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Would you publish a deeply personal essay about mental illness during PhD?
First a little background:
I am in the middle of my PhD and recently came down with pretty severe depression. I would not say my PhD work is the cause of it (I am not in a toxic lab), but the immense pressure to always deliver is definitely not helping.
I feel like I am still affected by the general culture in academia and that it is not very accommodating of my struggles with mental illness. Living up to the "student really passionate about their research dedicating their life to it" is pretty damn hard when you sometimes lose control and cry for days, can't get out of bed, and battle suicidal ideation. This makes me frustrated, because I feel like that is not fair and inclusive of people who struggle with mental illness.
Mostly for myself, I started to write a personal narrative essay describing my experience and frustration. Then I had the thought to submit it to Science Working Life — maybe there's someone out there with similar struggles that would feel seen and inspired from reading it?
Now the question(s):
Maybe this is my anxious side all over again, overthinking everything, but if you were me, would you submit deeply personal writing like this? Do you think it could have value? Would you, as a reader, value something like this?
P.S.: To anyone else struggling, you are not alone ♡

What subject are you pursuing your PhD in? I think this is a major differentiator. If it is in social sciences or psychology, I think publishing an essay like that would be to your benefit. But if it's in STEM or business -- absolutely not.

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If you do write and publish a personal piece such as this, be aware that (potential) employers, students, colleagues, etc will google you and find it. Some of them may find it inspiring, many won't care/read it, unfortunately a few may consciously/unconsciously hold it against you. If any person/institution is mentioned/implicated it could cause problems for them (and potentially you) as well.
I think it's important to have stories like this out there for exactly the reasons you mention. But unfortunately the reality is that there can be consequences.
If it's possible to anonymise this could eliminate most negative consequences while maintaining the positive ones.

thanks for your answer! I do see your point, although part of me is a bit reluctant to publish anonymously because I feel like that would fuel the stigma surrounding mental illness... But this at least gives me some ideas about what pros and cons I need to think about before making a decision

I understand the whole "publish anonymously to prevent negative consequences" and I HATE IT WITH EVERY FIBRE OF MY BEING. It is exactly that mindset that allows mental illness to continue to be a stigma.

This comment also concerns @Trunk, ShernRenTee, Ben, and anyone else who feels tempted to hint that having been through depression implies being mentally divergent.
Science says "Nearly 21% of adults in the United States will go on to develop Major Depressive Disorder at some point in their lives". Other variants are even more common.
Why should anyone in academia contribute to hiding that fact?

@IanKemp There are other ways to reduce the stigma – like people who've already climbed that ladder (e.g. celebrities, tenured profs) coming out and doing activism work. The vulnerable don't have to put themselves out there. Yes, this way is slower, but equally, reducing stigma is a means, not an end.

@IanKemp Who will bell the cat?

The essays themselves could certainly be valuable, so long as they are insightful and well-written.  (The peer review process should be able to give you feedback on this so go ahead and submit if you like.)  As you say, there could be others experiencing similar problems (or dealing with people experiencing similar problems) who would find your writing about your experience useful.  So, in principle, it might be useful to a reader.
You should bear in mind that it is sometimes possible to submit and publish work anonymously (e.g., submit from an anonymous email without your real name and see if the editors will agree to anonymous publication, and ensure that your essays give no identifying details).  This might be an option in the present situation, depending on the needs and approach of the journal in question.  Anonymous publication for highly personal issues has some benefits and downsides that you would need to consider.  On the plus side, anonymous publication would preserve your privacy.  The downside is that it might hamper communication with interested readers (though this might still be possible through an anonymous email).

I applaud your desire to publish your story, and affirm your sense that the career culture in academia is deeply broken.
But where everyone else has advised you to anonymise your story (which I fully agree), I would advise you to go one step further and obscure easily identifiable details.
The selfish reason for doing this is that if your identity can be deduced from details in your story, then there's no point anonymising your name.
The altruistic reason for doing this is that your story will inevitably include descriptions of other people's behaviour. While you are obviously consenting to (anonymously) tell your story, other people have not consented to have their story told, and they have the right to not be identified in a story which may not represent them in the best light.
Of course you have to balance this against the detail your story must include to back up your experience. But many such details do not make your group identifiable -- for example, "I had to trudge three miles through snow every weekend to discombobulate the widgets because my supervisor would rather fund conference travel than pay for a widget discombobulobot" is both vivid and discreet. Here are a list of identifiable details that I modified from a grant guide on preparing anonymous grant proposals:

Your name
Your institution’s name
Any project codes or names
Gendered pronouns
Heavily referencing your / your group's papers
Current and previous grant results
References to named partners
Specific details of team make-up
Career length of yourself or teammates

You may certainly have to include some of these details -- but try not to include too many.

