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I have been invited to peer review a manuscript for a reputable journal. This is my first so I have a few questions to the more experienced

Are PhD students generally invited for such reviews? I was under the impression they would prefer someone with a Doctorate degree or more experience in the field.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of accepting to review?
The general discipline that the paper treats is related to my field of study but my active research is not necessarily related. Is it still OK to accept the invitation to review?

You are of course aware that there is lots of advise available on how to write a good review?

If you are not a technical expert in that specific field it is usually okay to say so. You might not be able to get down the specific technical details but your perspective is often quite valuable as an outsider. You can often indicate "reviewer expertise" (select something in the middle!) or simply indicate in the review that your main area is in X and as such you are approaching this paper on Y with the background of X.

It is not unusual that PhD students get invited as reviewers, after all a PhD student will likely be a true expert in the field of the PhD. If you are a student during your first years of study, the request may be a little premature, generally speaking but if your are in your final year then it will be a good experience. What you need to consider is whether you can provide an insightful review of parts of or preferably the entire paper. You should have a sense of why you were invited, i.e. why your expertise may have been asked for.
Peer review is a vital part of the publishing process so getting experience of reviewing other's material is very worthwhile. If you continue in academia this will be expected of you so you will have to start sometime. You can definitely add reviewing for journals in your CV, not mentioning what you reviewed but certainly for what journal you have reviewed.
If yo have not done a review before you should probably ask someone (or preferable more than one) more experienced within your field for a brief outline of what should be included in the review and how to formulate the review.

... or ask someone experienced whether you could show them and talk through your review before submitting it.

Quick remark: When one rejects a request to referee, there is usually the option of suggesting other possible reviewers to the editor (who makes the final choice anyway). So it is not that unlikely that your advisor or someone else that you know put your name in.

I would just add to Peter's answer couple more remarks:

It is important to write reviews. I can tell you that the list of names of people who don't do reviews is, at least amongst people I know, a "public secret". I mean, people who don't do reviews are known for it and it's certainly a negative thing.1 On the other hand, if you reject because you don't feel strong enough to do it, that's fine. Still, there has to be "first" once.
If it's your first review, tell that to the editor once you decide to do it. Just a brief mail: I have recieved the preprint and I will review it. However, I would like to bring to your attention that this is the first review I am writing.2 After all, in many cases (especially at conference reviews), you have to choose a "confidentality score" from 1 to 5, which exactly says how strong do you as a reviewer feel considering the review.
Discuss with your supervisor. It's surely ethical to ask someone close to you for opinion/help, so don't hesitate to approach him if you feel so. You may agree with him that you read the article yourself, mark what things you consider problematic, and then he helps you classify which things are crucial and which are not, and how much positive or negative the review should be. After all, your supervisor is not only your research director, he is there to help you (but not to do your job) with all parts of the scientific work.

1 There're people who reject reviews in Elsevier and Springer and some other publishers' journals, because they don't like the fact that these companies profit from it a lot. That's probably fine, too.
2 It's in general good practice to reply to the editor and say whether you accept. Unfortunately, not many people do it.

Yes, PhD student often have more time available than Faculty and they are actively keeping up with the literature themselves.
Disadvantages - a good review takes quite a bit of time. Advantages - it's useful experience, you can add it to your CV, you will learn a little bit more about active work in your field.
Yes, that's fine.

In terms of writing a good review, you will find a lot of helpful advice from any Google search. The one thing I would add to that is that (at least in Computer Science) it is sometimes quite easy to spot reviews from PhD students as they tend to be harsh and unhelpful. As a student yourself you are probably used to getting a lot of feedback on your work, and that is good. Don't be tempted to take your frustration out on the poor person who has written the paper you are reviewing.
Remember that at least part of the purpose of reviewing is to increase the quality of work in the field. If you review a paper which is rejected, likely it will be submitted elsewhere. If you accept the paper, the authors will improve it before final submission. So the purpose of the review, apart from quality control, is to tell the authors specifically how to improve their work. Avoid being vague in your criticism and avoid taking an unprofessional tone. Even if reviews are "blind", write as if the authors know you (and chances are that at some point you will meet them). Think about how you would wish your supervisors to give you feedback, and take your own advice.
By far the best reviews I have ever had have not been the most complimentary ones, or reviews from the best places I have submitted to, but they have certainly been the most helpful. They contained comments like "X is a poor presentation of the data, use the technique mentioned in paper Y". Or, "the author has used technique Z, this is outdated and should be replaced with W". The worst reviews I have had may well have been correct in what they said, but they have also been rude and unhelpful. For example, "X is not novel" is a fine criticism to make, but to be useful you need to say where X has been done before.


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Inclusion of `computer code` in a thesis
During the compilation of thesis (MSc or PhD) in a case we wanted to include some program codes as chapters:
We prefer to put heading to all program codes everywhere they appear as complete source to clarify the license. Is it nice to do so? Any other solutions?
Something like this:

3.1.1  Loop
    ...text...
-------
Copyright 2013 Coder, ...                   !this part
-------
function loop(...) result (...)
some code
-------
    ...text...

I think that the license of your thesis itself would apply to code snippets that are included in it.  Of course, you may release the full code under a different license.  But I wouldn't repeat that license with every code snippet.

@DavidKetcheson We think if someone wanted to try the code (because they are complete codes) he/she may just copy the code and run it. In this case the license as it was not with the code is ignored indeed. We don't want this happen by any extent so.

If someone wants to ignore your license, they may do so -- regardless of how many times you print it.

@DavidKetcheson Correct. But in this case he/she is doing that consciously not by mistake. In any distributed code as file there is header of license as we see almost everywhere. Here we include all the code in print instead of filing (due to some reasons) so this is the case.

You should add source codes scarcely and when it is interesting to add the code. Loop does not sound one of the interesting headings. In those cases you should include source code as figures and discuss them in your text.
in other cases, you can give complete source codes in appendix or in a CD/DVD as an attachment.

I would just put the code on the internet.  CDs and DVDs may be obsolete in a few years, and are a pain for the reader to get.

Hey, Loop is just for demonstration, you may consider finite difference solver instead :) if you like. Furthermore, We want them to be chapters not an appendix in any form.

If you want the code itself out there, put it up on GitHub or BitBucket.
As to the thesis itself, it depends on the pedagogical value --- some algorithms are worth including as code themselves: where the specifics of the language and environment matter. Others are best included as pseudo-code.

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How and why did the top journals become top journals?
Journals like Nature and Science have impressive impact factors. How and why did these top journals become top journals? Why are they able to sustain their statuses?

Downvote for .. what?

It seems like a very good question although it may be hard to find factual answers supported by evidence rather than opinion, I upvoted

mmh: I wouldn't worry too much about stray downvotes.  In fact, if the question is actually reasonable, stray downvotes often backfire by making others more likely to want to upvote.  Anyway, I think this is a good and even important question.

Flounderer gave the answer I was about to write: my hunch is that that effect is some kind of "unstable equilibrium": If two competing journals start out indistinguishable, and one is "luckier than the other" and gets a horse's head in the competition, then that difference will reinforce because it is attractive by itself.

Not my area of research, but I'm going to guess that it's a self-selecting cultural phenomenon.

All journals that have a high standing have the standing because of the support of the community. If the community loses interest, the journal will drop in the ranking. The top journals have therefore attracted authors for one reason or another. The editorial staff of journals try to maintain this status by making sure the work published there is of good quality and will be cited. It is thus not impossible for new journals to attain high status as long as authors provide the necessary papers. To this mix, we now also add the impact factor and other bibliometric factors. They matter now but have not been the driving factor for making the older journal what they are today.
I work with a more modest journal and I can definitely state that improving your impact factor is far more difficult than to drop in ranking. But, if your ranking becomes high enough (no specific number will be relevant since it varies between fields) a journal will be self-fuelling since many want to publish their material there and competition stiffens leading to a strong selection.
So the standing of Science and Nature, is part their long history, in part the hard work by the journal itself and in part the, now, need for authors to publish in as high ranking journals as possible since that is what forms the basis for most evaluations in academia.

I think this is analogous to "why is Harvard a good university, and able to maintain its standing as such?" A partial answer is that (1) it was founded a long time ago, and (2) it was founded by serious people. Given that, further serious people will tend to gravitate to the same institution, creating an inertia in the rankings.
A quote from The Crucible (set in the year 1692):

I am not some preaching farmer with a book under my arm; I am a graduate of Harvard College.

(but published in 1953.)

Suppose you start with a collection of journals and people who want to publish quality papers in them, who arrive over time. Suppose that each new quality paper is sent to a journal which is chosen at random, but where the probability of choosing journal X is an increasing function of the number of quality papers which have already appeared in X. Then you are dealing with a preferential attachment process  and you will find that after a long time, most of the quality papers will be appearing in a few top journals and there will be lots and lots of mediocre journals with very few quality papers.
Naturally it's a very simplified model, but the same argument can be used for the sizes of cities, views of Youtube videos, distribution of wealth, etc. See Chapter 18 of Easley and Kleinberg's textbook for more.

