text:
How to best leverage resources offered at small undergraduate school to be a competitive applicant to top law or architecture + planning schools
I am currently a senior in high school, and will be attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York next year. Though Hamilton does not have 'core curriculum' requirements and is a small liberal arts college, I want to prepare myself so that I have a competitive advantage in applying to top graduate schools. Among the programs I might be interested in are Stanford or Harvard law school -- I'm particularly interested in their respective centers for internet and society.
On a different note, I might be interested in MIT school of architecture + planning. Obviously this early in my career my interests and goals will certainly change, but my question now is how to best leverage the resources offered at my small undergrad school to get into these sort of graduate programs. A general answer for a broad question is suitable.

A possibly useful post here.

A general answer is: study hard. I can't think of anything else.

I would think that you should find someone (or someones) at your particular small liberal arts college to ask about this question.  One could imagine trying to give an answer in general terms, but someone at Hamilton College can give a better answer to a student attending Hamilton College, right?  (One might even think that this is a good question to ask while you're trying to decide whether to attend a small liberal arts college.  But it's certainly not "too late" to ask.)

@PeteL.Clark exactly

As you mentioned, your career interests may change, and at the moment seem to be rather varied. However, there are a few things you can do to prepare for a graduate career.
1) Research the programs you are interested in (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) as well as similar programs that you would be willing to apply to. You will likely need to split this into two groups: architecture and law. Once you've identified approximately a 6-12 of each type of program, look at their admissions criteria, recommended coursework, and suggested extracurricular or work experience. Most graduate programs will indicate the grade point averages, standardized test scores, and subject matter experience they desire in applicants. Generate lists of the most frequently mentioned criteria.
2) Examine the offerings at Hamilton College in relation to those lists. If the law schools all request you take Intro to PolySci, be sure to work that, or an equivalent course, into your schedule. If the architecture schools all require you to submit a drawing sample, plan on taking at least one art class so that you can develop a portfolio (and possibly a letter from the professor). If certain specialty courses are unavailable at Hamilton, see if you are able to take the class at a nearby university, or complete it as an independent study.
3) As you narrow your career interests, use the summers (or possibly the school year) to engage in internships or jobs in those fields. Entry level work in a specific field and internships are often seen as markers that students are driven, organized, and mature. You may also consider joining undergraduate student organizations in these areas, such as the American Institute of Architecture Students (https://www.aias.org/website/article.asp?id=8), which can engage you in the field at a national level.
4) Regardless of where you apply, you will eventually need letters of recommendation. Be conscious of this while in school and develop strong relationships with your professors. Speak up in class, volunteer for projects, and seek their advice on your career.
I attended a small, private liberal arts college and used similar steps to prepare myself for possible graduate careers in biology and psychology, and found them to be effective. Although the school may not have been a tier 1 research institution or offer classes in every subject, the flexibility to complete independent projects and faculty support were invaluable.


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Are editorial management systems helpful to journal editors?
In this amusing blog post, Scott Aaronson explains why he is unwilling to deal with editorial management systems as a referee. They make you log in to some complicated system, using a password you've probably forgotten, all to provide your expertise for free. They often don't give you the sense that you are corresponding with an actual human.
And they can go hilariously wrong. In March of this year (2017) I was informed that I was supposed to have finished a referee report by May 15, 2017, that my report was therefore "-51 days late", and that I should therefore finish it as soon as possible.
From my perspective simple e-mail correspondence works better as a referee. (Many math journals make do without these systems.) However, I have never been a journal editor, and so I wonder if I am missing the point. Do editors genuinely find these systems to be more convenient for managing their workloads? Or alternatively is it publishers that prefer to use them, and thus ask the editors to go along with them?

There's the issue that an editorial management system preserves a "paper trail" of the correspondence that can be independently inspected by the editor-in-chief or publisher in case concerns arise.  That's not the case if the correspondence only exists in the handling editor's email box.

I've only reviewed for journals to which I've also submitted.  It's the same login.  Don't lose it.  Some reviewer preprints are too big for some email systems when you include figures, so directly emailing a PDF isn't 100% reliable either.

@ChrisH: To be fair, they make it easy to recover the login information if you lose it, so even in that case it's actually only a mild nuisance.

@Anonymous most probably do, you're right. O wouldn't assume that though

@ChrisH, I think you can assume password recovery.  Most invitations these days come with a link to recover password, or the site does.  Can there really be systems that don't allow you to reset your pasword?  I don't buy it.

By the way, all to provide your expertise for free is in fact for me the high-order bit.  In particular, I am troubled by the concept of reviewing, for free, for a for-profit journal.  But I think those run by nonprofit professional organizations deserve our support.  And in particular, unless you never submit to a journal, don't go telling me you refuse to review for them.  We each have to do our part.

@FredDouglis: In case it was not clear, I do not refuse review requests and am not advocating that anyone else do so.

I understand you were quoting someone else, but it's the same issue. It wasn't directed at you but at Aaronson and those who feel that way.

I think that one can infer two very useful guidelines from Aaronson's blog post (as well as the comments there): (1) Any automated e-mail that asks you to do something should have a direct link to a website where you can do it, without requiring any further authentication. (Some systems do this already.) (2) You should be able to reply to these automated e-mails, and trust that your reply will be read by a human. -- It sounds like this would also work perfectly on your end, although please tell me if I am mistaken. In any case, I am not in charge. :)

Any submission system I have seen was more or less pain in the ass. Both in author and in reviewer roles.

I served as editor-in-chief of an IEEE magazine for 4 years and have been an associate editor on various editorial boards for the past couple of decades.  For as long as I've been on edboards, I'd say they have used some flavor of online management system.  Pretty much everything I'm on now, not to mention everything I submit to, has coalesced on "manuscript central" from Scholar One.
I fully agree with @Nate Eldridge's comment about the "paper" trail.  That is definitely a plus, because I can look and see past correspondence -- was someone reminded at the right time, etc.  And to be honest I couldn't imagine managing this offline.
That being said, I find the system (and the others I've used) frequently painful.  Aside from the bug about being negative days late, my biggest problem is that the system tends not to remind anyone that a task is outstanding.  In particular, as an associate editor my job is to line up the actual reviewers.  In two cases recently, I discovered that I'd invited 3 people, and usually more (as people might decline), but in the end 2 from each of 2 papers had agreed to review and 1 in each case had never responded.  The system sent them a reminder or two, then from what I can tell, it neither reminded them nor told me it was time to find someone else!
There are other minor difficulties, such as finding reviewers within the system rather than creating duplicate accounts for them as new reviewers, that sort of thing.
Bottom line: they serve a purpose, but they can be improved.

Are they helpful to journal editors?
Absolutely.
Can they be improved, especially from the standpoint of reviewers?
Absolutely.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

From several discussions with editors and publishers and my own experience as an author, a referee, and a OA advocate, I can infer that:

editorial management systems can be useful to editorial boards, in particular some give the adequate warnings and reminders to editors, as Fred Douglis mentions he would have expected,
they can be nice to authors and referees (in particular, some of them don't need every referee to log in; some use ORCID identification to have you get a unique login/password for all systems who do the same),
most systems, especially those used by the largest, most expensive publishers are much less useful and much less nice to authors and referees than they could, probably because changing them is a huge problem when you have thousands of boards to embark in this move,
these systems are definitely liked by large publishers, who collect data through them; in particular they collect data about who refers what, and use it to provide editors with referee suggestions. I expect them to also use it to target advertisement, to map science and try guess in which area a new journal could be launched, and probably other purposes I don't imagine,
at least one board of a very important and quite large journal avoids the editorial management system provided by its large publisher precisely to avoid giving it all this data, so there are ways to avoid it.

From the point of the reviewer, it's easier to just use email, since the reviewer is usually only handling one review (at least for the journal in question). For the editor however, it doesn't work that way. The numbers quoted below are order of magnitude estimates.
Let's say you're handling ten papers, each of which needs two reviewers to proceed. Because there's a nontrivial chance an invited reviewer will decline or not respond to the invitation, you might have 3-4 reviewer invitations going for each of those submissions. That's 30-40 different invitations to monitor. In addition to that, you still have to monitor when reviews are due, if any are overdue, and whether or not to invite more reviewers for those. If you are the editor-in-chief, you have lots more papers to monitor as well as associate editors to keep track of. Without the editorial management system, keeping all these things up to date is very difficult.
There are also other administrative benefits as well: for example, to keep track of whether you can invite reviewer X or if another editor has already invited X for a different paper; to keep track of whether you've sent reviewer Y three invitations in the past 3 months and so might be taking up too much of Y's time; to keep statistics of turnaround time to quote on the journal's website; to answer author queries about when their manuscripts will be ready.
Having said all that, if you find using the editorial management system to be an unbelievable hassle, you can probably email the publisher and get them to upload your review for you. That's because based on personal experience, few reviewers request the publisher do this, so the desk editor can probably cope with this tiny bit of extra work. I found it tedious, but still, someone has to do it, and the reviewer's time is more valuable than mine. If you're doing this, be sure to mention any confidential comments you might have, and indicate whether you want to see the manuscript again if the decision is revise.
PS: Please don't everyone start emailing the publisher.

