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My PhD defense is next week and I am having negative thoughts about my work and knowledge. Any advice on how to tackle this?
I am presenting my PhD thesis in front of my committee next week and I feel that I have just not done enough. My work is simple and I also feel that I have poor theoretical foundations and am going to be an embarrassment when quizzed by my committee.
I am not feeling confident about presenting my research and I am finding it extremely difficult pushing away negative thoughts like (I feel I have not done enough or I am not theoretically strong enough for doing my PhD on my research field).
I am revising theoretical stuff (related to my thesis work) that I studied in my first year of PhD, but I am not able to push out the feeling of guilt and the impending doom.
Any advice on how to tackle this?

"80% of success is just showing up."

The 'feeling of impending doom' you are describing is perfectly normal for any kind of important test situation i found myself in ;)

You might be interested: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11765/ive-somehow-convinced-everyone-that-im-actually-good-at-this-how-to-effect

"Any advice on how to tackle this?" Grab a beer and chill. Do not overthink.

What does your advisor think about this? If they are letting you present in front of the committee, that most likely means that they are confident you know enough to pass.

Everyone feels like this. It's normal. You don't need full mastery of the theoretical aspects, it's better to have full mastery of what you've done and what you've written. For theoretical preparation, go from a "your work first" approach. As long as you know enough to explain the motivation and conclusions of your work, you should be fine in almost any situation that will arise in the defense.

Keep in mind that you are the expert on your own work - hence you know all the flaws and attacks possible. If you want to destroy your work, there is no-one better than yourself. Try not to worry about it. Make sure you know what you did and why you chose to do what you did. The why may also include problems such as a lack of resources (if applicable) which may justify aiming for a "lesser result" because it is achievable and works toward the greater objective.

When you see that your thoughts are negative, take their absolute value.

Is there a counselling/wellbeing service in your University? Many universities have these facilities and it could be useful to take their help

Consider that you have spent a lot of time getting really deeply into the woods on this subject - there is still a lot you don't know, but you know more than almost anyone. You're now just more qualified than anyone to see what you still don't know.

Hope that you have gone through the thesis review comments made by the examiners, and have prepared the responses. If they have cleared the thesis, then viva should not be a hurdle; it's more of a formality now. Try out a few time-limited mock presentations (aloud), which would boost your confidence. Knowing your work well should suffice; usually, 1st year subjects wouldn't matter here unless something is directly related with your work. Keep back up slides at the end, so that you can refer to them if something comes up. Relax & talk confidently. Everything should sail smoothly. All the best!

It's now 3½ years later. How'd you like to add a section to the end of your question telling us how the defense went? I'm in a similar position to you right now, and I'd love to know.

Take a deep breath. You will be OK. You're suffering from impostor syndrome.
PhD defenses are traditional formalities. Your advisor wouldn't let you schedule yours if they didn't think you ready.
The examiners are more likely to want to know what you did than  theory from your first year you have forgotten.
When you pass your defense come back here and tell us about it.

While I generally agree with this, the third paragraph may be true or not. There are places where the defense is actually an important and thorough examination. But if that is the case, the OP should know that already.

Academia varies more than you think

Not everyone suffers from impostor syndrome.  It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you.  It may also be the case that OP is genuinely underperforming and that they are rightly concerned that they are actually unprepared.  We don't have the information to make that determination.

@J... I agree that we don't have enough information to know this answer is right for this student. I think it's likely, and thus likely to help. Only the OP can tell.

Well, your first three sentences sound like a firm diagnosis. It's a supposition, at best.

I think @EthanBolker was trying to encourage the OP as well as offer some pragmatic advice.

@J... at least with the way it works in the systems I'm familiar with, their supervisor clearing them to defend their thesis is fairly strong evidence that they should be capable of doing so

Simple to rectify, just change "You're suffering from impostor syndrome" to "You're likely suffering from impostor syndrome".

@HankyPanky I like the sentence the way it is.

It is not true that PhD defences are traditional formalities. Many are, some/many aren't. Plus - the fact that many are only formalities is actually a problem, and - in my opinion and experience. I know several cases of dissertations which should have been rejected, and possibly would have been had a serious, good faith opposition been mounted.

Here's the thing: People's dissertation work is usually not an earth-shattering achievement.

I feel that I have just not done enough.

I feel my Ph.D. was sorta-kinda enough; and a "strict version of me" might not have accepted it.
(in hindsight I developed a better opinion of it. I now feel it was solid enough work.)

My work is simple and I also feel that I have poor theoretical foundations

Well, your work may be simple (or it may not), but most research findings are simple once you have all the context in mind. The point is that you discovered or invented something new that wasn't known / didn't exist before. You have done that; and that's basically why you deserve your Ph.D.
As for the lack of theoretical foundations - ugh, tell me about it! Even at my peak I felt like an empty-headed fool compared to the "sages" of my field. Again, it's possible that you're under-estimating yourself, but it's also possible that you're setting unreasonable expectations: Most Ph.D.s in your field know less than you do about what you've been studying.

and am going to be an embarrassment when quizzed by my committee.

From best to worst:

You'll probably know enough about what they ask you to say something non-embarrassing.
"Esteemed opponent, that is an interesting idea. I have not considered that avenue during my doctoral work, and would need some time to consider it. It may well lead to further results beyond my own work."
"Esteemed opponent, I am not versed in [insert complicated subject here]. It is possible this field may have bearing on my findings."

Now, is no. 3 embarrassing? Well, it might be. But it's also the truth. Don't try to run from it in your head. You know what you know, you've done what you've done, you are who you are. That's not shameful.

I am not feeling confident about presenting my research

You should present what you did. Don't try to glorify it, nor to downplay it. What the question/goal/challenge was, how you approached it, how/why it worked, what the results were, what the consequences/corollaries/implications are. You can be "confident" about that - since these are just facts.

I am not theoretically strong enough for doing my PhD on my research field

You are strong enough in the sense that you've already done your Ph.D. work. You're not auditioning for the title of all-knowledgeable theorist.

I am not able to push out the feeling of guilt and the impending doom. Any advice on how to tackle this?

As for the guilt - don't try to make it disappear. Just try to separate the presentation from the guilt. You present the stuff that you're not guilty about.
As for the sense of doom - I tried to make the non-doom'ishness more palpable for you; I hope this works.

To further reduce the feeling of doom, let me point out that, even though this event is called a "defense" everywhere (as far as I know), the examiners are called "opponents" only in some places --- not, for example, in the U.S.

"Most Ph.D.s in your field know less than you do about what you've been studying."  This is basically the definition of a Ph.D.  In the course of doing the research, the candidate is becoming the world's foremost authority on that particular topic.

@AndreasBlass: TBH I think it's fair that it should be a defense, that the opponents be opponents, and that they make an fair attempt to question the candidate's research findings if they have weak points etc. This may be less psychologically convenient for the candidate, but it is in the interest of science.

@einpoklum When I'm an examiner, I'll look for weaknesses in the thesis, but if I find any, I won't wait until the defense to ask questions. I'll ask the candidate or the adviser beforehand, to give an opportunity to correct the problem. Only if they can't or won't do that, or if the problem becomes visible only during the defense, would I act as a genuine opponent at the defense.

@AndreasBlass: I don't think the two contradict. I would basically do the same, except that I would be oppositional during the exam and expect the candidate to have addressed the issue I had pre-informed him/her about.

I like the given answers but I'm surprised there isn't more practical advice in them. If you want "things to do", here you go:
As someone who recently defended (successfully) and felt similarly before the defense, I think you are not only suffering from impostor syndrome, but a separate feeling that probably has/deserves its own name.
As the creator and person most familiar with your own work, you are more aware of its faults than anyone else in the world.
There is a lot of good advice here about trusting the process and your advisor's opinion about your work, but I'll offer some other practical tips for dealing with your anxieties that only you can understand, because only you are fully familiar with your own work.