--- Nice answer!

One related comment-
There are some comments here that are equating high-impact factor with high prestige. I think this generally holds true, especially for people working firmly within the boundaries of a single discipline. For these people, of course, reputable journals are going to be more widely read and thus cited more frequently, and have higher impact-factors.
For people whose work are more inter-disciplinary, the relationship between prestige and impact factor are not so straightforward, because the size of the disciplinary audience can be very different.
For example, my work is interdisciplinary and lies at the boundaries of sociology, economic geography, management/organizations, and Asian studies. Journals in each these fields have different audiences, number of scholars, and thus, different impact factors. For example, Asian studies have a number of high quality high prestige journals that publish excellent papers, but because the size of the core audience, even the top journals hardly have impact factors that exceed 1. For management, however, because the field is very large, even journals that publish not-so-rigorous studies tend to have high-impact factors, easier exceeding top journals in social science/humanities. There are a number of journals that have impact factors over 5 or 6, and even mid-range journals have impact-factors around 3. Sociology and geography lie somewhere in-between.
It might be a natural tendency for people to try to publish in journals with high-impact factors. However, I would say, at least in my field, there is definitely higher prestige that will be attached to work in, say, top tier Asian studies journals (say, impact factor of 0.5-0.6) or a top- sociology journal (impact factor around 2-3) than a mid-tier management journal (impact factor of 3-4).

Journals gain their status mainly by being the first to offer publications in a new field and secondly by recruiting influential people in the field as editors.
Once a journal has a high impact factor people will want to publish there because authors themselves are judged on the impact factors of the journals they publish in. This means the editors can set a higher standard for acceptance. Since the impact factor is based on citation rates it then increases further. Most academic journals publish only papers and have very little editorial content, so this positive feedback mechanism is the main thing that maintains their top ranking. The mechanism operated even before impact factors were formally measured because people still knew roughly what the impact and standing of a journal was.
It is very hard for a new journal to get a good reputation because it takes two years for them to even be given an impact factor and this will remain low because they will fail to attract the best papers initially. A new journal needs to offer something different to succeed. They may specialize in a new field that does not already have a top journal, or they may offer open access for low charges in order to get going, but the established journals are always very hard to dispose.
The other factor that keeps a journal in the top ranking is its editorial board, but this is not because the editorial job requires their skills and knowledge. What the journal needs is  a good supply of peers willing to review articles well and it is not easy to persuade academics to dedicate their valuable time to this chore when they don't get paid for it. The main reason they do agree to review articles is to impress the editors because the editors are influential people in the field who may help them get their next job.
Editors themselves take on the role because of the prestige of being an editor for a top journal and because they get an opportunity to identify reviewers who understand the field so that they can recruit them. This establishes another positive feedback that helps maintain the journals top spot. One of the few things that can destabilize a top journals position is the resignation of its most influential editors.
Whether this amounts to a good system for academia is very much open to debate. Most top journals are in the hands of big commercial publishers who understand how the system works and who have cleverly developed and promoted the journal impact system to their advantage. They make huge profits taking money from scarce scientific funds when most of the hard work in publishing is done by unpaid authors, reviewers and editors. Efforts by academics to change this usually fail because they don't understand how the system works, or because they dont have the time or funding to realize their ambitions. Another reason seems to be that governments and funding agencies like the big profitable corporate publishers so they tailor legislation to suit the publishers rather than the academics. Also the academic societies (APS, AMS etc.) who supposedly oversee the interests of the fields are themselves funded mostly through their journals so they have a massive self interest in perpetuating the system.

So true. You have summarized the situation very well.

Stringent review standards, leading to highly integritous articles, could account, in part, for what has led these journals to become 'top' journals.

But perhaps we should conduct a study!

Droll. Very droll.

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What do I do when a co-author takes too long to give feedback during the peer review process?
Two years ago I did a piece of research for a journal's especial edition. I got the reviewer's comments, did all the corrections and sent it to my co-authors. One of them took so long to return his comments that the paper wasn't included in the EE. I then tried to submit it to another journal but again the same co-author took long time to provide his comments. Finally my boss suggested me to submit it to another journal (good one) without waiting for my co-author's opinion. I got the reviewer's comments back, I did all the corrections (I have 45 days), sent it to my co-authors and gave them a week to send me their comments. The same co-author is now telling me he's not happy I didn't tell him I submitted to that journal and that he won't be able to make comments in a week. I'm again in a catch-22. What do you do?

Did you submit the paper without contacting your coauthors? Because I don't think that is the right move. You should have at least given them a heads up. Also, don't collaborate with this guy again.

My co-author hasn't sent the comments after nearly two weeks. The others had. Shall I just give up. I'm at the start of my career.

It seems you are following your boss' (good) advice. Dealing with co-authors is not always easy as you have experienced. I think I have experienced a similar co-author, not responding but complaining whenever something happens. In my case, the co-author was definitely over-committed and the actions were basically a symptom of frustration about not being able to perform. Now, I think you have done the right thing to a point. The only thing that would have improved things would have been to provide the co-author with the information but with a strict deadline but not more than a week or two. Doing so at all stages, is the only way to deal with such cases. It is not very nice, or comfortable, but it is necessary to make a stand and convey the seriousness. In your case you have clearly had a lot of extra work due to the (lack of) actions from your co-author. I assume he has not apologized?
So what to do? Well, I would write and state that you are sorry the co-author feels left out (or however the co-author has phrased it). You can then state that the lack of response earlier made you assume the co-author was not prioritizing the work and that based on suggestions from your boss you have now taken the actions you have to get the material published. Be brief and courteous but do not add many excuses.

This situation reminds me of the adage: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The only other comment I have on this fine answer is that the O.P. might be able to spin that "not prioritizing" part in a slightly more positive way (i.e., "Your earlier lack of response made me assume that you weren't prioritizing the work" could be expressed as, "Your earlier lack of response made me assume that you had too much on your plate").

I think "advise" should be "advice".

Summary

Apologize to your co-author for not telling him about the
submission.
Try having a meeting/phone conference with the co-author (if possible including your supervisor) to solve the immediate problems.
Change your requests to the co-authors to an opt-in style.
In the future, send out "submitted paper to :-)" with the final version to all co-authors as last point on your submission routine.

he won't be able to make comments in a week

That just tells you that you won't have his comments within the week. But you need to know when you will have them.
Usually, I'd ask back when I can have the comments. Here, however, things look more difficult. So:

For one thing, I'd switch from email to phone (or a visit to his office). That eliminates the dead time between emailing several times and may allow you to extract a definitive answer for the time line.

The second thing I'd probably do would be trying to have a meeting (or a phone/video conference if the co-author is too far away). If he told you that he cannot do the comments this week, send a list of possible meeting times for next week. I'd (try to) include a number of "weird" times (early morning before the usual office routine sets in, evenings, possibly even at the weekend). This serves  two purposes: it makes absolutely clear how important the meeting is to you and it closes loopholes for him. Talk to your supervisor about this first, you'll probably want to have him at the meeting as well - so you need to find times that are OK with your supervisor as well (that's the "try to" above).
I'd probably email the list, ending with: if none of these is possible for you, please send me your preferred time for a meeting next week. I'd then do an immediate follow up-call "We need to talk about the paper. ... I just emailed you a number of possible times for a meeting". Ask him to tell you when the meeting would suit him.

For the future:

gave them a week to send me their comments

From the context I assume you wrote something like "please send me your comments within a week".
What about changing the question to an opt-in style: "please send me your comments asap. If I don't receive any within any within a week, I'll assume you're fine with the text as it is and move on with the submission." O course, you need to be extremely timely yourself if you do this and you need to give sensible deadlines.

Submission without the OK of all co-authors is misconduct. However, if I understood the described situation correctly, a manuscript that was approved by all co-authors was sent to a different journal. Again, an opt-in for changes would have been the proper way, but IMHO it is not as serious as general "submit without co-authors approval": after all the text was approved by the co-author, and the choice of the journal should not make any scientific difference.
Also, if I understood correclty, the co-author in question does not complain about the submission, but about the fact that he didn't know about it. That again is a valid complaint, so apologize.

It's inappropriate to submit a paper for publication before all authors agree that it is ready.  Your boss shouldn't have advised you to do this.
First, you should apologize profusely to your coauthor.  Make sure he knows about the deadline, then wait patiently until he is able to give his comments.  If the deadline gets close, you could ask the editor whether you can have more time.  If not, it may be necessary to withdraw your submission and resubmit later.
When you collaborate with coauthors, you have to accept that the final product needs to be something that everyone can agree on.  Yes, this may be inconvenient if one of them is slower, or has different standards than the others, and it can cause you to miss opportunities.  This is the price of collaboration. If it becomes a problem, you should talk to your coauthors and try to work out a solution that's agreeable to all, but you cannot act unilaterally.

