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How to formally report database literature search results?
Years ago, I seen an interesting article that made reference to database search results. The author run a few queries through PubMed and reported on the number of records. This was a neat introduction to the wider discussion on the state of the scholarship in the given field. I'm interested in doing something similar. I would appreciate if someone could point me to out to papers or notes on how such findings should be reported. For example let's say that there is x amount of articles on Term A and y amount of articles on Term B. Consequently, the one could assert something on the lines:

Contrary to common expectations, it seems that relatively little is published on Term A in relation to the Term B. For example, both terms appear only on n occasions in the Database D.

I'm interested in how to state such results in a non-confusing manner, in particular I would like to know:

Where and how would it be appropriate to search the nature of the query
Presumably, the date when the query was applied should be stated as well?
Should the reference be introduced to the bibliography? If so I would be grateful for sample entry in APA or any other common style

This sort of thing is pretty standard when it comes to meta-analyses, since each begins with a search for relevant studies. Generally, descriptions of the search query and its results are included in the methodology section of a paper; in addition to including the keywords used in the search (and, preferably, the reasoning for their inclusion), the start and end dates of the search should, as you mentioned, be noted. A diagram may also be helpful for readers to indicate the way in which you selected studies for analysis from the initial pool of results, and the languages in which the studies you assessed were written.
There are many papers that demonstrate this; as an example, "Psychosocial factors and chronic spontaneous urticaria: a systematic review" published in Allergy states the following:

We first conducted a search of the PubMed and OVID/Medline databases
  using the keywords ‘urticaria’, ‘chronic urticaria’, ‘chronic
  spontaneous urticaria’ – given that the definition of CSU was not
  clearly established in early studies, we also included more general
  terminology such as urticaria and chronic urticaria, but excluded
  articles clearly assessing physical or acute urticaria –
  ‘psychopathology’, ‘stress’, ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’ ‘life events’ and
  ‘axis I’ and ‘axis II’, including full-text accessible articles in
  English, French and Spanish. We then performed a meta-analysis that
  included all these studies (see Fig. 1) from 1 January 1935 to 1
  January
  2012. After two reviewers (M.B.S. and I.B.) independently evaluated all potentially relevant studies, we conducted statistical analyses
  using Stata® version 12 (StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA).
  Methodological quality of included studies In order to assess the
  quality of the aforementioned studies, we employed a standardized
  measure specifically tailored to this systematic review, based on the
  Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) (8). This approach included the appraisal
  of external and internal validity, as well as biases common to
  observational studies specific to CSU and psychosocial factors. The
  independent reviewers mentioned above evaluated the study quality
  separately and resolved the differences in opinion by consulting a
  third reviewer (A.R.) (Table 1).

To sum up:

Databases searched
Search terms used (potentially alongside their justifications)
Dates of publication included in search
A diagram which explains how you winnowed these studies down to the relevant ones (and a table for the ones you decided to include in your paper)
As a bonus, if multiple authors are responsible for assessing studies for inclusion in your paper, include how these decisions were made/conflicts resolved.

I've bolded some of these ideas in the paragraph above to give yo a good idea of how this works.

Thanks, is it in a good practice to report the  number of returned results? I'm particularly interested in highlighting that certain terms occur more/less often in publications than other.

Yes, in that case you would certainly want to report the number of returned results.


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What should I do to make it to a top-ranked graduate program given my current situation?
I am from an elite non-IIT school in India (one of BITS Pilani/IIIT Hyderabad/NSIT/DTU). I've just finished my third year, and after taking courses from AI and ML related fields, I realized I am actually interested in the field, and would like to get deeper into one of the subareas of applied ML. I have also identified the professors I would like to work with.
However, there's a caveat; I have a 7 point CGPA (on a scale of 10), mostly because of my youthful immaturity during the initial years of my undergraduate education. I realize that this might not be an ideal justification to bad grades, but this unfortunately is the truth. I also realize that this might very well be a red-flag on my admission to a prestigious PhD program.
I have been working on some projects on my topic of interest, hoping to cover up my grades with some project experience, though none them have produced publishable results yet. Have I totally blew my chances of getting into a top-ranked PhD program? Is there any way I can still fix my chances of getting a good PhD admit?
PS: My current project advisor is not so well-known a researcher that his recommendation will get me through a highly selective admission committee.

While getting into a top program would definitely be great, it is not a necessary condition to become a top researcher. As an example in a relevant context, consider Prof. Yoshua Bengio, a superstar scientist in the fields of deep learning, AI and ML, in general. He graduated (both Master's and Ph.D.) from McGill University, which is certainly not a bad university on a global scale (#44 overall, per US News Best Global Universities Rankings). However, in the Computer Science rankings, McGill score places that fine institution at a not-that-impressive #91 (link). So, this researcher with a worldwide professional brand not only graduated from McGill, but also continues to work there, producing extremely exciting and important scientific results. What are the conclusions from this example (and there are many similar cases of top professionals, graduating from non-top schools)?
Firstly, don't pay too much attention to any rankings. Secondly, the quality of education in an institution, while somewhat important, doesn't play a critical role in one's future professional career. I firmly believe in that, ultimately, it is up to an individual (that is, you) how one will build your research or other professional career and whether one will excel in it or not so much.

There are always rare exceptions to a generalization...

@user124384 Yes, rare exceptions do exist along with generalizations. However, as well there are examples that illustrate a potential trend or support an argument that might or might not be true. To generalize, solid reproducible and replicable studies are required and I'm not familiar with any that have explored correlation (let alone causation) in this context.

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How do I turn down an internship offer by a professor because I have a better offer in a corporate research lab?
I applied to several corporate research labs for internships. Seeing no progress on my application, I emailed a professor in a top university asking for an internship. He was impressed by my work and agreed to accept me. Now I got an offer from a top corporate lab in my area of research. How do I politely decline the professor's offer, given that I might want to do a PhD with him in future?

Just send her/him a polite e-mail saying that although you were/are very much looking forward to working with her/him, you are taking another offer right now, but wish to stay in touch:

Dear Prof. X, I am very much looking forward to working with you.  However, at this time I have also received a placement offer at company Y, and I will go there.  I hope we can work together in the future.
Best regards,
Firstname  Lastname.

Or something similar.  If you are polite and honest, you should be fine.

won't he be angry on why did I even apply to work with him if I was already expecting another offer?

There's no reason to be mad. It's normal to apply to several places.

I would avoid this sentence: "I am very much looking forward to work with you" as it starts off the email as if you will accept.
I would say something like
"Dear Prof. X, Thank you for your replies, your work looks very exciting, however, I have received a placement offer... "

@Rohit: Not as long as you were clear and honest with the professor. If you did something like clearly accept his offer, then back out of it, yes, he may be angry.

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Accepting a PhD offer from my tutor's/adviser's "rival"?
Last year, when planning my academic future, I contacted a research group at my university, because I was interested in doing my Master's thesis in their field. One of the professors replied a couple of days later, and offered me a meeting. After said meeting, I accepted the proposed project, and have been working on it since. A few days after accepting the project I received another reply to my initial mail, from another professor in the group, which turned out to be one of my teachers in a course I had a few months after. I stayed with the first professor and project.
So fast-forward to present day: I am finishing up my Master's thesis, and interested in pursuing a PhD. I have not talked about it with my current adviser, and he hasn't offered me any projects (he is actually going to MIT in June, for a sabbatical, so he will be absent for a year). A couple of days ago, while talking with the second professor, he offered me a PhD scholarship/fellowship (I do not know the right word). The precise field of research has not yet been decided, because it depends heavily on government funding (but the general area of research is of interest to me). I have recently learned that said professor is actually a sort of "rival" to my current adviser (they have had projects from rival companies, and had a "competition" over an academic position).
I do not know whether to accept or not. I like the offer and the professor, but I would be interested in staying in the research group after completing my PhD, and I think it might offend my current adviser and cause tension.
Is it OK to accept said offer right now (telling my adviser, of course)?

I think that the correct answer is: it depends.
Theoretically, you should be able to accept the offer and tell your current adviser right away. However, practice and theory do not always agree. I know of a case where a student received a lower (but still good) grade for her master thesis than originally was intended, after she turned down the offer to do a PhD thesis with the her master thesis adviser.
So, you will need to assess whether your adviser's ego would be able to deal with you performing a PhD at his rival's group. When you think that this is not the case, or when you are not certain, then it is better to inform him after your master thesis grade has been determined.
Things are a bit different when you actually would prefer to perform a PhD thesis under the guidance of your current adviser. Then, I would suggest that you inquire about such possibilities. You do not need to mention that you have an offer from his rival.
Finally, I would like to stress that it is your life and academic career, so it is in your own best interest to choose the path that suits you best (and not necessarily your adviser's).

+1. Unfortunately, academics are human just like everyone else. Some professors are easily offended and may feel jilted by one of their students leaving for a "rival". Others see "rivals" as friendly competition and applaud their students going on to broaden their academic horizons. You could learn a lot by switching working groups, or you could make an enemy for life. It all depends on the personalities of the people involved.

