, this is my 1st time, and the result is pretty...not so good :(
Most schools, the science or engineering related program, reveals the average or preferred GRE scores for quantitative and verbal sections for admitted students. But it seems they don't care about the score of Analytic Writing section. Really?
To be honest, my writing score really bumped this time. I want to know if there's a preferred score range for this section.

There's a reason it's not listed--there is no preferred score, it doesn't really matter.  I am not an expert, but I feel like the writing score is something that can only hurt you, not something that can help you, at least with respect to science or engineering graduate programs.
More concretely, I can see a very low score preventing you from getting into a program, but I highly doubt the admissions committee saying: "Well, he got a great score on the writing section, that really differentiates him from other applicants; let's admit him."
For a foreign student or non-native speaker, doing well in the writing section probably carries a little more weight than it does for native speakers; nonetheless, I believe that the above still holds.

According to my experience:
The GRE scores are just initial cut-offs.
Analytical writing usually requires a minimum score of 3 that's it. But this is true for most of the universities there may be some exceptions to the rule obviously.
Scores 3 and 2.5
Displays some competence in analytical writing, although the writing is flawed in at least one of the following ways: limited analysis or development; weak organization; weak control of sentence structure or language usage, with errors that often result in vagueness or lack of clarity.

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How do we know if something relevant is already published?
I keep reading European Conference on Computer Vision, International Conference on Pattern Recognition, and others, and I find so much in common in those papers.
For example, half the papers seem like: X Algorithm combined with Y algorithm tested on Z database and was better than A in this category but worse than A in that category.
There are many top journals and top conferences with > 1000 papers, in a year, in this field. In addition to this we would have to go through all the tier 2, tier 3 conferences for lack of a similar piece of work.
While working on organic solar cells I found the same problem. I saw 20 different papers on extracting parameters from a single-diode/double-diode/XYZ model.
So how do we know if something relevant is already published?

There appear to be three unique questions here. The title question and the two questions on the last line of the message. All are very different questions with different answers. Please chose one.

"how do we know if something relevant is already published ?" Thats kinda the whole point of workign in research/academia.

Well think of it from a perspective of an individual student(Bachelors) just reading papers on a topic of interest online.

http://memegenerator.net/instance/29379693

subscribe to google alert, create a scholar account and keep an eye of the suggestions. I believe you won't miss ONE..

I wrote a blog post on this topic that may be useful.

That title summarises a large fraction of all research ;-)
You need to spend a significant amount of time browsing through scientific literature. This illustration from PhD comics illustrates the problem:

My strategy is as follows:

I start with an arbitrary paper with a title that seems relevant. Let's call this paper A.
Using an online service such as Scopus (payment or subscription required), I look for:

All references, e.g. papers cited by A.
All citations, e.g. papers that cite A.

Both the references and citations can be sorted by the number of citatons, so you get the most highly cited papers first. Select the papers that seem relevant (at this stage, reading the abstract is usually good enough).
For all relevant papers left in step 3, repeat step 2. You should find considerable overlap already. By now, you should have already found the important papers as well as one or more review articles.
Iterate steps 2–4 until your hard disk is full ;-)

Of course, if you iterate this process indefinitely, you will soon have downloaded all scientific research ever published. But by being selective but not too selective, this process should lead you to any relevant publications. Even if nobody has cited the relevant publications, the relevant publications themselves should cite other publications, so via step 2.1 you will still find it.
The only caveat here is that databases like Scopus are incomplete, probably in particular when it comes to conference proceedings (in my field, those are rarely relevant). Maybe other databases work better in your field. Hopefully, there is a scientific database that is reasonably complete for relevant publications in your area of research!

Thanks!! This seems to be a more effective and efficient method than just checking on google scholar!!

@gerrit: What other services but Scopus can you recommend?

@Dror I use mostly Scopus. My girlfriend uses adsabstracts but I think that's only for her field. When I don't have access to a journal I do a web search on the title to see if I can find a PDF copy somewhere else (for example, on the author website).

@Dror: Consider using Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) and Web of Science (http://isiknowledge.com/WOS)

This method also has the benefit of Plausible deniability. Meaning if someone says, "I did this years ago and you didn't even cite me," you can effectively say "How was I suppose to find your paper when you didn't even cite any of the most important papers on your topic?" Basically, it would be hypocritical of them to accuse you of not finding them when they didn't bother to find anyone else.

Gerrit has given a good summary of how to perform a bibliographic search. On this topic, I'll add two comments:

Review articles and academic theses, when well written, are invaluable. They contain a lot of information and citations, often in a more “relaxed” format than a pure research paper.
Try to identify one or two journals/conferences that are central to your field, and a few authors that are big names: then, subscribe to their RSS feeds or set up web alerts for new publications by these teams.

In addition to direct search of the literature, a good way to keep on top of the papers published in a given field is to attend conferences and discuss with a lot of people. Poster sessions are particularly good for that. Do not hesitate to bring to the poster presenter questions such as “so, in your opinion, what’s the biggest break among the recent literature?”.

Yes, I've found theses of Caroline Rebecca Pantofaru, Pieter Abbeel and Carlos Guestrin to be interesting conceptually. However, most of this is just being done on a random basis as of now.
I just find a paper -> seems interesting -> read it -> put up a post or two on my blog -> add it to my 'read' papers list on citeulike.org and then forget.
Following conferences is something I just recently started doing. Unfortunately, the lack of major conferences in my area in addition to shoe-string travel budgets(I am an undergrad student) limits actual physical visits.

A good review paper or theses is worth its weight in gold. Especially, considering that they've done a lot of the sifting for you, in addition to being more accessible.

Good tips above, I have one more:
* Collect good search words, e.g. in a mind-map. Maybe different synonyms are used by slightly different authors? Try to think of different ones, check which actually really work.

what do you use other than gscholar?

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Choose journal before writing paper?
I want to write three papers from my thesis. But actually I am stuck. What is the first step to do?
Do I first choose the journal (more precise scope) and then I move on to write the article according to this scope. (Of course the choice of journal is based on my research topic.)
Or do I start with writing the paper and then move to choose the journal and readjust the paper according to the template and ameliorate it?

Talk to your supervisor!

@Aditya - I can't talk to his supervisor, but his question applies to me.  I wish I had someone who could give me some excellent direction here.

This may be field-dependent; I am answering from the point of view of an HCI-related CS subfield that is frequently in touch with other fields (for different use cases etc.).
Always choose your venue (concrete journal or conference) first before writing the manuscript.
The underlying core information you want to convey will remain the same no matter what. Hence, you may prepare a very abstract outline first. However, writing the paper before choosing a venue does not make much sense:

Important if you are in a field where manuscripts are formatted with the final styleguide: Each venue will require a particular formatting styleguide. While you should largely keep contents and format separate in your document, there are still more than enough detail decisions that require changes in your document according to the styleguide.

For instance, if you use LaTeX, depending on the venue-specific document template used, usually only one out of three or so alternative existing packages for a specific feature (e.g. subfigures, special tables, ...) will be compatible with the template.-
Also, at least I frequently find myself in a situation where I fill a paper up to the very last line (and page restrictions are very strict in my field). While different styleguides and page restrictions are roughly equivalent across venues, switching from one venue to another can easily mean gaining space for an additional figure or subsection.

Different venues have different audiences:

Even when presenting the very same procedure and findings, you will have to add a different set of explanations, references, etc., depending on the primary audience of the target venue.
Likewise, depending on the audience, sometimes you are better off starting with formal definitions and then presenting a concrete use case, whereas other communities prefer starting with a concrete problem and a case-specific solution description, and then formalizing that to a generic model.