"Profuse" apologies are not appropriate here. The co-author has scuttled three different attempts at submitting this paper because he is apparently too busy to respond in a timely manner. The author should apologize for the brusque manner and the short deadline, but a reminder that prior efforts to submit the paper have failed because of the co-author's inaction has to also be noted, too. (Polite frustration would be what I would aim for here.)

@aeismail: I absolutely agree that the coauthor's dilatoriness would be extremely frustrating, and under other circumstances I would agree with you that a sterner approach is appropriate.  However, I think at this point the OP has put herself in the wrong by submitting the paper without the permission of one of the authors (if I correctly understand that is what happened), and so she's not really in a position to scold or issue an ultimatum.

As I said, the tone needs to be of polite frustration—express regret for following the boss's instructions, but letting the co-author off the hook for his bad behavior will just prolong the cycle and encourage his obstructive ways. This has been going on for years, and something needs to change, or else this paper will never be published. (Part of me believes this is actually the co-author's goal.)

The only workable conclusion I can draw from this answer is to drop the coauthor and somehow rewrite/redo his work without him, or just accept that you will never publish the paper. Neither of these seem better than the route the author has taken. This answer might be correct if this was the first time, but it's not. It is the THIRD time.

@MirroredFate: Sometimes you just draw a blank. It is just one paper; if the collaboration does not work at all, it is possible to simply give up. Find other collaborators, find other problems to study, move on.

Apologise to your coauthor. Hope that he is not too upset. Ask him what to do next.

In the future, do not ever submit a paper for publication without discussing it with all coauthors.

I don't understand this whole 'apologize to the co-author' thing. That would have been fine if this had been the first time, but (assuming we trust the OP's version of events) it's not. The co-author has established a track record of harmful negligience and has abdicated their own responsibility to the paper. I don't see any need to cut them any more slack than a week's notice. Peter Jansson's advice seems the right one.

@Suresh: Being passive and unresponsive is just impolite. However, submitting a paper for publication without a coauthor's permission is a case of academic misconduct.

That's overstating it. the co-author was given a week to make changes, inspite of having stalled the paper twice before (again, assuming the facts as stated).


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What happens to summer salary funds if one has more than three months' support?
If someone has been successful enough with grant support that they somehow manage to accumulate more than three months' summer support per year, what happens to the remainder of the funds above the three-month threshold?

Sorry—I've edited the question to make my intent clearer.

Now I understand the question, but I don't understand how the situation would arise. Wouldn't the grant proposal have included a budget  listing the amount requested for summer salary? Did the funding agency actually award more money than the proposal requested, or is there some other reason why the recipient can't pay herself the full awarded amount?

@NateEldredge: suppose you apply for four grants, and in each one apply for one month's funding, and then by some miracle all four applications were successful. aeismail, is this what you had in mind?

@StephanKolassa: Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind.

Some people can buy off a course from their teaching duties in the non-summer months usually at the rate the department would have to pay to hire an adjunct to teach it. Some agencies will allow you to shift the salaries off yourself and onto a student so that maybe you go to 3 weeks from each of 4 grants rather 4 from each and use the saved money to fund some additional student time. This may or may not require permission from the funding agency, but it can usually be done without it as long as the PI isn't reduced to zero time.
With the NSF in the US, faculty aren't allowed to have more than 2 months of time funded across all NSF grants without explicit permission from NSF. Now, if you have 1 DoE grant covering 2 months and 1 NSF grant covering 2 months, they won't notice.
Some people also finagle this problem when their grants are staggered enough that there's only a short period (say one of three years) where this is an issue by pushing the money off to a future year and then exercising an option for a no-cost extension of one year to spend out the money.

This quite accurately reflects my experience: usually as long as the money is still funding personnel and key personnel are kept at a reasonable level, there is no objection from the funding agency, and often not even a requirement to notify.

Yeah, I can only speak from my NSF experience from an non-academic department as a full-time research professional, but I get the impression that there is a lot of flexibility for those who are winning grants. It would be good for @aeismail to discuss the question with various agency program officers/managers that are relevant to their field and to people in their own department for further clarification.

It probably depends on the rules of the grant (you didn't say which agency you're discussing), but generally one is able to just spend the money on something else, or leave it for a future year.

"but generally one is able to just spend the money on something else" – this also depends on the rules of the grant. You may have different pools of funding for different purposes (staff, equipment, travel, etc) that aren't allowed to mix without going through a huge amount of paperwork. Unspent grant money may also return to the funding agency after the project deadline. Maybe these restrictions are not so common in the USA?

@Moriarty There are restrictions on moving (National Science Foundation) grant money to a different purpose, but, as far as I know, money intended for the PI's salary can be moved to any other purpose without special permission.  (Moving money from another budget line to the PI's salary line would be much more difficult.)

@AndreasBlass: That's not true. It's generally allowed to move around salary from one person to another, but you can't move salary into the travel category without prior approval, for example.

@WolfgangBangerth That's interesting.  Maybe it depends on the particular NSF program.  I'm quite sure that I was allowed, without prior permission, to move money from my salary to travel and to student support (which would include not only the student's stipend but also tuition).  Of course, if you're talking about other people's salaries, then your description agrees with my experience; I couldn't move someone else's salary money to travel.  But moving my own salary never needed permission.

Maybe, or maybe it is "Locally Invented Bullshit (LIBS)" about what one can and cannot do. As a PI, you can certainly assign someone else's salary to yourself (e.g., postdoc salaries) and vice versa. I don't think that at my current university, I could move my own salary to travel.


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How long is it reasonable to wait for a graduate student or postdoc to obtain a visa?
For a recent position for which an offer has been made, a colleague of mine has been waiting for more than eight months for a visa to be issued. Is there any reasonable point at which it makes more sense to try to withdraw the offer (as the candidate has been unable to secure a visa, which would enable him to work) and look for a replacement? Or must the offer "stand" until a final visa decision has been made (even if there's no such date in sight, as is the case here)?

Problematic but are there special circumstances why a visa cannot be issued and are there known issues with visa issuing bodies? would it be possible to be a little more specific about countries, since I think the answer may vary on those grounds. Not that I mean it makes a difference from an ethical point.

Which country are you talking about?

@DmitrySavostyanov I am not sure which country matters here. From what I know, many country governments have their own regulations when issuing visa. You could encounter this problem in many countries (of course, not everywhere).

The student hails from what the US would consider a "sensitive" country. I don't want to go into more details to respect my colleague's privacy.

Isn't your university's International Office helping out? What do they say?

It's not the student's fault that USCIS and the State Dept behave like this towards watchlist countries. Escalate the matter immediately to your dean, university president and International Office and have them contact both USCIS, the State Dept, USCIS Director Leon Rodriguez and SecState Kerry and local Congressmen, Senators, esp. ones involved with oversight on immigration. Document the disruption and cost this delay has caused the research work. SecCommerce Penny Pritzker and SecLabor Thomas Perez might or might not be useful too.

^ and if your university authorities refuse to help, at least document they were asked to help and didn't.

Perhaps this is also a lesson in having future job offers contingent on getting the right paperwork within a specified time frame.  If it doesn't happen, one can move on and not be in limbo.

@Jon Custer and all of you: you completely misunderstand how the US visa process currently works, viz. "background checks", esp. applicants from watchlist countries (Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan etc.). Applicant can only apply after they have the offer, and due to background-check insanity there is no "specified timeframe". It's not uncommon for "background checks" to drag on for 12-18 months for reasons they're not obligated to tell you. This whole nonsense has been worse since 2003. It's an incentive to employers to avoid hiring people from those countries - through no fault of their own.

There is zero disclosure, near-zero accountability and zero recourse. There is no FOIA disclosure obligation due to the usual security-theater excuses. If some secret official causes an unnecessary secret 18-month delay in a routine H1B renewal, they don't get in trouble, let alone fired. This is why talented students and academics from those countries have been dropping the US in favor of China, Pakistan, Canada, Europe, the Middle East. The insanity has been going on since 2003 and has been well-documented. That's why this question is US-specific and specific to watchlist countries.

@smci: I said the country was considered by the US to be a sensitive country. I didn't say that the admissions process is taking place in the US. Please don't make me roll back further inaccurate edits.

Expecting the same treatment and determinism that apply to your visa application for your European skiing vacation is... insanity.

@aeismail: on this regard, US visa application processing is utterly different from Canada, Switzerland, NZ, etc. If you refuse to give details of your question, noone can answer you. Specifically: Are the causes of the processing delay outside applicant's control? secret? How actively has the employer intervened to rectify this?"

The most I can provide without violating confidentiality is that it's in the EU.

@smci - Having lived and worked in other countries, I actually do have an idea of the morass of visas.  However, how long can you hold a position for somebody who is not making progress towards getting the visa? 6 months? 1 year? 5 years?  Will the money be there when it is finally settled? There are two sides to an employment offer, and each has to try to protect themselves from an interminable indefinite wait.

From the comments, I assume that you are trying to fill a position in the US and so it is a US visa that's needed. For the sake of this question being clear in the future, please could you edit this in? (the question is perhaps not country-specific, but the answers given are...)