In addition to the points of Danny, I think the research you will be doing can vary the amount of tension, and this is something you (not us) will need to figure out.  As you stated, your not sure what the research will be.  If they are 'rivals' in the sense that their research topics are the same and are nervous about being 'scooped', it might cause more tension.
From the humanistic side I think you could imagine that your current advisor may feel a bit more upset if you are taking specific lab knowledge and lab secrets to a direct research competitor.  This would depend on the field and the type of research you are doing.
If you do want to take the position, you may be able to give some assurance to your current advisor about your future plans and your understanding that his work is confidential.


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When is the appropriate time to email professors as a prospective PhD student?
I think my research interests and experience are perfectly aligned with a professor. And I plan on applying to the department when the admissions open.
But when is the right time to email the professor as a prospective PhD student? I don't want to shoot off an email and get ignored by being either too early or too late.
In this university (in the US) the admissions are granted by committees and not individual professors. Also I speak as an international student.

Is the position open? Then contact whoever you should contact. Just keep in mind that the more detailed your email title is, the easier it is for the recipient to put it in the "candidates" email folder.

The worst time to contact faculty is when they are deliberating the current round of applications and while they are recruiting the accepted students. In the USA, this would be December through April.
Conversely, best time would be May through October.

From my own experience, I would suggest getting in touch as early as possible, after the previous year's recruitment is out of the way. I had made my prospective advisor aware, and we were able to find time to discuss ideas and possible projects, and to even find several possible funding sources.
Perhaps this differs in departments with a more formal application process, but I found that the actual approach to the advisor was the important part - after that point, they were glad to encourage me to apply, since our research were well-aligned.
It does depend on the advisor though - some might not be able to even begin to think about next year... Others (perhaps more senior, and less daunted by thinking about funding someone that far ahead), may be hoping people get in touch. I suggest you find out how the intakes work - we have year-round applications and admissions, but generally people are concentrated around February or October. There's nothing to stop and application to start at another time, however, so obviously doing a bit of homework may help here (if it's not just annual admission in one group).

For your current Ph.D. application and any further activity during your Ph.D. always ask for suggestion/help/support from your Ph.D. supervisor.
You might be align with the activities of a supervisor; however thats one way thinking! It might be the case that he/she has many students and can't take any more regardless how much your previous work matches his/hers. So always ask, there are many nice supervisors that get excited to help their new/potential Ph.D. students.

This answer doesn't help since OP doesn't appear to have a PhD supervisor yet who could help him.

He is asking when to email potential advisor meaning should he/she email him/her before submitting the application or after that? your answer is completely irrelevant to the question


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Do I need to keep my high school transcripts?
I graduated high school in the United States and I have a bachelors degree from an accredited university in the United States as well.  Would I need to keep my high school transcripts for any purpose?  For example, Grad school in the US or abroad or any other need?

I don't think anyone will ask for them but why would you NOT keep them?

@earthling Trying to get rid of excess clutter and debating whether to scan them and then throw them a away.


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How To Volunteer Research Assistant?
I am a community college student in Computer Science field who likes to have good resume when I want to transfer to university, I found out this is very useful if I start to work in particular area in my field like Machine Learning, Security, Algorithm, ...and start to work with other professors in this field area like they who publish paper and conference, I couldn't find any professor in community college who works and researches in a serious field, I found out research and research assistant is not part of community college and you have to look for that in university then I started to send emails to other professors in different universities like UC and CSU and ask for volunteer research assistant but I didn't receive any useful response, some of them told me they will let me know if something shows up and other didn't answer me. Now I am getting disappointment because they don't want to give a chance to a college student because I am studying in community college but I want to know is this a common way I am doing if yes how is the correct way to do this?

Doing research with faculty at University X before you are even a student at University X is likely to prove impossible in practice. The UC and CSU campuses have enough students to work with already.  Transfer first.

Disclaimer: The opinions I'm about to express are based on my experience in mechanical engineering, as an undergraduate research assistant, a master's student, and currently a PhD student. I'm quite confident that what I'm about to say should apply to Computer Science as well, but if I am incorrect, then I apologize in advance.
First of all, it is good to see that you are motivated about research. You seem to be interested in fields that are very active today (I know quite a few colleagues that are working on machine learning for instance). Your curiosity and interest in advanced fields are admirable.
Now what you need to know, is that most professors (in my experience), hire undergraduate level research assistants with the prospect that they'll pursue graduate studies afterwards. The reason being, most fields of research are far fetched compared to the knowledge typically available at 2nd - 3rd year level, so you have to spend quite a bit of time reading literature, and your supervising professor will need to dedicate a lot of his time guiding you through it. Moreover, research methodology is very heuristic, and requires experience, because you have to solve open-ended problems. That means there is no solution in a book somewhere that you can look up. So the whole exercise is to train your mind to see a possible path to a solution that you might arrive at after months of work, with occasional milestones that tell you that you're on the right track. So this means that after months, your supervisor may have dedicated long hours of his time supervising you and have nothing to show for in return. The only consolation is if a student plans to stick around for a master's, then it makes sense to invest the time required, because you will have learnt a lot out of this process.
As a community college student, it may not be clear to the people you're contacting that this is your aim. This is due to the fact that most people view community college training as job training, not so much education that could lead to a field of research. As a matter of fact not even undergraduate studies train you for research, which would make the prospective supervisor even more hesitant. You may need to prove to them that you have a path in mind such that you can satisfy the university's admissions requirements for graduate students if it comes to that.
From what you've said in your OP, I can infer that you feel insulted because you are offering free work, and yet nobody seems to be interested. That is noble of you, but for the reasons I stated above, as far as they're concerned, statistically speaking you're likely to be more effort that benefit.
Another aspect that I'd like to touch on is the fact that your grammar is not adequate based on what is expected in academia. I'm making this assumption based on your original post, so I may be wrong if you simply wrote it in a hurry, but if your contact e-mails with the researchers were anything like it, it suggests that they'll have a difficult time communicating with you, and that is another headache for them. A big part of research is being able to communicate your work to people who are from your field, from other fields, and requires nuanced language to express subtleties that exist in most advanced scientific and technological fields. I know it doesn't seem important, but it truly is. You're expected to leave some sort of record of your methodology, present it at conferences, submit to scientific journals, and write grant proposals for which grammar and format is an easy way to dismiss applications at a time when research budgets are getting tighter.

I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of community college being seen as job training.  At least in the US, very many people begin their studies at a community college with the intention of transferring to a university bachelor's program after a year or two.  Community colleges offer a way for students to take college-level classes at very low cost, as well as remedial classes to brush up any areas where they are weak.  University faculty, especially at public universities, are well aware that for many students community college is the first step toward a 4-year degree or beyond.

That's very nice of you and those are very good advice, the reason I am going to community college is financial problem and for grammar I've to say I just wrote that as a unofficial document but my emails are better how can I make my resume for transfer to university ?


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Conference; withdraw submission before results notification
In conferences, especially in computer science domain; is it ethical, accepted and legal to withdraw a submission before the results notification/announcement?
Anyway, what if it has been just accepted!

If there is an error, then you ned to withdraw (as indicated by Ran).  If more exciting travel plans came about, then it is unethical.  Perhaps you can explain your motivation.

In certain cases, e.g., when you found a serious error in your paper, it is very acceptable to withdraw the paper, as soon as you possible. Paper can be withdrawn even if accepted. It is better to withdraw as soon as possible, to allow the conference to accept other papers or to avoid the overhead of reviewing the paper.
Even from your own perspective, you also would definitely prefer to withdraw a paper as soon as possible, and definitely before it appears on the list of accepted papers (or worse, in the proceeding). Otherwise, questions may be raised about the paper that appears in the list but not presented, or worse, you will be publishing an incorrect paper. Both may  affect your reputation.
(I assume you wish to withdraw because some kind of a problem, but maybe your situation is different; in that case, you can edit your question to give more details)


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What is the distribution of payoffs in research?
What is the distribution of payoffs in research?
Looking back through history, some research topics can pay off big, eg the double slit experiment in physics.  "Pay off" here is not precisely defined, but in this case that was an experiment which started the whole field of quantum mechanics, so that would be intuitively considered as a huge return for the effort invested.  On the other hand there are experiments which provide useful or valuable information, but do not appear to lead to any significant advancement of theory; and some of those may require a huge amount of effort.
Are research payoffs fairly evenly distributed (every experiment moves science forward a step) or very unevenly distributed (a few huge successes and many failures)?  Is there something like a power-law for the value of research?  Is there any relation between the effort or money invested and the payoff?
Also, are there certain properties of a research topic that make it especially likely (or unlikely) to lead to a disproportionately large payoff, such as the establishment of a new theory?