I disagree strongly that people "have the right not to be identified in a story which may not represent them in the best light". If someone has behaved badly, there's generally no legal barrier to you publicizing this in a truthful manner. Whether it's prudent to do so, and whether you're prepared to deal with any backlash or fallout, is another matter.

Rather than join the anonymization bandwagon (the answer author community here is generally of the "it's terrible out there - people are horrible! Protect yourself!" bent) I would propose the following more nuanced and step-by-step approach:
By all means write the essay! It brings good in several different forms

It can be therapeutic, at least in a palliative care sort of way. I don't think it will provide rapid relief from clinical depression, but it does offer one a window on what's going on that may be helpful. But do it with the help of a mental health professional or counselor so that they can step in if it spirals out of control and you start focusing on those sneaky, nasty destructive or hopeless thoughts that the "depression monster" likes to generate to make us feel even worse.
If the time to publish comes, you've got your writings. You may be in a different state by then and want to add some further perspectives to it, but you've got the contemporaneously written material recorded forever.
Speaking of contemporaneously written material, if ever something happens and you are harassed or discriminated against by your environment, you have this as additional documentation that something is really going on and there's a reason you might be performing differently at the moment.

But continue to question if this is the right time to actually publish
That decision is easier if you fully anonymize, but in the 21st century with the internet, writing style analysis, nosy people who spend lots of time online, etc. is it ever foolproof?
Publishing under your name could potentially have positive benefits. More enlightened coworkers and supervisors, realizing that something powerful was happening without them realizing it may really reach out and be supportive. Of course exactly the opposite may happen as well. Life is full of choices (or a box of chocolates as Forest Gump explains)

My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

Future readers may be future employers and if they are like-minded or enlightened might really see "extra value" in you. (As you can tell, I'm not of the "everyone is horrible" bent). This could become a lifelong filter that steers you away from employers who are unenlightened when it comes to mental health, and towards people who are. Who would you rather work for, anyway?
But yes, it could blow up in your face as well. Life really is like a box of chocolates and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
You can also ask yourself if depression is the best time to make impacting decision
The fog of clinical depression also makes it really hard to make this kind of decision. I mean it can make it really hard to decide to even stand up and walk across the room to feed ourselves or take some medicine!
Bottom line: By all means write it! But work with friends and mental health professionals you get along with well on the question of publishing right away vs later.

P.S. To anyone else struggling you are not alone ♡

Indeed! After my first (of several) bouts with clinical depression that didn't respond much to medication subsided, I was able to "write in stone" a messages to myself that I could use in the subsequent bouts.

It gets better. This too shall pass.  It's not real even though it feels so real. It's temporary.

thank you so much!

People tend to think that academia is 'above' the rest of the world but it's not. Some may find your work inspiring others may use it against you... just like life. I myself wrote a critical analysis of the entire concept of mental illness, situating it in a cross-cultural perspective. I used Michel Foucault's work as a backdrop but also applied comparative mysticism. The professor in question was not helpful. I don't regret writing that essay, but I was naive in thinking that some jerk would not use it against me. And it wasn't even about me!

Say you are not using a pseudonym as discussed by five other answers, however without using the proper term.
And say a potential future employer dislikes your essay.
Would this hypothetical situation be disadvantageous?
Would you like to have a job in a place where you would have to hide your weaknesses and fight every day to just survive like in your current position?
Or would you prefer only to get jobs in places where people will understand that having the competencies and will to deal with your own personal problems is a strength?
Several top scientists have struggled with mental illness.
You should prefer to always be honest about yourself.
A well-written and honest book will always be of great value, as you suggest yourself in the P.S.


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Should I inform authorities of someone falsely claiming a non-existing PhD?
I know a person who falsely claims having a PhD in computer science.
His name card reads as "Name, PhD" and he has long been working in a high profile and remunerative position for a semi-government company.
However, he does not have a PhD!
He had enrolled for a PhD program in a X university, but his PhD program was terminated, because he could not publish any papers within the allotted time. I have complete details on this person including his registration number with the university, supervisor name, the company name, address and company supervisor name.
Specifically: the maximum duration of the PhD program in this X university is 6 years. To graduate, the university requires the candidate to publish one ISI indexed journal paper or two Scopus indexed papers. This person did not meet the requirements and, in fact, does not even have a conference paper to his credit.
I often feel like informing the company he is serving, as I find this infuriating and deeply unfair, but I just can't seem to make up my mind:

Is this the right thing to do?
Why should I report this?
Why shouldn't I report this?