A related question: Obtaining a US J1 visa for someone who has worked in the Middle east - is it possible?. It was later migrated to Workplace SE. The link in the answer there says "less than six months" is broken.

Ok the question is about somewhere in the EU, not the US. Without knowing the specific country and the way they treat visa applicants from watchlist countries, we can't say much; all we can say is the delay is almost surely not the applicant's fault and outside their control, so the university should make a serious effort to pull strings with the relevant immigration, commerce and science authorities and politicians to get it resolved. As to whether the offer can be withdrawn due to circumstances outside their control, and when, we don't know either the the contract or the labor law.

Visa issues can be seriously problematic, especially given the high degree of arbitrariness that is often applied toward people coming from disfavored countries in the developing world.  For example, consider the apparently arbitrary visa denials faced by students coming to the US from Iran.
Given this I would recommend using the following criteria in making a decision:

Is the person being reasonably aggressive in acting to secure a visa?  If the student is attempting to secure a visa and being blocked/slowed by outside forces, time to secure the visa should not be held against them.  If the person is not bothering to act towards securing a visa, then it's the same as not bothering to physically move, and they can be let go with a clean conscience.
Is there a concrete time limit on the funds? If external requirements mean the money is on a short-term "use it or lose it" status, e.g., a 1-year externally funded project that includes a task for a postdoc, then the person may be disqualified through no fault of their own by the circumstances.  In this case, I think it is appropriate to put the deadline early enough to have a reasonable chance at hiring an alternate person to fill the post.  The deadline should be made clear to candidates as early as possible, however.

If the timeline can be flexed and the person is being reasonably aggressive in pursuing the visa, however, I think that it is morally important for the ideals of science to continue to extend the offer.  Science should be, to the extent possible, practiced openly for the general benefit of humanity, and it needs all of the diversity of strong intellectual contributors that it can obtain, no matter where they may originate, so long as they are honest and open contributors.  Giving a person time for visa issues to resolve is one small but important thing that an individual scientist can do to support that ideal.

In case (2), one should still contact the funding body to explain the situation and request a no-cost extension.

This varies wildly between countries, and with how much you're willing to pay.  A given consulate may expedite requests if paid an additional amount, but even then they are likely to include clauses about how exceptional cases may take an exceptionally long time no matter what.
You can find details on visa processing times and other visa information at the travel.state.gov site.  The processing time (time to mail out the acceptance/denial) says it takes about a day if it's the US consulate in Tel Aviv; the Baghdad consulate is currently closed; and the Kabul, Afghanistan consulate takes about 33 days to arrange an appointment and then about 4 days to process.
As for the intervening time between an interview and completion of processing, meaning the time to actually make the decision, the site says the following:

Administrative Processing
These estimates do not include time required for administrative processing, which may affect a small number of applications. If necessary, this additional processing is usually resolved within 60 days of application, though some cases may take longer. When administrative processing is required, the timing will vary based on individual circumstances of each case.
Administrative Processing Information
Some visa applications require further administrative processing, which takes additional time after the visa applicant’s interview by a Consular Officer. Applicants are advised of this requirement when they apply. Most administrative processing is resolved within 60 days of the visa interview. When administrative processing is required, the timing will vary based on individual circumstances of each case. Visa applicants are reminded to apply early for their visa, well in advance of the anticipated travel date.
Important Notice:  Before making inquiries about status of administrative processing, applicants or their representatives will need to wait at least 60 days from the date of interview or submission of supplemental documents, whichever is later.
About Visa Processing Wait Times – Nonimmigrant Visa Applicants
Information about nonimmigrant visa wait times for interviews and visa processing time frames are shown on this website, as well as on U.S. Embassy and Consulate websites worldwide. It should be noted that the “Wait Times for a Nonimmigrant Visa to be Processed” information by country does not include time required for administrative processing. Processing wait time also does not include the time required to return the passport to applicants, by either courier services or the local mail system.

You may be able to find additional information on expected timeframes on the website for the specific consulate.
Eight months sounds like a lot to me, but there's always the fine print that sometimes it takes a lot longer.
If you haven't already, I would request that the relevant candidate make inquiries with the consulate they applied for their visa at about the status of their application, and if there are any additional details or documents that they want.
As for withdrawing the offer and pursuing someone else, the conditions for this may be spelled out by whatever is providing the funds.  Worst case, consulting with your chair or your dean (who is, ultimately, responsible for approving all hires) would be appropriate.
People have lost positions due to visa problems before.  While I was doing my Ph.D. a hire from a "sensitive country" was made, but ultimately his visa was denied and the department had to scramble to find at least a lecturer to cover his teaching load.

"I would request that the relevant candidate make inquiries with the consulate they applied for their visa at about the status of their application, and if there are any additional details or documents that they want" Of course they've been doing this for months, and USCIS is giving them the runaround. That's why it needs to be escalated. By the university, not them. USCIS routinely f***s things up, and has near-zero accountability.

What you're missing here is that "background checks" and associated delays are not disclosed to the applicant. I had a coworker who (although he'd already been in the US for ~6 years on a H1B ) encountered unexplained delays with the background check on his H1B renewal, and had to sit in Bangladesh for 13 months, through no fault of his own, until the USCIS finally got their act together. Luckily, his employer did not fire him, and we all put in a good word for him because he was a useful guy and we needed him. But most employers would have fired him, or not held his job open.

@smci I hadn't specifically thought of that at the time, but that would certainly be one of the reasons that the timescale is vague and noncommittal.


text:
What are the standard practices for hyphenating/spelling scientific words
I would like to know what are standard practices when words are spelled differently across the literature and/or dictionaries (when these words can be found in dictionaries). A few examples of the kind of discrepancies I see:
  flow field vs flow-field vs flowfield
  sub-critical vs subcritical
  mass flow-rate vs mass-flow rate vs mass flowrate
  sub-grid vs subgrid

Is the most important thing for my own work (i.e., PhD thesis) to be consistent? For example, just make sure flow-field is always hyphenated?

Probably belongs on English Stack Exchange

@gerrit This is more an issue of usage within the domain.

This depends upon what's being written. For a university thesis, for instance, you should follow the guidelines of your particular institution: if they recommend a particular style manual, such as the Chicago Manual of Style or the [ACS Style Guide], then you should follow the recommendations contained therein. If you are publishing in another venue, follow the guidelines of the publisher, if they make those available.
Otherwise, you should follow a consistent set of guidelines. Note that this is not the same as saying "always use a hyphen" or "never use a hyphen." For instance, you would write

"the velocity of the flow field increased"

but

"the flow-field variables are . . ."

because "flow field" is a noun in the first example, and "flow-field" is an adjective in the second. There the hyphen links the connected words: "flow-field" and "variable" versus "flow" and "field variable."

Thanks for the explanations, I had never looked into that subtlety before (English is not my mother tongue). Unfortunately, my university does not seem to recommend any specific style guide, so I will just try to follow the general principles you described and also the answer to this question or this one.

Hyphenation can sometimes change the meaning. un-ionised vs union-ised.


text:
Take a few courses in another university
I'm a foreign (non-EU) student enrolled at the CS master's program in a European university.
I would like to take 2-3 courses that my university doesn't offer, and the first idea that came to mind was to take them at another university (preferably also European) in another country.
Obviously I want these courses to be counted in my diploma (assuming that they fit my program).
What you would do if you were in my place? Is there any "general" approach to my problem?
From what I've found there are a few ways:

Go as a free mover and enrol to the courses individually (seems that not all universities offer this option)
Go as an Erasmus student (not sure if I qualify being non-EU citizen)
Go by direct exchange program to the university that have bilateral agreement with my university (in my case, I'm not satisfied with offered transfer destinations, so it's not really an option)
Something else?

UPD:
I assume there are 2 general cases:

My university and the university I wish to go are "partner
universities", i.e. they have some sort of mutual agreement
They are not "partners universities"

It would greatly depend on your university accepting it. That may or may not be possible depending on the country you are in, the willingness and flexibility of the administration, the possible agreements with the other university, and the fitness to your program.

Yes, I understand that. I've updated the post and narrowed it a bit

"What would you do if you were in my place?" seems primarily opinion-based and/or too broad. All the options you have cited are possible in principle, you should contact the relevant people at your university to discuss your specific situation.

@fkraiem I think "What would you do?" is in this special case not very broad. However, I would rephrase (interpret?) it as "What options do I have?" (which is also close to his second question).

Go by direct exchange program to the university that have bilateral
  agreement with my university (in my case, I'm not satisfied with
  offered transfer destinations, so it's not really an option)

That would be the easiest way.

Go as an Erasmus student (not sure if I qualify being non-EU citizen)

If you are not qualified for Erasmus, you are certainly qualified for Erasmus Mundus. Just talk to the Erasmus coordinator at your university. If you are going with Erasmus they (should) have already taken care of the getting credits problem.
If all that does not work out, you could also organize it yourself. That is more work but sometimes worth it. Then you have to take care of most of the things yourself:

Funding: 3 possible sources come to mind: the country you want to go
to (for Germany that would be DAAD, but similar options also
exist in most EU countries, e.g. France or Belgium BAEF), the
country you are comming from, or your home country.)
Credit: Talk to the director of your program/ the dean of student
affairs / international relations person
Enrollment in the foreign university. You also have to apply there.