You admit yourself that the notion of payoff is not clearly defined. It is even more difficult to define its distribution, before even thinking of characterizing it. "Success" and "failures" may seem straightforward, but they are not: negative results, although unsatisfactory and very difficult to publish, help other researchers in obtaining positive ones. To summarize, it is a very vague and general question, more likely to trigger a debate on a forum than to obtain a clear answer on a StackExchange community website.

@Eusebius: You're right, it's not clearly defined; this is part of the question.  But it could be defined in many ways which approximate our intuitive understanding, for example literature-based: number of citations, or total number of descendents in the citation acyclic graph; or rating/ranking-based: with an expert panel that ranks results.

@Eusebius Just because he didn't define it, doesn't mean the question is meaningless. I could easily provide perfectly serviceable operational definitions, such as Nobel Prize given yes/no (binary), number of times the person is mentioned in popular science books (integer), impact factor or h-index (continuous) and so on.

I'll give some half answers which may help you improve the question: Yes, there is obviously a power law, most research has small or no payoff, a small fraction has big payoff. There is a relation between money and effort: With no effort and no money, no science will get done, but just because you have effort and money doesn't guarantee a big payoff or even success. I have an answer elsewhere with my thoughts on the relation between money (also indirectly effort) and success. And yes, topic matters - new topic = more low hanging fruit.

There's a vast amount of ill-definition and uncertainty wrapped up in your question... and yet despite that, the answer is almost certainly yes, there is a power-law distribution.
I'm going out on a limb a bit here, because I'm not building on any published analysis that I'm aware of.  However, a little analysis of limit cases and fundamental principles can take us a long way here.  Let us start with two simple and relatively uncontroversial statements:

Better experimental design leads to better results. It seems self-evident that if you make a bad choice in designing and experiment, it's not going to get you the interesting results you want.  At the micro-scale, some choices are clearly better than others, and some are clearly worse.
Sub-fields appear, expand, shrink, and die.  As I write this, CRISPR research is hot, and a lot of people are finding interesting results there, and accordingly that field is rapidly expanding.  Nobody is doing research on the luminiferous aether because it's been discredited as an idea.  Nobody is trying to prove that it's possible to generate machine code from high-level specifications because Grace Hopper did that in the 1950s, when she invented the compiler, thereby initiating what is now a fairly mature and stable research area.

So clearly, no matter how one defines "payoff," any sane definition will see a highly uneven distribution of payoffs both the micro-scale of individual experiments and at the fairly macro level of sub-fields.
Finally, we need to recognize that "significance" is a matter not only of objective value, but also of communication through human social networks.  This means that the same result may have wildly different impacts depending on the methods and circumstances of its communication.  The history of multiple discoveries in science is ample evidence of this fact; one nice illustrative example is the way in which Barbara McClintock's work on gene regulation was largely ignored until its later rediscovery by Jacob & Monod.
So, we have variation and we have interaction with human social networks, which tend to be rife with heavy-tailed distributions.  All of this says to me that it would be remarkable if there were not some sort of power-law distribution regarding pretty much any plausible of definition of impact, significance, and investment.  For these same reasons, I think it would also be surprising if one can make any more than weak predictions using this information (e.g., "luminiferous aether research is unlikely to be productive", "CRISPR is pretty hot right now").
And the devil, of course, is in the details...

Thank you, this was a valuable answer.  Especially "may have wildly different impacts depending on the methods and circumstances of its communication"...


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CMS citations: complete page numbers for serialized works
When citing a novel that was originally serialized in a journal (Dickens, for instance), one usually does not give complete pagination of all installments individually. But the issue may arise, if for instance a major focus of analysis is the journal and its handling of, advertising for, and conversations with the author. The issue is particularly significant when citing novels in Japanese literary journals, for instance, wherein each installment may be a quite small fraction of the page range of the complete volume; to skip the page numbers in the citation would thus be like citing an article in a large scientific journal volume without giving page numbers. How would one give such pagination?
EXAMPLE (note form):
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress, in Bentley's Miscellany (February 1837--April 1839), PAGES.

One might have a note at the end (appendix) with all of the issues and pages for the entire novel, but in your analysis you would be referring to specific somethings about a specific bit.

@JonCuster Usually, yes, but not necessarily. I'm working on a volume discussing a lot of novellas, most of them serialized over 2-14 months in huge monthly volumes that include, along with lots of other articles, 3-5 running serial works at a time. Often authors make slight changes between original versions and 1-volume reprints. If someone wants to follow up a remark that chapter 13 changed dramatically, they need the page run of the original chapter 13 in part 7 of the original periodical publication.

Right, understood. So, at some point in the work you have a listing of every single issue and pages for the convenience of readers interested in finding it all again. When discussing how chapter 13 changed you reference the specific issue/pages. (It would not surprise me if at least one novel ended up changing where installments got published as well).

Something I've done in some personal bibliographic lists (not for publication) is to use something like "(February 1837 & April 1837 & November 1837 & January 1838 & March 1838), pp. 28-36 & 30-37 & 17-26 & 48-59 & 3-12". Of course, this becomes more awkward as the number of individual issues increases. And if you're including the issue numbers, these would be strung out in the same respective order prior to the dates. Finally, if the listing spans more than one calendar year, then the volume number is also likely to change (but not with every issue).

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Making additional changes to manuscript after the refereeing process is completed
After doing some revision to my paper to include changes suggested by the referee (who will not see the paper again, having recommended the paper for publication), is it OK for me to make a minor change of my own, in the manuscript (before I send it to the editor)? Should I declare this in the list of changes or should I wait till the paper is officially accepted for publication by the journal? Would it then be up to the editor to check the validity of the slightly changed statement?
(I've noticed something minor in the manuscript, which needs to be fixed - and amounts to changing a couple of words in the comments section).

I always make minor edits (unrelated to the reviewer comments) at the time of doing revisions, and make a comment in the response letter, e.g. "we have also made minor changes to improve the readability of section 4.2." It's in the interests of the journal to have a well-written article.
Depending on the journal, you will probably also have a chance to make very minor revisions during the copyediting process.


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Why did some US universities require writing a translation to get a PhD?
My impression is that some US universities at one time required producing a translation of a non-English language article in order to receive a PhD. As far as I am aware, this practice started before World War II when English was not as dominant a language in science as it is today. The requirement seems to have been removed at some point after World War II, and at some universities not until after the Cold War ended.
Does anyone know about the history of this requirement? Why was it added? Why was it removed?
Not much can be found online about these sorts of requirements. UC Berkeley has a page on what sounds like a similar requirement, but only for some programs. And it sounds like the concern is more knowing a foreign language than necessarily producing a translation. Perhaps producing a translation was only one way to satisfy a (now removed) foreign language requirement.
I recall speaking with someone who got a PhD in math from NYU in the 90s. They were required to write a translation, though as I recall they described the process as more of a formality and did not believe it continued long beyond their time at NYU.
Also, I spoke with a European academic interested in translations who was not aware of similar requirements in Europe. If anyone knows of similar requirements in Europe and their history, I'm also interested in this.

Some departments at Harvard still have similar requirements. When I was there, the requirement was to know two languages other than English, so it appears to be gradually disappearing.

Regarding the Why, my understanding was that it was part of demonstrating a sort of breadth across the international community. French and German here, given a few hours to get as far as possible.

@Sverre  I'm not surprised that a linguistics department requires knowledge of foreign languages. The OP notes math specifically. There it's less obvious.

Before the early 1990s, virtually all U.S. mathematics departments with a Ph.D. program in (pure) mathematics required TWO foreign languages for (pure) mathematics. In fact, of the roughly 20 such departments I was initially looking at in Spring 1989, only two required just one foreign language, one of which I wound up attending. In my previous graduate attendances (yes, there was more than one; four in fact) earlier in the 1980s, I don't recall ever seeing a program that required just one foreign language. The languages usually had to be chosen from French, German, or Russian, (continued)

but others could be used with permission. For example, Italian was a common alternate language asked for. What it took to satisfy the language requirement varied greatly, however, and sometimes even within the same department (because often one could propose a way of satisfying one of the language requirements, which would then require departmental and/or Ph.D. supervisor permission). Sometimes translate a paper or two over a weekend, sometimes translate a paper and/or passages with use of dictionary alone in a somewhat supervised empty room, etc. (continued)

In my case, it was taking a course specifically designed for graduate students in science (all areas) and getting at least a 'C' on a final exam that was some kind of standardized multiple choice exam (ETS?). Someone I know satisfied one of his language requirements (back in the 1970s) by translating this lengthy French paper (not in a weekend, however; I suspect this was something that took most of a semester).

Note that historically in much of Europe, this was the case for any higher education. Latin and Greek were essentially mandatory to be considered a well studied scholar, and if you were a scientist you probably also knew some combination of German, French, Italian, and English. This wasn’t some arbitrary decision, but a result of the relevant texts being in those languages and people being sensible enough to consider it better to read the original than a translation.