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Other than on business card, where else does he claim he has a PhD: webpage? LinkedIn? resume? interviews? articles?

There's something not completely clear in your description: are you sure the university terminated his PhD? It's not uncommon for a university to bypass its own rules on an case by case basis. If this is the case, this person might even have been allowed to defend without the required number of publications.

Check out whether they have a dissertation in the university's database. Any PhD should have a registered dissertation under their name and that information should be found in the university's library, or online database.

It is certainly appropriate for you to bring this to everyone's attention. However, it is also important that you do so in a way that will protect yourself from retaliation as you seem to suggest the person has some power.
The dilemma, of course, is that an anonymous accusation is easy to dismiss. But if you can just direct people to source of your information so that they can independently verify your claim it will stand a better chance of being heard.
It is also possible, that the "authorities" are already aware of this and are, in fact, invested in the career of the person. This happens in some places, so, depending on the norms of your location, it may be especially important to protect yourself, and in the worst case prepare for the situation that it won't be addressed.

The correct way to report it would probably be to find a public claim of where this PhD is from, and then refer it to the university in question. Even if it's anonymous, they are in a position to check (if they choose to).

@buffy what could be the best possible anonymous method to inform the "authorities" as well as the university to investigate the "fake claim"? Any suggestions or advice.

@nilāmbara, Postal mail can be hard to trace back, but your letter would need to include enough information that the receiver has a basis for confirmation. Going thorough a trusted third party is sometimes  possible, but less likely. In this case, the third party would him/herself need a certain amount of power/authority so as to be trusted by both you and the "authorities." In some situations a respected religious leader might work.

I'm not sure if you are implying it, but it seems wise to make the "people" you mention be the university he claims to have a PhD from. They certainly have the biggest reason for being concerned about this for image reasons. Also, they can find out the truth easily by checking their own records.

@AnoE, actually I mean, more generally, anyone who should be informed and/or could look into it.

@buffy, recently I have come to an understanding the supervisor allegedly proclaims this student had graduated! This is false claim. I have proof that both supervisor and student are lying. What should be the best course of action in this case.  Any suggestions?

@nilāmbara, i think the advice is the same. Protect yourself first.

People who need to lie about obtaining any title are clearly not capable (or not able, maybe for external reasons) of obtaining said title (otherwise they would have done so), but want to enjoy the benefits that come with this title. By not being capable of earning the title (in most cases), the person is not displaying the required traits of those who successfully (through hard work) earned that title, which, in my opinion, gives a bad name to all holders of that title.
There are, of course, some people who have earned a PhD, but still give other PhD title holders a bad name, but it is their right to do so, they have earned the title.
Those who did not do the hard work and did not earn the title do not have the right to do so and need to be reported without exception.
When reported, it should be reported to the ethics council of the university the fake title supposedly came from or the the ethics committee of the Ministry of Education (or similar).

I disagree with the first paragraph. There are plenty of good reasons to not get a PhD even if you're capable of doing it (e.g. money), and plenty of selfish reasons to lie about having done it even if you were capable (e.g. money).

Additionally, there are plenty of people who have failed to obtain a PhD due to discriminatory reasons.

As @JiK says first paragraph is wubbifh. There are lots of skilled people held on a leash under fear of dropping out. They can definitely be more skilled than people graduating fast. An unskilled candidate is no loss if he finishes (and leaves) early, but a skilled candidate sure can be.

This seems to be less a question about academia, and more a question about the workplace. How do I get company x that employed this person who lied about their credentials, to take action.

Well, it doesn't sound like you know for a fact that the person did not earn the PhD, but you are surmising it because you can not find published papers.
If you are reasonably confident that the PhD was not earned, then I think you could anonymously notify both the university and the employer.  At that point, I believe, you have done your duty, you have raised a question about the credentials someone has claimed.  The employer may take this seriously or not, depending on whether they have verified the credentials previously, how important it is to them to be able to prove the person has the credentials, e.g. if an engineer is designing a bridge and lives could depend on it, an employer wants to be sure of an engineer's claim that they have their Professional Engineer license.
Maybe the employer won't care because the work output is satisfactory.  I would hope the university would at least make a cursory review based on the student's name and years in the program.
Beyond that, you need to consider if there could be adverse fallout for you.  Could someone guess you reported the matter?  Could that be held against you?  What if you are wrong, and the person has their PhD?