You should ask your dean of student affairs (or whatever this is called at your institution), if your university will accept these courses. Usually they should (if these courses fit in the curriculum) but this, of course, depends.


text:
Why is it that adjunct faculty positions pay so little?
There's been a series of articles recently [1,2,3,4,5] that basically decry the dismal working conditions of adjunct faculty.
I would like to ask: Why do these positions pay so little? Is it because there is a vast amount of oversupply of teachers? Is it because the Universities have such a diverse range of topics to cover that they cannot afford to hire full-time instructors to cover these courses? Is it because there is decreasing income and funding for academic institutions?
I am curious about what conditions led to this situation where adjunct professors are paid so little.

I would add to the question - how many hours do adjunct faculty work? Converting salaries to hourly rates, is the pay of an adjunct faculty comparable to that of full-time teaching staff?

While I think this is a great question in general, this is really at the edge of what's an acceptable question for this site. The question scope is far too broad, and the topic very likely to generate a lot of discussion with few concrete answers, if any.

What? You get paid by being an adjunct?! I never got paid. :(

The adjunct model seems to be predicated on an assumption that most adjunct faculty are presumed to be employed somewhere else. It's supposed to be a win-win: the institution gets a qualified expert with current, out-of-the-ivory-tower experience; the adjunct gets a chance to scratch a teaching itch, or to work with the university. All this happens for a modest compensation – which turns out to be a bargain for the university, and a little extra pocket money for the adjunct.
I didn't read all five of the articles you linked to in your question, but I did look through three of them. They seemed to be focusing on the depressing conditions for those who are trying to make a full-time living through a collection of part-time teaching assignments. I don't think that's the way the system was ever intended to operate.
Where I teach, I'm an adjunct, and I love the perks. I get to use the campus gym, and I get access to campus library resources. I have a passion for teaching, but I don't get to do much teaching at my full-time job. The extra money hasn't made me wealthy, but it's led to a few lifestyle improvements and splurges for my family. $9,000 isn't enough to live off of, but it goes a long way when you want to renovate a kitchen, take a vacation, or help pay for a wedding.
Moreover, where I teach (a state university in the U.S.), the adjunct rates are not set by the department. The going rate is the going rate, take it or leave it.
My brother once asked me how much my adjunct job paid per hour, if I factored in prep time and grading time. I told him that I never bothered to calculate that, but it didn't matter, because I enjoyed my duties too much to give it up. I'm fortunate in that I'm not doing this for the money, so even the relatively low pay is very much appreciated. I enjoy the challenges of teaching, the chance to experiment with new pedagogies, and the chance to make an impact on the future.
Let me put it this way: Teaching two nights a week for fifteen weeks? $3,000. Staying up until midnight grading final exams? Zero extra dollars. Getting an email from a student from two years ago, telling you about how she's using stuff from your class at her new job? Priceless.

"predicated on an assumption that most adjunct faculty are presumed to be employed somewhere else" +1

I think this is a great answer. Too many recent graduates think that the system that just credentialed them now owes them a guaranteed teaching position. +1 for people "trying to make a full-time living through a collection of part-time teaching assignments."

Great answer , I am in a similar situation where I work fulltime and am well compensated so I don't really need the money. But the idea of it still seem very wrong. I was recently offerer an adjunct position that pays 2500 per course. As an undergrad student I was payed 1500 per month.

I believe the answer is simply one of supply and demand. As you mentioned in your question, there is an oversupply of those willing to teach. As the old saying goes, those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. While this saying does not represent my feelings I did find it a quite typical American perception toward the teaching profession.
Years ago I taught as an adjunct in the US. The hourly rate (just for teaching hours, forget prep, marking, etc.) was so low that I could make literally four times as much working in 'the real world.' The math was quite easy to see. They needed someone with lower skills than I had and while I could do the job, so could most others.
As you can imagine, I didn't stay in that situation long. I stopped teaching at universities and focused on the private sector. Those whom I taught alongside felt like they were lucky to have their opportunities (I clearly felt differently).
If you scan websites for teachers (e.g., the Chronicle, etc.) you can see countless posts of teachers complaining that some other teacher took their job. Sometimes it is a full time teacher who wants extra money so they pick up adjuncting at another school. This constant oversupply naturally pushes rates down.
So, why would schools pay more than they need to? Out of the goodness of their hearts? In the US, sadly, teachers are not valued. If you look at Europe or Asia, (average) teachers actually make quite a nice living because they are valued for the dual-professionals that they are (subject matter and pedogogy).

Some quibble with the quip about "those who can, do, those who can't, teach", as this somewhat muddles the issue. E.g., low-level or remedial math is eminently do-able by essentially everyone. That's not the question. High-level mathematics is non-trivial to teach, but that's not what adjuncts do, with very few exceptions. Your other points about market for low-level math teaching are on the mark.

@paulgarrett My point about "those who can..." was not my personal opinion but rather the way Americans tend to view teaching as a profession. As a teacher myself (in Asia) I believe that it is a great challenge to be a dual-professional (subject matter expert and pedagogical expert) and it is the more (not less) qualified people who should be doing it.

Ah, ok. Perhaps that context, and your disavowal, could have been made more clearly up-top? ... Thx.

I don't know about your area. Recently in Taiwan, the situation is going the way America has been in the past. People call adjuncts "homeless teachers". First, it occurred in middle/high schools. Now, it spreads into universities. The only thing that is little different from America is that they are still viewed as one of the most respectable professionals.

I do find it surprising that there is such a supply of "qualified" teachers for many of these topics, but this may be also a product of a University administration's lack of concern for teaching quality.

I think the oversupply comes from researchers struggling to make a living teaching with a dangling carrot in front of them. They assume if they stay in academia there is always a chance they will find a tenured track job some day ... the reality is if you didn't get one within 5-10 years after graduating, it's most likely over for you, baring some major breakthrough, and major breakthroughs are rare while teaching 4 classes a year at different Universities.

In addition to other useful comments and answers: in my context, of mathematics... : yes, only a very small fraction of "adjunct" teaching is done because of lack of expertise of "regular faculty". Examples would often be "financial math" or "actuarial math". Far more typically, adjuncts teach very low level math. Now, on one hand, while the mathematics itself is very easy, reaching the audience is non-trivial. Full of pre-existing neuroses, etc. Although the typical adjunct teaching such things has very modest mathematical ability, that is more than sufficient, and, typically, such a person's ability to "connect" to "normal" kids who're "having trouble with math" is greater than that of talented mathematicians. (Tho' not always.)
True, "The Market" observes that there are many more people able to do this than the number of jobs, so the pay is depressed. It doesn't help that there is a mythology in (academic?) mathematics that teaching itself is something anyone can do, perhaps after one has lost the "zip" to "do research". All the more ridiculous that this mythology exists among people who's teaching is awful, at every level, their whole life. Luckily, their job description emphasizes "research".
But the mythology, seemingly confirmed by The Market, marginalizes (non-specialty) adjuncts. At my current institution, none of the (non-specialty) adjuncts has a Ph.D., which further reduces their status.
And then there is the current budget squeeze on universities... Everything has to be done more efficiently, etc. Departments' supply budgets are cannibalized to pay for office staff, etc. It is crazy. Night-school classes, once paid for through separate budget lines, have been "in-loaded", so have to be covered by departments often with the same budget as before (!) So, hardly the time to think about equity for people who're willing to "work cheap".
The AAUP has long argued for better treatment of "adjunct faculty", but harsher economic times are not fertile grounds...
For that matter, often the real competition for adjuncts is grad students as Teaching Assistants, who are "more expensive" if their tuition is included in the package. Thus, at best, adjuncts have some incentive to keep their pay below that of grad students + tuition. A crazy dynamic.
It is true that the volatility of enrollments gives management incentive to find a way to avoid liability... but in the dim past there was simply consistent excess capacity, not so much a population willing to absorb that volatility!
Nowadays, upper echelons of the university almost make it against-the-rules to cushion people (other than tenured faculty) against volatility...
Not a happy situation.

I wonder if this is why big R1 private universities pay their adjuncts a bit better. Grad students + tuition at these schools is expensive, >50k a year! Forget tuition, some grad students have stipends of 30k if they teach or are on a grant during the summer. I would not be surprised if the average adjunct makes less than the grad TA stipend per class. I've never seen the grad TA stipend less than $6,500 per semester. It is common to see adjuncts paid less than that. I think that would be a pretty good law to institute. It should be illegal to pay an adjunct less than the grad stipend!