In Europe, foreign language exams can be part of the PhD requirement . E.g in Hungary two foreign language is necessarily for any PhD (including STEM).

As late as the 1970s, Cambridge University (UK) required all undergraduate students (in any subject) to have passed examinations in a modern foreign language and also Latin. Of course having a national high-school-level examination system in the UK meant they didn't have to test applicants themselves.  Probably Oxford had the same requirement, but I'm not sure. But this was no big deal, because anyone attending a UK Grammar School and aspiring to go to university would have taken the two exams at age 16.

In Germany (at least in my state), two foreign languages in your highschool exam are a base requirement to even be allowed to go to university. Exceptions apply to those with a previous professional education, and the "applied sciences".

@alephzero assuming GCSE would count for that (I can’t imagine A level was a requirement, as most people only did 3), it’s pretty much a given that anyone with even a slight possibility of going to OxBridge will have done a MFL. I did French, to a C grade! Latin is less common, of course.

If you study in continental Europe, your professor knows that you speak the local language fluently because you talk to him all the time using that language. He also knows that you know English very well because in all likelihood, all of your academic writing is in English. That's 2 languages you provably excel in. If you get anywhere close to that level, you can easily translate an article.

@DanielHatton interesting. I suppose I was lucky to still do a MFL (my secondary school required it of students expected to do well) - and that was 2013 I was making my choices - 10 years on from the start of the decline

Not that anyone else cares, but since I care . . . Regarding "four in fact", that part was not correctly expressed. I had a total of 4 attendances, 3 of which were previous to where I lucked out with having only one language requirement. Regarding the person who translated that lengthy French paper, I'm sure he overkilled the minimum language requirement. However, that paper was very important for his Ph.D. work, so translating it was mostly for background study in his research.

See this related question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/118092/43905

There's an old saying: If you speak 3 languages, you're average.  If you speak only 2 languages, you're below average.  If you speak only 1 language - you're American.  (Speaking as an American who speaks 2, but I'm only semi-fluent in French...)

Some personal evidence.
In the 1960s I had to show that I could read mathematics in at least one  of French, German or (I think) Russian. That was a reasonable requirement at the time - much historical literature that was still relevant called for that kind of literacy.
The exam did not call for a formal translation. I just had to make reasonable  sense of a page or two of mathematics - not highly specialized. Presumably if I could do that I could master the details of any paper I really needed to understand.

Can you really be older than I am??? Anyway, my experience, a bit later, was both French and German. There were courses especially for grad students. The "proof" was a sufficient grade in the class or, perhaps some other demonstration for those who were already literate in one or more of these. Likely a brief oral exam. But it wasn't long before the need for that became moot as the academic world moved more toward English. IIRC, Russian might have been a substitute for one of the languages and later became one of the preferred choices.

@Buffy I'm 83. So yes.

You are having a good run, as am I. NO surrender.

This agrees with my experience, even though I'm only 73.

I’m “only” 64 and for my Ph.D. (U of Wisconsin) had to produce a written translation of several pages of mathematics from two of French, German, and Russian. Each test was a few hours long, and the use of a [language]-English dictionary was allowed. If memory serves, one could petition for another language if there was significant literature in that language for the student’s specialization. Even now, on occasion I find something worthwhile that’s only available in the original French or German and can slog through. I suspect Google translate isn’t ideal for mathematics but haven’t tried it.

When I was at Cornell in the 1980's, the language examination requirement for math PhD students excluded French as it was assumed to be mastered de facto when engaging into mathematics. Much to the sorrow of my French Canadian friend who had to study German for this exam.

I'm in my thirties, and I had to pass a similar exam for my Phd, so some universities clearly continue this tradition

I had a very similar requirement as a math student at Harvard in the 1990s.  I had to pass a language test in two of: French, German, and Russian.  The test was a page of an article to be translated.  It was a useful skill; my advisor did give me an article from Comptes Rendus to read.

PhD in math, UPenn, started in '05 and finished in '10.  When I started the requirement was "proficiency" in two of French, German, and Russian, by departmental exam.  I took the French exam fairly quickly and had no trouble using my high school French.  I took a course in "German for Reading Knowledge" but it was more aimed towards humanities students (I think few science depts. had this requirement), so I didn't take the exam b/c I wanted to brush up on my mathematical German. Before I got around to it the requirement was revised downwards; I don't remember if it was down to one or zero.

To add one more data point to the time scale: in late 80s Notre Dame switched from "two languages other than English" to "two languages other than your native one". So as a foreigner I only had to add German (English given). Since I had already read articles in German this was a piece of cake. The test was administered by a German math professor in the staff. He ok'ed my suggestion to translate may be 5 pages worth of text from one of those articles. I was worried about having to do French also, and took a beginners course while spending a summer at home. "Luckily" that was not required.

During this shift, universities started calling the language requirement "research tools." At that time computers were first coming on, so this new terminology allowed things other than languages (like computer languages) to count as "research tools."   I had to do two languages and got my Ph. D. in 1989, but there was noise at the time that soon we would be able to use our programming skills as the second language.

When my mom got her PhD back in the 80's, she was required to be (somewhat) fluent in at least one other (non-English) language. This was for a PhD in English Letters, so if she had to do it, everyone did. Is this no longer A Thing?

To comment on the "why": at a certain point a lot of work in many fields, including mathematics, was untranslated from the original into other languages. There was lots of critically important mathematics written in French and German, among other languages.
Russia did important work also, but a lot of it was hidden from much of the rest of the world due to the Cold War. Some things actually had to be independently replicated in Russia because of the Cold War. St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad) was one of the centers of deep math thinking. IIRC, the Simplex Method was discovered independently there.
The same was true of other fields with a bias toward those same languages - philosophy, for example. But Spanish or Portuguese, maybe Italian, might have been more critical for someone studying some aspects of Literature, though translations of non-technical work came a bit earlier than scientific work.
But translation is more ubiquitous now and there is a bias toward English publication that didn't exist before. If you are a scholar in Germany at the moment, you are likely fluent in English. Maybe more so that lots of native speakers.

There still is a lot of important mathematics in French, which hasn't been translated, and I had to read a German paper for my research last month (although that was admittedly a special case)

I am looking for a reference for a fact that I think must be in the literature, and I have just printed out a paper by Demazure (in French of course!) which is one of the likely candidates to contain it.

Echoing other answers, with a few more details:
Yes, in my own experience and direct observation, it was typical at U.S. R1 universities, in mathematics, to require "reading knowledge" in two of French, German, or Russian. As others have said, this was because there simply were no English-language primary sources (nor translations) for lots of important things. I think it's fair to say that German and French were more important languages for mathematics (not counting Latin!) from 1770 until 1945 or so.
For example, in the mid 1970s, most of J.-P. Serre's high-level expositions from College de France and elsewhere were only available in French. Some of them started being translated into English in the late 1970s.
Much of C.L. Siegel's work was written in German, and was not translated. Indeed, in those days, so many math people could read German that there seemed to be no reason to translate it.
(In contrast, relatively few people in the U.S. and western Europe could read Russian, which surely helped motivate the Amer. Math. Soc.'s translation program for various Russian sources.)
In 1977-79, P. Deligne's contribution to the Corvallis Conference (held in Corvallis Oregon) (AMS Proc Symp Pure Math 33), was written up in French. At the time, this seemed a little idiosyncratic for an English-language conference, all whose other contributions were written up in English. But no one got excited about it, because essentially everyone in the audience (at the conference, and for the conference proceedings) could read/understand some French, at that time.
In recent years/decades, the utility of being able to read more than in-English mathematics has decreased, not only because more things are written in English, but, also, because translation software is often more efficient than a weak grasp of the languages (moderated by some sanity checking about technical things).
So, at my R1 U.S. univ, in math, we had reduced the language requirement from two to one some years ago, and will reduce it to $0$ in the immediate future.
Yes, this does cause some bottlenecks for my PhD students, because it's still not the case that everything is available in English. I am indeed quite glad that I can read math in French fairly easily, and in German with some effort. I regret not learning a little Russian when I was younger, too, but it was rarely available in the U.S. in those times.

I did my Ph.D. in ~2000 at a math department (in the US) that required demonstrating reading proficiency in another language, as evidenced by being able to translate a mathemetical article in your field or a closely related one, to one of the professors in the department who was professionally comfortable in that language.
There were those who preferred to do so by writing out a translation of their chosen article. Others preferred to show up with the article and viva voce translate at the random spot chosen by the faculty member, say 1/2 page worth.
Our general departmental culture was very collegial, so if you did at all a creditable attempt, you passed. Just like it was hard to actually fail our comprehensives. There were ongoing friendly arguments whether the oral or written approach was "better", which depending on the disputant could mean "easier" or "more creditably demonstrating sufficient mastery".
The arguments in favour of "written", which seems to be the context of the question, were from both angles:

An acceptable written translation better demonstrates you sufficiently understand nuance, and provides documentary proof thereof (can be filed away).