Preparation helps quell anxiety: Practice your talk, with your advisor if possible. Try to come up with the questions that you would be most afraid to answer. Then come up with some imperfect answers to said questions. At this stage, remember that it's expected to have limitations in your current work. Nobody can expect you to have done everything, so making simplifying assumptions, leaving things for future work, etc are almost always acceptable answers. This is what people mean by "trusting the process." They mean that if these sort of terrifying questions actually uncovered fundamental flaws in your work, then your advisor should have found them much earlier. I would argue that it is most important simply to show that you have put some thought into these "scary" questions.
Don't sell yourself short: Even if you don't know exactly how to do something. Be clear up front about the limitations of your work, but don't frame those limitations in terms of your own personal abilities. If you are asked a question you can't answer totally, get as far as you can. Say "while we have strong intuition (for x,y,z reasons) that there exists theory to back up our empirical results, we leave that derivation to future work. We might derive it by trying Q, R, and S on problem formulation T". Don't say "I don't know how to derive this so I didn't, and I have no ideas for how I might do it".
Fake it 'til you make it: My advisor gave me some really nice advice before my defense: part of the committee's goal, whether they mean to or not, is to determine whether or not you seem like you should be given the same Ph.D. title that they have. You are being inducted into a community. So act like a humble but full-blown researcher. When they ask a question, they often don't have a correct answer in mind: they're probably legitimately trying to gain an insight from another expert (you) who has done work related to theirs. When someone makes a suggestion/critique that you haven't thought of, take a moment and weigh its merits. If you have doubts, explain why. Ask them to clarify. If you think it makes sense, don't be hard on yourself and say "I should have thought of that", say "Oooh interesting, we tried the approach we did for X,Y reasons, but we should follow up on that in future work. Maybe your approach lets you do BLANK". If you can, draw on previous experiences of attending technical talks given by strong researchers for this. If you can't remember any interchanges, youtube has plenty of examples.
Invest in good pizza: No, I'm not being facetious. At the end of the day, these are humans judging you, not machines (as of November 2019). Human judges are invariably subject to all sorts of confounding variables when making judgements. For example, studies have shown correlations between judge leniency in criminal trials and the time of the day: you're more likely to go to jail when a judge is hungry (i.e before lunchtime). If you are able, supply your audience with good food at the beginning of your talk. If that doesn't work, at least you'll have good food to eat after a bad experience! At the very least ensure that your committee has access to pens, paper, water, and the comfiest chairs in the room. I was asked zero hard questions at my defense, even though I could think of quite a few, which I partly attribute to the local pizza place.

Hope that helps, best of luck!

#3 is so important, and it's perfectly legitimate for "X,Y reasons" to include things like "that's all we had time and money for".

Mostly good advice. I don't think buying pizza for the committee is a good idea. I wouldn't quite call it bribery, but it is a little tacky.

Let me emphasize the "trust your supervisor" advice that others have already given you. I don't know the official procedures in your department, but I imagine they're somewhat similar to those in my department. Before one of my Ph.D. students can schedule a thesis defense, I have to provide two official documents. One is a description (usually about two pages long) of the work in the thesis, ending with my recommendation to my department that the thesis be accepted. The other is not for the department but for the graduate school; it doesn't require as much information about the thesis, just some general comments on its quality, but it must also include my statement that the thesis is acceptable (perhaps with minor revisions). Furthermore, a second faculty member must provide an independent evaluation for the department, and all members of the committee must provide the second form for the graduate school.
So, by the time of the defense, I've already officially stated (twice) that this thesis is worthy of a Ph.D. I wouldn't do that if I wasn't confident that the student can pass the defense. If anything went wrong at the defense, I'd be at least as embarrassed as the student.

It is possible to submit a PhD without the approval of the supervisor at some universities.  Of course, to do so implies a massive falling-out with the supervisor.

In my department, although candidate don't technically need their adviser's approval, they do need the approval of the department's doctoral committee and of the graduate school administration. If neither of the two reports for the department is from the adviser, the doctoral committee will surely investigate the reasons for that situation. In effect, this would amount to the student's getting a new adviser.

To complement what @Ethan wrote, trust the process.
No (good) supervisor will let you do irrelevant work and defend insufficient results. If you have good supervision, trust your supervisor. By the point of defending you should have at least a few peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations under your belt. Use that to convince yourself that your results are relevant.
You can always do more, however that is not the point of Ph.D. The point is to learn and demonstrate knowledge of how to do research.
Even if your results are insufficient and you are facing the committee as a means of evaluating your work. The committee will point out specific deficiencies in your work. Their feedback is for both you and your supervisor to consider and adjust the course.
Do not assign your self worth to the thesis work. There is more in life than just that!

My supervisor mentioned 3 key points that were checking in the viva.

Interesting work
The work is correct
You did the work

You have done the work.  Understand your own work first, not stuff related to your thesis.  Trust your supervisor on the first two.
I have never seen anyone not nervous before a viva.  My other half commented that I still had some shakes when we went for lunch an hour after my own (and that was a good result).
And then the final thought is that in most countries it is very hard to shift grade very far in a viva. It is on the thesis which has already gone.  Finally issues happen and mistakes happen in a thesis.  Minor corrections are generally to be expected and major ones happen.  If either result comes in it is still fine. Take the notes on board and fix the issues pointed out, no different to a paper review (albeit normally a bit more work).
You should feel proud getting this far.  I know plenty who didn't.

Grades? In the UK, a PhD is a simple "pass/fail" (well, actually the viva result can be "rejected", "passed with minor corrections", and "passed" - and most are the middle).  There is no concept of a "good grade"

Yeah I meant pass without corrections/ pass with minor corrections / major corrections (essentially a large scale rewrite and resubmission, generally taking months to do) and rejected as the 4 "grades".  Most are minor corrections alright.  They are not quite traditional grades but I tended to consider them as such.

Ah right!  (I'd forgotten "major corrections").

The fact that you have submitted your thesis is in itself an achievement, with sufficient responsibility shared by your Guide too.
You may have already worked out and specified some propositions in your submission. You need to list them during the ViVa and explain them, to provide more clarity during your presentation.
Always try to present objectives clearly and refer to them  sequentially, while highlighting the conclusions of the study. Also, mention some of the obvious limitations and explain (if possible) as to why they happened and how the next study on your topic can get over them.
Finally, this is only a defence of what you have done. So, believe in it and go forth and defend.
All the best!

Identifying your problem as being "imposter syndrome" is, I think, correct. The greater problem is to find a way of overcoming it. Negative thoughts are not easily dismissed and repeating to yourself that your work is OK and that there is no need to worry is, of itself, unlikely to be sufficient.
A strategy that I have found useful in similar situations is to imagine myself as a legal advocate for a client. It's a job, it's not personal. I'm not here to evaluate the client. My job is to be the very best advocate for them that I can be. Afterwards, when "we" are celebrating our success, I can tell the client I didn't believe a word of it (insert wry smile here).

You feel ashamed by your work ? Please don't !
A lot has been said by other contributors, but I would go further, make one more step.
You probably think about all what you have NOT done during your PhD and it's normal, you can not explore all the possibilities. for the quiz with the jury members, feel open. It's not a lawsuit, it's a discussion between people who are relevant, passionate and know a lot about your PhD issue. It's a great (and maybe the only one) opportunity to have the most relevant advice and ideas on your work.
As far as I'm concerned, I really enjoy the quiz part, even if I were petrified at the very beginning of my presentation. I understand that jury's members are not there to judge you, but to put the introspection to a next step. I realize I miss some opportunities during these years of tough work, but more essentially, I understand that I need to share more my work and discuss with people more often, even if everything is going well. It should have opened more doors and now, I'm aware of that.
Your presentation is just one step in your life and you are prepared for that. It's like a wedding ceremony, lot of pressure but it will past too quickly :)
You know a lot about your topic, just relax, be open to conflicting views, stay in a productive state of mind and you will enjoy it.

There is so much fake research going on under the guise of PhD. It has become just like any other Masters defence. No one cares much about the results, no one is gonna check/review them. You are gonna do just fine my friend..... just go in there with a wide smile, and say everything you have done very confidently. You are gonna do amazing :-).
Also, you have worked really hard for 2/3 years now and your examiners will take that into consideration. Also consider the fact the you are gonna be part of the top 1 percent in the world. Its a really huuuuge achievement. So just go in there, and kill it with whatever you got.

I did a PhD defense as well, in 1984. Hard core physical science. Getting this far, it's highly doubtful you could fail at this point, and hopefully your committee knows that. More importantly, just be confident, mainly because you probably know more than anyone else on earth about your thesis content and subject. Good luck, it will go fine.

Been through that for my PhD and did very well, your anxiety is normal.
Prepare a very good and detailed defense presentation:
I suggest you organise it as follows: (list from my PhD supervisor Veronica Orvalho)

Problem statement, very short and clear
teaser video of what you have done that supports the problem statement you previously defined
Explain the problem
Explain the objectives of the thesis
overview of the solution
Explain core of the thesis
Results
Contributions (include papers, patents if you got any, awards...)
The future after your thesis, how your work can impact other areas of research or open new areas of research.
Best wishes!


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How to deal with slow peer reviewing process
I submitted a short (10 page long) manuscript to a math journal. It has been 9 months. Almost 4 months ago I emailed them to see what's going on. Their response was: "Your paper has been sent out to review but we haven't heard back".
What are the options at this point? The journal is one of the best in the field but at the same time I'm concerned thaat I might wait a long time just to receive a rejection letter.