The reason adjuncts are paid so little is that colleges and universities have become businesses and have adopted the neoclassical economic and neoliberal political positions that encourage the exploitation of workers. (Neoclassical economics and neoliberal policies are not mere labels but specific ideologies that emphasize markets, competition, and individual freedom while failing to regard any collective or communal responsibility. See Harvey, A Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism Oxford UP, 2007) If you want fulltime work in a college or university, go into administration. Administrations have ballooned in the last 30 years. (Can I be so radical to suggest that if the money that had gone into administration had gone into teaching, the problems with student success might not be as severe.  But then, do we really want everyone educated to their highest potential?)
Adjuncts, those who teach the most courses and hope for fulltime work, represent the roughly 25% of the workforce that work part time because full time work is no longer available.  In other words, being an adjunct merely reflects a pattern consistent with general employment market.  Further, U.S. Labor law encourages policies that make all employment at the will of the employer.  Fulltime faculty have annual or multi-year contracts.  Adjuncts are also contract employees, but only for the specific academic term.
The deeper reason for adjuncts and low adjunct compensation is that education has become a commodity and thus, like factory workers, education in merely inculcating content.  You can see how this flies in the face of reams of pedagogical research.  There is in the mind of a politician voting on an annual or bi-annual state budget little qualitative judgment about what is needed in a classroom.  In Virginia, where I live, the state legislature has failed in the past 20 years to raised college and university funding to meet the growth in enrollment.  Even the Democratic governor, elected in 2013, has made sharp cuts in education funding requiring similar cuts in course offerings and adjunct employment. The funding formula twenty years ago where I teach had the state paying 80% of the cost with the student paying 20%.  The formula is now the opposite: 20% state and 80% student.
Thus, adjuncts are low paid workers because what they do and who they are is devalued. We are going back to a place in American culture where education and the educated are suspect.  We collectively talk a good game about the value and importance of education, but we have lost a deeper sense of what it means to be educated.  I often mentally compare being an adjunct to being a medieval monastic or an 18th century journeyman who lack the cultural capital to establish their place in the world.

My wife is an adjunct teacher at a state university. She is paid $3,000 to teach a class that meets twice a week for 15 weeks in Earth Science. That's usually 30 classes divided into $3,000 = $100 per 1 hour 45 minute class. So... she makes about $57 an hour. How is that "getting paid very little?" Now... many people want to tell me that she has to grade homework and tests outside of those hours, answer emails etc. Well there are many professions that have to take their job home with them too. (Real Estate Brokers get emails and calls and have showings and open houses on weekends to name one. Or getting ahead in the corporate world for me has involved after hours extra work, usually more than she has to.) The problem isn't that adjunct teachers get paid so little, it is that they work so few hours.

I will vote this up, but I think it misses an important issue. For someone with a separate job, who teaches one class, $3,000 may be a fine salary. The issue is for those who try to cobble together a living doing nothing but teaching one-off classes. Teaching 6 classes a semester - a very hard load - would be only $18,000, which is $36,000 a year - with no health or retirement benefits.

yeah, it's hard for me to grok the question: "How is that 'getting paid very little?'" if very little because its more than 52.5 hours of class contact time.  it is class preparation and topic research, devising homework and exam questions, meeting with students, advising them on homework and course content, grading homework and exams.  i'll bet it comes to 100 hours and $30/hour comes out to be about equivalent to $60K/year full time for an Earth Science professional.  and no benefits like health insurance or retirement investment.

The model of why adjunct positions are needed is two Ideas:

real world, practitioner, industry background to augment academic background of PhD TT (or, just as often, master's degree, at the time this model was crafted) faculty;
sporadic need.

The facts though are that

applies to regularly needed faculty (instructor with legal practice teaches course in tort law)
applies to faculty who make use only of academic training but are used for overflow (freshman composition).

The bundling of these two ideas together is because they both mean dramatically reduced cost and commitment on the part of the institution, something that the tenure system makes all but impossible. That's how the adjunct position "augments" the value of the "regular" (at one time, majority) faculty.
"Win-win" was a subterfuge from the beginning. The "misuse" of adjunct positions was there from the beginning, willfully, but only now gets greater attention because of numbers.

In my experience, adjunct faculty are employed part-time, and thus cannot be paid at the same rate as full-time faculty.  Often a university department has a set allocation for the number of full-time faculty it can employ, based on predicted enrollment.  So, adjunct faculty pick up the slack, as needed, based on actual enrollment.

yes, but to reach a tenured faculties salary they would have to teach 10-40 classes a semester. That is how low they are paid!

Because they can.
If universities had difficulty finding adjuncts, they'd pay more, but they don't. Sadly, it's all about supply and demand.

Do you have any evidence supporting this purely economic explanation?

If universities had difficulty finding adjuncts, they'd pay more — [citation needed] Or they might abuse a different class of people (like grad students) more instead.

@eykanal, it's self-evident.

Adjuncts get paid little because there are enough adjuncts to go for a dime per dozen. The abuse that adjuncts are subjected to is borderline bizarre - in some places front-desk secretaries or assistants are treated with more importance than an adjunct instructor.

This does not add anything to the existing answers.

Supply and demand can't be ignored in answering this question. If there was not a sufficient number of persons willing to take these positions at such ridiculously low pay, then we would not see what we are seeing. That does not mean less willingness to take the job would mean higher paid adjuncts as it could also mean more full-timers and fewer adjunct. However, there are factors beyond pure supply and demand that also play a role. If it was pure supply and demand, and given that a large number of those teaching as adjunct want very much to become full-time tenure track teachers, then we would see tenure track positions also paying very little. All faculty would receive very low pay and the pay difference between tenure track and adjunct would not be so pronounced. Many adjunct want to be tenure track teachers and are therefor willing to endure the low pay for years, paying their "dues", in the hope that the next full-time position will be theirs. The pay differential itself bolsters this desire and pushes up the supply of adjuncts. Also, when the general public looks at professors, they look at full-timers and see someone who makes an OK living; adjuncts are most often not consider as part of the faculty and so get hidden away. Wittingly or not, adjuncts can be exploited without creating a "black mark" for the college. It is also true that adjunct tend to not be well represented by unions. In California, most are part of a union. It's usually the same union that represents the full-time faculty. But the leadership and majority membership of these unions are full-time faculty. Colleges have learned to suppress union efforts to improve adjunct pay by offering instead to improve full-time pay. Such offers, attractive to the majority of the union voters, tend to be supported by the union. So, with adequate teacher supply, a system has evolved that feeds on itself to push up full-time pay, and suppress adjunct pay.

When you say "If it was pure supply and demand, and given that a large number of those teaching as adjunct want very much to become full-time tenure track teachers, then we would see tenure track positions also paying very little" it seems like you are saying that the supply of (potential) TT faculty is high because adjuncts are willing to take TT faculty positions.  But they don't count toward supply because the university doesn't consider them to be qualified for those positions....

The way this excess of "supply" reduces the pay of TT faculty is when the university starts using adjuncts to (partially) substitute for TT faculty.  Of course this happens to some extent, but since the university does not consider them completely interchangeable, one shouldn't expect the pay of TT faculty to fall to that of adjuncts.  So the economic analysis in terms of supply and demand curves is still valid, although I agree that it's not the whole picture.

All this analysis isn't necessary though impressive. The answer is greed.
The pay disparity between the adjuncts and full-time faculty/administrators is so wide, it should embarrass them until you understand it HAS to be in order for them to get their high salaries. If the adjuncts get paid less than minimum wage for hours worked, they can give themselves higher salaries.
"It takes three of you to pay my salary" is an exact quote from a retiring
full-time community college faculty member who just came out and said this to us in the break room. His salary at retirement? $128,000.
It's pretty simple and comes down to just about what everything comes down to in this country---greed.

Perhaps you could adjust this to be a little more evidence-based and a bit less polemical?

Schools are not really focused on teaching, per se: universities want to be recognized for research. Research faculty do not want to teach undergrads, they want to work with doctoral students (& get more publications!) But a doctoral program is costly, it eats the revenues produced by undergrads.  Schools need big undergrad programs that can be run relatively cheaply to pay the big salaries of research faculty who really don't want to teach at all.   This system probably exists because school administrators essentially worked their way up the ranks via research, not by teaching & not with their management/administrative skills (administrators who are good managers and/or good motivators are a bonus..not essential to the position).  Once you understand that Universities are really about self-promotion of research and the status that comes from research publications (even if only within the academic community itself) you'll understand that the adjunct (low paid) faculty are absolutely essential.   Providing that someone will accept the low wages, there is no reason to pay more.

Research faculty do not want to teach undergrads — [citation needed]

Layzell, 1992, chronicle of higher ed

@JeffE: it's obviously not universally, invariably true, but it's hardly an original claim or unfamiliar sentiment.

Maybe computer science is weird, but the well-worn claim simply doesn't match my experience. Certainly some research faculty don't want to teach undergrads, but in my experience, most do.

Also, Layzell 1992 actually says "Many state legislators and policy makers believe that faculty members ... care little about undergraduate education". That doesn't make it true, either in 1992 or now.