(From the other side) Written can actually be easier, since you can look up in a dictionary, take your time, redo part, as opposed to "being on the spot" orally.

You asked for a contemporary example in Europe: Russia still requires PhD theses to be translated into Russian in order to get foreign PhDs officially recognized in Russia.
Apart from that, there is a list of foreign universities whose PhDs get automatically recognized in Russia without translation. There is also list of Russian universities that can recognize foreign PhDs on their own, without approval of the central authorities (VAK).  However, neither list is particularly long, and not all universities that have the right to recognize foreign PhDs on their own also make use of this right.

I think the question is about requiring the PhD candidate to translate a foreign research paper into their own language, but your answer is about requiring the PhD candidate to translate their own thesis?

Yes, indeed, it seems that I misunderstood the question.  My answer is about translating the thesis itself.

An anecdote from a relatively recent experience:
I completed my PhD (pure mathematics) in 2017 at a Big 10 university in the Midwestern US.  At that time I was required to complete a language exam in either French, German, or Russian, none of which I knew anything about.  I decided to go with French since I do know some very basic Spanish, and the syntax is fairly similar.
The graduate chair told me I was to find a 10-page excerpt of an appropriate mathematical paper or textbook and take it to a specified French-speaking mathematician in our department for approval.  I selected a chapter from a text on the differential geometry of surfaces, and it was approved.
The French-speaking mathematician then told me to take a few days and do my best to create an English translation of the excerpt.  I was permitted to use whatever resources I wanted, even translation software.  I did it mostly with Google translate and the assistance of a standard English-to-French dictionary.
I took the original excerpt and my translation back to him, and we reviewed them together.  He asked me a handful of questions about my translation, and also asked me to read specific passages from the French original and describe what they said without referencing my translation.  The whole meeting was very informal and took less than 10 minutes.
The point was basically to demonstrate that you have the ability to understand mathematical work not written in your own language, and I did that, so I passed.
This requirement was mildly annoying but not very burdensome, so students in our department have generally not pushed back much against it.  Also, I believe (but I'm not completely sure) that students who speak English as a second language are exempt.
A final comment:  I know of a pair of PhD students at another Midwest Big 10 university who petitioned their department to allow them to take their language tests in Italian.  They were studying PDEs, and apparently much of the relevant literature to their work was written in Italian, rather than French, German, or Russian.

I have also heard that some algebraic geometry PhD students took language tests in Italian, because the work of the Italian school of algebraic geometers was relevant to them.

authors: Xi'an ні війні

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text:
'Read before The Royal Statistical Society ' What does it mean?
In the header of several journal articles, I have seen this:
Read before The Royal Statistical Society at a meeting organized by the Research Section on Wednesday, May 5th, 2004, Professor J. T. Kent in the Chair
What does it mean for a paper to be read before the Royal Society ?

This means that the paper was presented to the members of society who were present at the meeting noted.
I am more familiar with this language in much older papers. I believe its use here is a holdover from a time when paper would be presented by a Fellow of the society (who may have been the author of the paper, or otherwise) to the assembled members of the society. For example, neither Darwin nor Wallace were present at the 1848 meeting of the Linnean Society at which their joint papers were presented; instead the papers were read by secretary John Bennett.

I think it's an RSS style thing - it just means that the paper was presented. The only place I've come across this in recent (ish) papers is from the Royal Statistical Society. (And I've been to conferences in this style, where someone stands up to do their presentation, literally reads their paper for 20 minutes, and then invites questions. [If all you were going to do was read it, i could have done that more quickly!])


text:
Outdated letters of recommendation for graduate fellowships
I received my bachelors in 2014 and started a Ph.D. program in 2017 after taking some time off to work in an unrelated field. I am currently applying to a graduate fellowship (similar in vein to NSF/NDSEG, etc.), and am not sure how to appropriately choose my references given that most of them are 3-4 years old at this point.
I have one from my research supervisor in undergrad whom I published a paper with, so this one is a no-brainer. The professor I'm working with to write my proposal is also writing me a letter. As for the third one, I have a couple of options:

A professor at my current institution who I worked on my NSF GRFP proposal with last semester. I did well in his class, and his research is related to my interests, but I have no research experience with him (or anyone at my current institution since first years do not typically do research)
Research advisors from short-term (5 months) projects I did in 2014 and 2015, respectively. They can obviously speak to my research ability, but are quite dated. I used these letters in my grad school apps and presumably, they helped get me into a top 5 program in my field

If my other research references were more recent, I wouldn't hesitate to use them. But the professor I'm working with on my proposal suggested that I should try to get a second letter from my current institution if possible. Does it look bad for me as a first-year graduate student applicant to only have one reference from my current institution? And would it be a poor decision to use letters from people whom I last worked with 4 years ago?

It is perfectly normal to have one letter from your current research, since you presumably only have direct, extended experience with only one faculty member.
In picking your letters of recommendation for fellowships, the most important criterion is who can comment meaningfully on your potential to become a researcher. Whoever can provide the strongest letters should be your top priority.
However, I would tend to lean against asking someone who has never written for you before to do so after a gap of some years without providing more recent information on what you've been working on since.


text:
Good place to publish funded grant proposals
I have two grants and I would like to publish their proposals for which I received funding.

Should I publish them in the first place? I think it would look good being transparent, and it would certainly be informative about what I'm currently working on (I am at least 6-8 months away from publishing my first results from these research). But I also think that it can have drawbacks like others thinking I'm just trying to pad my CV, or giving space to any and all kind of accusations about my research topic or about the quality of my proposal (I'm in the Social Sciences from a CEE country where social research is becoming more and more ideology-driven. I already have bad experiences about ideologically biased attacks and accusations against my academical activities)
Where and in what form should I publish it? Should it be a self-publication on my institutional or personal website, academic social media account, in a repository etc.? Or should I find specific journals that publish grant proposals? (Do such journals exists? I found one https://riojournal.com but it looks like I have to pay them a fee for this).
In my CV there is a section for funding. If I publish my funded grant proposals, should these items go to "Publications" or should I add them to "Awarded Funding"?

Thank you for your advice!

About your first question: Should I publish them in the first place? Did you ask your funding agency?

No. I'm not obliged to make it public (there is nothing about this in the funding contract). I can ask them about it, sure.

I can think of a few reasons not to make them public, from my experience (your case may differ). I have used preliminary (unpublished) results, half-baked ideas, copyrighted figures (owned by others) and things like that in my proposals. Making them public would incur in (possible) copyright violation and the risk of being scooped. You can of course get permission for copyrighted material before publication, but the risk of getting scooped is always there.

AFAIK, publishing grant proposals (successful or not) is highly uncommon in the sciences (I've not come across that and don't know of a suitable platform). There is an obvious reason for that: proposals contain new ideas which the applicants plan to pursue in the future, so publishing them invites others to do the same and potentially scoop them.
Ideas are the scientist's capital (in particular for theoretical research) and unless they have a substantial overabundance of good ideas, they must be careful to not give them away too cheaply. Of course, in experimental/applied research an idea must be accompanied by the necessary resources and equipment (i.e. an advantage over any competitor) before it can be successfully pursued.
In your CV, you should list the grants with title, period, and value. However, the proposals themselves are not listed in a CV, they are definitely not publications.


text:
Should I ask for permission from the journal before making available publicly the (anonymised) text of the evaluation I received from peers?
The question says it all. To add some relevant information, I must note that

I published some articles in national journals
The level and the process of peer review in some of those national journals was quite low or even nonexistent; yet they claim to be double-blind peer-reviewed and are in the top of their field according to a journal list our Academy of Sciences use when evaluating research performance
I intend to make available publicly the substandard reviews, or, in the case of non-existing external review processes, my correspondences with the handling editor on the internet

Now it seems obvious for me that no permissions will be given to me by the journals if I ask for it, so I'm not sure whether I should ask them anyway. But would that be a bad move; legally speaking?

Unless you signed a very peculiar publication agreement, you are under no obligation to keep the reviews your received confidential.  Moreover, there is probably no issue with copyright infringement either.  Publishing a modest amount of text, for the purpose of critiquing it, almost certainly qualifies as "fair use" of potentially copyrighted material.  (This could, however, vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.)
So I think there is rather little legal risk of doing this.  However, it sounds to me like a very poor idea nonetheless.  In most academic contexts, the dangers of doing something wrong come less from formal legal repercussions than from the damage that may be done to your professional reputation.
Presumably everyone who has published in these journals understands the relatively lax nature of their peer review (having gone through the process themselves).  Unless one or more of the journals has an undeservedly high reputation (which seems doubtful, since you describe them as "national"; prestigious journals typically have international contributors and audiences), publishing accusations of laxity against the journal are not likely to affect the journal at all.  On the other hand, doing something like that can definitely get you a reputation as an obnoxious troublemaker, which can be extremely damaging to your career.