That's sounds pretty normal for a math journal. (I'm not saying that's good, I'm just saying that's how it is). You should feel free to inquire again though.

People sometimes wait for years for a decision from math journals.

I would do the same if the journal in question was Annals.

As others commented already: Nine month is not unusual in math, and this applies to journals of all levels.
However, 9 month is a good time to send a new friendly reminder to the handling editor. From my experience, this seems to be the time when the editors also get impatient and start to press the assigned reviewers harder (or even proceed with one review less).
I would have written the first friendly reminder after six months (four seem a bit early to me) and a second one after nine month.

"Nine month is not usual in math": Or is it?

Oops! Unfortunately, it is not unusual.

Most math journals would not proceed with one reviewer less, as that would mean zero reviewers.

No, I received between zero and three reports from math journals and also have been told by a math journal that my review is not needed anymore.

Can you not use double negation? You may say "it is usual...". I got confused first time.

Well "usual" and "not usual" do not mean there same thing. What I wanted to say is that nine month review time happen.

Receiving zero review reports sounds suspicious. Having multiple reviewers does happen, but from my own experience (which seems to be mirrorred by most mathematicians using this site) the vast majority of math journals use just one (probably the main exception are the very top journals).

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Can I publish a survey-paper on a broader subject of a technology instead of narrow approach?
Can I write a survey on a 'Broader' subject of a technology, discussing how literature has discussed the technology, instead of a particular aspect?
For example in 'cellular communication for vehicles' there can be a number of ways to explore the field, including 'implementation challenges', 'Resource allocation', 'security', 'coding', 'vehicle-to-infrastructure communication'...and the list goes on.
Is it necessary that I present the survey on any one of this narrowed field. During my Ph.D. I have read a lot about almost all of these topics, can I combine them into a survey on the lines of "Survey of communication technology in Vehicles" etc. which details all these aspects?

Sure, why not?  You can write whatever you want.  Or does "Can I write..." actually mean "Can I publish..."?

of course "can I publish" :@

In theory? Sure, you can write a survey paper about any topic you like, no matter how broad.
In practice, there are two main restrictions: practicality, which is - how the heck will you write a proper review of a subject so large given resources that are available to you, and is now the right time for you to do that?; and publishability, which is your ability to find an appropriate venue that considers it on topic and get reviewers to sign off on it as good.
For the obstacle of practicality, as your starting scope becomes broader more papers must be included, until it quickly becomes unwieldy. Using your example, a search on Scopus for "communication technology" AND "vehicles" returns 265 articles in 2017 alone, and only slightly lower amounts for previous years. Removing the word "technology" shoots the results into the thousands per year, as an example. Clearly not all of the papers returned by a keyword search such as this are relevant (and not all relevant papers are turned in 1 keyword search), but a proper review paper covering even only the last 5-10 years would still be a considerable undertaking. The length of time you need to cover depends on the publications in your field, and I've seen some reviews cover 50 years, which obviously would not work if the scope included 10,000+ papers.
This leads into the issue of publishability. One problem is by being more broad, some of the more specialist topic venues might consider it out of bounds. But honestly, the more likely problem is that as you broaden the topic, it becomes harder and harder to do a good, convincing job of covering so much material. The exact numbers vary by fields, but in fields I'm familiar with a published survey paper generally covers at least 10 years of work, and is sufficiently bounded in scope to include around 200-300 papers. Re-using the example from Scopus, if even 20% of the papers returned in a keyword search were relevant you'd already be at over 400 papers already, which only includes searching in title/abstract/keywords. I've also been repeatedly told this sort of work is hard to publish at the top venues my colleagues care about, but this of course varies by field (its also rare to publish meta-analyses in my field, but this is certainly not true in other fields).
Reviewers will also inevitably ask, "what is new here?", so you'll need to explain how such a review covers things that no one else has already covered in this way. If 3 papers review A, B, and C, and you propose A + B + C, it will tend to be seen as "nothing new, reject" - and if you make it A + B + C + D, only D is new, which can also encourage rejection because only a small percentage of your review is 'new'.
The other big issue - which draws on both these restrictions - is what the "point" of the paper might end up being? If its just "here's a bunch of papers", that is often seen as less interesting than if your review also systematically addresses interesting research questions. So if you, for instance, set the scope to be "challenges for industry adoption of between-vehicle communication technologies", your systematic review is more structured, it will be less likely to read as a paper-dump, and conveniently in your selection of papers you will have more criteria to look for that allows you to throw papers out as unrelated - narrowing down the papers you need to actually cover in depth. But if its just "lets talk about a bunch of papers that happen to be about this general topic", you are going to need a lot of work to explain what is "interesting", and a reader might need to put in more work to figure out why this is worthy of publication - which generally does not bode well for the project.
None of this results in a "yes, do it" or "no, don't do it". As always, the best two sources of guidance is the literature in your field (what are published surveys, how are they structured, what do they cover, where are they published) and senior researchers who may have been involved with surveys before and can give you first hand experience more relevant to your specific field.

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Where to put related works in a PhD thesis (Computer Science)
My thesis consists of an introduction, background, literature review and a chapter for every approach I proposed. The literature chapter contains a related work subsection for every approach I proposed. These related work subsections describe the structure of the area in general (for example: computer science consists of Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering... Hardware Engineering can be divided into ..etc). They also mention and describe the tools proposed to solve theses issues.
I thought it would be better if I move the part where I mention and describe the tools from the literature into their correspondent chapters. So I will add a related work section after introducing and evaluation every approach I proposed. This allows a theoretical evaluation and for the related work to be precise and specific. It also keeps the size of the chapters balanced to some extent.
My questions: do you recommend it? (I found PhD thesis  that did that) & what do you suggest I call the section where I just talk about the structure of the area not the tools? (is "overview of ... techniques", for example, a good title?).

Personally, I think what you are proposing makes better sense in your case than having a traditional separate literature review chapter. Moreover, arranging the theoretical background in close proximity to the relevant methods would probably make it easier to revise the thesis for journal article publication after you've defended the thesis. However, if you choose to do that, I recommend that your "Background" chapter have a subsection dedicated to discussing the broad literature that spans the general theme of your thesis without specifically focusing on any one theme.
That said, ultimately, you need to talk to your advisor and see what they are comfortable with. If your advisor prefers the traditional dedicated chapter, then you should go with that. Your advisor needs to be comfortable with your thesis structure, too, since that would enable them to be will be your advocate with other people, such as your committee members or outside evaluators, who might not be used to your non-traditional approach.

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Is it possible to change paper title after send back from reviewers for revising?
Me and my supervisor were written a paper on medical imaging as a part of my master thesis, we sent a paper to a journal for publishing, after a period of time the journal send us back the paper with some comments from each reviewer. In our perspective a number of questions from reviewers comes from a word "Novel" that we wrongly put it in a title. And I want to ask you professionals that is it possible to change the title? is it a good or bad idea? this will make our paper to be refused by reviewers or not?

This is a very straightforward question for experienced researchers (though not obvious for new researchers). Wasn't your supervisor able to tell you that the answer is clearly "Yes"?

In any case, well done on receiving a request for revision. That is a good sign because it means the editor thinks your article might be  publishable. Best wishes on getting the revision accepted!

It's normal to change titles during the review process, sometimes reviewers even ask for it explicitly.
If it's causing a problem or confusion, change the title.

I wouldn't say it's "normal" (it's uncommon), but it's certainly not abnormal either.

sometimes reviewers even ask for it explicitly --- I've actually done this. A few years ago I was reviewing a paper (what follows is made up; it was a pure mathematics paper) that I thought was a study for rivers in how much various aspects of the water flow near one side of the river can differ from the corresponding aspects of the water flow near the other side (this being based on the title and the abstract, both of which I provided suggested revisions), but in fact the paper was a study of these differences on the two sides of a line of fixed approach angle to a fixed side of the river.

@Allure I guess it's maybe more common in my experience than yours. Probably >25%, <50%, which I would consider pretty normal. There are lots of opinions about titles (should they contain conclusions or studies? should they be specific or brief?) that come out in review processes. Journals in some fields are also quite picky themselves, especially in medicine.

I would say yes it's possible as I have just had a paper accepted where I changed the title during review. Now the change wasn't huge and the referee had commented on the title (and I'm not submitting to medical journals). Like most things in a refering process, if you can justify it and the referee(s) accept the change you can get away with alot. It might get more complicated if you posted the paper on a preprint server beforehand (only in the sense people might mistake it as two papers, depending on the level of "change")


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Should I improve the article even the reviewers didn't point out?
A reviewer's comment:

some sections, such as A, are very short and they need to be expanded or removed; other sections such as B and C are very superficially developed

So I am wondering if I am supposed to revise section only A, B and C or any other sections with same problem?