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Can UK universities require students to be vaccinated?
Are UK universities allowed to require their students to have the Covid-vaccination prior to attending physical teaching? Have any announced the intention to do so for the next term? Would an allowance for "religious or philosophical" objections need to be made?

Some students may not have had the chance to get vaccinated by the time term starts in September/October. I'm 26 and will have only had my 2nd dose by mid-August. 18 year olds are at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to appointment booking.

Note that the answer to this question is highly time dependent. A valid answer in early July 2021 may be obsolete a few week/months later. Look to current regulations if you need to know.

@Buffy is spot on - there's currently talk of not the universities requiring it but the government, for in-person teaching (in England at least -  which government is responsible for what has been the cause of a lot of confusion recently).  That's supposed to be backed up by an increase in availability of jabs for the appropriate age groups so it's meant to be possible, perhaps with a grace period

I had the chance to raise the question of making Covid vaccination mandatory for our students at a faculty meeting. The answer was our university leadership, union representatives and the Welsh government had discussed the issue, and arrived at the conclusion that it is not possible for our (Welsh) university to enforce a vaccination requirement on our students. So it seems we need to rely on our students doing the right thing on their own volition.
Update (July 29th): Raab is making some noises about maybe demanding students to be vaccinated in September (when there would be enough time for students to actually get both jabs). It is unclear whether he is taking about England or the UK. BBC
Update (July 31st): Right now, the government is saying they don't have any plans in this direction. Guardian

Is the word 'enforce' the key point here? My naive understanding is that a private organisation could indeed introduce a rule that 'only vaccinated individuals are allowed to set foot on our premises' (provided there were sufficient exemptions so as not to discriminate against protected characteristics), but asking people to prove this by disclosing their medical records is the legally-problematic part - making the rule essentially pointless.

Disclosing full medical records wouldn't be necessary as there is already a system for disclosing CoVID vaccination status only in the UK. Universities already require proof of e.g. HepB to work in labs with primary human material.

@avid Most universities in the UK are not really private organisations. Their status is peculiar and it's not obvious whether they are really public either.

I cannot answer for UK universities, but the planning for my university in Germany is that it will require either documentation of a vaccination, or of having recovered from COVID, or of having a negative test within the last x hours. Most of the entrances are closed, and all students can only enter the buildings by going past a person who checks their paperwork.
Students with religious or philosophical objections can thus participate in physical teaching by getting tested every day they want to attend university. Right now, the tests are free, but not offered by the university. So there is no financial hurdle for those students, but there is a real hurdle in terms of time and organization.

Thanks for sharing this, it's interesting to hear how this is handled in Germany. However, for my question here I am really after the UK case specifically. Maybe we can have another question for Germany?

No vaccination requirement has been announced by any UK university to date that I am aware of. It is not planned at the UK university where I work. I think this is very unlikely to happen, as it raises a range of legal and privacy issues. It would also be very controversial, as the topic of COVID-status certification generally has been here.
The UK government's current position on Covid-status certification is (as of 6 July 2021):

the Government will not mandate the use of COVID-status certification
as a condition of entry for visitors to any setting at the present
time

However, they do not rule it out for the future and they do not plan to prevent any business/organisation from imposing their own rules (subject to existing privacy/discrimination laws). Existing laws would most likely necessitate exceptions for medical, religious, and likely other reasons as discussed in this article.
As a note, most universities in the UK strongly encourage regular Covid testing (twice weekly at my institution) of their students and staff who are attending campus. However, the universities do not know if this is actually done by a particular individual or what their test results are. They also have no way of checking covid vaccine status as this is considered private health information.
Like anything Covid related this could change, but as it stands now a requirement for Covid vaccination for students to attend a UK university is technically legal, however it appears very unlikely. Of course it would be prudent to confirm this with your institution.
Update as of 26 July 2021:  the UK Government has floated the idea of requiring vaccination for attendance at lectures. I still think this is unlikely to happen due to a variety of legal, logistical, and practical reasons but it seems more likely then it did when I first wrote this post.

This is not answering my primary question, whether (individual) universities have the option of introducing vaccination requirements. The linked BBC article seems to indicate that any such requirement would need medical excemptions.

@Arno, as I said in my response. Any organisation can impose their own rules subject to existing legislation. So theoretically a university could require vaccination, however I believe it is unlikely and I have not heard of any plans to do so.

I've reread your answer thrice now, and I'm pretty sure that you do not address the question of whether universities have the power to do so. You hint that they might be completely unable to enforce it, because they might not be allowed to demand proof of vaccination. If that is the case, then this sentence should be expanded to form the core of the answer.

Second last paragraph " they do not plan to prevent any business/organisation from imposing their own rules". I have also clarified in the last paragraph that it would be technically legal for a university to impose such a restriction (but very unlikely in my opinion).

Ditto for the meningitis vaccine. Everyone was encouraged to get it before attending university (I think you usually get it as a teenager). But in my experience it was not enforced or checked so I find it unlikely they would do the same for Covid @Arno.

@DanielHatton That's weird given that tetanus is not a contagious disease.

@DanielHatton Ah, yes, that sounds a reasonable concern, even though such a requirement seems quite uncommon.

Its not that uncommon. Every university I've worked in requires a HepB jab before you can work with primary human cell lines.

@IanSudbery the vast majority of university students don't work with primary human cell lines.

@fqq No, but my point is that they do require people to have vaccinations in some circustances, which suggests they have that power.

The Council of French Rectors said it supports the full reopening of universities only after widespread vaccination of staff and students. But in general, European universities are more loyal to vaccine refusals.
Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, Germany do not oblige employees and students to get vaccinated, although they actively promote it. The Council of Rectors of Italian Universities said: University staff are vaccinated as part of a national campaign to vaccinate certain people, but universities have not yet planned to require it from teachers and students of the profession. But the council of Spanish rectors even asked the staff: to consider universities in the priority group for vaccination.
In many European universities, vaccination is not required for continuing education on campus, and epidemiological control and prevention are provided through access control, dilution of streams, regular, and so on.

The question specifies UK.

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Illness affected performance - but not that much?
In my second semester of sophomore year, I was moderately sick for most of the semester. It was not life-threatening, but I often could not attend class because I didn't feel well. As a result, I was behind and had to work a lot to keep up. My research output was significantly lowered during this period also, for the same reasons.
However, it's not like my semester was bad - my GPA was lower than usual, but from a 4.0 to a 3.9. My research was lessened, but I still did some productive work. It's just that it turned a perhaps stellar semester (at least, a semester in line with the rest) to a perhaps good one. One slightly less great semester might not matter much for some grad schools, but I'm aiming for top ones as well. Is this something I could ask my advisors to note in their letters?

my GPA was lower than usual, but from a 4.0 to a 3.9 — Oh, stop whining.

^This is exactly the kind of thing that I felt people would think. My sickness during that semester might seem irrelevant since my academic performance didn't seem to drop much, but the research output that I lost in that semester might truly be the difference between an acceptance and rejection since I am not a 'superstar' candidate, just a good one. I actually feel that I should have just failed my classes instead of killing myself to keep up since at least they would realize the magnitude of my suffering.

@JeffE Looking at this again, your comment really doesn't look good. Would you say "Oh, stop whining" to a cancer survivor? Not that I'm comparing my situation to cancer but unless you have ever been in a situation where you dreaded just waking up the next day because you knew you would feel like absolute s---, and you had lost all hope that you would ever get better, I don't think you have the right to make such a callous statement. And even if you have been in such a situation, dismissing others' suffering because it wasn't as bad as your own is not a very empathetic or logical thing to do.

I "lurk" on this board a lot and you are usually one of my favorite posters as you often have well-thought-out and sympathetic responses. I hope that your statement was just a misunderstanding or a moment of thoughtlessness rather than a trivialization of disability or an expression of animosity towards me (although that last is pretty unlikely since you don't know me). If not, however, I will have to seriously reevaluate my opinion of you (not that my opinion would matter as, again, you don't know me).

I do NOT mean "Stop whining about your illness", and I sincerely apologize for my carelessness in suggesting that.  I meant "Stop whining about the impact on your GPA."  Your illness may have done significant and permanent damage to other aspects of your life, but your academic performance was not one of them.  Even in the context of considering top PhD programs, a 3.9 GPA is still absolutely stellar.

Thanks. I know a 3.9 is nothing to worry about, in hindsight it was probably irrelevant to even mention. The point is, my research application is not great - I've done quite a bit, but knowing how competitive top (CS) graduate schools are, I'm concerned that they might reject me - even though it's possible I am so close to the borderline that I would have accomplished enough when healthy to have gotten in.

I'd leave it out. This certainly doesn't sound like a bad semester that needs to be explained away. Being able to do well under adverse health conditions isn't really something you want to use as a selling point. Stick to what you did, not what you think you could have done.
If you mention it, there's a risk that someone on the admission committee will wonder if your illness is going to come back, maybe worse this time, and affect your work in grad school. They should not consider that, but people are human, so they might.
Congratulations, and glad you're feeling better.

I have no authority or a base to form an opinion on the matter... but... really ? Intuitively, I would say that being able to successfully overcome a health condition and still produce good work (not just a health condition, any kind of obstacle), would be a positive thing? While widely elaborating on that (in either the cover letter or in supervisors recommendation) sounds a bit over-the-top, if I was guessing I'd say that mentioning a "successful year in spite of challenging personal circumstances" would be a positive thing?