For most papers and journals, the adaption to the journal’s style, requirements and audience is comparably easy – the main exception being journals with a length limit. It happens very often that a paper has to be adapted because it was rejected by a journal and shall be submitted to another and often this can be done within a short time.
Nontheless, I recommend to try choosing a target journal before you start writing. The reason for this are:

Usually, choosing a journal does not cost more time when done writing the paper than afterwards. So there is no disadvantage to this.
Even if your paper would have only few journal-specific adaptions, it is still less work to consider or include them from the beginning. You are also less prone to make your work inconsistent due to this.
If you happen to choose a journal with a length limit, it may help a lot to know this from the beginning, so you can decide which information to include in the paper, include in the supplementary material or leave out altogether.
Choosing the journal and looking at journal’s guidelines and scopes may give you important information or reminders on how to best write a paper in the respective field. Of course, you could look at those independently of choosing a journal, but then you would have to look twice.
Having selected a journal and downloaded its style file you have done something for a start. This may help you overcome the initial writer’s block for your work. Looking at the journal’s guidelines may also help you in that respect. Finally, the same goes for selecting a journal in the first place, which may require you to make up your mind as to what will be the rough contents of your paper and what your central message and audience is.

Of course, this is only a general recommendation and needs not always be the best choice. If you have big trouble deciding a journal, it may help to write the paper first.

Answering more for the biomedical sciences, but I'll echo what some other people have said: Yes, I'd choose at least a target journal, or at the very least a "genre" of journals if there are several competing journals, before writing a manuscript. This helps inform a number of things:

Format. This seems obvious, and is probably the easiest to simply adjust per journal, but it's still fiddly and time consuming, and you might as well skip the "Format Draft into Paper for Journal Target #1" step from the get-go.
Style. If you're working at all across disciplines, there's likely discipline-specific language that will come up from time to time, and the choice of journal can help determine that. For example, phrases like "...but this effect was not statistically significant" are less likely to fly in several major epidemiology journals, and conventions like "...is left as an exercise to the reader" just don't happen at all.
Content. Similarly, if you're writing for a general interest journal, a society journal with a narrow focus, of a different society journal with a different narrow focus, there's going to be some fine-tuning of content - what gets put in, what gets taken out, etc. Again, by way of example, the number of equations that I'd put in the same paper going to say Mathematical Biosciences versus American Journal of Epidemiology versus a clinical journal are vastly different.

Depending on your field of research, I would suggest that the first step is coming up with a publication tree for the article. In other words, for any given paper idea, figure out the different potential venues the product paper might have. That way you can know what will happen if your first candidate venue rejects the paper. For your own career, there's nothing worse than having papers that cannot be published anywhere which took months or years of your time to write.
Then write the paper with the top candidate venue in mind. Get feedback along the way, etc.
It's not super important to follow their formatting guidelines while initially drafting, because it's purpose-less to master these for any given journal unless that's the only journal you're going to be publishing in. Instead, once the paper is written, then read their formatting guidelines and implement them.
Finally, submit, revise, etc.

Different journals will only differ in terms of their manuscript templates, the exact content of your articles shall remain the same, only typeset according to the journal style. These things are very easy to manage if you are writing using LaTeX, since the body of the article stays the same, only the header part in the preamble gets altered, i.e. you call the relevant template in the document class. On the other hand, if you are using MS Word etc. too, the option of copy-paste remains valid, only the process is more messy.
It certainly makes no sense to jump the gun - first keep writing everything in some file (Latex/Word) in an arbitrary format, and finalize all these aspects only at the time when you have actually finalized stuff enough to be submitted to a journal. When that happens, you can adopt the relevant journal style.

authors: زيد ماضي عبد


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How to determine if a topic warrants a research paper?
I'm a professional game developer looking to write a few research papers on various topics.  They mostly involve graphics techniques so I was planning on starting with the Journal of
Computer Graphics Techniques when I’m ready to start submitting the paper to publications.
These topics vary in complexity though, and while I haven’t heard of peers using these techniques, and I haven’t found reference to them on the Internet. There are some for which I’m not sure whether they are paper-worthy or not because the write-up would literally be one to two pages probably.
Is there any sort of metric to gauge topics in this way?

I don't know about the particular journal mentioned, but I think it's very likely that if you review the literature, develop a novel technique (or extend an existing technique in an interesting way) and then apply it to enough cases to understand its costs and benefits, you should be able to write considerably more than 2 pages about it.

Good point. I've started on the smallest and yeah, there are some details to explore that I hadn't considered ahead of time.

You've chosen a journal that looks like it is well suited to your background and topics.
By itself, the length of your paper is not related to whether it is important or publishable.
There are three things you can do to test whether your potential topics/papers are worth writing and submitting.  First, read many articles in this journal,  similar journals, and also conferences.  You aren't just looking for articles on the same topic or technique as yours.  Instead, you are learning about what constitutes a good research paper in your field.  Based on your reading, write a detailed outline of your proposed paper(s), and also an abstract.
The second thing you can do is to write a version of your paper(s) as a "Working Paper" and then circulate them to peers or colleagues for feedback.  You can post this to Arxiv and post links on social media or mailing lists to get broader feedback.  This approach has two advantages.  You sometimes only know the value of a research paper after you finish writing it.  And you'll get the most useful feedback from people when they have a finished paper in their hands, as opposed to reacting to a concept.
The third thing you can do, building on the previous, is to submit a paper or two (each revised based on earlier feedback) to a journal or conference, and then learn from reviewer comments if they reject you.


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Organizing technical documents and reports
At my university, I work on an aircraft design project. I’m building a fairly hefty collection of technical and design reports I’ve written as well as documents about things I’m trying to research to help with my design.
How can I organize these documents in a professional and a formal manner? I’m thinking of something like a document numbering system with hierarchy. For example, I’d like the numbering scheme to reflect document type (technical report, research findings, data, calculations, CAD drawings) and aircraft element (control systems, control surfaces, wing, landing gear, etc).

It might help to add a few details to enable specific constructive responses. What is the purpose for organizing the documents: personal use, internal use within your team/department, public but less formal use such as your personal webpage, public and more formal use such as website of your research group, or inclusion in CV?
Each of these uses is aligned with different (though possibly overlapping) audiences, and might imply different approaches for what and how to present, what to highlight or omit, etc. etc.
So, first I recommend to organize your organizing needs/priorities, then address details.
A few general ideas, with regard to organizing in "professional/formal manner":
Personal use: There are tools such as Mendeley that can be helpful for figuring out and experimenting with ways to categorize the documentation. Mendeley can be leveraged for open/public access to materials as well as private use (e.g. uploading citations but not actual attachments).
Research team website: collaborate with your team to determine what might be worth sharing publicly (beyond what has already been made available). For instance, you might collectively decide that adding some previously un-shared white papers/tech reports, or even datasets might "fill out" the public profile of the group's research and allow the team to cite/reference these resources.
Personal website: Regardless of whether you make the material available on a collaborative formal webpage of your department/group, I see no problem with also featuring a few technical reports/white papers that you have authored or co-authored on your personal department page. Technically, if you work for a public university and unless your research is classified, your research output is in the public domain and you should be able to enable public access to it without any negative consequences. (There may be other specific caveats around this in each case, but you need to explore those and use your best judgment).
CV: In my experience, citing technical reports or white papers in your CV is totally acceptable and could serve to boost your research track record. Since tech reports are not typically externally peer reviewed, a safe approach is to place them in a separate dedicated section, e.g. "Technical Reports."
Finally, there are numerous sites out there such as Mendeley, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, etc. The sites differ in functionality, target audiences (e.g. more hard vs. more social sciences) and visibility/uptake within a given discipline. Here is a fairly complete listing as a starting point:
http://connectedresearchers.com/online-tools-for-researchers/. Good luck!