I haven't read your paper, ofc, but this to me might also suggest you've created too many section headers, when you could do fine with less sections. That said, still take Buffy's answer to heart but something to consider.

The reviewer mentions "sections" (plural), giving A as an example. This seems to indicate they found others too short as well.
But it isn't the length, specifically, that is an issue but whether you say enough to support your arguments in those sections. A section can be long objectively, but still "too short". The opposite is also true of course.
But in your case, the reviewer seems to be asking for more generally, not just in section A. Back to work.
And the "or removed" also needs to be considered if some section(s) is not useful overall. Say more to make it more relevant or consider dropping it.

Hi Dr. Buffy, thanks for your reply! The whole comment is "Some sections, such as A, are very short and they need to be expanded or removed; other sections such as B and C are very superficially developed", so I am wondering if I am supposed to revise section only A, B and C or any other sections with same problem?

I would suggest a wholistic approach to the entire paper. And again, it isn't the length, itself, but the development of the arguments in those sections. Also consider which are the most important sections to the overall product.

The reviewer didn't say sections A, B and C are the only sections that need revision. They said there are many sections (with a plural) that need revision, and gave A, B, and C as examples. Examples aren't usually exhaustive, which means other sections also need revision.
So the answer is "yes, you should".


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Systematic Literature Review: enhance context in discussion
Currently I am writing a Systematic Literature Review. I am aware of the systematic approach. But do the papers also constrain my discussion? Am I allowed to widen the frame by including related facts and implications in the bigger context?

Yes, absolutely; you should not be constrained; you should definitely go beyond the literature. Note that when people say "systematic literature review", they almost always mean "systematic literature search". However, following the systematic literature search, you can use any synthesis approach you want.
It is certainly expected that you faithfully report what the literature says. However, this does not mean a mere summary of each article--that is not very useful; readers could simply read the abstracts of your list of articles if that's all they want. This summary should be organized in an intelligent way that leads readers into a big-picture view of the literature that they would not easily obtain just by reading randomly themselves.
Then, beyond this--and more directly in response to your question--not only should you not be constrained by the literature, but you would help your readers even more if you go beyond the literature and add your insights that go beyond the mere summation of the literature, but bring out points that could be seen only by bringing all the literature together.


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Can blogging about research results first affect your ability to publish them later?
There are the obvious worries about getting scooped (discussed here http://www.quora.com/When-is-it-wise-to-blog-or-talk-about-your-academic-research-work-before-you-submit-it-for-publication).
But I'm wondering if there are more subtle concerns. Could it hurt your chances of publishing in a venue that doesn't allow preprints?  Should I cite myself if I copy text?

It depends on the journal. For example, here is Nature's policy: http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html

I remember very clearly when an editor for Science was asked about whether or not they would publish work if it appeared in a blog post, the editor replied with "so long as it has no more than 70 likes, 20 share, or 30 re-tweets".
She was actually being satirical, and ended up having to restate that Science doesnt care so long as "the core scientific message" is novel in their publication.
Truth is, I hear a lot of stuff like this from journals claiming to be all about the dissemination of science. What i DONT hear is people who's work was rejected specifically because of a blog post. Probably because the rejection letter is the same old standard "Better luck next time." and the real reason is never known.
Long story short, if you want to keep publishers happy, do whatever you can to make the article valuable...

About your first question you should consult with the conference or journal about putting your content on preprint servers (e.g. Arxiv), the policy of different publishers might vary.
About your second question You should cite every content you copy, even the content you copy from your previous research and papers otherwise it would be a case plagiarism or self-plagiarism (copying your own content without citing properly).

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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How to address a military officer with Ph.D?
What is the proper way to address a person who is an office in the military (USA) who at the same time has a Ph.D.? Would it be Dr. General John Doe or General Dr. John Doe?

I would be surprised if either would cause offence.

According to Robert Hickey, military rank trumps academic achievement, so you would use the rank only.

Everything I've seen suggests that "General John Doe" without any "Dr." is correct (you've never heard of "General Doctor David Petraeus" right?); for example, military doctors are usually addressed using their rank, not as "Doctor." In part it just sounds clunky to try to use both titles.  Similarly at Virginia Military Academy (bizarrely, in my opinion) all of the faculty are officers in the Virginia state militia, and are listed on the website with military titles (http://www.vmi.edu/Content.aspx?id=4294974313), not with the title "Professor" or "Doctor."  I think "General John Doe, Ph.D." is more common, though discouraged in some sources I read.  I think it's hard to go wrong just addressing someone in the military by their rank.
EDIT: I should probably say that isn't to say that you never combine Doctor with another title:  "Herr Professor Doktor" is standard in Germany, (though I'm not allowed to call myself that, since I have a doctorate from the US) and "Reverend Doctor" (or even "Most/Right Reverend Doctor") are established titles, though more common in Britain than the US.  Just in the specific context of military titles in the US, it's not standard to mix them with other titles.

Your answer looks better than mine...

Yeah, I'm not sure I agree that double titles are just over the top ("Reverend Dr." or even "Right Reverend Dr." are established forms of address, whereas "General Doctor" isn't).

Thanks for the answer. I did a bit more research, and it seems that you are correct.

This seems to be correct. If you look, for example, at the US Military Academy faculty pages, the people who are photographed in uniform are listed with their military rank and the people who are photographed in civilian clothes are listed as "Dr."

I'm pretty sure I've been described (though not addressed) as "Professor Doktor" even though both my doctorate and my professorship are American. Maybe it's the "Herr" that was missing. (Shortly before my first grandchild was born, there was a family discussion of how she should call her grandparents; I suggested "Herr Professor Doktor Opa" but that didn't work out.)

@AndreasBlass Well, the person who described you that way might have been liable for a year in jail for that.  This article seems to suggest that things have been fixed now, though I had a recollection of hearing about this issue more recently: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/title-fight-us-academics-harassed-over-false-credentials-a-540459.html

@BenWebster: No, nothing would have happened to the person. In general, you can, and could, address anyone with any title you like. The critical point (also covered in the article) is if you pretend to have a certain degree yourself that you do not have (or if you otherwise get some direct benefit from pretending someone has that degree, e.g. by promising your customers they will be attended to by "Dr. ..." in exchange for booking the costly premium service). Other than that, you are, and were, under no obligation to be correctly informed about, or correctly represent, someone else's degree.

CPT John Smith, Ph.D.; MAJ James Dean, M.D.; or LTC John Doe, J.D. are more correct when addressing doctorate officers in writing.
Although this is true that Military rank usually comes before academic in most cases, there are some exceptions.
Doctors in the Medical Corps are often addressed as "doctor."  Many medical officers preferred to be called doctor as this title reflects their professional and client relationship instead of subordinate and superior.  In addition, JAG officers are sometime addressed using the title of "counselor."

in general the only time a rank and title are used together is with Chaplains. Formally it is Chaplain (Major) John Doe, and informally it is Chaplain Doe.


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Does assigning DOI numbers signal anything about the authenticity of a journal? Why do some journals not assign them?
I have seen few journals which are indexed in well known databases like Zentralblatt MATH, AMS Digital Mathematics, CiteFactor but still does not assign DOI numbers to published articles, what could be the reason? Is this a common thing ? Does DOI number add any value to authenticity of journal ?
Most importantly which purpose does this DOI number serve ?
I am asking this because I have heard if journal do not assign DOI number to its published articles then it could be low profile journal or even could be fake.
The similar question has been asked in Why do some papers not have a DOI?, but my query related to quality/authenticity of journal could not be resolved.
PS. My question is related to authenticity of journal "Computational Methods for Differential Equations" published by university of Tabriz, Iran.

One question per post, please.

For how to determine the quality of the journal: Check some of the papers that appear in the journal and see if they are good.

In cases of legitimate journals or papers, the lack of a DOI is becoming increasingly unusual, but it is not an indicator of authenticity. On the other hand, sometimes fraudsters or crackpots will argue a journal or paper is legitimate because DOIs are somehow mentioned, assigned, or involved.

DOI, by itself, certainly does not add "authenticity".
The Digital Object Identifier is, by design, meant to be a method of producing and providing a persistent actionable identifier to entities. To put it in plain English: the DOI is an effort to prevent link rot, and importantly, does so by not only providing a registry of the numbered items, but also providing a mechanism for accessing/retrieving those items. The Wikipedia Article on DOI also explains pretty well what it is for. Notice that DOIs can be had for many more than just journal articles. In science, a growing practice is to use DOI referring to datasets.
As to why a publisher may decide not to participate in the DOI scheme: for starters, it does cost money. This may have contributed to the correlation that sham publishers typically do not make use of the DOI service.

authors: AVANGARDIST ИСКУССТВОВЕД


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Advisor forcing to publish paper in high profile journal
One of my graduate students, doing their PhD in another university, is doing quite well. Recently, he told me that he is having a tussle with his supervisor on communication of his work to a specific journal. His supervisor insists he submit his research to a very high profile journal, but my student does not believe that his research work would be accepted by this journal. Side note: His supervisor does not have any publications in this high profile journal.
Now my question is that, how to deal with such situation?