Thanks, but penelope's comment also seems logical. Also, if they did reject me for such a risk (even though my illness isn't the type to recur once it's cured), wouldn't that just be straight up discrimination?

@kavin it's better to be the "consistent, strong candidate" than the "candidate who has overcome adversity."  You want to be perceived as the former (if you have the record to support this, which you apparently do), and any mention of your illness just distracts from this message.

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Getting into gradschool from a "real job"
I'm interested in going to grad-school but I have been working at a "real job" as a software engineer for the past few years (since I graduated with a BS in Math in 2010).  What are the best ways to to break back into the academic world?  How can I spin my work experience in a positive way to departments?
Ideally I would be getting a phd to study Mathy CS, or CSy Math.

You may need to specify location.

America would be best, but there are interesting looking programs in Europe as well.

For math, at least: the Graduate Record Exam is essential.  It will show (for example) that you do not need lots of remediation for what you have forgotten.

We see a number of students who apply to graduate school after an undergraduate degree in math/cs followed by some years spent working at a not-any-realler-than-faculty job. In short, what admissions committees would like to know is:

what have you been doing since then, and in what way does it influence your current interests and desire for grad school
have you continued working on projects on the side ? (not a problem if not, but good if yes)

In other words, I don't view work experience as a negative in CS. In fact it's a bit of a positive because the student then usually knows what they want to do and is a lot more focused about it. There's a lot more maturity as well.

I have seen people coming from top companies like Google into PhD and still they struggle a lot during their PhD. So, when it comes to research, the work experience is not everything. You can see it from a couple of different perspective.

Given that your "real job" is relevant to your future program, a good practitioner style CV would be beneficial.
Also, if your "real job" is truly cutting edge AND you maintain good relationship with your past organizations AND you can demonstrate that you can use your industry experience to involve organizations in a way that it will add empirical component to your  research, THEN it is quite an attractive offer for universities. Too good to refuse.
However, if your "real job" is yet-another software engineering job and distant to your future program, then your industry experience is somewhat irrelevant.

On top of it all, for US universities a low academic scores such as GRE could be deal breaker with or without experience.


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Unsolicited request for a scientific collaboration
I have a research problem in an area of Mathematics. There is mathematician whose domain of expertise is very near to the subject of my problem.
I read frequently his works, he probably doesn't know me. But it is possible that he has seen some of my works. He is a senior mathematician. I am junior.
Anyway we don't know each other and because of geographical and other considerations, I don't think we have the occasion to meet each other in a conference or workshop in new future. I am scientifically isolated in my country as nobody works in my area, finding funds for participating in conferences and workshops is also very difficult. So the only possibility of a collaboration that I envisage is doing by email.
I am very optimistic that my problem interests him and if we collaborate, the result would be very fruitful. I have had some experiences to do scientific collaboration with some people that I knew by email. But the story with this mathematician is different because we don't know each other personally.
I feel that sending an email saying that  my name is X and I am interested in the question Y, I would be glad if you are interested to work on this problem  is not perhaps the best approach.
What is the best strategy to maximize the chance of starting a scientific collaboration with him?  How I can formulate my request of doing a scientific collaboration with him? Is it wise to 'reveal' my problem while I don't know if there is a chance of collaboration?

Be specific and brief, with a clear action item.

bad:

My name is X and I'm interested in Y, and I'm hoping you'd be interested in working with me.

slightly better:

My name is X, and I'm interested in Y. I read your recent papers on Foo1, foo2, and foo3, and I was wondering whether you thought Theorem eleventy-seven in your paper on foo2 could apply to the problem of Y''.

much better:

My name is X, and I'm interested in Y. I read your recent papers on Foo1, foo2, and foo3. I had an idea about how to apply theorem eleventy-seven in your foo2 paper to Y'', by inserting the well known lemma Bar1, and Bar2. I was wondering if you were aware of approaches that have tried this? I looked at refs 1–157 and didn't see anything relevant.
I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested.

Again, your mileage may vary. There are cultural variations, personal variations and so on. But I’ve had success with emails of this kind.

I fully support @Suresh's answer, and only want to add one thing: if you have the possibility to invite your senior colleague for a few days, maybe ask him/her to give a talk, then that often serves as a good context for discussing topics of common interest - and allows both of you to find out informally whether working together might work out.

Are you sure that I don't need to introduce my affiliates or position?

Could I suggest:

My name is X and I am a\the junior mathematician at the University
  of Somewhere.  My credentials available at
  www.some-academic-site.ac.xz.  I am researching numbers and have some of your papers, foo, bar and baz.
I think that your work on special numbers would greatly helpful and
  hoped you would be willing to correspond with my on how this relates
  to my own work on some different numbers.  I have enclosed a brief
  summary of my work, and how it relates to your own.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Yours Faithfully
my name

Unsolicited mail needs to be interesting to the participant, and it's integrity verifiable, hence the inclusion of your academic credentials, work you have done and proof that it does indeed correlate\support etc your own work.  (You also show that you have actually done work, and this isn't some attempt to get someone else to do work for you)

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How should I adress (grammatically) a referee whose gender is unknown?
I'm responding to an anonymous referee who made comments and suggestions on an article I wrote.
Since I don't know the gender, I thought of two possibilities:

We agree with the referee on its comment...
We agree with the referee on their comment...

Is either of these the proper way to refer to the referee? Or should I just write "he/she" "his/her" on every occasion?

Number 1 is just wrong in English (American for sure, British also in my experience). Number 2 is fine. A further alternative would be 'We agree with comment #2, and have...". If you have to respond to a comment, it really doesn't matter which referee made it.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about English grammar and usage. Possibly on topic on the English Language Learners website.

From the grammar tag: Questions about proper use of grammar specific to academic writing.

I can count three questions on Meta regarding gender, made in the last two weeks: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3484/gendered-pronoun-usage, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3499/should-an-individual-users-request-for-gender-neutral-language-be-honored, http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3280/how-do-we-feel-about-gender-specific-terms. I find it hard to understand why the users who closed this question believed it to be non related to Academia.

This conversation has been moved to chat. Those voting to close please do so, those voting to reopen please do so. Please take all other comments to either chat or [meta].

The use of singular they, as in your second option,

We agree with the referee on their comment...

is perfectly appropriate. You can also use some other alternatives, most notably he/she, as in e.g.

We agree with the referee on his/her comment...

I would discourage you from using some of the more niche alternatives, such as Spivak pronouns, in correspondence that's this formal.
On the other hand, your first alternative (We agree with the referee on its comment...) should not be used under any circumstances. It is considered extremely rude by native English speakers, since it reduces the referee to the level of an inanimate thing. If you use it you can hope, at best, to come off as someone with a very poor command of the English language.

Thanks EP. I had my reservations about using it as an example, but it was the only alternative to they I could think of.

"Agreeing with the referee on his/her/their comment" is exactly the same as "Agreeing with the referee's comment", which completely avoids the gender issue.

@DavidRicherby That's already addressed in other answers (and please keep in mind this comment by the OP). Or must every SE answer indicate every possible variant that can be used?

+1 Thankfully the absurd restriction on singular they put about by grammar mavens has more or less lost its influence and so it is now unlikely that anyone will object to this construct.

@JackAidley  - - yes, it's much more important to avoid a situation where one is may incorrectly believe you are rudely making assumptions about a person's gender than making people work hard to figure out what exactly you're talking about.

Why not

We agree with the referee's comment.

(I gathered my answer from the question "Agree on" vs. "agree with" vs. "agree to" on English SE)

It looks like I beat Scott by 14 seconds.

As I mentioned in one of my comments on the original question, I can probably avoid the use of any pronoun in this particular example. I am not sure I can avoid using it throughout the entire letter, hence why I need an alternative.

This is the most correct answer.  One can virtually always write a scholarly paper (or a review of such or a response to the review) without the use of personal pronouns outside of direct quotations.  An author can guide the reader through a convoluted argument or proof without referring to the reader as "you" or the author as "me" or "I" (however, many texts used the personal pronoun "we" in such discussions to mean the thinking that the author and the reader are doing together, the prohibition of this usage appears to now be an anachronism).

@Gabriel, actually in the posited situation, this happens to be the clearest use of language.  I understand your point, but perhaps a less tortuous example would be helpful.

I agree that in this particular example this might be the best solution. As I said though, I am making a more general question, not just about this particular example.

In "unknown" gender situations, I use constructions like s/he and his/her.

How about "We agree with the referee's comment."  In general, less words are just better for conveying a message.  If you must pick a genderless pronoun, "he" does not necessarily convey gender, and is perfectly acceptable in most cases.  If you feel you must, the first use you could use s\he, his\her, or the like, to prove that you make no assumptions about the gender of the referee, and then use he or him for the rest, because it just sounds better.

I will not downvote this answer, since there is nothing wrong with it (and downvotes are to be used for BAD answers, not answers one disagrees with). But I disagree that using "he" is the best option.

I agree with Tom about the use of "he". I believe it does convey gender, and should not be used as a gender-neutral alternative.

Similar to this answer: I have recently seen "she" as the gender-neutral pronoun in academic contexts more and more often, especially in math contexts (your field is not mentioned but this is the one I have experience with).