There is generally no need to obtain permission if you are intending to excerpt portions of a review as part of a critique.  That would fall squarely under the "fair use" aspect of copyright law (at least in the US).  An recent high-profile example of doing exactly the sort of thing you are asking about is the sexist PLOS ONE reviewer whose review said to get a male co-author: the angry author posted a few lines of the review, which was sufficient to get a firestorm going on social media.
I would advise against posting a lengthy review that you are not commenting on in detail, however.  It is both a stronger argument and also a more defensible legal position to post only key excerpts, and a whole review only if it is very short and that is the point you are commenting on.  If that critique of key elements then brings requests for the full review for context, then it would be reasonable to post the full review.  While there might be some question about copyright in such a case, it would be a foolish journal indeed that would complain after your critique has already met a significant reception, as that would essentially guarantee a Streisand Effect backlash.


text:
How Scopus CSAB plan to evaluate a submitted journal's citedness in Scopus?
Our journal applied to Scopus for inclusion a few months ago and I, as an editor, would like to clarify some citations to our journal from articles already indexed in this database (as far as I know, the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board will be looking for the citedness of our articles in Scopus and the outcome will affect the result of the journal evaluation process).
Though there are some articles in Scopus that cite articles published in our journal, many of those citations are corrupted: Our journal's name is not given in full, sometimes author/article details are missing or misrepresented etc. I contacted Scopus Author Support but they informed me that they can only process my request once our journal is indexed in Scopus. Until than, they will not modify the incorrect citations.
Now I'm wondering how Scopus CSAB plan to evaluate our journal's citedness in Scopus if their database do not show these existing references properly? I was barely able to find them in Scopus and only succeeded because I knew exactly what I was looking for. If I've simply used advanced search and searched to our journal's name within the references (what I'm expecting the committee will do) I would have found no citations to our journal whatsoever.
Is there anything more I can do in this situation?

Have you been about to find anything out from Scopus?  I see that the advisory board was expected to meet in October.

no :(  Operators on the live chat directed me to addresses from where  I only received form emails.

For Scopus, like for any organization, if you can't find anything out online and aren't getting information back via email, then the next step is to call them on the phone and be persistent in finding the right person to talk to.
Beyond that, they are a private organization owner by Elsevier (a for-profit company), and there is no mandate that requires them to have either a transparent or a sane process, and there is likely little more advice that anyone outside of the organization can give you.


text:
Course development: can I pay someone to make slides for the course?
I am asked to start from scratch and develop a new under-graduate course this fall. I still have about 2.5 months left but since there are tons of research commitments ahead, I am basically a bit unpositive on whether I can get all the course development task done before that.. The central hurdle is to make slides for about 12 weeks' teaching load.
I am writing to inquire some conventions on course development. In particular, can I pay someone to make slides in my situation? If so, then:

do I need to acknowledge certain authorship for such cases?
where should I find such services?

Why don't you consider paying someone to do your research for you? Because the same reasons apply for teaching.

@DmitrySavostyanov That's obviously different. Doing research is explore some thing new and unknown. Let me put it in this way, typically you can reuse some "legacy" slides (if exists) in your department when teaching a course, can you reuse other people's unpublished paper?

Typically, one can reuse slides when they teach an existing course. Your were asked to design a course from scratch. This is academic work, same as writing papers.

Why don't you use the blackboard instead?

Do you want someone to create the slides from scratch or just someone who formats your detailed notes and makes diagrams, illustrations and stuff? The latter is a classic student TA-job, while the former will be quite questionable.

@mlk  the former one.

Who actually learns the most during a course? Answer: the teacher. Sorry, but you need to struggle with figuring out what material to be covered when and how. That is the hard part. Then the slides are easy. If you don't do the first bit, you won't be able to deliver the lecture and answer the questions.

Are you asking about designing slides or designing a course? Because these are very different things.

Has there been an explicit requirement that you develop new course material starting from scratch, or have you just been asked to give a new course for which you happen not to have legacy slides available? In other words, has your department told you "produce new course material", or "give a new course (and we don't care whether you reuse your own old slides, or the old slides of a former colleague, or the slides that come with some text book)"? The latter is more common.

Not an answer to your questions, but another way around the problem:  find a textbook that covers what you want, and use the author-provided slides. Many newer texts come with access to complete slide decks for the course, usually available from the publisher's website (after registering with an agent of the publisher).

I had a few teachers whose courses were pretty much like the summary of the reference textbook. Even the examples were the same. They did not prepare slides, but rather used the chalkboard. People generally didn't complain about this. If you have a good book to use as reference, it should be easier to do so than to ask someone else to write slides that you'll have to review anyway, and this person's work is more prone to errors than a good textbook. I can hardly believe the total energy investment of this to be more than what you'll need to outsource the course preparation.

As for 2) you might be able to find a student at the university/college familiar with the subjects for your course.

I've had professors use author-provided slides before, and it was very obvious when they hadn't spent adequate time reviewing them, as the results were quite bad. So I agree with @JonCuster that the time spent actually creating slides is actually small compared to the rest of the time spent preparing. (In fact, if you're very well prepared the slides can be quite sketchy, just enough to keep you in order and avoid skipping.)

Do you have the ability to hire a teaching assistant through your school or uni? They can help you put together a slide lecture.

@DmitrySavostyanov there's nothing wrong with paying others to do my research for me, and it's a common practice both in academia and industry to hire all kinds of research assistants, lab technicians, technical writers, software engineers etc to do parts of the research. Probably most research is done by someone senior getting funding to research something and paying postdocs, students, and other personnel to do most of the actual research, and doing so is perfectly reasonable, as long as attribution of authorship is handled properly. But yes, the same reasons would apply for teaching.

If you take this approach, what happens when you're in front of the classroom and don't understand your slides? There's a reason why course development takes time.

Your university might have an office set up to assist with this kind of thing already.

@MassimoOrtolano Cannot agree more with that. The best courses I can remember from college were the ones where the teacher used the blackboard. The other ones just tended to be just the teacher reading the slides (which in turn used to be just bullet lists with the same things as the books of the course).

In my disciplines of math and computing, most of the undergraduate textbooks come with instructor resources including prepackaged lecture slides, to assist with exactly this concern. I find that the quality ranges from bad to barely-adequate. About half the time I can use them as a starting point (and otherwise need to restart from scratch). So unless you are developing a very nonstandard course, you could research textbook options and pick one that comes with lecture slides as a start. I would expect to be editing, refining, and customizing those slides for future semesters as you learn more about teaching the course.

Hello Daniel, thank you very much for the answer. This is what I am doing right now.

Theoretically you can, but practically I doubt you will find someone qualified who is willing to do it for a reasonable price. Designing a course is hard work and pretty individualized. Look at how many different ways there are to teach the same course. Everyone does it differently and I hate teaching to someone else's syllabus and cannot image using someone else's unaltered slides.
As for acknowledging the author, you probably need to let your department know that you have outsourced this aspect of your job. You will need to make sure that the material is appropriately licensed so that you and the department can use it as needed.
As for telling students, I believe there is a fair amount of leeway regarding the reuse of material. Specifically, for many courses, you are not presenting "original ideas" so it is not plagiarism in my opinion. That said, when possible, redirecting students to the original source can be helpful.

There's also the issue that it would have to be the right person, because it could take nearly as long (or literally as long) to make sure you communicate your desired slides to them, review their work, give them feedback on what they've done, rinse, repeat...

I would also hate teaching from someone else's unaltered slides. And yet: I know multiple other college professors (different colleges, disciplines: economics, psychology) who work with departmental common slides for larger undergraduate courses and who are prohibited from altering them (with the intention of focusing new faculty on research tasks). Bewildering to me, but such things exist.

Thank you for your insightful inputs! I found a textbook which comes with some slides (although probably cannot directly reused given the quality), but I will start from there and refine the materials. Less than two months the new semester will start, and I am working on three papers and a few funding proposal. gee!

In effect, it sounds like you want to sub-contract course design, or at least part of it. In theory, I don't see an ethical issue with this as long as nothing happens that will disadvantage the students taking the resulting course. The important issue is that the students get a high quality course, whether delivered by you or someone else or developed by you or someone else.
Of course it will be your responsibility to judge accurately whether the resulting course meets appropriate standards and to guarantee that it does when delivered. You are, in effect, taking on a management role in course development and are completely responsible for the result. But the process is less important than the result, IMO.
It will also be your responsibility to deliver the course in an appropriate (say, flexible) way. Students, as usual, need reinforcement and feedback no matter how the materials were developed.
I will note, I hope accurately, that courses delivered by Open University UK are (a) high quality and (b) developed by large teams, including, in many cases, the production facilities of BBC. The process is very involved and takes quite a bit of time, but the results are high quality. I suspect that other online courses have similar team development structures.
Normally it is good to acknowledge such help, but that can be a contractual issue and may need to be if it seems unwise to have students contacting the developer for any reason.
Sorry, but I can't help in finding such a developer.