If he insists, make the best paper you can, go ahead and submit. If it is indeed not good enough, it will be rejected.

Supervisor is actually insisting him to do work publishable in that journal. How he can expect his students to have publication in the journal in which he himself can not think of. Worst thing is that he himself is not that supportive in research.

I agree with @Davidmh. Go ahead and submit to that journal. There are two outcomes: (a) the paper gets accepted, implying that your student underestimates the quality of his own work or that he got lucky (both fine), or (b) the paper is rejected and the student will be able to submit to a more appropriate place without big arguments with his supervisor. Win-win.

"Supervisor is actually insisting him to do work publishable in that journal." - OK, that's a different problem than just insisting that the student submit a paper to that journal. I think you should clarify that in your question.

Don't see a problem with this.  What is the problem of aiming high?  Also, if that journal has many experienced researchers as you say, then it'll be a good chance to get some constructive feedback.  Just make sure the paper is of the highest quality possible; i.e., don't send them junk.

Supervisor is actually insisting him to do work publishable in that journal. Great, an advisor who's doing his job.

Besides time for review, the PhD student has nothing to lose if he submits to a leading journal in the field. If everyone would have this approach(aim for low), the quality of the work would be reduced.

Does this PhD student have any evidence that his intuition for what kind of journal a paper should be published in is correct?

In economics, when you send some paper to a high ranked journal, they probably give a very good referee reports, which is a good way to improve the paper and send it to a lower ranked journals.

@Fomite......PhD student already have three publication in high impact journals but advisor is insisting to have publication in that high profile journal so that he(advisor) can improve his standing in researchers community without doing anything. First he himself should prove his caliber by publishing in that high profile journal, then should expect from his students.

@Mskalsi I'm not sure what makes you think that it's an entirely selfish act.

@Waterseas..........that poor pal has spent almost close to 4.5 years in PhD and his degree his hanging just due this condition of advisor, he (advisor) is selfish as he had contributed very little to his(student) research.

A personal case where being realist would have given more: the bulk of the work I did in my PhD is unpublished as we aimed too high for the amount of work. I had to leave, the paper was never submitted. Two years later minor loose ends are still being tied up by the current postdoc in my former supervisor's lab when she has time.

"One of my graduate students..." I am curious to know how this is the case, since you have a question http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/68938/ referring to your advisor

@YemonChoi .....I am assistant professor for last ten years without PhD and now you would be curious to know how I could become Assistant professor without PhD. In our country only associate professor level needs Phd as eligibility condition. That student was my B.Tech graduate in 2006-2010 batch.

@YemonChoi .... My advisor is very junior to me academically except the PhD tag.

Most answers/comments seem to have the philosophy that "there is nothing to lose by submitting to the top journals, so go for it". I would like to offer a different perspective.
There are costs to every journal submission.

Time spent formatting the manuscript to fit the journal. This sometimes requires relatively minor changes such as formatting references, but might involve more significant effort such as adapting the length to fit a word limit, or altering the focus of the introduction. A lot of the very top journals have quite specific style requirements that are very different to other journals.
Time waiting for a response. At least if it is a desk reject, this will be quick. If it's a rejection after reviews, then as Bartosz points out, at least you will get some good feedback. But the wait can be important at certain stages in a scientific career. One paper can make a big difference to a grad student's CV.
Potential (but often very real) emotional cost of (possibly repeated) rejections.
Costs to the system. If everyone adopts a policy of always submitting to the highest journals, editors become swamped and even more likely just to reject on sight. (Yes, I know, it will still happen because of the Tragedy of the Commons).

These costs need to weighed against the potential benefits if the paper is accepted, which of course are large, but far from guaranteed in the case of high-ranking journals.
Therefore, I don't think it is as simple as saying "you might as well try, you've got nothing to lose". There comes a point where the chance of acceptance drops so low that it is not worth sinking the above costs into an effort that is very unlikely to succeed.
Notice that the costs listed above are much reduced or absent for the supervisor. Therefore, while there is little harm for the supervisor in aiming high to start with, the same is not necessarily true for the student. Therefore, it may well be worth getting some further opinions as to the chance of success for the submission. Ideally, try asking some other faculty members whom you know and trust to have a quick read of the manuscript and give their opinion. They may agree with the supervisor, in which case, great, go ahead and try! But it is worth asking around before putting in all that effort.
NOTE: This is not meant to sound negative. The answer for your friend may well be that he should give it a go. But I do think that there is a non-trivial decision to be made.

I think this answer is partially conflating the general issue of authors who submit to a succession of journals starting from the best one and working their way down, with the specific situation in the question. It is true that there are costs to longshot submissions and that they should be taken into account, but I don't see this as being very applicable to OP's friend's situation. As I explained in my answer, in this specific case there is every reason to think the best advice is for him to follow his advisor's suggestion, unless the adviser shows signs of being delusional.

@DanRomik That was my reason for highlighting that the supervisor has a different (albeit overlapping) set of interests to the student. Even with the best of intentions, their advice may be biased by the fact that for them, there is much less cost to be balanced against the long-shot benefit. I don't think there is much harm in getting an extra opinion or two that may be slightly more impartial.

@user2390246 yes, those are good points, and I liked your answer as well, I just thought most of it addressed a more general question than what OP was asking about.

It's always amusing when answers are chosen as correct based on bias.

Everyone should be so lucky to have an advisor who pushes them to excel and to aspire to the highest standards of achievement. Really, I don't see why your friend is complaining -- he should just go ahead and submit the paper to the high-profile journal.
Moreover, your friend's advisor, whether he published in the journal before or not, is considerably more qualified than your friend to judge the chances of the paper to be accepted to the journal. If the advisor thinks that's where the paper should be submitted, your friend would in all likelihood be foolish to disagree, especially since the worst that can happen is the paper will get rejected, probably sooner rather than later.
The only exception to this advice is in the bizarre situation in which the advisor is clearly delusional. In that case, your friend has much bigger problems and should probably look for a different advisor, not because of the small and self-correcting problem with the journal but because having an advisor who is so delusional and has such poor judgment does not bode well for your friend's eventual success in his research.

As others have noted, there is absolutely nothing wrong in aiming high when publishing papers (unless some exceptional situations with university deadlines etc.). When you get rejected - you can just try another journal.
When you do the other way around and get accepted for the first any low-profile journal you will never know if your work didn't deserve something better - and possibly you will regret that decision :)
Another advantage of trying high-profile journals first, is that even if you get rejected you will get great, constructive reviews, which are really worth the wait.

Well, you might not get reviews at all, you might get rejected by the editor. But if that's the case then at least it won't have cost you much time.

@user2390246 Not necessarily. A few months is probably minimal in my discipline and sometimes it is a rejection with no comments. A few months here and a few there add up pretty quickly, too.


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Does it make sense to do two PhDs? Sociolinguistics and History
I am currently enrolled in a PhD program in the discipline of Sociolinguistics. Even though I like my topic of research and I am doing quite well, I cannot get over the fact that the discipline that I am really passionate about is History. I wrote my Master's Thesis in History and ended with an excellent grade. However, I could not get a funded PhD position.
It is not that I don't like my current field, I do like it, but I took the position mostly because it was fully funded and it seemed like a very good opportunity. Also, taking this position saved me from being deported from Germany as I am a non EU citizen and my visa was about to expire. When I am working on my project, I enjoy it, but cannot help but thinking that I would have been happier if I was researching something that I am truly passionate about. That's why I was wondering if it would make sense to pursue a PhD in History when I get this first doctoral degree. Would that make sense? Would I be even admitted to another program?

Possible duplicate: is doing two PhDs a good path?. See also: Why is having multiple PhDs frowned upon?

You don't say anything about long term goals. Is it just that you are comfortable being a student? Three doctorates? Twenty? Regret for what might have been is common, of course.

I'd like to certainly pursue an academic career and if possible conduct research in the field of History rather than in Sociolinguistics.

Then why bother to complete the current degree? You are just putting off your future. Find a different program, perhaps in a different place.