I'm not speculating nor surmmising. I've all the requisite details on this person. My mistake, I should have been more explicit in the question. Anyway, I've updated the question now. I have known this for a very long time. it's just that I can't seem to bring myself to a consensus and then I'm also worried about the repercussions involved. This is why I've "kept quiet" for all this time. But then yesterday, I accidentally stumbled on this site and found discussions on ethics, plagiarism. This motivated me to seek expert guidance or suggestions here.

@nilāmbara - Assuming that you could actually suffer negative repercussions related to this, I hope there is no way that this other person knows you, and/or that you have not used your real name here, or that you have not posted this elsewhere with your real name. Otherwise, they could now, or in the future, discover this and suspect you have/will, or at least have discussed reporting them.

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How can I use parentheses when there are math parentheses inside?
I want to write the following sentence:

The space O(X) (O(Y)) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) (g(x)–f(x)).

By which I mean:

The space O(X) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) and the space O(Y) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x).

But the parentheses are kind of distracting to read. What should I do about it?

Your sentence makes no sense to me. If you include the context (perhaps a paragraph) in which it appears we might be able to suggest wording. This question might be better asked on math.stackexchange. If you post there, delete here.

Question on Writing SE as to whether such an expression is a good idea (featuring a detailed elaboration by me why it never is): Is elaborating the opposite case in brackets acceptable and clear?

Also: Your particular definition is weird, as the second pair of alternatives is identical and none of the functions seem to be related to X or Y. Even if I ignore the last part, the symbol O is overloaded, such that I don’t think it is clear to the reader what O(Z) would be.

It is particularly hard to see the point here since $O(whatever)$ refers both times to $g(x)-f(x)$? Is that the intent?

Why not just use words? "The spaces $O(X)$ and $O(Y)$ have the functions $g(x)-f(x)$ and $g(x)-f(x)$ defined on them, respectively."

This is from a draft that I am writing with others so it would not be easy to get consent to share it here. Sorry for the poor choice of wording and lack of context. However, I do believe it's understandable that these situations do arise for new authors like me.

Tangentially to the issue of the parentheses, the wording “has functions defined on it” is vague and nonstandard. It makes it hard to discern whether the sentence is a definition or a claim, and makes me wonder whether those are all the functions that the space has, or can there be other ones.

Some people believe that parentheses should never be used: If the text is important it should not be between parentheses, if it is not it should be left out.

If the second way of saying it is what you mean, why not just write it that way in the first place?

I'm with @David on this one.  Your question says "I said A, but I meant B, what should I do" - and the answer is "say B".

@Buzz gives a good answer, highlighting that it is a style question for which people have different preferences. I personally don't like to use anything other than round parentheses, so my preferred approach to avoid the confusion is to use additional words as buffer:

The space O(X) (or, alternatively: O(Y)) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) (alternatively: g(x)–f(x))...

Agreed: It is better not to separate two formulas with mere punctuation.

alternatively, or respectively, any of the two wordings will do.

In my experience "respectively" is much more common; I first read "alternatively" here.

Isn't ‘respectively’ usually abbreviated to ‘resp.’? (Maybe not for the first usage, but for subsequent usages.)

@gidds Not in math, but I've never seen that.

As @gidds says, "symbols (resp., moresymbols)" is a common mathematical usage. The "resp." breaks up the symbols, and strongly suggests that the parentheses are not mathematical.

Do you really need colons after alternatively?

@paulgarrett: that comma after 'resp.' looks wrong to me.

@TonyK, well, there is a tradition prohibiting two adjacent punctuation marks. But if the word were not abbreviated, I think a comma is warranted. But I can imagine conventions/preferences vary. :)

As Federico Poloni points out, it is customary in mathematics writing to use "respectively", abbreviated as "resp.".
This gives, for your example:

The space O(X) (resp. O(Y)) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) (resp. g(x)–f(x)).

Readers used to mathematical writing will have absolutely no issue with this sentence, and they will easily "skip" over the parenthesis without being distracted.

You can even "chain" them:

The space O(X) (resp. O(Y), O(Z)) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) (resp. g(y)–f(y), g(z)-f(z)).