I'll pile on - "he" is only construed as a gender-neutral pronoun by males. For people that do care about gender neutrality, this shouldn't be used. Downvoting since the only correct part of this post is already available elsewhere without the wrong bits.

I'll chime in. There is a long history of treating both 'he', 'him', 'man', 'her', and 'she' as gender neutral. Examples are wide. The poem "No Man is an Island" is not saying that women are isolationists. Another example is 'feminists'; they advocate for men's rights too. I've read technical reference books referring to the prospective reader as 'her'.

@RichardRast, so would "she" be more acceptable than "he"?  Either seems wrong to me.  "They" is horrible.  There may be a move on to promote it as a gender neutral singular, but it's simply confusing.  It's not always contextually clear that you're talking about one person.  If I need to pick a way to err, I'll go with the way more people are likely to understand what I'm trying to say.  As to continued he\she after the first use, its just awkward.  Alternating between he and she just makes it unclear whether you're referring to the same person or different people.

@E.P. -- to so positively assert that "he" can't be properly used as gender-neutral disagrees with the wikipedia post that you labeled "alternatives" in your own answer.

@ScottSeidman I wouldn't recommend either (I would use "they" which you dislike). It was purely a comment on the answer, that "she" is also used for a similar purpose. Alternating is definitely confusing.


text:
Learning new topic: read literature from oldest to newest or the other way around?
I need to start learning about a new research topic, I've been collecting articles for about a year now. I collected +400 articles, spanning a range of ~40 years.
I haven't had the time to read them since I was working on finishing a few papers, I'm finished now so I want to get on it.
The question is: should I start from oldest to newest, or from newest to oldest?
I can see some pros and cons in both approaches:
Oldest to newest:

Pro: it feels right, since that is the way the research actually happened.
Con: It will take me a lot of time to become acquainted with the latest developments in the field, and I am not able to start working on it until I do.

Newest to oldest:

Pro: I will quickly develop some knowledge (not in depth though) into the actual state of the field. This allows me to start working, at least on minor things.
Pro: It will alert me of wrong paths taken previously in the field, so when I find them in the older literature I'll be already aware.
Con: It will be considerably more difficult to follow, specially at first, since I'll be diving into the analysis of the latest developments of an unknown field.
Con: I'll necessarily be jumping back to older literature anyway, risking going down the rabbit hole of research.

Are any of the papers in your collection reviews? Regardless of whether you read forward or back through time, beginning with reviews should help provide a wider picture which may make it easier to work through the rest of the collection

Possibly, yes. But after reading a review (or more) I'm still wondering if I should start from the top or the bottom...

This question presents a false dichotomy; why assume that chronological order (or reverse chronological order) is the best way to go through these papers?

I'm not married to either way, those were just the two logical methods that ocurred to me. If you have a better method to go through a large library of an unknown field, please share it.

I would suggest in the future to not do this again. You will likely find that many of those 400 articles were not worth collecting, which you would have determined rapidly if you had been reading things as you got them. Coming up to speed takes time, not just to read, but also for your brain to wrap itself around the topic.

Are there any textbooks covering the field?

My guess is that you collected too many papers and you will likely not read whatever you leave for last.

Neither.
First, identify the "important" subset of your 400+ papers and read those. Second, try to identify the "good" subset of the papers and read those. Then, (if at all) read the other papers; perhaps you are doing all this with the intention of writing a review, in which case it makes sense to read oldest-to-newest to get a sense of the history.
The most obvious metrics which you can subsitute for "importance" are number of citations (these will likely include review articles) and the ranking (pick one) of the journal of publication. Note that "important" does not mean "good", "honest", "well-written", "reproducible", etc.
For a second sweep, focus more on what you actually do consider to be "good", based on authors and journals that you have found to be of consistent quality.

The issues I see with this answer are the "importance" metrics. The number of citations will be biased towards the older articles, and the ranking of the journal is of no use in my field (Astronomy) since there are 4-5 main journals which concentrate pretty much all research, and all of them have very similar IFs.

I very much agree that what I've suggested for "importance" are flawed metrics, but barring access to an expert in the field who can guide you, I can't think of better suggestions.  Maybe you can weight your "number of citations" rating to take age into account?

I completely agree with this answer, and would suggest using reviews to determine importance. It would seem to me that if you read a review of a literature and don't finish with a sense of what were the key papers in that literature then the author has done something wrong.

I agree, except for the part about finishing the article before clearing up the parts you don't understand.  Never go on past a word you don't understand thinking, "Well, I'll catch that later."  If there is a part of the article you don't understand, find out about it right then.  You might look ahead in the text to see if it's explained, or you might check other sources, but the action of clarifying what you are reading or getting terms defined is separate from the action of simply reading or studying (even if it involves looking ahead in the current text for a definition.)

If the new reviews are too complex you might need to start with some older ones, but I would really suggest starting from the newest publications. People already spent years and years collecting all the old research, sorting through the mess and writing "concise" reviews about it. There's no need to do the reading to repeat that.
You would need to follow your nose / go down the rabbit hole sometimes, but at least you'd know there's a hole. If you'd start from general/random papers 30-40 years old you'd just read dirt most of the time, research that never went anywhere, or that turned out to be wrong.
Remember that you're studying some scientific field, not the history of the field.

Neither direction works well on its own. I have never profited from a literature review to learn a topic except in this way:

Skim the Introduction, "Related work" and citation lists of current research. Find sources that introduced new ideas or that constitute the definitive treatment of them, as evidenced by the fact that they keep being cited. Possibly iterate this process once or twice.
Read those older sources, in temporal order.
Now read those current texts that seem relevant.

A scientific paper simply lacks the space to properly explain the concepts on which it builds, so inevitably you will have to achieve roughly the same experience and mind-state that the author had to understand it well. Reading what they read is hands-down the simplest way of achieving this.

If you want to get an overview over a field, find an overview paper or a book.
If you want to understand a special theory/method/theorem, take the paper where it is explained and gather all the relevant references that the paper uses. In some cases you have to dig even deeper and get the second level of relevant references (relevant = a crucial part of the paper depends on it).
Then I would go back and forth between these papers: If you struggle to understand the material, go one level deeper, if you get bored by irrelevant stuff, go one level higher. Try to sketch the relevant parts and their relation in your own notebook. That would be the approach I prefer.

It depends on whether there's a lot of building on understanding certain concepts in order to understand some other things.  If so, then you'll need to control the order you read things in rather carefully, so you don't end up rather lost.
If not, then follow your nose.  Dive in where it seems most interesting, and then work your way around with your curiosity as your guide.
When this journey of discovery starts to slow down, then you can go through them more methodically.  At this point you will be familiar enough with the area that you will be able to do some skimming (e.g. it looks like this one was a preliminary form of the idea that was later more fully fleshed out in such-and-so).
Make sure you make a guide for yourself, which you should update from time to time, of what your goals are, in other words, a list of what you are trying to accomplish and understand through this big reading project.

Conducting your reading from a purely chronological perspective seems incredibly arbitrary.
Jumping in at the deep end and reading published journal articles would unlikely be an effective way of learning - journal articles are typically aimed at an audience that already knows about the subject at had.  Hence, they would not furnish you with the core concepts and fundamentals that you would need as a newcomer.
If learning an entirely new subject, my approach would be to read several recently published introductory texts, such as those aimed at undergraduates or collections of essay, ideally from a variety of different academic publishers or university presses.
I would also speak with colleagues, associates and subject librarians for advice and reading lists.
The aim is to get a feel for:

Underlying concepts and theory of the subject
Points of contention or disagreement
Areas of uncertainty, current ground breaking research
Seminal texts or thinkers

I would then read the seminal texts in the subject with the other three points in mind, together with recommended reading from the people mentioned above.
From that point on it would be clearer whether reading old articles would be more or less fruitful than starting with the later work (eg if something has been refuted it might not be a top priority to read or if a body of recent work has utilized an old article that might be where you should look).

I don't think it's productive to collect hundreds of articles before you even start reading. Until you've made yourself familiar with the subject, how can you know which articles are useful, and which are not?
I think the best thing to do is identify one or two well-written review articles. If the field is not too distant from your own, you should be able to read a review article from start to finish. Otherwise, you can at least read it to get a sense of what is going on, and from there identify a few more articles which will allow you to gain some more depth.
And my recommendation is to read review articles from "most recent" to "older" --- there is nothing scientific about naivete', in my opinion. Knowing more does not spoil the previous work.


text:
How long should I wait for the response of the referee?
i wrote a message to the Editor to inquire about my
revision sent about 4 months ago.  He informed me yesterday(March 20th, 2014)
that my manuscript has already completed 1 review.
However, we are still awaiting the last report.
from the remaining referee. My question is How long
should I wait for the response of the referee? and what do you advise me to do?
n.b. the journal belongs to Springer
Best regards

What's your field? It's relevant information.

@scaahu: Indeed. If it's mathematics, my advice would be "just keep waiting, this is normal".

Yes, keep waiting! What I usually do when I choose a journal is look at some (recent) papers. Usually they have a short "history" like first submission, revisions, and the date when it was accepted. But 6 months waiting period is nothing unusual. Esp. if the field is pretty narrow and reviewers scarce.

4 months is, unfortunately, not very long in some domains. I'd be over the moon if reviews were done that fast in my domain.

I am seismologist

4 months for secondary revision is too long no??