Thank you for the great response despite my lack of detail. Specifically, the reports are currently for my own usage but in the future, should I continue the work further with a team, I should like to be able to have the reports available and organized for easy reference. Additionally, some of the reports may be shared in the aircraft design community.

The research, however, will be kept for personal use and reference. For example, I might put together a table of certain trends for reference during my design work. I might also put together a document that summarizes my findings from the Internet and the literature for a certain topic. More specifically, I could certainly use something such as a reference book or manual that is quite common in the scientific and engineering communities except this book would be filled with content that I have put together based on data and information I've founded online and in literature.

@user26358, Thanks for clarification, you might also want to add this to your original question above so it's clearly visible to future readers. Personal organization seems to be highly dependent on preferences of the individual, for some people a clean folder structure in Windows may be enough while for others it is necessary to use a spreadsheet like Excel, or document management tool like Mendeley. Also tools such as Microsoft's OneNote are fairly popular due to their flexibility for arranging/rearranging material. If you do find a system that works for you, please update/share here!


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Use paper as master’s thesis or sign up to a “direct” PhD program (and use the paper for this)?
I’m currently a computer science (and mathematics) B.Sc and M.Sc student in my third year (since I started my B.Sc).
At the second year of my B.Sc studies, I have started to work on research (in computer science) and I have two (amazing) advisors, I have written (i.e, submitted) a couple of papers so far and currently working on a few more.
One of the papers I have already submitted was quite big and accepted to one of the top conferences in my field, so my advisors suggested it will be my master’s thesis.
As I’m still finishing the B.Sc courses (and the M.Sc courses at the same time) I have two options after finishing the courses:

Submit the thesis, get the B.Sc and M.Sc and sign up as a PhD student (signing up will be more of a technicality as I’m [obviously] staying with the same advisors and our current work will be a part of the PhD anyway).
Not submitting the thesis and signing up to a “direct PhD” program, which I don’t know much about, but it should basically mean doing the same as an M.Sc and a PhD minus submitting the master’s thesis.

My question is, is there any reason for me to choose the second option? Are there any benefits to having or not having a masters degree? (My thought of this right now is: Maybe the direct program will be faster if it is not allowed to include the masters thesis in the PhD thesis and then going in the direct program will allow me to include that paper in the thesis?)

If you actually have two amazing advisors, I would suggest following their suggestion. They know the implications of each option much better than us here on the Internet (and, presumably, better than you). Btw. at least in my university, one cannot "retroactively" decide that some research one did was one's master's thesis.

That's probably the right way to get an answer (but I'm still trying to gather at least minimum knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of this before bringing it up, maybe there is something critical I'm missing...). About the thesis: it was discussed beforehand.

If you want to stay in academia, you cannot rely on getting a PHD degree faster, based on that one (possibly very good) paper done during your undergraduate years. You need to have as many equally good or better recent publications as possible, during your PHD years. Otherwise, some people might think that this paper was more your advisors' work than yours, since you could not back it up with equally good publications during your PHD years, when you worked more independently on your own.
In this sense, this paper should not help you get a PHD faster if you cannot back it up with better publications during your PHD studies. And if you actually manage to write those better papers, you will not actually need this paper to get your PHD faster. Listen to your advisors and stick to the slower BSc + MSc => then PHD route.

Given how hot the computer science field is and will remain, I think you should get the M.Sc. Let's say something happens to you and you can't complete the PhD, at least you'll have the M.Sc. It seems to me that a lucrative job will be waiting for you even if getting the PhD via this route takes a little longer. It sounds to me like financial success is easily in your future with or without the PhD or the time it took to get the PhD.

Thanks. I'll add a bit of information: my goals as I view them currently are academic and not working "outside" in the near future.

Still, having the MSc is a nice backup and I think you should get it if it doesn't involve too much extra work.


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Feeling frustrated by colleagues' behavior, considering leaving the university
I'm aware, that this question is going to appear too emotional and exaggerated, but I'll try my best to describe the whole situation as it is, unbiased.
The point is, I'm major degree student who changed his field of study from Informatics and Computer Science (I've got B.S. from it) to Computational Mathematics. I was not very happy with lecturers' behavior in B.S. degree (HERE is my question about Bachelor's thesis, where my supervisor effectively refused to cooperate), but now it's much worse than everything I've ever imagined.
Most of my colleagues in this new field look down at me, like I was some pauper who went there to steal something to eat. The most terrifying thing is, that even some professors obviously share this attitude, that Informatics and CS student are not worthy of being accepted by mathematicians. The first incident happened approximately 2 weeks ago and I asked about it HERE.
Today, the second incident happened, or better, climaxed. Since the first week of this term I was trying to contact one of professors, who was responsible for my acclimatization plan (one subject, where are the most important things from B.S., so you could catch up with your colleagues in your new field). He was supposed to send me some studying materials and tell me, which topics I should learn. Also he should tell me about terms of my exams and the topic of the project he wants me to do. He did none of these things, so I was contacting him again and again.
He usually responded to my e-mail with some vague info about "consulting it next week on Skype". Yesterday I insisted on consultation, but he told me, that he only wants to do it through Skype. Then he send me some messages late in the evening and in the morning today with the text similar to this: "Do you have the time to consult it right now?" I had no chance to even read it exactly in the time the message was delivered. Today I accepted the whole "Skype thing" and send him an e-mail in the afternoon again. He told me that he'll be online today at 8 p.m. But, even after three my messages, he wasn't. I got only short e-mail about him being ready in 5 minutes (so he was near his computer), but he wasn't. I gave up waiting in 9:30 p.m. After 10 p.m. I got e-mail from him with text "OK, tomorrow I'll be here from 10 to 11 a.m.".
I consider this last message to be a pure mockery, he probably wants me to wait for him again and again, even in weekends.
The problem is, I don't know, what should I do now. My greatest dream was becoming a successful scientist. After B.S. I was offered a part-time job in our research center and I got about 6 offers to the industry positions (even a programming job for company which produces airplanes). Even if those positions were much more lucrative, I accepted the position in research. Because of this research center is our university ranked top in my country.
I've sacrificed everything I could to this dream. My friends (who are away or in the CS field), hobbies (bodybuilding, martial arts and even fishing were too time-consuming activities) and my health too. I've started loosing hair, weight, my hands are trembling permanently and I had to undergo lesser back surgery because of long-term sitting, so now I have the typical "drug-addict look". It didn't matter too much to me, I was working and studying about 14 hours every day.
But now I'm incredibly frustrated, sad and shocked because of my new lecturers' and colleagues' attitude. I feel like I cannot continue my degree here, but I don't want to leave either, because I would've left my job in research.
Ok, so here are my questions:

What do you think I can do about professors' attitude? I don't think an official complaint is the best idea because of their positions.
Is it possible to suspend my career in the academy, take the job in the industry and try to get into another research center next year? Or will it damage my career as a researcher deeply?

I'm sorry for a very long description of my problem.

See Take a deep breath before writing and "Here's my situation, any suggestions?" is not an answerable question. After reading this whole post, I can understand how you are feeling but it's still not clear to me what you want to know. How to make your colleagues respect you when they don't think much of your previous field? How to pin down a flaky professor for a meeting?

(continued) Most of the questions expressed in the body of your post are not really things we can answer here; for example, we can't tell you whether leaving your PhD and taking a job in industry will make you feel better or worse. If you have a question that can be answered by others, please [edit] your post to focus on that question.

@ff524 I've tried to reformulate my questions.