That being said, your sentence is weird (no Y / y in the second part of the sentence), since it seems that O(X) and O(Y) are defined the same way: do you mean

The space O(X) (resp. O(Y)) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x) (resp. g(y)–f(y)).

assuming that it is clear that x ∈ X and y ∈ Y?

By convention, x is usually a member of X, etc.. I think it should be g(x)–f(x) (resp. g(y)–f(y)).

I agree with this usage, at least in math, but FYI not everyone does.  A reviewer of one of my papers said it was wrong, and in a more general context see: https://english.stackexchange.com/q/212549/109750

@Kimball That's very surprising to me. In the Computer Science / Mathematics papers that I read (and write!), this is clearly the common usage. I understand why it may sound incorrect, but it is, by a long shot, the easier to parse unambiguously to me.

Oh, God. A (resp. B). It's a very useful, and completely ungrammatical piece of writing. I hate it, but have learned that my red pen of refereeing outrage cannot hold back this particular tide. For similar losing battles, see also: 'that' and 'which'; 'none is'; 'Jones's'; putting 'and' at the end of lists separated by a semicolon.

@DavidA.Craven I'll be curious to see how you would formulate that statement without "resp.". If you have a nicer, more correct way that is as easy to parse as this one, I'm all ears!

The spaces $O(X)$ and $O(Y)$ have functions defined on them as $g(x)-f(x)$ and $g(y)-f(y)$ respectively.

@DavidA.Craven this should be the accepted answer.

@DavidA.Craven What's wrong with Jones's? The cat belonging to Jones is Jones's cat, while the cat belonging to the neighbors is the neighbors' cat.

@AlexKruckman Sorry, I mean that it is Jones's cat, not Jones' cat.

@DavidA.Craven Oh good, we agree!

This is a style question, so there is not going to be a uniform answer that everyone agrees on.  Some people use (and some journals seem to prefer) nested parentheses just like in your examples.  I personally find this both esthetically unappealing and often hard to parse.
My practice (and this seems to be followed by a fair number of journals in the mathematical sciences) is to use delimiters in running text the same way that I would in mathematical expressions.  For a expression like the one given in the question,* that would mean

The space O(X) [O(Y)] has functions defined on it as g(x) – f(x) [g(x) – f(x)]....

I find that more readable than text that involves the same delimiter repeated (even if the text and math parentheses are in different fonts).  Moreover, this continues with further delimiters in the pattern

{ [ ( { [ ( ) ] } ) ] }

so that, for example, if a parenthetical includes a mathematical expression with square brackets, it would be marked off with French brackets, e.g.

This is the largest the function can grow {assuming, as before, that Δ[sin(x)/x] remains within the unitarity domain}, so we can conclude...

*Actually, this expression, even with the square brackets has the potential to be confusing.  As a general rule, in any situation where you are using multiple delimiters like this, it is good to look to see whether you can tweak what you have written to make it more readable.  For example, I think your statement would be still easier to follow with the following added clarifications:

The space O(X) [respectively, O(Y)] has functions defined on it as g(x) – f(x) [respectively, g(x) – f(x)]....

(Maybe the second "respectively" is superfluous, but it probably doesn't hurt.)

In (pure) math, I would find this use of square brackets weird (and similarly for braces, etc). They're usually just used for citations in plain text, though in math expressions some people do use them as you describe, e.g., x*[(y+1)^2-1/y].

Relying on typesetting (e.g. math mode vs. text mode) or using square/curly brackets is only confusing to the reader. It may be unambiguous, but it is not clear at all. And many formulas already have more than enough parentheses, so please do not mix them with text formatting and make it even harder to read.

Also worth saying that there are mathematical contexts where the type of bracket matters (for example $f(x)$ and $f[x]$, or $(a,b)$ and ${a,b}$, can have very different meanings). Be wary of confusing a reader in that way.

Your example is weird, as people have said, because both have functions defined as g(x)–f(x). If this is really what you want (TBH it sounds as if you do not quite understand what you're trying to do) you could just say: spaces O(X) and O(Y) both have functions g(x)–f(x) defined on them.
More generally, it is better to write: the dah-dah has a dee-dee. Similarly, the pah-pah has a bee-bee rather than the dah-dah (pah-pah) has a dee-dee (bee-bee). I understand you aim to avoid boredom and annoyance on the part of the reader, but the extra verbiage is usually worth the clarity gained. Only when the reader is seeing all this for the umpteenth time, would I use the parentheses construction.
Putting respectively or or else: in the parentheses is helpful, but at that point your wordiness is about the same as the one at a time construction, so why bother?