This is probably something you should be asking people working in your field. When I'm submitting, I usually ask the journal what their expected turnaround for reviews is. That way (in theory) I get a bit of a heads up.

i wrote a message to the Editor to inquire about my revision sent about 4 months ago. He informed me yesterday(March 20th, 2014) that my manuscript has already completed 1 review.

Since you have contacted the editor and they looked into it (and perhaps pinged the reviewer with a reminder), I don't see that there is much else you could do at this point (other than something drastic like withdraw, which would be entirely unjustified after four months).

However, we are still awaiting the last report. from the remaining referee. My question is How long should I wait for the response of the referee?

As long as it takes.

and what do you advise me to do?

You've just contacted the editor and gotten a response. My advice now would simply be to be patient. Try to put it at the back of your mind and focus on other work. (And don't message the editor again for another few months; have faith in them to do their job.)

4 months for secondary revision is too long no??

In many fields, unfortunately, no.


text:
How do I find or request a copy of someone's thesis if this person did their work in mainland China?
I hope this question is appropriate for the forum here.  I was hoping to locate and read a thesis outside of the United States, specifically for someone who went to a reputable University in mainland China (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).  However, all of my internet searches have been largely fruitless, and the library site at the university dedicated to theses appears to be down.
Does anyone know how to proceed in these circumstances?  I unfortunately cannot speak Chinese, and the person in question has been non-responsive for months.  Are these theses typically in English at top Chinese universities?

The e-mail address of their library is master@mail.lib.sjtu.edu.cn

Is this thesis a PhD thesis? What is the publication year? It might be more difficult to get if it is older.

I am currently in China, as a postdoc. From my experience with the inner workings of Chinese academia and culture, I must say your objective is not an easy one. Most of my Chinese colleagues will only move by either by personal interest or when receiving an order. This thus is how you should approach this situation.
The proposed strategy of contacting a dean or some other local authority is a valid attempt, but you should make sure that person would be interested in helping you (by transmitting an order) for some reason. Otherwise I'd locate the respective advisor stating that you're interested in obtaining a thesis because [enter here something which will benefit that person, citations/publication/funding/collaboration/etc]. Try calling them directly while asking their name first-thing, which should put them temporarily in a responsive position.
Finally the last resort is to show up in person, where you will be treated like an authority while visiting.
The Chinese are quick to ignore communication on topics which they have no interest, and there is little casual chitchat meaning that the fact that you've written to some people about your request is unlikely to be mentioned to others.
Finally concerning availability and language, my bet is that the mentioned thesis is in Chinese with an English abstract, sitting in a cabinet full of others' theses in an office of the department. If you manage to get someone to help you, the easiest would be that a student takes pictures on a phone of every page and sends by Wechat or QQ.
Good luck!

Try writing (in English) to the department chair.

You can also try to locate collaborators of the person (thesis supervisor or coauthors of published work). They may be able to get in touch with him/her or they may even have a copy of the thesis.


text:
Are there any tools to automatically search and download literature in a given .bib file?
I'd like to download automatically tons of papers listed on .bib file so I'm trying to find a way to facilitate the process by, e.g. I import or input to a tool a certain .bib file which contains a list of literature, the output is the literature's .pdf file. Any idea to do so?

Does it contain DOI or arXiv identifiers? If it does, it may be possible (though, automatic downloads are usually not allowed by journals).

Related questions here and here and here

Don't forget what happened to Aaron Swartz.

Aaron Swartz's issue wasn't the automatic downloading, it was the intent to distribute the copyright materials.
What Macchiavalley is asking has no such problems, at least not directly -- it may still be against policy, but it won't be anywhere near as much of an issue.

Maybe a stupid question: Why would you do that? Surely, the bottleneck for reading through the papers is not finding and downloading them, but actually reading and understanding them?

In contrast to the freemium/proprietary tool suggested in the answer by andreas, I propose a FOSS solution that works reliably for this specific task.
Assuming you are connected to a network that provides permissions to legally download the required content, the cross-platform reference manager,JabRef has integrated fetchers to download full-texts for the entries in your library. Import your bib file into Jabref (maybe just start a new library for this task to keep things clean) and select the desired number of entries for which full-text PDFs are needed. Then, from the Quality pull-down menu, select Lookup Fulltext documents.
However, you still have to manually confirm all downloads. From the user's perspective, this requires just a bunch of clicking the OK button in the same on-screen co-ordinate (for pop-ups that appears sequentially for each citation entry). Jabref does all the heavy-lifting and correctly downloads the desired PDFs of the full-text and link each of them appropriately by matching to their relevant citation entry in the library.
The latest master build of Jabref is recommended, since there were some recent fixes to its IEEE fetcher (i.e. if IEEE matters to the OP).

Thanks for sharing it, that's an excellent solution, on top of being a FOSS one!

As of Sept 19, JabRef didn't work for me, the program freezes after every OK operation.

BibTeX is usually a very heterogeneous source of bibliographic references. URLs can be stored in several fields like 'url', 'howpublished', or 'citeulike-linkout-0',  'citeulike-linkout-1'... 'citeulike-linkout-n'. Moreover, some entries have a DOI, arXiv ID, PubMed ID or PMC ID and some don't.
As a developer of Paperpile I had the pleasure to dig into this over the last years, and there is no easy solution to a problem like this, but I think Paperpile comes close to a 'least effort' solution for the user. Let me explain
how you can handle such a task with Paperpile.

Simply upload the BibTeX file to Paperpile
Paperpile will automatically match the uploaded references against databases like PubMed or Google Scholar to get better bibliographic information. The key point here is that it will retrieve DOIs which point to the website of the article at the publisher.
You can then trigger automatic download of the PDF of these articles

The nice side effect is that you will have an updated bibliography with many of the articles being up to date and having the abstract. Of course, you can also export your references then again as BibTeX.

I have taken the script developed by Janik Vonrotz (https://janikvonrotz.ch/2020/05/07/bulk-download-papers-from-scihub-for-text-mining/) and updated it:
urlencode() {
    # urlencode <string>
    old_lc_collate=$LC_COLLATE
    LC_COLLATE=C

    local length="${#1}"
    for (( i = 0; i < length; i++ )); do
        local c="${1:i:1}"
        case $c in
            [a-zA-Z0-9.~_-]) printf "$c" ;;
            " ") printf "+";;
            *) printf '%%%02X' "'$c" ;;
        esac
    done

    LC_COLLATE=$old_lc_collate
}

readarray list < ./doi-list.txt
for doi in "${list[@]}"
do
    echo "Download for term: ${doi}"
        echo "$(urlencode "${doi}")"
    link=$(curl -s -L 'https://sci-hub.se/' --compressed \
        -H 'authority: sci-hub.se' \
        -H 'accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9' \
        -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,es-CO;q=0.8,es;q=0.7' \
        -H 'cache-control: max-age=0' \
        -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
        -H 'cookie: __ddg1=BtxiJLnNZJLBkABn4hpt; session=97bea0eea9e31566256d52c73ff7f0c8; refresh=1632424058.9403; __ddgid=ZhCUNBqgvzZw8NyO; __ddgmark=fwbZCB5monJGgo14; __ddg2=xmUHEIajmbeImx4L' \
        -H 'origin: https://sci-hub.se' \
        -H 'referer: https://sci-hub.se/' \
        -H 'sec-ch-ua: " Not A;Brand";v="99", "Chromium";v="92", "Opera";v="78"' \
        -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
        -H 'sec-fetch-dest: document' \
        -H 'sec-fetch-mode: navigate' \
        -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \
        -H 'sec-fetch-user: ?1' \
        -H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' \
        -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.159 Safari/537.36 OPR/78.0.4093.231' \
        --data-raw "sci-hub-plugin-check=&request=$(urlencode "${doi}")". | grep -oP  "(?<=//).+(?=#)")

    echo "Found link: $link"
    cd ./Downloads/papers/textmining && { curl -s -L $link -O ; cd -; }
done

This version accepts one URL (BibTeX URL field), PMI/DOI, or search string (BibTeX title field) per line in the input file

You may don't like this answer but automatic download is explicitly forbidden by many publishers and can result in the ban of labs/campus access to the journals of the publisher. Such automatic download can made by e.g. EndNote (actually, it does it automatically in some settings), and done by some students in our lab - as a result,  a bunch of IP addresses get blocked.

Mendeley can do this, though for non open access articles, you will get at most the abstract. Also, there's no guarantee on automatically getting pdfs, as this depends on user uploads.

can you please elaborate on how this can be done using Mendeley?

Sorry, I haven't used mendeley in years, though maybe someone else can answer. I thought it was just a matter of synchronizing, but as I said, it has been years.

Some of these answers are overtly incorrect. OpenURL is a publisher endorsed standard (amongst others, such as DOI), that was built to facilitate exactly this. There are subscription models which most universities sign up to for this. The issue around Schwartz and Scihub etc. is linked but it is possible to legitimately download many articles in an academic bibliography in a batch/automated fashion. Endnote is a commercial tool that specifically has a function which involves downloading full text, as an example.

Zotero can import many formats, including *.bib.


text:
Received a book review request, how to know if publisher is credible?
I received a book review request from a publishing company called PACKT. How do I know if the company and book is credible and if the effort would be worthy?