Let me suggest, pretty strongly, that if it is history that you see as your future, then find a way to study history. Perhaps you can do this with a local change, but it might require a move.
If you are very close to finishing the current degree (writing the dissertation) then I'd suggest differently and you just get it done. You can then evaluate your best path forward, whatever the field.
The purpose of a doctorate is to give you some guided practice in research in some narrow area of some field. The process of research between (some) fields is narrow enough that you don't need to go through the entire process again.
My doctorate is in math, but I switched to CS due to a poor market for mathematicians. I didn't require a different degree, but I did get some formal instruction, in a summer program run by some top people in CS. What I needed was the background, not the research process, even though CS can differ quite a lot from math.
The trick for the second option is to get a suitable job, in whichever field and to get some "space" to refocus your career.
But I doubt that a second doctorate would be the short path and suggest your efforts would be better spent elswhere. Even collaboration with historians by a linguist might be an option to get some papers done and build a reputation.

+1. I would just add to make sure you do a realistic assessment of what your options will be post-PhD. As far as I know, the demand for historians and socio-linguists is not exactly high, so I would want to seriously consider my options before pursuing formal studies in either field (let alone both).


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Is it OK to ask the conference chair to waive the registration fee?
I recently got one of my papers accepted at an international semiconductor conference. I am the solo author (no mentor, no coauthor) and am not affiliated with any school or company currently (I will start my PhD this fall). Understandably, I have no funding to attend or even register for the conference.
I really want to attend the conference as I am very proud of my work. In addition, I really want to experience first-hand if solo papers are worth it. Should I ask the conference chair to waive the registration fee? Is it worthwhile?

As others have said, you can always ask. What others haven't said is Congratulations! Doing all this pre-PhD is extremely impressive, and you should be very proud. || @Trunk mentions speaking with the department you'll do your PhD at. This is likely the best option. This can even be acknowledged on a slide in your talk somewhere: "to start PhD at Amazing University this Fall, thanks to them for funding my conference fees"

You can always ask. What is the worst that can happen if you politely explain your situation and your lack of funding? They say no. It is unlikely that such a request would lead to them blacklisting you from future conferences.
So go ahead and ask but be nice and not entitled about it and be prepared for a no. Maybe they offer to switch to a poster presentation instead.

And how would a switch to a poster presentation help the problem of not having enough money to register and travel to the conference?

@wimi At some conferences, poster presentations can also be without attendance.

You may also word your request differently depending on whether you are planning to attend the conference even without the fee waived, or whether you are considering to withdraw the paper and/or not attend the conference if you do not get a waiver. (Of course, though, stating this candidly may affect the answer you get.)

At some conferences, poster presentations can also be without attendance. - that still isn't really what OP wishes: I really want to attend the conference as I am very proud of my work plus I really want to experience first hand if solo papers are worth it.

@tevemadar I understand that this is not what OP whishes, but without funds they might have to settle for the next best option even though that is not what they want. You can wish a lot of things, but if you lack the means or circumstances to make them happen, those wished might not come true.

@wimi If travel cost if prohibitive, why don't just ask to present remotely (although it may not count as "first-hand experience")?

You can always ask.
If it is a large conference with other funding sources or even an endowment, they might look at this request favorably. You would be the one in a million person to have work good enough to be accepted at a prestigious conference and might deserve an exception.
If it is a small non-predatory conference, you will have some explaining to do. By submitting a paper, you agreed to play by the rules. This means paying a registration fee, showing up, and presenting your paper. A smaller IEEE conference for instance has to break at least even (after paying a fee to IEEE to guarantee the expenses of the conference). A venue needs to be rented, coffee and tea provided, publication costs met, etc. You are now telling them that you are not keeping up your part, but if they are nice and do not complain by waiving the registration fee, you will present your paper. This is just like a kid who does not have the money for the circus, but still wants to see the elephant. I am sorry if I am a bit harsh on you, but conference organization is a hard business usually done by volunteers. Not playing by the rules creates real headaches. Now, there is a good chance that this is not a real conference (because papers by people like you are usually not publishable) in which case it does not matter.

What does "because papers by people like you are usually not publishable" mean?

Because it is very difficult to learn how to obtain good results and publish them in isolation. One needs to know the field rather well, since papers are expected to have a related work section. One needs to know what the questions in the field are. ... If OP has a good result publishable in a first class conference under these circumstances, then someone needs to pick OP up and make sure that OP gets the education because OP would be a rare impressive raw talent.

"By submitting a paper, you agreed to play by the rules. This means paying a registration fee": note that, in most conferences I know, the amount of the conference fee is not at all known at the time when authors submit papers, and often the requirement to pay the fee is not even made explicit. If author now discovers that they should pay a fee which is higher than they expected, I find it understandable that they ask for a waiver and/or withdraw their paper if they cannot cover it.

Registration fees at honest conferences are based on the costs and are therefore somewhat predictable, especially since conferences tend to follow the same procedures. OT could be forgiven for not knowing how conferences work, but is still responsible. German law has the unsolvable "wine auction" case where someone bought a bunch of wines unknowingly. Did OT enter a contract or not? Again, if this is a small conference, OT has put the organizers in a pickle.

Strictly speaking OP didn't say they won't go if the registration fee is not waived. They just want it to be. If the registration fee is not waived, perhaps they can still find another way to pay it, it will just be a hardship. It's not unheard of for financial aid to be available for conference-related expenses, and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask in this case.

@a3nm In all the recent conferences I recall, there's a check box statement on submission promising that at least one author will attend if accepted. Detailed  policies can be found on the web.

@user71659 I am not sure that there is any legal value, or moral imperative, attached to making people promise, just by ticking a checkbox, that they will attend an event and pay a registration fee which is not yet disclosed.

@GoodDeeds Its an artificial barrier of entry for Academia. Partly to filter out cranks, partly to assist in maintaining robust scientific practices, partly for vanity. Good results and good publication of said results are not the same though, and the skills involved in making the results a good publication are rarely, if ever, overlapping with the skills involved in obtaining the good results. Good results can be pulled from an anonymous 4chan post, which can then later be formatted into a publication. The defining example of this: https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem

Many conferences have sponsors from the industry, and some sponsors may want to pay for OP. If OP asks the organizers, they may connect OP to these sponsors.

Only big conferences easily attract sponsors.

@a3nm, there in fact could be legal significance to checking the box, inasmuch as it could be interpreted as an agreement to attend in the event that the paper is accepted being part of a contract between the submitter and the organizers.  Not that it would be worthwhile for the organizers to sue violators.  But even if it did not rise to the level of a contract, checking the box absolutely conveys an uncoerced, conditional agreement to attend.  The organizers commit resources based on that agreement, and fulfilling it is a moral duty.

Besides asking only for a discount, you could offer to help out the conference organizers in some way.
I once visited a IEEE conference in Italy for free in exchange for helping out at the conference. I worked at the registration desk, handed out conference bags. During the conference was babysitting the conference laptop, pointer and beamer in some rooms during some sessions, and was free to visit other sessions about 50% of the time. Before and after there was some carrying of stuff (poster-walls, plants flags, beamers). It was definitely worth it for me, i probably got to know more people at that conference than any other conference i visited. But i still had to pay for the travel and sleeping expenses myself.

As others pointed out, it is OK to ask. But they draw a bleak portrait. Many conferences reserve at least a few seats for special cases where the registration fee could be waived. Generally, these are reserved for extreme cases, like disability or being affected by war. However, not having a financial source could be acceptable depending on the circumstances.


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Is it possible to get back into academic research after being dropped due to funding problems from 6 year postdoc?
Due to funding issues, I was dropped as a postdoctoral researcher with a 2 week notice. Due to seniority (6+ years) and funding climate it has been exceedingly hard to find a position within academia in the US. I was good at research. I have publications. I have skills. But I am "old" and where it was easy to get a postdoc, now it is difficult to find anything at all. I do not have an institution, so that makes garnering funding in the US very difficult, and I am not competitive with the other candidates for Assistant Prof positions.  Most "training" programs will not take anyone more than 5+ years out of PhD. I just want to continue my research, now nowhere to do it. I have seen "Research Assistant Prof positions" and other non-tenure track opportunities but these are few and far between, I wonder if that means the competition is as fierce or worse than for TT positions. I have been looking for positions for almost a year now...and that cannot look good. Is this just a pipe dream to continue in academia and research? Any recommendations as to how to get back in?

You haven't said what your field is.  That might be important in answering this question.

Life Sciences- Neuroscience. As I understand there is an overabundance of us already for positions.

I think that you need to decide whether what you really want is to be in research or to be in academia.
It sounds to me like you right now you are considering only positions at major research universities.  With respect to that, you are indeed in a very bad position: competition is fierce, funding is getting tighter, and if you don't already have a network of people interested in you at this stage in your career, you are likely to find it difficult to secure a position of this sort.
There is, however, a much larger universe of possibilities if you really want academia or you really want research.