Sometimes you will encounter stupid people, disorganized people, rude people (=jerks or snobs) in this world.  Very rarely will you encounter people who are really out to do you harm.  If you are finding yourself suspecting certain people are really out to do you harm, then it's probably time to remove yourself from the situation and put yourself in a healthier environment.

My adviser told me in my first meeting with him: "I warn you that we'll agree on meetings, and I will just forget to come." This isn't ideal, but I took it as a cute forgetful scientist comment, not an insulting admission. And yes, it turned out to happen a lot.
Professors deal not just with research and supervising students, but they might be involved with industry, probably have a family, and certainly spend much time fighting administration; and the more accomplished they are, the more time is spent dealing with issues they'd rather not instead of focusing on what most like (such as doing research, and supervising). I fully understand that your experiences are frustrating, but they don't strike me necessarily as that unusual. If you find yourself with an adviser who is always extremely reliable, you are lucky. You are not lucky, but this is still to say that all I think you need is patience.
There is more to it though. If your adviser is the busy type, and offers a meeting right after sending you information, he obviously doesn't expect you to have it digested already. You should have taken him up on the offer, and refrain from fatalistic attitudes such as calling re-scheduling attempts a "mockery." Marcus Aurelius wrote (from memory) "We cannot change what happens to us, but we can change how we feel about it." While this isn't so easy, it's good advice as attaching negative feelings to events in the course of work or study doesn't help. From your questions here, you appear to do that commonly. I think your mind and body would benefit if you wouldn't. To learn this, maybe talking to a counsellor might help, if only to verbalize your frustration with them, and maybe so get it out of your system.
I can't help but feel that the world around you isn't quite as dark as it appears to you. Try to learn how to perceive it that way.

To be honest, I wasn't always like that, but last "year and half" is so terrible, I feel like a character in some really bad movie. Anyways, thank you for your response.

Is there a graduate student administrator? A professor who has special responsibility for graduate students in the department? If neither of those, go for the head of the department.
In any case, contact that person explaining that you have not been able to schedule a meeting with Professor X, and asking for help working with him or an alternative who is more accessible.
Try to keep your communication very factual and relevant. For this purpose, your feelings about "mockery" are irrelevant. All that matters is that you need to get "acclimatization plan" information. Professor X has not been able to either send you the materials or be available to consult about it.
Incidentally, my interpretation of the situation is that it is likely that Professor X is seriously over-committed at the moment. He tried to arrange a Skype call at 8 p.m., which probably means he was going to be doing it from home, where family matters would take precedence.

+1. I can guarantee the OP that the professor in question is not scheduling 8 PM or Saturday morning calls --or emailing at 10 PM -- because he is trying to mock you. There is 100% chance that he has much better things to do with this time than play some elaborate joke at your expense. The fact that the professor is cutting into his own evenings and weekends should be a clear message that this is someone who wants to do the right.


text:
Is it appropriate to ask a professor about continuing my degree?
I'm in a very unfortunate situation. I have B.S. from Computer Science and I change my field to Applied Mathematics for M.S. (because of recommendations of my colleagues from research).
In CS I was pretty good, I finished with Dean's award for Bachelor thesis (that's why I was offered a part-time position in research), but now I'm struggling heavily to even pass the first term in Math. CS program was concentrating on programming, so we had only single-variable calculus, basics of linear algebra and some graph theory.
Now I must take exams from Functional Analysis, Complex variables, Partial differential equations etc. and I'm afraid I'll not be able to pass them. I was able to pass lesser tests and projects, but I need a lot of time for every single problem and now, before exams, I see how many things I don't understand.
Additionally I'm suffering from high-blood pressure since I was 15, but now is my condition worsening very fast (probably because of stress). I feel tired, depressed and dizzy very often.
So, is it appropriate to ask the one professor, who is the head of department, about possibilities of suspension or simply going again into the first year of M.S. next year?
Maybe I'd like to ask him about his opinion about my talent for this, because I've never experienced such setback in school and so it's possible I'm simply too silly to comprehend Math.
EDIT:
I'm studying in the Czech Republic.

Perhaps it is useful to comment problems in advanced mathematics tend to take a lot of time and that is the nature of the course and you taking time for these problems is no comment on your ability.

Please say what country you are studying in when asking questions like this. Practices vary massively arround thw world.

To me it never hurts to discuss possible options. Complex mathematics can be a difficult hurdle to cross and it seems you're making a leap from basic math to university-level math without being prepared for it.
Explain your situation in detail. I'm sure this isn't a first for the head of your department and maybe (s)he can suggest some courses which might help you in catching up with the program.
I'd keep your high blood pressure problem out of the discussion.

Upvoted for suggesting to keep the health issue out of the discussion with the prof. If the uni has a dedicated health support, a separate thread could be started there.

If you are looking to withdraw (I'm guessing that is what you mean by suspend).
It is worth speaking to your universities disabilities coordinator.
Both long-term blood pressure problems, and depression are both (at least where I am) the kind of disabilities they deal with every day.
The disabilities coordinators tend to have all kinds of special powers to adjust the rules. Such as the capacity to withdraw without it showing on your record, even after various cut off dates are long past.
Secondly, they will be keyed into exactly who else who you should see at the uni,
such as psychological counselors; and likely what kind of classes exist for catching up etc.
In my experience (which is pretty limited) most professors have no idea what is going on with anything even remotely administrative, like withdrawing (Which i don't think is unreasonable -- it is a totally different skillset). Exceptions apply for heads of school and various people who are secondly billed as course coordinators. But even then there were better student admin people to talk to.

It also depends if you want a career in academics, or not (or maybe not really, read on).
If you want to go into industry later on, you'd be surprised how irrelevant the specific title from university often is. If you have a M.S. in a technical field from a good university and 3 years of industry experience, in 95% of the cases it won't ever matter anymore what specific field the M.S. was in. Therefore, if you want to go into industry, I recommend you to do an M.S. you can enjoy doing, that's the most important. To answer your question, in that case do not simply repeat the first year of the same M.S. - talk to the professor and also discuss the option of doing a different M.S.
If you want a career in academics, it obviously does matter a lot what field you did your M.S. in, and it matters even more what specific knowledge you gained during your M.S. - however, if you can't enjoy the field now there's a chance you won't enjoy it later. Especially since you mention depression, I know some people who finished their PhD, got hit by a real hard depression where they could do zero work for a couple years, and had to start a new career that ignored all of their academic work.
In summary, this is too big to not talk about with someone. Maybe it's best to pursue the current M.S. maybe it's best to repeat a year, maybe it's best to start industry work right now with a B.S. Maybe your Head of department can even offer you a job at one of the university's start ups - the world sometimes works funny like that. If your head of department can't help you they should be able to refer you to someone else who can.

While both computer science and math are highly technical subjects, and the skill set is somewhat overlapping, many aspects are quite different. As a caricature (it is, of course, not always true, especially in high-class algorithmics), in writing software one often has a clear route, once the concepts are in place, of how to proceed.
In math, even the simplest problem statements can have highly non-obvious solutions (for an example, see Simon Singh's book on Fermat's problem, where there is a simple geometrical conjecture which remained unproven for 80 years until an elementary proof was found).
There is no reason to feel bad about that. Math is hard, and once you have seen top mathematicians at work, you will realise that there is essentially no upper limit to how much better these people can be compared to even strong students.
Most importantly, if you enjoy the topic in itself, try to find a route which gives you enough time to catch up, perhaps part-time or similar, until you get the hang of it. If, even with slowing down, you do not get the hang of it, it's probably not for you - but you should definitely try to give yourself more time. CS most likely did not provide you with the skill set of a general mathematician, so you definitely need time to adjust.