If it is PACKT(https://www.packtpub.com/) it is a credible company.

Indeed PACKT is credible - I have a few of their books on my shelf.  Now, whether I'd recommend them to someone else is another question, but they are reasonable books.

Just to clarify and perhaps it doesn't make a big difference, but what kind of review have you been called to do: (a) an internal editorial review - i.e., to give feedback to the editor about whether to publish or feedback to the author on how to improve the book; or (b) an external review: I.e., you've been asked to write a post on your website about what you think of the book.

@JeromyAnglim an internal editorial review.

I had a pathetic experience with Packt. After all work was done from my side, they stopped responding to the emails. I wasnt given any credibility whatsoever. Just a heads up.

Why do you care? Let them send you the book, if you are at all interested in the topic. (Free books! Yay!)
Then review it. If the book is obviously crap, then stop reading after page 15, write up how far you got and why you stopped reading, and submit the review. You may not get any more requests for reviewing from that particular publisher after that, but a one-paragraph review that warns people off a bad book is certainly helpful. And the entire process won't cost you more than half an hour.
And if the book is good, you can spend more time on it, write a thoughtful review and got a Free Book out of it.

EDIT: on second, third or more-th glance, I do see a way in which reviewing for a shady publisher can hurt you. Suppose an author plagiarizes a large amount of text for his book - but you don't notice (maybe because you are not familiar with the text that was plagiarized) and write a good review. Once this becomes known, of course people will wonder why you did not notice.
This really presupposes that something like this could more easily happen with a shady publisher, an assumption which may be open to question itself. I'd rather wonder about the author than the publisher here.
So I'd recommend something like this: google the author. Check his publications. Does he have a track record in the field? I'd be suspicious if someone with no scientific footprint suddenly were to write a book.
Check the publisher. What else have they published? Go by the publisher's website and by Amazon, especially if you don't trust them to be honest on the website. How are the reviews of their other books on Amazon? If you google their books' titles with "site:edu", does any educational institution set them as textbooks?
Finally, if the author has a website but does not mention the book you are supposed to review and the publisher looks extremely fishy to you, write him an email and ask about the book. It may be that an unethical publisher put his name on a plagiarized book that he never saw (however, I don't think that this is likely).

Thanks for the answer. I care because my name gets associated with the publisher. So, I thought I should know more about them before doing any business with them.

So suppose you review a bad book, and write in your review that it is a bad book. I am a bit unclear on why you would be afraid of this outcome. Likely enough a problematic publisher won't want to draw attention to a review that pointed out the flaws in one of their books. (I recently reviewed the worst Springer book I ever saw for JORS. I don't think my review will make it on the publicity page for that particular book.)

Note that being a technical reviewer for a book is a slightly different matter, involving more work but you get paid for the task. Even there, though, your reputation isn't particularly affected.

@Ketan: I don't know whether you are notified of edits in answers to your questions. I did think of something that can hurt you in reviewing for unethical publishers, and I edited my answer accordingly.

@StephanKolassa thanks for caring enough to rethink and elaborate your answer, I really appreciate this. I have not been given the name of the author. I will contact the publisher and ask about it.


text:
Reliable Rankings of US Universities?
I am aware of US News which publishes the rankings for US Universities every year.
But somehow I feel that they try to emphasize more on private universities than public(state) universities.
Also they have recently stopped showing the rankings according to fields of study(CS, ECE, Mechanical, etc) without paying them.
Google also could not help me find any reliable ranking organisation.
I would like to know whether there is any respectable ranking organisation other than US News.

No one said that US News is reliable. :) Seriously!

@paulgarrett I was thinking of making that comment, but then I couldn't decide if anyone ever said they were respectable either.

Both of these organisations are International but you can search by region and study area.
Top Universities is complied by the QS Quacquarelli Symonds
This page explains the methodology they use to rank institutions.
The Times Higher Education rankings are compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine in the UK with the help of Thomson Reuters. According to their site

rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

I think Times ranking is not logical at all. Top Universities is the best of the 3 for me.

If your goal is a general list, @gman's answer, as well as other general guides, will do.
If your goal is to select a graduate program to apply for, I recommend phds.org.  You can specify which criteria are most important to you: research productivity, support for graduate students, diversity, funding, etc.  Based on your choices, you will get a personalized ranking of the graduate programs in your area.

I totally agree with Ben on this one. Although the website also provide some useful information.


text:
reviewing other articles for a conference
I have been appointed to take part in reviewing papers for a conference. At the beginning I received an email in which the program chair told me to mark my fields of expertise, so I did that.
After a few days, it appeared in the reviewing page a list of all the papers submitted. But when they assigned me the papers, they do not assign me those in which I have expertise in the field and that I put in a previous email.
So now I have reviewed my assigned papers. I have seen that I can see all the papers submitted and there is also the possibility to put my review in those that there have not been assigned to me. Should I do that with the papers that are my field of expertise? or should I only review those that I have been assigned.
Thanks

This sounds like a pretty specific question. Personally, I would just email the conference chair and ask him this question directly; his answer will be more definitive than anything you get here.

@eykanal: It is actually quite common in my experience.

@DaveClarke - See, this is why mods always have to wait before casting close votes :)

Welcome to conference reviewing.  Your situation is unfortunately extremely common.  If the number of submissions in area X is less than the number of reviewers with interest and expertise in area X, then inevitably some of those reviewers will be assigned papers in area Y.  Symmetrically, if the number of submissions in X is more than the number of experts in X, then some of those papers must be assigned to reviewers who'd prefer Z.  Ideally, most papers are reviewed by experts and each reviewer is assigned mostly papers in their areas of expertise, but sometimes the matching system breaks down.
By default, you must review the papers that you were assigned.  But there are a couple of ways to address mismatches.

If your assignment looks like a complete mismatch, you should quickly contact the PC chair and express your concerns, and in particular to verify that they received your preference email.  If you're early enough in the process, the chair may be able and willing to swap assignments with other reviewers with complementary mismatches.  There might also be a mechanism to swap assignments directly with other committee members, but you should always get the PC chair's permission before actually swapping.
Most computer science conference review forms ask for your confidence in your review; fill in this field honestly.  If you really don't have the expertise to understand the paper or make a recommendation, your review should read "I apparently do not have the expertise to understand this paper or make a recommendation."  That's a damning review of both the paper and the assignment process, but that's okay; your job as a reviewer is to be respectful but brutally honest.

On the other hand, as a matter of simple self-preservation, you should not review papers that you were not assigned.  Reviewing well is extremely hard and time-consuming, and you have many other demands on your time.  (And reviewing badly should just not be done at all.)  Generally speaking, doing extra unsolicited reviewing will not earn you additional credit or brownie points.
There are a few exceptions.  If you see a paper that you plan to read in detail anyway, despite getting no credit for doing so, you might as well write a review.  And if the initial reviews of a paper disagree, the PC chair may seek out additional input or even full reviews; if you're asked about a paper in your area of expertise late in the review cycle, you should help.  (If you're asked about a paper outside your area of expertise in later rounds, you should just say no.)

Your advice about when not to review is very sensible. I wish I heard it earlier. I have on multiple occasions reviewed multiple papers I was not assigned. This has been beneficial for me to obtain a broad view of the field when I was a PhD student. I have also done this for sub-areas that I felt needed better representation but had few expert reviewers. I'm not sure if that was stupid, but I felt the need to support an area.

That advice was specifically aimed at the OP, who has complained in other questions about lack of time and support for research. Of course you should read papers that aren't assigned to you.


text:
If I've decided to go to Grad. School for Mathematics... a little late?
Two questions following a bit of background:
I'm currently a 4th year Physics/Mathematics major to graduate in the spring, and I'm beginning my applications for Grad. school. My goal is theoretical/mathematical physics. Just the idea of applying pure mathematics to physics is exciting to me.
I've taken the Physics GRE Subject tests and all that great stuff, but the more I think of it... the more I feel I prefer mathematics, and as a result---mathematics graduate studies; I'd still like to apply this to physics, eventually, but what I really want is the pure, abstract math first.
1) The next Mathematics Subject GRE is in April. If I want to get into a mathematics graduate program, have I missed my shot?
2) How viable of an option would it be to switch from a physics grad. program into a mathematics one in the same university?

If I want to get into a mathematics graduate program, have I missed my shot? — Maybe for this admission cycle, but you can always apply next year.

The next Mathematics Subject GRE is in April. If I want to get into a mathematics graduate program, have I missed my shot?

Yes, it will hurt your chances for this year, but you might still be admitted.  Admissions committees can sometimes be flexible about requirements like this if you give a good explanation, so it could still be worth applying (but what the chances are depend on the department and perhaps even the specific committee members).

How viable of an option would it be to switch from a physics grad. program into a mathematics one in the same university?

As a general rule, being admitted to one department does not make it easy to transfer to another.  If you have good interactions with the mathematics faculty, then that might help some, but you would still have to apply in the usual way (and the chances of admission would in general be comparable to what they might have been if you had not been in the physics department already).
[Added in edit:] On the other hand, you may be able to accomplish your goals in either department.  You can certainly talk/work with faculty from both departments, at least informally and perhaps through some sort of formal arrangement.  If you do work in the intersection of both fields, in the long run it won't matter very much which department your degree was from.  Mainly, it's a matter of which requirements you'll have to complete in the short term (will you take more physics classes or more math classes?).