+1 for the first few paragraphs. I imagine, however, that presenting slides from Open University, even if allowed under the licensing agreement, would lead to complaints from students who feel ripped off that they're paying for free content.

@cag51 Why do you assume students are paying to study? There are countries where university is free.

Good point. But still, I think students attend a university to hear the original thoughts of a brilliant professor rather than to be provided with freely-available tools (that said, I personally disapprove of using professors for low-level courses like calculus)

Actually @cag51, a "brilliant professor" can give a student true insight into analysis in a "low-level" calculus course. A grad student instructor may not (is unlikely to yet have) the true deep insight in a transferrable way.

@cag51, my comment about Open University was just to point out that slides and other materials might be prepared by others than the professor of the course and still be valid. It wasn't to suggest that those, specifically, should be used. And the people who do prepare them are certainly paid. I don't know if they have visible credit/citations or not. I can find out if anyone needs to know. By some definitions most content is "free". If you teach a calculus course, for example, you didn't invent the derivative. The expression of the content is another matter, of course.

Thank you very much for your insightful inputs! Eventually I found a textbook which comes with some slides (although probably cannot directly reused given the quality), but I will start from there and refine the materials.

If it was not stated implicitly that you are required to write your own slides, you may outsource the task. However, don't expect students to be attentive and rate your teaching positively should you fail to provide a suitable syllabus, which may create stress for yourself.
I personally find that this would not provide you with advantage, as assuring quality of the slides, managing your commissioner, and teaching the material might be a harder job than if you've done it yourself. Not to mention trying to find the right person to do this for you. If I were you, I'd talk to those who have previously create new undergraduate courses to get a feel of what may be expected of you as a teacher.
I have personally experienced getting taught by an individual who didn't put much effort into teaching our class, and a lot of students have raised complaints about him apart from generally not treating him very nicely during his lectures due to the frustration of feeling like he isn't trying at all. I believe it was stressful on his side to go through a room of 100 plus students who despise his lectures, and I don't wish it on you.

Thank you very much for your insightful inputs! Eventually I found a textbook which comes with some slides (although probably cannot directly reused given the quality), but I will start from there and refine the materials.

Does your school have a Faculty Development Center or something that helps people improve their teaching skills?  They may be able to suggest resources.
Some that come to mind:

Many publishers have slides that go with textbooks - they may know which ones are worth examining.
They may know a colleague you can work with (maybe brainstorm together, one summarizes the bits to include, the other is more graphically oriented, and you share notes & slides?)
They may know "master teachers" in your field (some are better at research than instruction, and it's ok if you're one or the other), and connect you for some mentorship.
They may have strategies that you can use, so there's less "information" on each slide, but more "teaching cues" -- prompts for the students to discuss or solve.   This may lead to less advance-prep, and you can adjust the content to fit the latest findings.

Basically, don't worry about getting help.  In the non-academic world, people hire content-creators and editors all the time.  Find out what resources you have available, starting with your own university.

Thank you very much for your insightful inputs! Eventually I found a textbook which comes with some slides (although probably cannot directly reused given the quality), but I will start from there and refine the materials.

Sometimes just having a not-blank page is what you need!


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For a new assistant professor in CS, how to build/manage a publication pipeline
I am a new assistant professor in a research institute, where the number of top-tier publications matter a lot. In short, they simply count the number of tier-one papers.
I am highly advised to work out a good publication pipeline, in terms of how many papers are in progress (e.g., implementation), how many papers are under review, and also how many are in the preliminary stage to investigate the feasibility.
So besides "working hard", what are some tips, comments and advices on start to setting up a "publication pipeline"? To concretize a bit, what I can come up with are:

has one or two main research lines such that you can constantly publish your major research output towards some really prestigious conferences in your field, in CS it's like SIGGRAH, OSDI, POPL and so on. But of course, usually preparing such a work takes a very long time; my personally experience is about 1~1.5 year, when I was a Ph.D. student.
Simultaneously, become versatile in terms of skillset and therefore can quickly hunt for some (low-hanging) fruit. This can be much shorter, say 3~5 months, can still target on tier-one conference, but maybe not that "prestigious" ones. I am not going to name such conferences to avoid some arguments here...
What else?

All I can find is a thread here (https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=38427.0), but the message is a bit unclear to me. Any suggestion or advice would be appreciated a lot. Thanks.

"... number of top-tier publications matter a lot. In short, they simply count the number of tier-one papers". Matter for what? Promotion to a higher grade, or some sort of assessment in case there is a probation period for you? If it is the former, you may have some/plenty-of time before you make the transition, everyone realizes it takes a little while for new faculty to get going in terms of a working-publishing group, so there might be an expected time-scale here. Also, is this criterion documented somewhere?

For contract renewal and eventually for promotion.

@299792458 just some internal list but essentially comparable to csranking.org

I do not have an answer and I would be skeptical of any answer.  If there was an easy answer to this problem, then everyone could be a tenured full professor at an elite university.

Here two pieces of advice:

As a mid/long term perspective you should build a large network with
bright people. In the beginning talk to as many as possible. Tell
them about your ideas and ask them about theirs. This will lead to a lot of collaborative papers. Don't waste too much time with people who are reluctant. Most people will be very open (especially the younger ones).
Do this also with people who are not working in exactly your field. There might be a lot of low hanging fruits to collect i.e. something that is easy for you to do but not for them or vice versa. There is hardly any type of research field that would not like to get some input from CS (buzzword "data science"). e.g. Experimental biologists here or people working in business or geography etc. This will not lead to first-authorships but possibly get your name on many papers by putting only few days of work in.

Younger (or more accurately, inexperienced) people can also be reluctant to share their ideas because they are scared of their ideas being stolen.

To the second point - it could very well lead to first authorships, especially if you are collaborating with people from other fields. At least in data mining, ML, and vision within CS, helping other domains solve their problems often gives rise to novel methods in your own field. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist that helped image the black hole, wasn't a physicist. She even gave a TED talk where she talked about how the collaboration was important to her success. Collaborating with other domains is also what my advisor's lab is all about.

thank you for the kind advice. I appreciate it very much!

So besides "working hard", what are some tips, comments and advices on start to setting up a "publication pipeline"?

As Lordy's answer points out, the key to a regular stream of publications is a healthy network of collaborators: external collaborators but also the students or postdocs that you supervise and consequenly who follow your research agenda. So to some extent a sustainable publication pipeline depends on maintaining a pool of PhD students or postdocs working with you. This usually depends on you getting some funding to pay them, by submitting applications to the appropriate funding bodies in your domain.
So the standard strategy goes like this:

Follow the calls in your domain and submit applications regularly in order to ensure a stream of funding for the next years
Fund some PhD students and/or postdocs on the grants awarded to you
They follow your research agenda, carry out most of the exploratory work under your supervision and you co-author their papers

thank you for the kind advice. I appreciate it very much!

While collaboration is important, I would caution you to get too hung up on this. You want to avoid being the person that just hangs around in the middle of the publication list in many papers - in my experience people eventually develop a bad taste towards scientists that they perceive to be freeriders on other's top research.
Instead, in my experience the most important key to having a good pipeline, especially if you are in one of the more applied CS fields, is to have a clear research programme. If you have, say, three PhD students, try to make sure that there are synergies between their work. In the ideal case, none of your future students past the first one or two should start from a completely green field - develop a portfolio of prototypes, methods, and data sets that you and your students can build on in the future. In my experience, this drastically cuts down on the time needed to write an A+ paper - if you start from a completely green field, it can easily take a year or two to collect enough material to have a shot, but if most of the scaffolding (knowledge- and technology-wise) is already there, I have seen people churn out excellent papers in surprising small time. This also has the advantage that your different research strands will eventually build up to something larger than individual papers, which ultimately ends up more important in tenure and promotion evaluations than the pure number of papers.

Good advice, but this will bear fruit over a time-scale. Once all the prototypes are in place, OP can even have two different levels plying within their group: a lower end, which keeps using developed prototypes in more and more "novel contexts", and an upper end, where they work on fresh problems and develop more prototypes to fuel the lower end. :)

thank you for the kind advice. I appreciate it very much!


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How much reputational value is added to a journal by being indexed in various abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases?
I'm co-editing a small communication and media-focused OA journal published by a regional scholarly association. We are in the process of being indexed in selected research databases of EBSCO (just signed the licensing agreement). My question is how does being indexed in EBSCO add to our value as a scholarly journal? As far as I know the publish-or-perish system, the real ground-breaker in terms of being established and respected is being indexed in Thomson Reuters' SSCI or Elsevier's SCOPUS and having an IF. We are still very far from that. Is EBSCO indexing competitive in the current "reputation market", or only good for increasing the visibility of our content?
Now it had come to my attention that many researchers are pressured to publish in faculty recognized journals. Which, I suspect, may differ from the list of SSCI/Scopus-indexed journals in our field. My question is that how bad the idea would be to write to specific departments asking for approving our journal? We can back up our request by showing that we are internationally recognised, question is how strong an argument of being indexed in EBSCO would be in that situation?