I would definitely go talk to someone. It doesn't neccessarily have to the head of the department, but discussing the possibilities with someone from the faculty would be a good idea. After all, starting again one year later (if that is what you want) is far better then spending your time on something you don't want to do
Also worth mentioning is the possibility to go to your other proffessors (who teach you analysis, lingebra ..) and asking them for a personal consultation. They can help you not only solving equations but often times can offer a valuable insight to your situation.
By the way, if I can bet, you are studying Applied maths at FJFI ČVUT (I am as well). The teachers there are one of the best at dealing with such situations and usually won't let you down.
If I am correct (and even if I am not !) I would go see the "garant" (no english translation AFAIK) of your field.


text:
When to label paper as "accepted" on your publication list?
The title basically says it all. At which point in the refereeing process does it become acceptable to mention on my list of publications (e.g. the one on my website) that a paper has been accepted for publication at Journal X? Specifically:

is it OK when I receive word from the editor that the journal is "ready to publish my paper after a revision"?
is it OK when I confirm the final version of paper?
... or must I wait until the paper is actually published?

I don't quite see the point in this question. If a paper comes back with "minor revisions", you would instantly do those and subsequently get the final acceptance within a few weeks. Why bother updating your publication list for that? If there are more than "minor" revisions necessary, I wouldn't boast about it either.

@Karl The point is that I will want to update my publication list at some point, and I'm just curious at which point (in the admittedly short period of a few weeks or so) this is appropriate. It's not that I want to boast as soon as possible, it's just my lack of experience in how things are done :)

I'd do it when getting the final acceptance letter. Before that, you can say "submitted" or "under revision".

If you have to make revisions still, you should list it as Revise and Resubmit at X. That's quite stronger a signal than Under Review at X: anyone can submit a paper to any journal, but an R&R implies that it's quite likely to be published there. Once you get the official acceptance letter, you can list it as Accepted at X or Forthcoming in X.

I prefer "under revision", as resubmit has the connotation of starting the review process again, with different reviewers.  It's a step back from the "normal" process.


text:
The unfortunate case of a paper with extremely slow review process
One of the first papers I ever wrote has a rather unfortunate history. Mistakes were made, especially by me, and after around 3+ years the paper remains unpublished. Below is a rough timeline of how things progressed (or rather failed to progress). Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.
04/2015: The paper is first sent to the journal. At the time, I'm in the second year of my PhD.
06/2015: The paper gets sent back to me because the bibliography is missing (basically: I accidentally run latex one too few times before sending). I promptly return the corrected version.
10/2016: I write to the Editor to ask about the status of the paper and receive no reply.
01/2017: I consult my Supervisor about the situation and he writes an email to the Editor.
02/2017: I receive an email from the Editor explaining that they had trouble finding reviewers and giving me suggestions about how to improve the paper. The gist was that the result is interesting but the exposition is inadequate, and I wholeheartedly agree with the second part (the 2015 version of me was a terrible writer).
06/2017: I finally receive the review, which is mostly positive but also points to problems with exposition. The email also mentions that the paper is "tentatively accepted for publication (...) subject to revision".
Now, what I should have done at this point is to correct the paper and send in the revised manuscript. Unfortunately, two issues came in the way. First, my thesis defence was approaching and I honestly could not find time nor energy for much else. The thesis ended up being rather unrelated to the unfortunate paper (the paper answers a question that somebody asked and I realised I could answer, it's in my field but not quite my subfield) so these two tasks were not related. Second, I came to realise that to make it a decent paper, the technical sections would need an almost complete overhaul, which made the task very unappealing (not only would it be very time consuming but also it would be a constant reminder of the poor quality of my previous writting). (The material was formally correct, but extremely inelegant.) In the end, weeks and then months went by, and there was always something that required more urgent attention (at least in my mind). Finally, I reworked the paper this summer and so:
08/2018: I send the revised manuscript to the Editor, with apologies for the highly inappropriate delay. I receive no answer.
09/2018: I send another email with apologies, politely asking if they could tell me what the status of the paper is (are they still willing to consider it for publication, etc.). Still no answer.
Now I'm at a loss of what to do, and unsure about what will happen. Should I keep badgering the Editor hoping for an answer? Should I take any other steps, or should I just wait for their reply? Is it likely that the paper eventually gets published?

Were you given a deadline for resubmission? Did you meet it or get approved for an extension?

No deadline was mentioned. My impression (based on interactions with other journals) is that generally no dates are stated explicitly but there is a tacit understanding that paper should be resubmitted reasonably promptly (although I might be mistaken about that and it may be field specific).

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


text:
Citing a Video Game in Harvard Format
I have to write an Extended Essay as part of my IB diploma, and I'm writing mine on the episodic adventure game of Life is Strange as an English EE. One of the issues I've encountered during the writing process was citing the game correctly.
After consulting online sources, these are the two citations I ended up with for two versions/episodes of the same video game (it has 5 episodes in total):
Square Enix 2015, Life Is Strange: Chrysalis, video game, PlayStation 4, Square Enix.
Square Enix 2015, Life Is Strange: Out of Time, video game, PlayStation 4, Square Enix.
Are these correct? I looked at how the cited it in Wikipedia, and looks quite different:
Dontnod Entertainment (30 January 2015). Life Is Strange. Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360. Square Enix. Level/area: Chrysalis.
Dontnod Entertainment (24 March 2015). Life Is Strange. Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360. Square Enix. Level/area: Out of Time.
The guideline I followed, however, was the one I found from the Harvard citation site, which states that I should include: Publisher year of publication, Title of game, video game, Console type, Publisher or Distributor in Australia if different to publisher, Place of publication if known. Any special credits and other information that might be useful can be noted after the citation.
I still have several issues that I can't find the answer to from the site though.
Firstly, should I include the developers in the citation? Dontnod entertainment was the developer of the game, but I'm not sure if it fits within the category of "special credits or other useful information".
Second, how do I go about making an in-text citation for a specific chapter/part of the game? Would it be acceptable to have something like (Square Enix 2015, ch. 4)?
Third, if the year of publication is the same for all episodes, how do I make their in-text citation so that a person could differentiate between the two? For example, if I wanted to make an in-text citation for the two games cited above, they would both be (Square Enix 2015) would it not? What should I do so that a person would know that I'm citing two separate episodes? My guess is that I should add a letter after the year i.e. (Square Enix 2015a) similar to how a letter should be added when someone is citing two different books from the same author and with the same publication year, but I'm still uncertain.
And... that's about it. Hopefully. But yeah, I would really appreciation it if someone miraculously has some of the answers to the questions, because the librarian at my school isn't experienced with referencing a video game, and I really want to have all my citations done correctly.

About the "third" you usually add an "a", "b" etc after the year. For example, 2015a, 2015b

Check this out: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2015/01/how-to-cite-software-in-apa-style.html

First, figure out what citation style you're supposed to be using in your Extended Essay, or if there is no particular recommendation, select one of the major ones and be consistent with it. That is, if you decide to use the Harvard style, use Harvard throughout your WHOLE essay and with every source you cite. Wikipedia doesn't have a house citation style, so what you're seeing there is going to vary from article to article.
You're spot-on with your research for the bibliography entry in Harvard style. You're also close with the in-line citation - just note that Harvard style doesn't use "chapters" there. Your reader doesn't need that information to locate the resource, so it isn't included. In your case, the in-line citation would simply be (Square Enix 2015a) or (Square Enix 2016b) if you end up citing 2 Square Enix titles. See here for another example.
If your teacher recommends that you use a different citation style, here are a few resources to get you started with citing video games:

MLA
APA
Chicago

Final thought: don't worry too much about the particulars of the citation for something as unconventional as a video game. If the answer isn't immediately apparent to you with a simple Google search, it won't be to your outside grader either. They're likely no more experienced in academic referencing than your school librarian. And no matter how much time you put into your essay, they're still only paid to spend the absolute minimum time possible reviewing it... The last thing they're going to notice is a misplaced comma in your bibliography.
So focus your energy on the good stuff - the content - and just keep the rest consistent.