Given sufficient teaching support and scantron exams, the enthusiasm for undergraduate teaching (in research universities) is probably higher than my initial comment. However, all research schools do not have TAs for grading and/or to work with the undergraduate students for hours outside of class. Moreover, scantron exams are not appropriate for courses that rely on developing critical thinking and the ability to express those thoughts in writing.   (I also think it is politically incorrect for any faculty member to state that undergraduate teaching is something to strive to minimize)


text:
Students who did poorly on the final exam
There are a handful of students in my course who came to class, did acceptably well on the midterm, and contributed to the (group) assignments, but did poorly on the final exam. The exam was a combination of multiple choice and long-answer "problem solving" questions. The class is heavily applied and has a strong emphasis on team project work but there was also a 50% exam component.
These students were surprised that they did so poorly in the course.
Is this an indication of a poor exam or poor instruction on my part? Is there something that I can do throughout my course to avoid this situation in the future?
Some articles (ex: http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-Telling-Students-to-Study/131622) advocate moving away from summative evaluations altogether for example.

Downvote.  This has no definitive answer and will just lead to discussion.

Disagreed. Discussion is a natural thing that will benefit us all.

@JFW: Regardless of its benefits in the abstract, this site is not the right context for extended discussion.

@James so to this day you're the only downvoter vs 25 upvoters?

Apart from the natural response of blaming someone else for one's shortcomings (as students often do), it is difficult to see where the problem may lie. I have studied under a summative system and always found my grades were very clear and understandable to me, particularly if I understood why answers were graded as they were. Now I usually did not question someone's judgement unless I felt it was absolutely necessary.
Now, many years later, I am teaching in a system where courses are set up with learning objectives. At first I found this quite strenuous since each objective must be underpinned by clear grading criteria for each of the grades A-E and F. Note that the major difference is that the learning objectives means you do not grade on a curve but in terms of how students fulfill the goals.
Working with goal oriented criteria demands a lot from the teacher in first setting up the appropriate goals and then to make sensible criteria for how to judge fulfilling them. At first it seems tempting to describe the fulfillment as good, better, much better and outstandingly good or something of that sort but the point is to pinpoint what characterizes the standard for the specific grade. Since many criteria make up a final grade one must also explain the ways in which the different criteria are weighted together but that is a only a minor problem reminiscent of the summative system.
What I have found in the end is that not only should the criteria give the students better ways to understand where they stand but they actually provide me with more fuel to explain why they got the result they did. I now have a thought-through list of arguments for a specific grade which is not relative to others but relating to a set of goals and how to fulfill them.
If this is manageable everywhere is beyond my horizon to speculate on but I must say that after battling with the system (after it was imposed on us) I have found that it actually works in my favour—and hopefully also the students'). It makes the grading transparent. It is also possible to stake out issues that may reduce grades such as spelling errors in essays or missing labels in graphs or whatever details may matter.
Now so far this concerned the setup of the course in terms of grading. It is of course necessary to also add structure to a class that forces students to work with the new knowledge during the course. This could of course be any activity that makes students read the literature and reflect on its content. As an undergraduate I was in a system where studying was mainly done during a few 24-hour days before the exam. Once it was passed most was forgotten. As a graduate student I was in a system with lots of homework and other activities and I found that I really did not have to study that hard for the exam. So activities may play a role to help students reflect on the material. Exactly what activities can and should be used depends on the subject but the main objective should be to have students digest and reflect on the material.
A final issue concerns examination. Does the examination reflect the type of knowledge in the course? This is a big question and one which needs thought. There are many alternative ways of examining apart from written exams and since I hate correcting exams I try to test other ways. Again, what works depends on the type of course but look into other ways of examining the course to see if that will help.
I do not know if this is helpful as an attempt to answer your question but the topic of learning outcomes is difficult and whereas the learning at university level really IS the student's responsibility, it is the learning activities and assessments we make that can help them reach results.

After much thought I've decided that this answer is the "correct" one as it covers two key points: the first is that it discusses how to speak with students who have doubts that their grade reflects their performance (i.e. speak to them with respect to the learning objectives, and indicate how the exam covers these objectives) as well as discussing the necessity of an exam. However, I found great value from the two other responses and the associated comments below as well.

I was just speaking with another instructor and received this advice:

Grades are non-negotiable unless there's a clerical mistake.
Transparency will help avoid issues at the end regarding mistakes. One way to easily post marks is to assign each student a unique number at the start of the course, which enables you to post marks as they come in.

I posted it as an answer to my own question because I believe it's helpful advice to know and something I wish I had considered more strongly at the beginning (especially regarding transparency).

Transparency is absolutely vital.  I used to post grades under student-supplied pseudonyms; more recently, I record grades on my university's course management system, which allows every student to look up their own grades. But another aspect of transparency (along the lines of Peter Jansson's answer) is to provide clear grading rubrics, ideally detailed enough for the student to verify their own grades.

On the other hand, I don't agree with "Grades are non-negotiable."  Everyone makes mistakes, including you.  Any student should be allowed to argue — with clear, compelling evidence, of course — that their grade does not reflect the posted rubric.  It's quite common in the classes I teach for students to submit non-standard solutions that are perfectly correct; sometimes those solutions get low grades just because the grader was tired.

Thank you for the advice, JeffE. Do instructors on this board post final exam solutions after the course is over so students can verify their performance?

Everywhere I've been as a student I had the right to at least look at my graded exam.  Once I've changed from a failing to a passing grade after discovering an error in the grading.

@Irwin: I always post solutions and rubrics for homework and midterms.  I usually don't do that for final exams, but I do allow students to see their final exams and request regrades.  Like gerrit, I've changed a student's failing grade to a passing grade after regrading their exam.

If you believe these students understood the material (based on other measures like projects), but they did badly on the exam, then it's a problem with the exam.
While I was in college, problems like this came up a couple of times, and the professors handled it with one of the following solutions:

Not having the exam, or removing the exam from final grades.
Grading students with and without the exam and giving them the higher grade.
Changing the grading scale for the exam (not necessarily on a curve).
Offering a chance to re-take the exam.

Since your class already has projects, the first two seem like good options.
Of course, this is all based on the assumption that you think they understand the material and just did badly on the exam. If they also did badly on the projects, then there's a good chance they're just trying to avoid responsibility.

But can you really do these things (other than the third one) with a final exam?  With a midterm, sure, but a final exam is a beast of a different nature.  Midterms may exist solely due to an instructor's whims, but final exams are often required by the university itself.  As such there tend to be much different rules on what you can do.  I'm not entirely sure that re-taking the exam is actually permissible unless they can be (legitimately) given an incomplete.  You also have to be careful on whether you're employing these to give preferential treatment to the minority of under performers.

@zibadawatimmy I guess it depends on your university. When I got my computer science degree a few years, I saw all of these options used, and not having an exam was fairly common in high-level classes (since projects were a better judge of students' understanding).


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Research on strategies for student recruitment
How do I find research on strategies for recruiting students into undergraduate programs?
I am an assistant professor at a small comprehensive 4-year public institution. My department (chemistry) has implemented a new strategic plan. One of our principle action items involves recruiting more high school students to attend our institution with the intention in majoring in chemistry.
I know that research is conducted, probably at the institution level, on what recruitment strategies are successful in various disciplines. However, since my research background is in chemistry, I am not familiar with the resources to find this research.
I will start with this question: What journals and/or databases should I be reading and using? I know about the Chronicle of Higher Eduction. Which others are good resources?
Update: I would like to find relatively recent reports, preferably in peer-reviewed literature or published by not-for-profits. Strategies that use social media would be great. There is a nice study linked in Dan C.'s answer, but it is from April 2004, meaning the data likely predates Facebook.

Computer science has an organization called SIGCSE that focuses primarily on undergrad education (and recruitment): they have an annual conference where people talk about all kinds of strategies to recruit and retain students. Does chemistry have something similar ?

The American Chemical Society has a Division of Chemical Education. However, it focuses on all levels and definitely more on education than recruitment. I don't need answers that are restricted to the field of chemistry. Best practices in other fields can be adapted.

This question is perfect for this SE new site: undergraduates if you find it useful you can follow it and help us in spreading the word about it.

There is a nice survey report online: "What Matters to Student Success", a report from the Government of Kentucky.
The work analyses the factors most crucial to student success in a college. It also discusses recruitment of students. For example,

Consumerism colors virtually all aspects of the college experience, with many colleges and universities “marketizing” their admissions approach to recruit the right “customers” — those who are best prepared for college and can pay their way (Fallows et al. 2003)

It does not exactly answer your question on strategies for selection, but gives some insight to what makes a successful student pool, for which admission process is one determinant.
I am sure the reference papers cited in the journal (and their citations) will assist you in an extensive literature survey.
For a relevant journal, I found this: Journal of College Admission. I do not know about the quality, but I was able to find this discussion (or thereabout) in a few papers herein.

The question was asking for resources, databases, and journals. Asking for strategies would be too localized to my institution. The report you link looks pretty good, and thank you for the link to the Journal of College Admission. It is published by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, so it looks like a good place to start.