In this simple example (and coming from a background in physics, where we can be a little lax with our mathematical language) I would use a construction like:

The space O(X) has functions defined on it as g(x)–f(x), and likewise for the space O(Y).

(I suspect you could omit the 2nd "the space"; you could certainly omit the "and")
This fits with my general approach of restructuring the sentence to avoid awkwardness.   Of course this isn't always possible

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Is it unethical to use ChatGPT to create abstracts?
I am interested in knowing whether it is ethical to use ChatGPT to write the abstract for a schoolwork/paper I wrote. The paper itself is my original work. Is it OK to use ChatGPT to help with an abstract?

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Why are you asking if it's "ethical"?

@Nik Probably because they want to know if it is?

To add up to the previous answers:

The best way to answer your question is simply to ask your academic institution about their policy (or their lack thereof) regarding the use of AI tools for scientific writing. They might be able to tell you that you're not allowed to use ChatGPT anyhow, that you may but need to acknowledge it, or to use your best judgement.
As previously mentioned, Nature recently released a series of articles highlighting the pros and cons of using AI tools in academia. Overall, my personal interpretation is that using ChatGPT can be beneficial for tasks for which the ratio "amount of time required to do it" by "epistemological importance of said task" is high. For instance, shortening an abstract to reach a certain word count, writing a summary for an internal newsletter, or writing a vanilla methods section, seem to be tasks that take a lot of time but could be delegated to ChatGPT without major issues (given proper human surveillance).
On the other side, AI tools should be avoided when dealing with sensitive tasks. Retraction Watch recently published about gross errors and fabricated references in papers generated with ChatGPT, which is terrible scientific practice.
Grumpy old man yelling at the clouds here: do not forget that, although boring and unrewarding, tasks such as writing an abstract, writing a review, studying a methods section, or summarizing the main ideas in a scientific text, are important competences in their own rights. Be sure to master them before trying to delegate them to ChatGPT.

+1 just for the last paragraph, though I'm another grumpy old man willing to yell at the clouds.

If point 3 isn't done, then point 2 will be repeatedly done due to sheer ignorance. There used to be a correlation between grammatical correctness and general correctness, but ChatGPT effectively broke that correlation so people should be conscious of that. ChatGPT can and will fabricate non-existent references. Extremely dangerous if you're a lawyer and you cite cases that don't exist.

Grumpy old lady here. I was thinking about this for a while. I came up with the question; if a student's work cannot be distinguished from the work of a bot, what are they doing at university? What is the university teaching them? Maybe the skill of gathering and collating data is best left to a machine. Like ploughing. Yes, you can use a plough unwisely or in a criminal manner. But it saves a lot of work-hours.

I've used MS Word Summarize feature to go from a 20 page paper down to a 1 paragraph abstract. I recalled it working pretty well...

In my understanding, ChatGPT has the same understanding of what passes through it as a printer does, i.e. none, beyond e.g. the printer following formatting rules and being able to execute computer language that drives generation of graphics.  Go ahead and generate a summary -- and then treat it as if a rabbit had eaten papers on the topic and left a trail of scraps:  check every word.

@RedSonja if a chess player's work can't be distinguished from the work of a bot, what are they doing sitting at the table? What's the point? You could save so many work hours... -- Not that I per se disagree with letting machines do boring data-gathering jobs. This has been done for decades. But there's a huge difference between writing an algorithm that gathers data according to a precisely understood specification, and letting an AI gather data according to some statistical patterns from its training that no human understands and may well be riddled with all kinds of weird biases.

Is there no quality concern when using large language models? I've never seen ChatGPT output that seemed all that good or useful to me, but I admit I haven't seen a lot.

@leftaroundabout Exactly! Though I know nothing of chess, I hope there really is a difference between grand masters and bots. But chess is supposed to be fun for the players, that's like me knitting socks when I could buy machine made ones. If a student leaves college no better than a bot then somebody was wasting their time, that was my thought.

I think this answer is a bit self-contradictory--or at least needs to be read with a lot of nuance. Shortening an abstract may be something to delegate, but writing an abstract that gives a concise sense of the importance of a paper is both difficult and hugely important. It may be the only thing most people read, and it ideally would be the product of careful thought about the most important ideas of the paper and how to convey them. I'd be tempted to say that an author who doesn't see the difference between a well-thought-out abstract & a generated one is telling on themselves...