Check with your instructor/advisor.  Offer to them that you researched how to format the reference, and can't find something exact.  Offer that ____ is the closest you can find.  See what they say.
It is likely that they will accept it.
In my opinion/experience, There are two real purposes for citing in a specific format - a) they want you to learn how to cite references well, b) it will be automatically checked.  (or c) they are OCD or a jerk...)
As an instructor, our department standard was MLA, though, I would accept it if it was close.
Per Harvard Style, for a computer program downloaded from the internet, the required elements of a reference are:

Authorship/Organisation, Year. Title of program. (Version). [computer program] Distributor/Publisher. (if available) Available at: <web address/URL> [Accessed date]

Example:

Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2013. Adobe Air (3.8 beta). [computer program] Adobe Labs. Available at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashruntimes/air/ [Accessed 30 August 2013].

An IB Extended Essay is graded externally, so there won't be anyone OP can talk to who would have the authority to "accept" it.

@NateEldredge, found it.


text:
Should I mention that I'm able to self fund my degree in my SOP?
Should I mention that I'm able to self fund my degree in my SOP? I don't find anywhere else in the application process where I can communicate such information.
I'm a prospective international student applying in the US in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

With respect to which country are you a prospective international student?  That is, which country are you applying to? The answer, can vary across countries. For instance, in Italy you don't specify this kind of information in the application process for a PhD, but you can choose later, once accepted, to not be funded.

I will be applying in the US. In the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering to be specific.

Lots of discussion here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/45746/8722

blmoore: I would have to say that most of the discussed points are exclusively tolerated towards PhD funding which may not translate well with masters. Especially that self funding masters is very common unlike PhD

At least here funds to finance graduate students are scarce, so somebody who will be an asset without cutting into said funding, is clearly welcome. You should definitely state that in your application, by attaching proof of your funding. If said funding is e.g. a competitive scholarship from your origin country, it should be a definite plus in your application.


text:
Should I make a fuss about small typos I found in a reference book?
I'm currently taking up a bachelor's degree in history at a distance-learning college. Since history is not a popular degree in that school, they don't revise their history books/ modules regularly. In fact, most of the modules they gave me were published about twenty years ago and contain few typos and outdated information. Should I make a fuss about this, or should I just correct the errors myself?
By the way, in general, the old references are still informative and useful.

What would your fuss accomplish?

Most institutions try to maintain accurate information especially in relation to their teaching. They will probably appreciate knowing about the inconsistencies in their information.

Just send an email. Most authors keep an errata on their website.

Yes. They need to be corrected. Otherwise, other students might learn wrong information. Overall, everyone should get updated and state-of-art information.


text:
Do professors care about their rating on websites such as RateMyProfessor or Koofers?
I am wondering if a professor is already an Associate Professor, do they still care about their reputation in the eyes of the department considering tenureship is already granted?

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

I occasionally check RateMyProfessor, and I do care (a little) about what students say: my feelings are hurt by negative comments, and I am encouraged by positive ones. I know some people who do the same; others never check the site at all.
However, these ratings are never taken seriously as an evaluation of effective teaching. I have never heard them seriously discussed in any hiring, tenure, or promotion meetings. Anyone who brought them up would likely provoke a very negative reaction from their colleagues.
Why is the site not taken seriously? My negative reviews include the following:

"The amount of homework was unreal. I spent on average, 5 hours a week on this homework, which is also graded on correctness."
"Only take this class if... you like learning on your own."
"He is a really tough grader and will take off points for little things (i.e. forgetting an equals sign)."
"He... marks off on tests if he doesn't know how you got an answer."
"Also, the homework is graded on accuracy not completion..."

If my colleagues cared at all, they would see these reviews as positive.

Students complaining about homework "graded on accuracy not completion" is about the single saddest thing I've seen today.

@AJK: I think it depends on a lot of things. I remember when I got a bit upset by that the first time it happened in college. It wasn't because I disliked the idea, but rather because I was used to that not being the case, and so it caught me by surprise when I'd already lost points for something that I could have probably double-checked somehow (e.g. with a calculator). Afterwards I was generally fine with it. However, I think it would be upsetting if done poorly, e.g. if the credit given for the correctness of the final answer vs. the argument was disproportionate, so it may make sense.

"Only take this class if... you like learning on your own." This varies depending on what level of education you're thinking about. In Britain at least, primary and secondary education are about learning things in class and not 'on your own'.

@Pharap: My reading of that sentence was, "taking his class won't help you learn [i.e. it's equivalent to studying on your own without his help]", which could apply at any level of education.

"However, these ratings are never taken seriously as an evaluation of effective teaching." -- PSA for students: If you want to provide suggestions for your professors, don't phrase it like an angry performance review; the angry rant + "failing grade" some people give professors is at best cathartic for them but not likely to help anyone (including future students). If you want to suggest things, phrase it more like "I have an idea about X that might help, what do you think?"

@Anonymous - I think it's good to check, as long as you're willing to discard the chaff. As others have said, it was easy to locate your actual page on the site, and having looked through it, I'd say one can certainly take points that are consistently raised as useful constructive criticism. What I noted as a theme with you is that students feel you assume more foreknowledge than the class's prerequisites might suggest they need. That may be, or they may be shifting blame for not learning everything in their prereqs. Still, if it comes up so consistently, it may deserve a closer examination.

If my colleagues cared at all, they would see these reviews as positive. No not necessarily. As far as I see you are mostly criticised for being harsh and there is a pattern in these comments: students don't agree with your actions. I am not saying you should be more flexible with the grading, that is up to you, but the problem seems to me is that you are not giving good constructive feedback. If you did, they would understand what they were doing wrong instead of blaming you. That said, they may be right. You should be open to criticism, it is ok to be wrong if you learn from it and improve

Concerning "take off points for little things (i.e. forgetting an equals sign)": I suggest that we start taking off points for confusing "i.e." with "e.g."

I did my master’s capstone project on "The Effectiveness of Online Evaluations" at California State University, Monterey Bay. I was also the administrator of online evaluations for faculty at CSUMB, and in addition to being full-time staff as an analyst/programmer, I was also adjunct faculty teaching computer science.
For the faculty RTP (retention, tenure, and promotion) process, the official student evaluations were the only ones considered. Faculty at the time could opt for paper evaluations distributed in the last two weeks of the semester, or online evaluations. I went through all kinds of hoops getting this process up and running. One faculty member claimed students would go home, get drunk, and submit negative evaluations; he wanted the evaluation system to only be available 8am to 7pm. We were about three weeks into the first semester that we tried online evaluations, so I analyzed the data based on time-of-day submitted, and found out that students were actually slightly more favorable towards their professors from 7pm to 8am, not statistically significantly so, but at least that killed that argument.
My thesis compared one professor who taught the same course for three semesters, two sections per semester. Her first semester, it was both sections paper evaluations. The second semester, one section was paper and one was online, and the third semester both sections were online. (Her teaching did not vary over the three semesters.) The paper evaluations and the online evaluations effectively exactly matched.
When students pressed a department chair for access to the faculty evaluation data, he refused (they are considered personnel information), but told them to just check Rate My Professors. (I'll note that many other universities have negotiated with the faculty unions that student evaluation data, at least the numeric stuff in the aggregate, is public record.)
I constantly hear the complaint that RMP responses are self-selected, and only the negative reviews are submitted. I decided to test this, and wrote a program to screen-scrape the RMP pages and compare those ratings to the course evaluation ratings that my official system collected. As long as I required a minimum number of ratings (like ten) on RMP, I found a >0.9 correlation with the official evaluations. So the whole "it's only students bitching on RMP" is not actually true, if you do real data analysis (and shame on you lazy professors for stating "facts" without data!).
Despite being a card-carrying member of the California Faculty Association, I will say I was dismayed by the lengths some of my colleagues would go to to attempt to "game" the evaluations, as well as how much energy they put into trying to prove they were inaccurate. I finally snarled at a faculty meeting that if some of these faculty would put half as much effort into improving their teaching as they did into trying to disprove the evaluations that said their teaching sucked, they would have nothing to worry about during evaluations.
Of course, I say this scoring 4.9 out of 5.0 on Rate My Professors. I've since jumped from academia to private industry.