Does this webpage have some of the information that you're looking for?
https://www.noellevitz.com/papers-research-higher-education/student-recruitment-and-financial-aid
(I recommend the "Factors to enroll" report; it asks for a login, but you can continue as a guest.)  Alternatively, you might also find the following pdf useful.
http://www.edgeip.com/media/edgeip/graphics/Research0404.pdf

One big question the report answers is for current college students, what percent cared about each of the following in choosing a school: cost, financial aid, academic reputation, size of school, recommendation from family or friends, location, campus appearance, and personalized attention prior to enrolling.  These factors are considered for various breakdowns of the student sample.

I will take a look at the items in your first link. I was hoping more for items published in peer-reviewed journals. Our recruiting budget is negligible, so I want to avoid paying for information collected by consultants.

The second link is a little dated. It's from April 2004, and while some of the general ideas seem good, all of the data was probably collected before Facebook existed (Launched Feb 4, 2004). I am on the lookout for something more recent. I will update my question to include a timeliness factor.

@BenNorris If you like the subject of the second link, but worry that it is dated, you may like another of the reports linked to on the first webpage.  Check out "The Communication Expectations of College Bound High School Students" (again you'll be asked for a login, but can proceed as a guest).  Interestingly, among 8 factors a college's facebook page ranked as least influential (by a wide margin) in whether students chose to apply to that college.

That is interesting. I wonder how influential Facebook is in finding schools. I'm not at one of the schools in my state. Making connections with potential students before they start narrowing their choices is important.


text:
Using BibTeX when submitting an article
Some journals have their own bibliography styles (bst) for BibTeX.

If a journal does not have its own bibliography style, am I supposed to include the content of the bbl-file into the tex-file I am sending? Or can I send the bib-file instead?

Many journals offer LaTeX-templates showing the style of the article. (This is almost always true if a journal recommends using its own document class.) In some case I have seen that this template contains BibTeX style (.bst file). But in other cases BibTeX was not used in the template, instead it was shown what the preferred formatting of references looks like.
I know that if I were the person who has to do the final typesetting from the sources submitted by an author to conform the style of the journal, I would prefer to have the BibTeX-file. (It is easier to simply change the formatting of references by changing the choice of BibTeX style than changing each separate entry manually.)

If a journal does not explicitly mention the recommended BibTeX style, what would be preferable way to submit the paper? Should I send both, TeX source and BibTeX file, so that editor can change the references using BibTeX style of their choice, or should I simply send the TeX-file, where I include also the bibliography generated by BibTeX. (And, if necessary, I modify it manually to be in the style required by the journal.)

(So far I have done the latter, but I am not sure whether it was the correct choice.)

I'd send the .tex and .bib file, which seems by far the most logical thing to do, to both you and me at least. On explicit request I'll grudgingly provide the .bbl file.
This should make things easier for them, as you correctly suggest. It is easy and fast to convert a .bib to a .bbl, but the other way round is impossible.
If the journal has a workflow that can't handle .bib files, that seems their problem and not mine. They are the professional publishers who charge for the "added value" of the professional typesetting and printing service, right?

Professional typesetter/layout editor (for a diamond-access journal) here, and .bib are definitely easier to work with. The only exception is if your .bib is of the unpruned, thousand entries long, using only @misc kind, in which case I have to completely redo the bibliography and starting from the .bbl is the fastest way. Happened six times last year...

@Luris Thanks for your feedback from the journals' side of things! In the unfortunate case when you have to start from the .bbl, do you ask the author for it, or do you generate it yourself starting from the messy .bib file?

I used to start from the .bbl (so that I don't have to redo entries that won't be used), and search the title/author/year in a database like MathSciNet or zbMATH. They generally give a BibTeX version of the reference that I simply copy-paste in the new .bib, but it's not always of good quality (zbMATH in the 1970-1980 range is particularly bad) nor cheap (MathSciNet cost us 10k€/year). But now that we stopped our subscription to MathSciNet, I'll probably ask the author for a clean .bib, especially since they're asked to do it when they submit their paper :)

Most journals do not have the resources (read time) to handle lots of auxiliary files in submissions. Unless the journal clearly specifies they want bibliographies provided as a .bib-file and has a fixed .bst style file, you should not provide LaTeX based manuscript that way. What you can do is to run your final version yourself and then manually include the resulting .bbl bibliography in your manuscript so that content and bibliography is included in the same file (see e.g., How can I insert by .bib file into my .tex file? on TeX.sx). The .bbl file contains all references in the common \bibitem[]{} format. Alternatively you can of course use the \bibitem form directly when you write the paper. If you do not have a bibliography style file for the specific journal, it would be simple to use one that yields a similar format and then manually correct the details that may differ in the .bbl file.

Most journals? Where does that come from? Given the typical subscription cost, it would really surprise me if they "do not have the resources to handle lots of auxiliary files".

Transforming a .bib into a \bibitem or a .bbl takes minutes in worst cases. The other way can take hours, especially if the typesetter don't have access to a good database like MathSciNet.

@BenoîtKloeckner I know the ACM SIG Proceedings format requires you to do the conversion yourself before .tex submission, at least, but they make it explicit. (Admittedly, that's for conference proceedings rather than a journal, but still.)


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Submission of survey paper and graduation thesis almost in same time
Location: South Korea. I am writing a survey paper and PhD graduation thesis and will submit them in 2020 July and 2020 June respectively. I am going to use Section II of my survey paper in my graduation thesis. If I submit the survey paper to the journal after I submit the graduation thesis, of course, the Section II I used will be shown as "plagiarized" in the journal`s system. In this case, will the journal accept the survey paper because the author of both works is the same or will I have to paraphrase Section II?
PS: Graduation thesis will be checked at https://www.copykiller.com/ (plagiarism detection service in Korea) and the result will be submitted to the University.

You are time travelling to submit these things?

@astronat I'd upvote your comment if I hadn't made the same mistake on the title slide for a talk I gave earlier this year.

This is ultimately up to the journal to decide - so you should contact them/consult their guidelines. I cannot imagine any scientific journal treating a thesis (PhD or MSc) as a prior publication, but this might be field dependent. In any case, you should explicitly write in your paper "This chapter is based on the author's PhD thesis to be defended (...)" or something to this effect, and I would think that this will be enough for the journal.

And since the timeline you give is a bit confusing, and since you mention what the university will do to check if the thesis is original - I'll comment that the same applies to the reverse situation: check the guidelines with your university/supervisors to confirm that (as long as it is cited correctly) it's OK for parts of the thesis to appear in journals before its submission. Again, I cannot imagine this to be a problem with a research you clearly did during your PhD (i.e it's not a 25 years old paper you scavenge for a thesis). But - ask the uni anyway.

lemon314, thank you very much for your brief answer!

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


text:
how could I mention sequence of figures in a research paper?
I want to say that:
Figure 1, 2, 3 and 4 illustrate ....
how could I mention them?
 is the above sentence correct?
 or I should say figure 1 to figure 4

If using LaTeX, use the Cleveref package. For example: figures \labelcref{fig:a,fig:b,fig:c} show that....

The exact format should be determined by the publication in which you publish your work (assuming this is what you do). You should be able to write Figures 1-4 or alternatively Figures 1 to 4 (although the former is what I am used to seeing). If the format uses abbreviated forms then Figs 1-4 would be the format. There is no need to repeat the word figure before both numbers in a sequence.


text:
How to defend Masters thesis?
I have to defend my thesis. I have implemented new technique but the results are same(as with the old technique). So how should I defend it? Is this necessary to get the better results or implementation of new technique matters in thesis?

I have implemented [a] new technique...does this mean that you are attempting your second defense of the same thesis?

No. Its my first and last defense.

This comes to mind... (don't do that)

It sounds as though your major contribution to expanding the extent of human knowledge is in showing how the new technique can be used to confirm results (X) which were obtained by the old technique. So when defending your thesis, you better be very sure that you show how this new technique enhances our understanding of X!!
If you are unsure how to best present this, talk to your advisor. In fact, even if you believe you know how best to present your contribution,  talk to your advisor! Take advantage of his/her experience and knowledge of the field to position yourself where your contribution can make the greatest possible impact.
You need to prove that you have expanded human knowledge, so focus on how this is better than the old technique, not on how you have gotten exactly the same results. Again, your advisor should best be able to show you how to do this.

What will be the advantage of using the new technique if it gives the same results as given by the old technique?

Muhammad, you've done the research and the implementation, so you are in a position to know! Is it faster? Easier? More cost efficient? Acknowledge the drawbacks, if any, but focus on the advantages.


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What is citation index?
What is citation index?
How are such indices calculated?
How can any journal become part of an index?
These are my questions about various indexes that are used at academic environments.

Have you read Citation index wiki page?

They are indexed if someone (like Web of Knowledge, in the wiki) considers them important enough to be indexed.

Is there any special formula to calculate them? How can I know which journals are listed in any indexes? How can I know reliability of one journal?

The formula is simple: the average number of cites their papers get after X time. To see the contents of an index, check the index. What defines reliability for you?

Reliability is power of any journal on academic world. For example which journal accepted as scientific and accept only strong articles?

authors: حمزة الترفوس