This is an entirely personal view.
There are ethical and unethical uses of such tools. Using them to produce and publish the abstract at least borders on the unethical.
Note that ChatGPT and similar things have no mind. They have no morals. They have no judgement. They aren't intelligent in any real sense. They can and do produce garbage with no warning. If they did have mind and intelligence then publishing what they produce without citation would be plagiarism.
But, if you treat them just as tools to get some possibly interesting feedback, then you could probably avoid ethical dilemmas. We use other "mindless" tools, of course, such a grammar and spell checkers.
If you assume that everything produced by these tools is possibly wrong and you use them only for suggestions or abstractions on things you have written yourself, then you are probably fine, provided that you adhere to the disclosure rules of any publishers.
But, I also point you to the last paragraph (especially) of the answer of Camille Gontier
And I'll also note that the tools seem to be getting more dangerous as they now can probe the web, which is filled with disinformation on many important topics. Mind and morals are required to sort out this cruft and these tools have neither.

There are, or seem to be, completely ethical uses of these tools. One that seems interesting and possibly useful is the examination of large numbers of x-rays to search for subtle things that indicate the possibility of cancer. But, even here, the results need checking by skilled humans (mind and judgement) to evaluate the output.
The problem isn't the tools themselves, but the use of the tools, especially when it is misunderstood what they can and cannot do. As with other tools and techniques, one must use intelligence to guard against both false positive and false negative errors.

I guess indeed, depends how you use it. I would argue that chatGPT is a great tool to create a first draft of an abstract, but the worst tool to create the final version of an abstract.

My experience, as a non-native, it's the opposite. It's the best tool to take my first draft of an abstract and make it into a much better prose (and often shorten it as a result).

What do you think is more likely to be wrong a spellchecker or ChatGPT? If a spell checker did not highlight a word you can be pretty sure it's in one of its dictionaries (or equivalent), the only reason why the word would still be wrong is because, you, human, meant a different word which you hardly can blame on the spellchecker being "wrong".

I would strongly disagree with the notion that GPT-4 has no intelligence. It's not a human-like intelligence (it's superhuman in some ways, subhuman in others, and deeply alien in the way it does things under the hood), but I find it hard to come up with any test of reasoning not contingent trivially on embodiment that GPT-4 would fail but, say, a chimpanzee would pass, and I would strongly contend that chimpanzees have some intelligence. Also not every contribution by an intelligent entity to a paper requires citation (for instance, reviewers often only get anonymous general acknowledgement).

It is not an easy question to answer! It all depends on one's preference and how one looks at it. I'd consider writing an abstract and then rephrasing it with tools like chatGPT or asking for help when I'm stuck with a code to be ethical. On the other hand, feeding the paper and asking it to write an entire abstract based on it would be something I'd not do. There was an article published in Nature on Monday addressing similar things. One may have a look at it:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03235-8

You have two different questions here.  One in the title, one in the body of the question.
Is it ethical ?
That's a moral question without an objective answer.  I personally would regard it as unethical as you're not doing that part of the work yourself and it's important work.
...because...
Is it OK to use ChatGPT to help with the abstract ?
I would say NO for an objective reason.
The abstract is a very important part of your document.  It is the part of the document which, after the title, tells people if they should or should not invest their valuable time in reading the article, which they would only want to do if the article covered a specific topic in a way that was useful to them.
Put another way, it's the way we filter out all the articles we don't care about from the ones we do.
It is, therefore, far, far too important to both writer and reader (and publisher if that's relevant) to be left to chance to a piece of software with no intelligence at all (calling them AIs doesn't make them intelligent, that's just marketing, i.e. a lie).
You cannot trust the "AI", so you have to check the AI delivers a proper summary of the article.  You'll basically have to put in as much effort as you would writing the abstract yourself in the first place.
Writing an abstract (or summary) is a valuable skill beyond academia.
Learning to write these types of summaries is a hugely valuable skill which has applications in all sorts of ways.  The reality is that when, e.g. your boss wants a report, you'll be lucky if they even read the summary ("abstract") so that bit of writing has to be good.  Learning to do this is enormously useful in careers, in business even in private life.
Using ChatGPT or similar does not teach you anything and leaves you at the mercy of it's (considerable) limitations and (frequent) errors.

Or, think of the "I" in "AI" as meaning "Intelligence level of an earthworm".  Too many people assume by default that "Intelligence" means the human-level intelligence which they have, because that is the majority of their experience.