Wow. That's a great answer, provided with data! Is there anything (like a thesis) regarding your project on the Internet?

It's an interesting data point. That said, my criticism of RMP isn't that the data isn't correlated with popularity in official evaluations (I am not surprised it is - why wouldn't it be?), but that RMP reviews are often fucking unprofessional and hurtful. As a faculty member, I reserve the right to not be judged on my "hotness". Of course, the more interesting question would be whether any anonymous evaluation is correlated with actual teaching performance (this question may also be the source of the pushback you received).

One thing missing in your evaluations is, how are the students evaluated? I mean, that should be the prime evaluation. You can only measure how good a professor is by measuring how well the students do.

@pieterb: "you can only measure" - why is that? Good professors can have bad students and vice versa.

Very nice answer... provides something that would not be possible to know without actual bench-marking - the fact that RMProfessors is a good representation of a professor's actual performance.

Some years ago, before I knew that "Rate My Professors" even existed, I found and looked at its page of comments about someone I knew. (I had a googled him to find his email address, and the "Rate My Professors" page was the first hit on Google.) What I saw there convinced me that I didn't want to read any more "Rate My Professors" pages. I've never looked at another one; in particular, I've never looked at my own.

Those "anyone can comment anonymously" sites tend to  attract trollish behavior. I don't know whether  [ratemyprofessor] or [koofers] are in this category.

I am wondering if a professor is already an Associate Professor, do they still care about their reputation in the eyes of the department considering tenureship is already granted?

Yes, people generally care about what their department thinks about them even after tenure. But no, nobody in any department that I know about takes feedback at ratemyprof seriously. And does this really surprise you? One of the evaluation criteria is "hotness", and the comment section is just a cesspit of unreflected noise. Instead, universities run their own evaluations, which are then taken into account for tenure and promotion decisions (to varying degrees).

Unfortunately, in some universities it is not mandatory (or it is mandatory only every third semester, but some instructors then just forget to hand them out) to do these evaluations.

I do read what some students say about me in RateMyProfessors. But I know it's not really relevant because over the years I have been able to compare with the actual evaluations done by the majority of the students. Here are a few examples that show how those rates are largely irrelevant:

One semester I taught this course with 17 students. One student posted in RMP basically saying that I did everything wrong. On the anonymous course evaluations, 16 students wrote good to very good remarks, and one student wrote "everything wrong".
Often, reviews in RMP appear two or three weeks into the semester. Complete with opinions on how I grade.
Many of the reviews are clearly written from a point of view of "the important thing is an easy pass".  I definitely do not teach to cater to such students.

Finally, I have never heard any discussion, neither official or not, about RMP in my faculty. The teaching evaluations carried by the faculty, on the other hand, play a role in tenure and promotion, and I know of promotions to full professor being rejected due to poor evaluations.

Did you ever ask the folk down the road at the U of S about some (in)famous RMP-related shenanigans 10-15 years ago? :)

Never heard about that. But then, I'm always the last one to learn about any kind of news :)

+1 for being the only answer so far (I believe) to point out the huge selection bias in RMP reviews (which is in my opinion the main think that makes such sites is useless)

From my experience in the US it does not boil down to caring about rate my professor for professional reasons (i.e. we don't have to worry about getting good grades on the site for tenure purposes), but it does boil down to ego or esteem. At my college, we all have internal review surveys that go out to students every semester before tenure, and then every three years after tenure. These results are then compiled and sent to the professors after the semester grades have been submitted. We also receive semesterly course visits from our dean before tenure, then once every three years thereafter to make sure we are doing our jobs properly and professionally. These are the evaluations that are most important for tenure and other professional reasons. I imagine it is similar to this in other universities. Internal reviews are way more important than rate my professor.
Personally I never want to look at my scores on rate my professor; I know that some students will like me, some will hate me, and I don't want to lose sleep thinking about the nasty things that students can write when they are able to be anonymous. From what little I have seen (especially from the great answer above) most of the comments are not at all constructive. Therefore I see little point in reading them, as I will not be able to take that feedback and improve my teaching from it. (Unless I ever decide to just let my students do nothing and walk away with free "A" grades at the end of the semester.)
However I do have a colleague who bends over backwards to his students and will brag unendingly about how he is one of the highest rated professor on RMP at our particular college. So, I suppose there are some who really do care about it.

I cheat - I bring donuts on final exam night (presentations actually) so I have good ratings on RMP :)  When these sites first appeared I made the argument as both a student and an adjunct faculty member that it wasn't obvious to students how the internal "student course satisfaction survey" was used, or if the results were available.  I tried to get our faculty senate to agree to publishing the results, but the majority couldn't agree to it.  Does your institution make any of the data available to students?

@ivanivan I don't think we make that data available, but that's a good question. I usually bake cookies. :-D

To be fair: In the great answer, the user may have cherry-picked the "non-helpful answers" (to make their point): Indeed, if you google for these statements, you find a ratemyprof-page where many students complain about their instructor not being able to explain calculus clearly and write that one has to have had calculus before to understand anything. These comments may be useful for the instructor, evaluations and of course prospective students.

My subjective answer is that in my environment they are way too busy to read such sites.  So, if someone they care about ever drives their attention towards a review of themselves in such sites, they are likely to go and check, otherwise the professors ignore the rating sites.
(That's all, folks, sorry...)

Whoever downvoted: why?

Just for reference, I know a part time lecturer who after a few years of teaching checked in patatabrava.com (a local equivalent to such webs) and found no reviews, rants, quotes or ratings on her. As a result, she was mildly disappointed, as  "important" professors are usually well covered in such webs.
In summary: as other answers have covered, such webs don't matter in practical terms, but they can still be a source of feedback and/or pride - probably a rather bizarre source.


text:
MSc for experienced professional?
I have 8 years of IT experience in India, I want to do a Master of Science in the US.
Would my already long professional experience hurt my chances to find a job after the MSc? I intend to settle in the US instead of coming back to India.

I would expect that it almost certainly does not hurt your chances. Many people proceed their academic education or career after professional experience. In our Master programme, this is treated as a significant plus, and I would be very surprised if companies wouldn't do the same.
But for the non-academic portion of the question (I infer you mean a job outside academia), you might want to ask at The Workplace and get opinions there.

You will be a very strong candidate in US provided you go to at least a reputable public university.

Hello, hoo, and welcome to Academia Stack Exchange. Your answer is in need of some improvement. Please try to include some more details in your answer so that it will be of benefit to other users.


text:
Article grammar and spell check
I'm not a native English speaker. My supervisor and I have read our manuscript at least twice, but after two months the reviewers say the grammar is unsatisfactory. I want to know if there is any software which can check the grammar of my article (either offline or online), or any forum I can ask about grammar questions?