If you really want to stay in research, there are often a much larger number of positions in various flavors of government, non-profit, and industrial research, including many that are very similar to academia.  In some fields, the amount of cutting-edge research being done outside of academia is actually much larger than the amount being done inside of academia, if one was to count up the whole bizarre ecosystem of startups, foundations, consultancies, pilot projects, little-known sub-departments in large companies, etc.  Life is typically somewhat less stable in this world than with tenure, but likely no worse than you have known as a postdoc and in many cases much better.  By your user ID and 6-year postdoc (ouch!), I'm guessing you're in a biomedical field, and this is definitely the case for much of biomedical research.
If, on the other hand, you really want to stay in academia, there are a much larger number of positions at institutions whose mission is primarily educational. A key challenge there will be if you have not been doing any teaching at all as a postdoc, but you'll likely be quite competitive in terms of your intellectual credentials.

So yes, your dream of going directly from postdoc to tenure track is likely not going to happen, just based on the numbers and how you describe your current status.  If you step into the demi-monde world at the borders of academia, however, you can likely find a path to continue your research and, if it is fruitful, may even find yourself coming back into traditional academia through a side door.


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How to find the exact category of a published article in a multiple-category journal?
I need to find the quartile of a journal(Advances in Space Research) in the specific year that my article was published. I can reach the journal metrics on Scopus and see the quartiles and details. However, the problem is that since 2018, the journal started to list six categories and our article is actually an interdisciplinary study, which falls into three categories at the same time. In that article, we are reporting our studies about some ionospheric measurements. So the article fits in atmospheric science, space and planetary science, and general earth and space science category. According to Scopus, the journal has different rankings/quartiles in all these categories. As the ionosphere is part of the atmosphere, I feel the study is closer to atmospheric science and I am listing it as in the atmospheric sciences category, but I can not be sure if this is correct. The journal web page does not show which category your article belongs to, either. So, does anybody know of a way to tell the exact category of an article? I would greatly appreciate it.

What does it mean for a journal to have a "quartile"?

None of this matters intrinsically or objectively: what it means to be in a quartile, what it means to be in a given field, etc, are all imposed subjective measures.
You say you "need to find the quartile" but I very much doubt you need to do this for your own purpose. Rather, perhaps someone has requested that you do this, and in that case, what is most important if you want to make that someone happy is that you provide them information that they are satisfied with. If they have determined that "quartile as defined by Scopus" is the measure they care about, then you have that part of the puzzle solved. The other part is "quartile of what category", so you'll have to either A) Use guidance provided by the person/organization requesting the information in the first place, or B) Use your best judgment of what you think is right or think you can justify if they question your choice. You might find it easier to justify a particular field if the journal organizes papers by field and placed yours in one of these categories, but not all interdisciplinary journals will do such a thing.
In summary, unless you have more specific guidance about how to do this, the category is the category you feel fits best and that you feel you can best justify.


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Are there differences between SM, MS, MSc, MSci degrees?
I have a Master of Science degree from the EECS department at MIT. From the website it is pretty clear they call it an SM degree. I think many US universities refer to a Master of Science degree as an MS degree. My UK department has offered for a long time a program that leads to a Master of Science degree that we call the MSc program, but next year we are introducing an MSci degree. Do the different abbreviations officially mean something? Is it dishonest to refer to my SM as an MSc in the UK? If not, is it helpful?

I think that SM might actually refer to the program name, not to be confused with something else that might have an MS program name. It is referred to as an MS degree on the LGO page

i.e. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/academic/msms/ Management Studies

While all these degrees fall under the category of Master of Science there are technical differences in the course content. In general you should always refer to your degree by its actual title/abbreviation. If you think someone might not know what an abbreviation is e.g. on your CV or something, you could add a brief note such as MS (US Master's) but I'm not sure how useful this really is. Google has all this information readily available.
For the particular degrees you list:

I've no idea if there is a difference between an SM and MS, but I'm not in the US.
A US MS is generally two years compared to the UK MSc's one. I also the impression that the MS is more research focused, although that might just be my view of things.
An MSci is a 4 year combined bachelors and masters that is increasingly popular in the UK. Generally students only do a single research project/dissertation in their 4th year which is slightly shorter than an equivalent project for MSc students. So having an Msci is not exactly equivalent to an MSc.
This is before you get to some of the more obscure things such as MRes which some UK students do. These are still broadly at Masters level but have different focuses to the course.

Just to be clear, I would consider it somewhat dishonest to translated the abbreviation of your degree.

Downvoted. Every country is different, and at least in the US, every university is different. There really is no way to tell what the degree requirements are from the abbreviation.

If someone says "Master of Science", is that MS, MSc, MSci, or SM?

There is no difference: M.S., M.Sc., and S.M. all mean Master of Science.  The difference for S.M. is that it is in Latin: scientiae magister.
I have no idea whether it will actually help anybody's confusion to translate back to MS, but there is certainly no question of honesty.  For anybody with a Ph.D., however, I expect it will not make the least shred of difference, as a Ph.D. supersedes it quite effectively.

Harvard University uses SM for its Master of Science degrees.  Please see https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/06/harvard-launches-data-science-masters-degree-program.


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What are the reasons for journals to have a policy against publishing material available as a preprint?
As it can be appreciated from this list of journals with varying preprint policies, certain journals consider a preprint to be "prior publication". In other fields like Chemistry, there is a strong policy against preprints.
I'm curious about those reasons, if there are other reasons, and if they hold weight.

This question probably borders the "open-ended" question. I would love suggestions on how to narrow downn the scope.

Other than the obvious reason: if they can ensure the journal is the only way to read the paper, they will get more subscriptions?

@NateEldredge, to this, I will attest is true. However, essentially the entire field of Chemistry believes in this philosophy and they do have some philosophical differences.

@cbeleites: Let me rephrase.  The journal may believe that the fewer alternative ways there are to read the articles, the more subscriptions they will get.

@NateEldredge: for sure this seems to be a valid reason. But does it actually work out? IMHO they cannot ensure this is the only way to read the paper: there are inter-library networks, you know your colleagues, email the authors (which are usually allowed to share their manuscripts with colleagues), in some legislations there are rights to share that the author will always retain, etc. My guess is that a large number of these subscriptions is still there by inertia from the paper-journal times. For the electronic subscriptions I see a movement towards e.g. nation-wide access. ...

... And I notice that the publishers change what they claim to be their contribution (that you pay for). E.g.  "Elsevier guarantees each PJA [published journal article]’s authenticity, we work with others (e.g. national libraries) to preserve them for posterity and in perpetuity, and we invest to drive their usage."

@NateEldredge: ... or that they at least hope to be able to convince people that it is this way - even if they know very well that it doesn't work out... ;-)

the entire field of Chemistry believes in this philosophy — [citation needed]  Do most individual chemists actually believe this, or do they merely accept it?

A a chemist, I'm very well aware of this.
Here's the ACS Journal Editors' Policy on Preprints' point of view about the disadvantages of preprint servers:

The disadvantages of preprint servers include: the potential for flooding the literature with trivial and repetitious publications, thus making extraction of reliable and valuable information more difficult; absence of peer review; possible premature disclosure with inadequate experimental details or supporting data; premature claims of priority; potential lack of proper references and credit to prior work; abuse of multiple revisions or updates; possible lack of duration and long term archiving.

Personally, I find the two concerns about

"premature claims of priority" and
"abuse of multiple revisions or updates"

the most relevant points.

"flooding literature with trivial publications" is IMHO an issue with and without preprint servers,
"repetitious publications" for me fall into the same category, as do
"inadequate experimental details or supporting data".
"absence of peer review" is clearly visible with papers from preprint servers - which is IMHO an advantage over journals where the peer review is uncritical.
"long term archiving" depends IMHO more on the responsible organization behind the server (I'm not any more concerned that arXiv could shut down than e.g. Langmuir, Analyst or Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry)

There have been "experiments" with preprint servers for chemistry some 10 years ago [1] but AFAIK they did not develop the momentum e.g. arXiv has, and they seem to have died meanwhile.
See also: Cecelia Brown: The Role of Electronic Preprints in Chemical
Communication: Analysis of Citation, Usage, and Acceptance in the Journal Literature, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54.5 (2003): 362-371.
(the discussed server seems to be down - or at least I can't get a response).