Reputation of a journal matters for two at least two things. The first is whether a library will subscribe to a journal. If you are looking for subscriptions, the more places you are indexed, the better. As your journal is open access, libraries are unlikely to pay money to subscribe, so I do not think this matters. The second is whether academics are willing to publish in the journal. I think serious academics choose journals based on what has been published in the journal in the past. Indexing is like advertising: it might make me think about publishing in the journal, but if everything in the journal is crap, I am not going to publish there.
As for faculty recognised journals, this sound fishy to me and I hope you are not talking about mainstream Western universities. Presumably, in these crazy faculties, if a researcher thinks your journal is good quality, they will fight to get the journal recognised regardless of where it is indexed.

The list of faculty-approved journal sounded strange for me too, as I never heard of that before. It was mentioned in a comment to one of my previous questions, http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40920/how-to-target-possible-authors-ethics-of-increasing-the-visibility-of-open-acce   Perhaps you have some experience of this practice? As strange as it may seem, we are listed and catalogized in many libraries around the world in spite of being open-access, although sometime in a separate "ejournals" category and not among traditional scholarly journals.

@HunSoc for that type of faculty list, my guess is where the journal is indexed is not important. But rather the quality of the journal, telling whoever is in charge, "20%percent of the papers come from top groups and over 60%from similarly ranked universities, and the remaining papers  are all good quality and highly cited" is going to be more influential than it is indexed in X.

@StrongBad yes that's exactly what it is. A list of quality journals the faculty/university has put together that counts towards quality publications with your research/grant targets (In Australia). So a Level B lecturer in say a school of social sciences needs to publish between 1.5-2.5 journal articles a year, with a percentage of that being in the quality publication list put together by the faculty/university.


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Is there a research exchange program for postdocs between UK and worldwide universities?
I completed a PhD a couple of years ago and am looking at postdocs abroad, but not in my original field, so my advisors aren't able to suggest good places to apply to. Are there any programmes (official or unofficial) where a UK PhD is highly regarded that facilitate exchanges of academics between UK and worldwide universities? I'm thinking US and China to start with.

What fields are you coming from and going to?

Computational Fluid Dynamics (although I don't understand that much about it because I take a mathematical modelling approach) to mathematical modelling of anything.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships fund individuals with PhDs to go and do a postdoc research project at another university for a while. If you are interested in the US/China, then you would be looking at the Global Fellowships, which fund a period of study outside the EU (typically 2 years) followed by a year back in an EU country to transfer the knowledge learned back into Europe. The scheme is highly competitive. You would need to make arrangements with appropriate host institutions yourself.

British Council "Newton grants" for travel might be along the lines of what you're asking for. [1]
They are generally shorter than you might be looking for (up to 6 months), and have a formal application call process etc.
You would need to be affiliated with your university to get one though - they're not for finding a postdoc abroad, rather for a finite duration research exchange to collaborate. For that reason it may not be what you're looking for.
As a postdoc, you might be working on one specific project, perhaps with industrial relevance. In that case, you might find your PI isn't keen on losing you for a period of time. On the other hand, if you're part of a team doing more academically funded work, they may like the idea.
From personal experience though, these grants tend to require you to have identified a partner institution to visit and do research with, along with the project you wish to work on, and the expected outcomes.
[1]  http://www.britishcouncil.org/education/science/travel-grants

That looks great thanks! I can think of a few projects up to 6 months which continue doctoral work, although as I'm not affiliated to my old university, potentially I could affiliate to a local one as a visiting scholar and then apply to Newton grants.

Only problem is my main collaborator from that research is in Norway, not a listed country... :(

That could potentially work, although my instinct is that you would need to be a more permanently tied person first. From my memory of the program (albeit in the opposite direction, where a scholar visited our institution), he remained employed and paid by his host institution, and the grant covered the costs incurred in the exchange. These opportunities are fairly competitive, and someone working as a contracted researcher will normally appear more attractive than a visiting researcher, in my opinion.


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Citation signals in numbered references
I'm reformatting a manuscript from author-date referencing to Nature's (superscript) numbered referencing. How can I include citation signals such as 'e.g.,' or 'see'? For example, how should I reformat the following sentence?

It was demonstrated that pigs can't fly (e.g., Smith, 1901).

I can omit the citation signal completely:

It was demonstrated that pigs can't fly1.

but then important information about the non-exhaustiveness of the citation is lost.
Someone suggested this:

It was demonstrated that pigs can't fly (e.g., 1).

But it looks somewhat strange. Any idea?

What about "Smith^1 demonstrated that pigs can't fly", where the superscript 1 appears with "Smith"? (Comments apparently don't allow for either 1 or $^1$ formats, by the way.) Note this is also a more informative statement, since "It" is replaced by "Smith".

Do you really need the 'eg', 'see' etc?

@Fabio Dias, I find 'e.g.'  necessary when I cite only few examples instead of the entire list of  studies that substantiated a particular claim. You can't always cite everybody but it's important to convey that there are more studies out there. 'See' is more subtle.

I dislike this citation style for just this reason.
You can, however, get around it by turning the parenthetical citation into a phrase:

A number of studies, including Smith1, have demonstrated that pigs can't fly.

More often, however, I see this being indicated implicitly by using more than one citation:

A number of studies1-3 have demonstrated that pigs can't fly.

I'll try the the 'Including Smith' phrase, it's a good idea. Do you feel that 'a number of studies' really conveys the message of the e.g. signal?

@Tal I think it's not a good way of saying "e.g.", but I also think I see people doing it.


text:
What to do (if something) when someone gets your paper wrong
What would be the best approach when a paper gets published referencing a work of yours, with a wrong explanation/assumption.
E.g.

"The tube lines by [the Mayor of London, 1863] are OK, but can only
  used on Tuesday, so in this work we traveled by cab".

This is clearly a wrong statement, probably formulated due to lack of information. What should one do in these cases, if you were the Mayor of London?
My hunch says just ignore it, but I assume that for young researchers like me (unlike the Mayor of London) this can have a bigger impact, as if the first few references to our work are stating something wrong, people may actually stop using the tube.

If the paper is already published, the only thing you can do is to get the journal to publish a correction. This is usually a huge hassle and only justified in extreme cases such as if the paper under question is mainly a response to yours. Being known as a pain in the posterior is usually much worse than being cited in a misleading way.
You can also use your own future papers to set the record straight. "Contrary to BLAH 2018, BLAH 2016 did not advocate to eat all the cookies". In minor cases, I would not do this either.
Things are of course different if a paper is not yet published, in this case, you can just write a polite email to the authors. Of course, in many fields papers are not circulated early. You can of course also write authors of published papers and correct their misperceptions so that they will not describe your work wrongly in future papers. In any case, be polite and not accusatory.

Thanks. Of course, being polite is the priority, most of these types of mistakes are done non-maliciously, so there is no need of being accusatory.


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How do i advance my research career and publish papers without university affiliation?
I am a recent masters grad from a US institution as a foreign student. As of now I have no university affiliation. My work as a grad student was mainly research oriented. Hence now looking for a job seems redundant as many research jobs in US require US citizenship or field experience. So as a researcher my options are limited. Nevertheless I am working on a theoretical paper. The question is

What are my options at this point considering an academic career where I could become a teacher/lecturer/professor or academician carrying out scientific work.
If I have a paper ready how do i publish it in a good journal with a decent impact factor without a university affiliation.

I could not find published research in reputed journals by any independent scholars.

I think you need to demonstrate that US citizenship or field experience are required. I hire plenty of non-citizens to do research work who have no field (presumably meaning outdoors with grass or a forest or something similar) experience who are non-citizens. Field experience isn't even a recognized concept in my ahem field. What area of study are you talking about?

My background is in electronics and electrical engineering and my masters is in Nanoscience. My current research is in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum dynamics at a nanoscale.

This question is a potential duplicate for many SE questions, tagged independent-researcher, i.e., this, this and this.

Please ask one question per post

Short answer: Simply write your paper and submit it and wait for feedback. If it is good enough a conference will publish it.
Longer Answer: A contribution is a contribution, and conferences and journals are always hungry for a good content. Affiliation does not mean much, as most high ranking conferences only allow double-blind submissions; and after acceptance you can put your name, email and the company you are working for. You then will be considered an independent researcher on the subject matter. I have seen many submissions from big to small companies over the years, on subjects that were important to them and their work, who decided to submit their contribution to a research conference and get feedback.


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Quantum information Science PhD position interview
Recently I got in touch with a professor in the field of quantum information science. I am really interested in the PhD program. After extensively talking with the professor he has agreed for an interview on skype. What should i expect from this interview and how can i be better prepared.

I'm afraid that we strangers on the internet are unlikely to be able to guess what will be expected by a random professor that we do not know.