A quick answer to your question could be Grammarly. This is way better than MS Word spellchecker. But, of course, every technology has its limits.

Grammarly, Quillbot, etc. are good grammar-check tools freely available (they have paid premium versions though). But, do not believe everything a grammar-check tool tells you (e.g. Grammarly reports all passive voice as error, Quillbot is eager to paraphrase perfectly correct sentences).

I think that, as such, your question is a wee bit narrow and not specifically related to academia. There is, however, a deeper related question which I believe is worth answering:

What language services are worth considering for research articles, for non-native speakers (or native speakers with subpar writing skills)?

This is the question I will try to answer below.

Translation software or online services: under no circumstances.
Spellchecking software: good to catch typos, pluralization errors, and the like. Worthless for any other use.
Grammar checking software: grammar checking modules of nonspecialized software (say, MS Word) is useless. Specialized software is little less than useless, and typically fails to grasp the more complicated sentence structures that are somewhat typical of academic writing.
Thesaurus: now that's a useful tool. One of the limitations of non-native speaker is that even if our vocabulary is quite broad, we typically have a much more restricted “active” lexicon (that which we use spontaneously). Thus, our language often sounds dull or unvaried. A thesaurus is a good tool to make you say “yeah, I could have thought of using ‘monotonous’ instead of ‘unvaried’”. To me personally, this is one of the most precious tools.
Real-life or online discussion fora: of course, our sister site English Language & Usage comes to mind here. Also, remember that you can also ask advice from native speaker friends or colleagues… that invited professor whom you showed the town around on his first week-end will probably be happy to give you a helping hand over coffee on a particular paragraph you have trouble with.
Proofreader or other comprehensive language service: sometime necessary. If you feel your English level is preventing you from getting the recognition your work deserves, this is a good money investment in the short term.
Translater: to be avoided unless your English is really, really poor. Technical translators who really understand your field will be very hard to find, unless you have colleagues who would like to moonlight :)  Non-technical translators are to be avoided, as their translations are very unreliable.

The bold items above correspond to the combination of tools I use myself. Note that I consider my own level of English to be quite decent for a non-native speaker… whether it is an excess of self-esteem you can judge for yourself ;-)

Was there more coming in your final bullet point? "Technical translators ... ??". +1 for the answer in any regard.

@Nicholas I just forgot to finish that sentence :)  it is now fixed

@F'x Quite surprisingly, I found non-technical translators (in scientific proof-reading, but not in my field) very good. Of course you need to review their changes, as sometimes they miss subtle distinctions.

@PiotrMigdal my own experience was miserable, but it's good to hear it's not universal!

Proofreading questions are generally off topic on English Language & Usage SE, English Language Learners SE, and Writers SE. There may be ways to sneak them in: read the help pages carefully, and consider popping into chat or meta to discuss your question before posting.


text:
How to prepare a Journal Club (or Methods) presentation?
I recently gave a presentation that was poorly received by my PI. I presented a technique that I have been trying to master (Patch Clamp). My PI thought I was not adequately prepared but gave no further feedback.
I spent three days putting together my presentation and read chapters  (Springer books) and papers, listened to lectures on the subject--over two weeks.  I have been giving presentations since undergrad. I just finished my M.S. I hope to enter graduate school in Fall of 2012.
I don’t know what I am doing wrong. What is a more effective way to prepare a talk or presentation? How much background reading is sufficient? What types of questions do ask yourself when preparing a talk? How do you know you have truly mastered the material?

Did you ask your supervisor what they thought was lacking specifically ? Just saying "you were unprepared" is not very helpful to you.

I agree with @suresh... your advisor is likely your best source of constructive feedback, talk to him and see what he says.

Not to be snarky but if your presentation contained as many grammatical mistakes and choppy flow as this answer did then I could see an irascible PI writing the presentation off without really assessing the content. (Hence my edits.)

(this is rather long: I wrote it for one of my students, who had a similar question)
BASIC UNDERSTANDING
When you're processing a paper, ask yourself:

what is their precise problem formulation
what is their solution
what larger issue are they trying to address with their paper
Do (1) and (2) actually fix (3)
(for experimental papers) do the experiments tell a convincing story to bolster their claims. Be suspicious of what they claim unless the line of reasoning is clear.

SYNTHESIS
Once you've done this for a set of papers, you should start trying to connect them together:

is there a linear progression of ideas ?
How do the tools connect up
Is there some way to simplify and explain what groups of papers are doing under a common theme ?

CRITIQUE
Once you have the above, then you can ask

what are the gaps in what people are doing
Are these gaps important or minor ?
Does some union of the papers essentially solve the problem ? if so, why and if not, why not ?
Are these papers even solving the right problem ? (this last point is both tricky and critical - it is very easy for a line of research to be internally consistent but get totally derailed from the original motivation for the problem)

DIRECTIONS
Now you're ready to suggest new directions and new ideas.
note that critique comes AFTER basics and synthesis - you must understand very well before you can judge.


text:
Is it ok to cite someone who provided a bad citation for correct information?
In a master's thesis the author provided a seemingly incorrect citation. ( Link to paper citation 4)
The information is obviously correct but in the cited paper I couldn't find any reference to the information he cited. Is it ok to cite him?

If you want to refer to his work (i.e. his results, discussion or conclusions), you should cite it.
If you want a reference to the particular piece of information he cited (the sentences describing plasma etching before his call to ref. 4), then you should find a direct source: either a textbook or review on the topic. This would be much better than a research article (or thesis), especially one badly sourced.

Why would a research article be better than a review?  At least in my field, research articles tend to be much more carefully refereed than surveys or textbooks.

What I meant is: if you want a reference for, e.g., how Smith’s formula applies to psychomechanics, you’d rather find a review article on that, or a textbook if it's a textbook matter, rather than citing a research paper chosen at random among the 100’s that use this formula.

In general I do not like citing non-peer reviewed sources. Further, it sounds like you ware using it as a secondary source, which I like citing even less.


text:
Would uploading preliminary research results on Arxiv certify new discovery as mine?
I have some preliminary results in my research, but due to my current situation I won’t have time to send these to a relevant journal. Yet I would like to claim these as my discoveries, in case someone else have similar results.  Would I be able to claim these as my discoveries if I upload them to Arxiv?

Note that while the Arxiv doesn’t have a typical peer-review process, it still has certain standards regarding your publication resembling a paper. You probably won’t be able to publish a bunch of data with a few notes.


text:
Is there a tool for showing trend in a technical research field?
Does anyone know if there exists a tool to generate the trend of interest in a particular research field over time?
I am particularly interested in wearable computing. I know this field has been hot for the last few years, I would like a measure of this “hotness” using academic publications relating to this area. i.e. the number of publications related to the keyword Wearable Computing.
Is there a tool that shows the trend of publications in an particular topic similar to how Google keeps track of keywords that people searches for?

Note: I am specifically interested in technical research field, such that papers that would get published in IEEE or some computer science journals.

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3439/easy-way-to-see-historical-trend-in-keywords-in-publications

I use Scopus quite a lot and it provides the ability to analyze keywords (there is a link to 'Analyze search results'):

I was able to quickly obtain this plot for publications per year for the keyword 'wearable computing':

It can also be restricted to particular sources. For example
this one for 'wearable computing' in 'IEEE Pervasive computing':

Unfortunately you need a subscription to access Scopus.

Hey thanks my university has a subscription to it!

It's not a tech-heavy corpus, but JSTOR's DFR does exactly what you want for the JSTOR collection.
http://dfr.jstor.org/?cs=any%3Awearable+&fs=ktm1&view=chart