Personal point of view on the problem
The possibility to be able to publish a manuscript on a preprint server before submitting it to a journal is not as imortant for me personally as the possibility to make the final contents of the paper publicly accessible.
Thus I can live quite well with not being allowed to submit manuscripts that are already available on preprint servers as long as I'm allowed to also publish the manuscript (preferrably the final version after peer-review) after I submitted it to the journal.

either at a preprint server (arXiv), or
on institutional, personal or project web pages
(preferrably both, of course)

One key issue to keep in mind when comparing different fields is the scale of money involved.  For example, according to their financial statement, in 2012 the American Chemical Society received $421 million in revenue for electronic services, including both journals and the Chemical Abstracts Service.  That's a staggering amount of money for a scholarly society.  (For comparison, the American Mathematical Society's 2011 revenue from Math Reviews and journals was $15.5 million.)  The ACS is the gatekeeper for publications and data that are worth a fortune to industry, so they have a powerful incentive to maintain that control.  It's no coincidence that they are much less friendly towards open access, the arXiv, etc. than corresponding groups in mathematics or physics are.

This sounded plausible at first. But I realized that IEEE, which publishes 30% of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, is not unfriendly towards open access or arXiv. If anything, they promote OA. As for arXiv, IEEE Information Society even encourages use of it at the time of submission. Other IEEE societies might have similar policies about arXiv. Is there some supporting evidence for your claim that it is no coincidence that they are much less friendly towards open access, arXiv, etc.? I think this might just be a coincidence.

I think the Information Theory Society is far more arXiv-friendly than the rest of the IEEE, but financially the IEEE is much more like the AMS than the ACS if normalized for membership size.  For example, publication and online services revenue per member: $421 million/163000 = $2600/member for ACS, $132 million/425000 = $310/member for IEEE, and $15.5 million/30000 = $520/member for AMS.  I certainly don't think the finances determine everything, and it's not clear how to interpret them anyway (total size, normalized per member, etc.), but I think it's unlikely to be a total coincidence.

I see. I don't know if the normalization makes sense in this context. But that may have something to do with it. Either way, what I asked wasn't if my observation on IEEE was correct. I wanted to know if your claim was based on fact (e.g., ACS's official statement that they're against arXiv for financial reasons, which I don't think is necessarily illogical or obviously unethical) or it was your speculation. If it was your speculation, that's fine. It does make sense. If there is a problem, I'd say it might be interpreted as a rude speculation that ACS is not entirely honest about the reasons.

It's speculation on my part.

Note however that this experiment of running a chemistry preprint server was actually initiated at an ACS meeting. I don't know what it died of (probably it wasn't widely used - I've never heard of it before I came across it yesterday) and I don't know how separate ACS publishing and ACS as a scientific society are, but my guess is that ACS publishing is still a branch of the ACS, so a political decision to go towards preprints would affect ACS as journal publisher. So I'd say that it probably also reflects a standpoint of the scientific society (at least in not being a pressing issue)...

... Note also that ACS journals are more restrictive here than Elsevier's or Springer's policies for chemistry journals. - Which are possibly more independent of the politics of scientific societies (although some of their  journals are the official journals of some societies). And of course, they may have been moved by pressure from more preprint-friendly sciences like mathematics.

There are commercial reasons for journals to be the only place where the article can be obtained. (advertising on the site or in the print journal). So simply violating their policy (if stated clearly) is one valid rejection reason.
(I personally disagree with this reason but such is life)

Interesting point.  I'm in mathematics, and I can't think of any  of our research journals  that carry advertising.  (I'm not sure this is a principled stand, so much as that I can't imagine it being worth anyone's while to buy such ads.)

In chemistry there may be ads in the printed journal. However, nowadays most of the papers are used in the electronic version, and I haven't come across ads there.

Taking at look at JACS, http://pubs.acs.org/journal/jacsat, I can see some ads even there.

As said in comment, one reason not to allow preprint publication alongside journal publication is to preserve the incentives to subscribe. To add a note to this point, let me remark that most of the preprint-friendly publishers (this adjective includes Elsevier and Springer: they don't do everything wrong) do not allow the final journal-template version of the paper to be deposited in an open repository. In other words, most publishers do forbid open distribution of published papers in some way, they draw the line at different points. Of course, drawing the line after or before the preprint version of the article makes the most important difference.
Another reason in some field, alluded to in the question, is a way to understand the pretty general policy that journals' goal is to publish novel publications. In all fields, this notably means that you are not allowed to submit to a journal a paper that has already been published. In some fields, notably humanities fields (at least in France) this extends to journal refusing to publish articles already available as preprint. As far as  understand, preprints are then really seen as publications, in the sense that they are no more novel. Of course, they are not considered as publications in the same way than journal articles in CVs...
Concerning the weight of these reason, it feels to me like tradition has a lot to do with it. Some tradition are easier to sustain in some fields than others; e.g. Chemistry can ask both reader-side for subscription charges and author-side for pages or color figure charges, as the field has some money notably due to its experimental nature; such tradition would be more difficult to sustain in humanities where money is much scarcer. As another example, it might be that the strong weight of book publishing in humanities is related to this "preprint is prior publication" point of view: it is more common for publisher not to allow books to be made available, and a field where books bear at least as much importance as article for idea dissemination seems more likely to adopt the same policy for articles.


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What does "awaiting reviewer reply" mean?
What does "awaiting reviewer reply" mean? Is it same as "under review" and "awaiting reviewer scores"?"

It means reviewers have been invited but have not responded to the invitation.
It's not necessarily the same as 'under review' and 'awaiting reviewer scores'. The latter is a clear term that means reviewers have agreed to review the article, but have not provided a report yet. The former is a vague term that could mean anything: reviewer has been invited, reviewer has agreed to review, maybe even reviewer has submitted a review but there're other reviewers who have not yet completed their reviews.
In any case, there's nothing to do except wait.

In the first sentence, "It means" should rather read. "It can mean, for instance, that"

For your purposes as an author, I would recommend regarding it as effectively the same.  There are a lot of different journal reviewing systems out there, and they use varying (and sometimes unclear) language.  I thus recommend against trying to parse the language too carefully.  What's clear here is that the peer review process is in progress and you can't really do anything but wait, whatever nuance the system might be telling you about the ongoing interactions between handling editor and reviewers.
You may also find this description of a typical journal workflow useful in helping to understand the major stages and decision points.


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What should a student do, when a professor delays submitting his letter of recommendation?
I'm applying to Stanford, which requires 2 letters of recommendation from teachers, due in 2 days.
Both teachers have known about this since mid-September, but one of them hasn't submitted his letter.  I've asked him, and he tells me that he has one prepared, but he hasn't submitted it yet.
I can't add a third letter that would qualify because of the way that the common application works.
Should I wait for the deadline to pass, hoping that he turns his letter in at the last minute?
Or should I ask someone else to write a letter in his place?
I'm mainly considering the first option, because I have no reason not to trust him, but I'm not sure what will happen if he doesn't pull through.
Turns out that they do accept letters of recommendation after the deadline, so long as the application is in on time.

Have you tried to drop by his office? If you are out of city do you know someone who can approach him? Also, do you know what will happen to the applications missing letter of recommendation after the deadline?

Gently remind him of the deadline.  (I, too, have one that's due tomorrow.)

@BobBrown That's what I did.  I posted here to see if anybody had good reason for me to do something else.

Politely and very gently remind the professor that the letter of recommendation is due. That's really all you can do. If your professors says they will submit it on time, try to believe them.
As you have found out after posting the question, to the extent that it doesn't hold up other parts of their process, people on admissions committees understand that your flakey letter writers don't mean that you are flakey and will usually do what they can to accept or consider late letters. Often, departments will remind students or letter writers that their letters are missing, at, or even after, a deadline.

Prior to the application deadline I would send an email along these lines (taken from Cindy Au on Quora):

Dear Professor [Professor's name],
The deadline for submitting letter of recommendation for [name of
  graduate program/ fellowship] is quickly approaching. I would like to
  inquire if there is still any document I can supply to make your
  writing easier.
I understand that this is a very hectic time in the school year and
  thus can't thank you enough for your time and support.
Respectfully yours,

You can also "accidentally" try to run across the teacher around his/her lab or class location, or simply drop by his/her office, but it really depends on teacher's style as some might be a bit annoyed. For most the email should be enough. Academics are used to deadlines (and last-minute submissions).
When I was applying for grad schools I applied for a fellowship whose deadline was 15 days before grad schools' deadlines, so that gave me two weeks of safety (I didn't care about the fellowship as it was conditioned on me returning to my home country after the PhD), but anyway if you trust a professor enough to write a recommendation letter for you, you can also trust that he will submit on time.

There's sort of an unspoken rule that writers will not always get letters in on time and letters are frequently accepted late. But late acceptance usually depends on how prestigious the thing you're applying to is. Your case is iffy. The general rule is to write early and often: Two months, one month, two weeks, one week, two days, day of, and shameful "you're late email" and a follow up with the program about whether they're still accept your letter. The place you're applying to will also, often, send reminder emails to the writer.