Some schools also allow you to do a jointly supervised thesis with advisors from multiple departments.

@aeismail: Good point, I was answering the question as asked, but the more important point is probably that you can work with faculty from both.  (I'll add this information.)

Actually what department you've gotten a degree from (Math vs. Physics) can affect the kinds of jobs that you'll be able to apply to.  Someone with a Physics PhD (even someone specializing in mathematical physics) is likely to have trouble getting a teaching job in a mathematics department and vice versa.

I'd give +100 to Brian Borcherds' comment if I could.

Excellent. Thanks for the answer. If given the choice between only mathematics and only physics, I'd choose the former. I will apply to Physics grad. school, and maybe switch to mathematics—it wouldn't take any more time, since the next math GREs are in like 6 months.


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When to make thesis available for public access?
I have recently finished my thesis and submitted to both university and national thesis center.
However, it is not online yet (probably there are many thesis pending). Should I wait for the thesis center to make it available or can I just put it to my website?

What country and what field?

Unless your university has a policy that explicitly forbids it (which would be very strange), you should feel free to post your thesis online as soon as it has been officially submitted and accepted.

I asked my advisor when I should put my thesis on arXiv and he said I should do it after my defense, but not earlier. (And I complied.) It seems to be a standard practice (at least in theoretical physics).
If there is demand, (very likely) you can mail your thesis privately (I did a few times). But putting it publicly may give some risk:

it could look as if you have already defended it,
in the case of failing (which, depends on country and procedures, may be possible or unlikely) it is kind of awkward.

Plus, the standard caveats: ask your advisor, check your institution policy etc.

I forgot to add, I have already defended it and it is accepted by the commitee

So, just put it (unless there are direct rules against it). If possible, I really recommend arXiv (or if not relevant - another repository). The chances are your website will be gone in matter of years (or decades).


text:
How to Direct the Reader to the Background and Terminology Section?
While writing a thesis, suppose that, one wants to inform the reader that he/she needs to have a basic knowledge of some topic to understand the following.
If the term is explained in Background and Terminology, how should I say this?

For the readers who are not familiar with the term blah-blah, we
  explain it in detail in Section 1.2.

or

We strongly encourage our readers to read Section 1.2 to obtain
  information about blah-blah.

or, what else?

There may be some conventions that come in to play. I was told it was expected that the first chapter was written at research level, and then the second has all the introductory material, more at graduate student level.

I personally don't like making presumptions about the reader's knowledge when I am writing.  Someone may, for example, be familiar with a term or concept but use it in a difference sense than the paper does.  This is especially true in cross-disciplinary work or when there are unsettled scientific issues in play.  I thus prefer a value-neutral statement.
For example, a general pointer might be:

See Section 2 for a review of the background and terminology of this work

while a pointer for a specific element might be:

We thus conclude that this snark is frabjous (for more details on frabjous evaluation, see Section 2.4).


text:
Is it a conflict of interest if I review a conference submission of my former colleague?
I have recently accepted an invitation for reviewership. I was asked to review a paper submitted to a well-known conference. Because of my carelessness (or laxness, if you will), I didn't realize that one of the authors is my former colleague whose name appears on several papers as a co-author.
I always try to be objective, and objectively the manuscript is borderline at best. However, if the paper somehow gets accepted, and the editors find out my relationship with one of the authors, I feel like my academic integrity will be damaged.
Should I just send the editors an email explaining the situation and rejecting the reviewership, or should I write this fact as a note after I finish my review? If neither, then what should I do?

Related questions: Conflict of interest as a referee?, Review a paper with recent coauthors, Is peer-reviewing a manuscript by a coauthor of yours truly ethical? and more - please also have a look at those questions and answers, which delve into the topic of conflict of interest in the described case.

If you've co-authored papers together, it would certainly be considered a conflict of interest. It also sounds like the journal sent you the author list before you accepted the review. In this case you may already have committed a transgression, though unwittingly.
Considering that co-authorship is also easy to detect, it is quite likely that this may be found out, and damage your standing somewhat. On the other hand, unilaterally rejecting the review offer after initial acceptance may incur some displeasure from the editor.
My suggestion would be the middle path, i.e. write to the editor, mention that the acceptance was made without due diligence, and seek their advice on how to proceed.

I think your review is an honest review and the editors are aware of this fact also, so I would suggest that you write your review and send it to the editors along with a note about your relation with a co-author.
After that it will be up to the editors what they decide about it.


text:
There is an uncommon icon for my submission on EasyChair
I have submitted a manuscript via EasyChair. I assume that
iIt is still under review because I had no notifications of any sort.
When I click on my role on the main page, there is a link which allows me to download the manuscript I have submitted.
The icon is as shown below:

There is a paper icon with the number 1 in a red, rounded square on the lower-right corner.
However, normally, it is like this:

Which can be described as an open folder icon with a small black arrow pointing right on the upper-right corner.
Does this mean anything?

Just a guess that it represents something in the folder that you should read. I'd also guess that clicking the icon will open the document.

@Buffy It is true that when I click on the icon, I see the paper I have submitted. But there is nothing new to read.

Just a note, when I submitted a submission to Easychair that required two files the files had icons like that (but the other had number 2 on it). So maybe somehow there is also another file associated with your submission?

@Laakeri I think you are correct, I needed to upload an extra file. Can you please write this as an answer so that I can accept?


text:
What are some good tips for people who wants to start a workshop from scratch?
I, and a group of my colleagues want to start a workshop which covers a topic which generally draws interest but usually categorized as "other topics" in well-known workshops.
We want to start a workshop for such a topic. We are well aware that initial impression of an organization is very important. Thus, we want to avoid some blatant blunders.
What are the best practices for a group of 4-5 people who intend to start a workshop? What kind of advice "save lives" in this context?

In what context would the workshop be delivered? Is this a workshop for institutional peers, a conference workshop, a student workshop, a webinar, a workshop where you actually build things ...?

@TaliesinMerlin It is a theoretical workshop in the field of computer science which aims to encourage people to share their ongoing work and find collaborators, and ultimately publish some papers out of their efforts in the workshop.

In Computer Science, many successful workshops are attached to major conferences, taking place on the days around the main conference. So (1) attend those workshops and see how they run, what you like or dislike, etc. (2) Submit a workshop proposal to the most relevant conference and trying to get included in the workshop schedule. This makes recruiting participants and the audience much easier --- they are already at the conference anyway.
To host a new workshop not attached to a conference, never having done it before, I'd really recommend adding some organizers with lots of experience -- and it doesn't hurt if their well-known names will entice people to come. (Sorry, that's how it works.)
Other than that, I would frankly say there's nothing tricky about it. I don't think I've ever been to a bad workshop -- not surprising, since I generally sign up because I like the topic! Some tentative suggestions:

Get at least 1-2 good, well-known invited speakers to give talks (45min plus questions is my suggestion).
Solicit submissions broadly and select some to give short talks (20-30min including questions is my suggestion). Focus on talks you think will be interesting to the audience, not necessarily the best/strongest work.
Make one of your goals diversity of your set of speakers.
A poster session and/or social time can be good. You can accept anything you rejected above as a poster.
Build in enough breaks and discussion/Q&A, be careful not to overstuff the schedule.
Speaking of schedule, it's probably good to have a webpage with the schedule and overview. Most of the schedule, like identities of the talks, can stay TBA for a while, it's ok.

There's probably an additional list of tips for a virtual modality....

This doesn't sound like a workshop, but a special interest sub-conference. Yes, CS conferences have workshops as well as what you describe. If it is a place to "get work done" then you don't need speakers or poster sessions. This seems too passive for most attendees. The Educators track at OOPSLA, for example was like what you describe, but it isn't really a workshop. The Doctoral Symposium is, however, just a workshop for sharing ideas of attendees and getting feedback. Much simpler to organize.

I don't think a workshop includes posters ...

That's a good answer but unfortunately does not fully address my question. I'm not asking about a workshop which is attached to a conference. Hence the phrase "from scratch." I myself also never attended to a bad workshop but this doesn't mean that bad workshops don't exist.

@padawan I don't think "from scratch" implies "not attached to a conference." If that's what you're looking for, you should edit to be a little clearer.

@BUffy, okay, we call them workshops. For example, if you look at all six workshops attached to STOC 2020, you'll find they are all just sequences of talks. http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2020/STOCprogram.html This theoretical-minded workshop at NeurIPS 2020 is exactly as I describe: https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2020/Schedule?showEvent=16150


text:
What's the difference between "academic staff" and "research staff"?
For example in Cambridge website of math department, it lists University Academic Staff and Research Staff. What is the difference?

This will vary. Are you interested only in Cambridge?

@Buffy no just want to have a general understanding.. but is Cambridge different from others?

Probably. I could give an answer that might be completely different from the meanings at Cambridge. I doubt there is any "standard" terminology for this. For example, "academic staff" can mean just secretarial staff - those who work for the department head or dean. Or more. The range of possibilities is probably too broad to be very useful. But for Cambridge, go ask them.

In the UK, "academic staff" tends to mean lecturers or professors, whereas "research staff" tends to refer to post-doctoral research associates, research fellows, and occasionally PhD students. As @Buffy says, this may vary by institution, so ask.

In the UK academic staff and research staff are typically used to circumvent funding regulations that limit many fellowships to individuals who do not have, nor have ever had, a permanent academic staff position. The fundamental distinction is that academic staff are on permanent contracts and research staff are on fixed-term contracts. Academic staff generally are on teaching and research contracts, but some can be on teaching only or research only contracts. I have never meet a member of research staff that wasn't on a research only contract.
Things get hazy because often research staff have two contracts. A fixed term research only contract and a permanent research and teaching contract dated the day the research only contract ends. If they then get a different fellowship, they tear up the research and teaching contract and get a new one with the new date. This allows them to continue to be research only and qualify for fellowships.
While there are obviously differences across institutions, looking at the provided pages for Cambridge, every member of academic staff I looked at had a academic rank (e.g., lecturer or professor) and non of the research staff did.
The tenure track is not really a thing in the UK anymore. Permanent contracts usually come with a 3 year probationary period. The requirements to pass the probationary period could be as little as do not screw up, but could also have publication and funding requirements. I am not particularly familiar with the publication requirements, but they are likely focused on the REF framework. Departments generally have a group For non-academic staff on fixed term contracts that have most of the same privileges as academic staff. Often this is the Research Staff group, but sometimes RAs and post docs get dumped into the research staff label. As I said above, these select non-academic staff people on fixed term contracts often have a permanent contract waiting for them if there is a lapse in their funding so for all intensive purposes they have tenure.

so which one leads to a tenure, academic staff, research staff, or both can ?

Tenure isn't really a thing in the UK; a different system is used. Academic positions are either fixed-term or permanent. Academics will probably undertake a few fixed-term research roles, before moving on (where possible) to a permanent lecturing position, from where they can be promoted to professor within the same university, or move on to a different one. This is something of a generalisation, however.

@athos see edit, but if you want to know about tenure in the UK either edit it into your question or ask a new one.

I'd agree with this, with the exception of "but all you have to do during that period is not screw up". Most places now have very defined criteria, at least in science. At our place you need at least one 4* paper as last author (or several 3* papers), one grant of at least £400k, complete a teaching qualification and score at least 5/10 on teaching evals. If you see the recent "Life of PI:Transitions to Independence in Academia " paper (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/571935v1), you'll see this is similar to most Russel group unis.

@IanSudbery my information appears dated. Thank you. I will edit something in later today.

@IanSudbery I just looked at the linked article. I can't distinguish between the promotion requirements and the probation requirements. The PGCHE requirement was around when I was in the UK, but I still liken that to not screwing up as apart from time, it was pretty easy to pass. That said, I edited the answer a little.

I can only really comment on my experience (as I detailed above) and those I talk to at other institutions (some of whom organised and published the above paper). The fact is that at our place, promotion and probation are basically the same thing. That is we've basically moved to a tenure track system where you don't get promoton if you pass, you just get to keep your job. That said, your edits look good to me.

Research staff in this context are mostly people who don't have permanent positions, rather they have fellowships that last x number of years or are hired post docs on projects. Hence the general age difference between the two groups.

Probably country or even university specific. Can you make your reference population clearer?

My reference was directly, specifically, Cambridge as the institution I received my PhD from. More specifically, I used to date someone in Pure Maths and spent every Friday at their happy hour...hence the use of "this context".

And for the record, they had nice beer at their happy hour. Such funding heaped on the maths and physics sorts, even reflected in their beer. Our social science happy hour had to make do with some cheap Stella that I had to ask everyone to pay for. Sigh!

@Grotesquesi It seems that you are using two different accounts (one of them unregistered). If this is indeed the case you can merge the two accounts.

Thanks Arnaud, I just noticed that! The wonders of too much technology. I'll do just that.


text:
Publication grade concept drawings
I am working on my Masters' thesis in aeronautical engineering and would like to make high-quality drawings (not technical drawings as in detail designs in CAD, but drawings of concepts and ideas, eg airplane with basic forces acting on it).
I am sure is this a common task in technical writings and would like to know if there is software available for such purposes?
Disclaimer: I am not a graphic designer and don't have the skill or time to make nice drawings from scratch. I am hoping there is software that has a library of a bunch of basic shapes and images that can be edited and freely used.

I think there is a TeX.SE question that deals with this. The details are not clear to me, but it appears that with a little work you can use TikZ with LaTeX to draw a plane:

This TeX.SE example used a variety of tools including Inkscape, Sketch, Blender, and Cinema4D (of which only Cinema4D is not FOSS) to produce:

From what I can piece together from this TeX.SE answer, details of how the above diagrams are made is available in Italian here. A Google Translate version of the abstract is:

This article shows how you can use the power of LATEX and PSTricks and TikZ packages in the production of advanced illustrations . The creation of designs that represent the three-dimensional scenes with directions of scientific content is made possible with LATEX . The author shows how it is able to manipulate and arrange three-dimensional objects in a scene with the program Sketch of Eugene Ressler edil its intuitive scripting language , getting a ' output in the form of PSTricks or TikZ commands . The proposed working method allows to overcome the limitations that users of a package as PSTricks , which also has relatively advanced three-dimensional drawing capabilities , meet whenever are going to want to draw and manipulate three-dimensional scenes containing objects simple and primitive .
The teaching of a subject such as engineering Flight Dynamics is a field in which he operates, and which they refer to the specific examples given in the article

which suggests that Cinema4D may not be critical.

Thank you very much. These drawings of aircraft are very cool examples. My problem is however that I am not allowed to use Latex for my dissertation (go figure). Tikz seems great, but can you save as png images? And how steep us the learning curve? I am not very creative so fear I won't really be able to make drawings as in your examples.

@Jonny, I haven't tried, but my guess is that not many people can make drawings as good as the examples I showed. As for TikZ to png, you can go TikZ to pdf which will allow you to eventually get to png. As for the learning curve my guess is it is pretty shallow, which in this case is bad since it means it would take a long time to get really good.

Thanks @StrongBad, I will certainly give it a try! I just downloaded the program QTikz which is a QT interface for Tikz and allows for export as .png!


text:
How do I make a bad semester not look bad during my scholarship application?
I am applying to the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, and they require a transcript. Now, I have a problem with my grades, in that I had good grades until my final year, where a combination of depression and a death in the family tanked my non-major GPA. During my final year, I went from a cumulative 3.55 to a 3.07, and also failed two courses. More specifically, my first semester of my senior year was awful, with a 1.22 GPA, and in my second semester, I managed to get a respectable 3.0, where I had to take 21 credit hours so I could graduate on time. So it's not as if I am a bad student, it's just one semester of badness which has to be explained.
How do I make this not look bad? I would like to explain myself in the personal statement that I am capable of rebounding from hardship, that I can rise to the challenge when confronted with adversity, that my performance in that one semester is not indicative of my abilities.
I am upset at the moment because after looking at my transcript, it's worse than I initially thought. As for my other materials, I believe I have good letters of recommendation, good industry experience, and I can write some kick-ass essays, despite the fact that English is not my first language.
Also, the bad grades are not in my major (CS), where I managed to keep a GPA above 3.5 during my studies.
Any tips on how to deal with this? Any other tips I could use? I really appreciate it?

They require a transcript, but do they allow any kind of supplemental statements as part of the package? If so, I would try to include some kind of simply explanation – something like:

During the fall semester of my senior year, my grades slipped due to some personal family issues.

You might even try put a positive spin on it:

During the fall semester of my senior year, my grades slipped due to some personal family issues. Even though my grades suffered, I learned a lot about priorities and biting off more than I can chew. Though my GPA might not reflect this, I emerged a better person because of that trying experience.

If there are extenuating circumstances that precipitated this dramatic drop in grades, use the opportunity provided by your personal statement to address this, as suggested by J.R.
A second point you can emphasize that - in my experience is quite important - is that you rebounded from this very sub-par semester by doing respectably in your final semester. This provides more evidence that it was a fluke and that you are on the upswing. From speaking with admissions committee members (which is admittedly a bit different), I've been told that bad grades earlier in a record, followed by good grades are almost a non-issue (if you get passed the initial GPA screen, of course). Between this dynamic and a well-written personal statement, you should be able to mitigate the damage of a single bad semester.


text:
Can I reuse my published images
I have written respectively co-written papers where we have added images to illustrate our contribution. The images are far from technical and show prototypes in the field of HCI. It is not uncommon to write follow-up papers, especially of latest braking publications.
A publisher has asked us if we had previously published any illustrations and if we had secured all copyrights for them. As we own the illustrations but have published them before in a copyrighted paper respectively article, would we be able to reuse them?
I have looked at some publisher's copyright statements but they mostly refer to the paper, not the images. Would the latter be considered part of the publication and, therefore, be implicitly also copyrighted by the publisher?

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3121/10643, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3100/10643

In the context of an academic publishing agreement, the "paper" almost certainly includes everything on the page including the images, but read the agreement carefully. If you handed over the copyright of your images, then you'll need to secure the right to reusing them from your original publisher. This is usually easy.

Thank you. I hope that with the current trend to publish more and more in an Open Access format (at least in Europe), copyright is less of an issue in the future.

@EricTobias, open access doesn't mean that there is no copyright or that a publisher or author might not try to assert it. You still should get permission for reuse.

I agree but it will be less of an issue to obtain the copyright!