Yes! The text produced by ChatGPT tends to sound very nice, but it's also very vague and it does not know which specifics of your research are important. It might be useful for an introductory sentence, but is not good at presenting specific results, which are important for an abstract.

The argument that checking that an abstract is good takes as long as writing it yourself is clearly wrong for papers that one has authored oneself. For instance, it's perfectly consistent to think that an unreliable abstracting AI might have to sample 20 times from its output distribution to find a good abstract, but checking 20 proposed abstracts for a paper I have written until finding a good one is probably still faster than writing one good abstract myself. And that assumes a user who does plain rejection sampling, not one who iterates upon the AI output intelligently.

@Technophile Humans would be utterly lost, for the most part, if they had to play GPT-4, i.e. answer the same range of questions in the same range of languages it gets, with say 20 times more time to answer than it takes. On the other hand, I think a human could play earthworm using appropriate remote controls, and GPT-4 could probably convincingly play human for a limited time (20 minutes?) if communicating online and prompted correctly. I'd say that suggests more than earthworm-level intelligence.

In many of the conferences I'm involved with, the committee typically permits the use of ChatGPT for rephrasing, but not for original content creation. Thus, its acceptability largely hinges on your intended application. If you're aiming to rephrase existing content, it's generally acceptable. However, always consult the guidelines of the specific journal or conference you're targeting, as some might prohibit the use of ChatGPT altogether.

I think this one is the best answer

OP is doing schoolwork; it's very unlikely to submit schoolwork to a conference.

Is it unethical to use chatGPT to create abstracts?

Regarding abstracts in research publications:
No. We are doing research. Our goal is improving human knowledge. Publications are just a way to convey some novel human knowledge.
The abstract is a condensed, human-friendly version of the publication. If some program helps researchers write abstracts so that they can spend more time doing actual research, then there is nothing unethical about it, except if it plagiarizes other publications.
Ethics put aside, some publication venues have an explicit policy on the use of AI to write publications.

ChatGPT and other LLMs absolutely do plagiarise other publications. They rely on a huge database of texts, collected from the internet without author's permission, and they never acknowledge original authors.

@DmitrySavostyanov here we are talking about summarization. It makes plagiarism much less likely.

OP seems to be doing schoolwork, not research.

@BryanKrause thanks, I clarified the answer.

@FranckDernoncourt LLMs "borrow" their words and phrases from the corpus of texts published on the internet. Many authors published their texts for free never gave consent for their texts to be used to train a close-source LLM to benefit a for-profit commercial company without compensation and acknowledgement. LLM won't be able to "summarise" without having access to the large corpus.

@DmitrySavostyanov how frequent do you think plagiarism is in LLM-based summarizers? Borrowing a few words typically doesn't suffice to qualify for plagiarism. If the summarizer borrows more than a few words from other texts, that doesn't sound like summarization anymore.

Whether it's "ethical" depends on how the abstract is used.
If it's used to judge the author, then yes, since it's not your work. If it's just to get scientific work done, it's still relevant, since language is compressive, and same words from it vs. the author warrant different interpretations. If the author agrees with the output, then it becomes irrelevant (to second point).
Personally: if I can't do it myself, I refuse to let others do it, as to me that's weakness, and I shouldn't be in this field. If I do great science but can't write, then that's who I am, and I won't pretend otherwise. After I master a craft, only then I can delegate it as mindless work - e.g. I'm totally fine with using calculators, since I've mastered arithmetic, and I even used Wolfram Alpha for much of my more non-trivial homework in college, but always ensured it wasn't impeding my learning.
That said, personally, I wouldn't mind ChatGPT writing the entire paper for me1 (minus doing the science of course). Because I know I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself, and have done it many times. Fat chance it does it as well as I, but that's a matter of time. If it does it better than I, then it becomes a problem, though in that case I'd try to learn from it so it's no longer the case, or make a note in the paper that AI assistance was used. However, can't say I endorse "as long as you think you've got it" as ethical, since it assumes honesty and correct self-evaluation; there'd need to be some external check (e.g. proof of prior work).
1: but I'd not do it for other, ethics-unrelated, good reasons. I've also not thought hard on this, take with grain of salt.

The other question is:  how far can you trust the result?  What are the equivalent error bars?  Considering that it has the same understanding of what it is processing as e.g. a laser printer.

I am relatively new to academia.stackexchange.com.  This is my first answer, though I have upvoted several of the answers above.  I disagree with @StevenG above, so I was not able to down-vote his answer.

Is it ethical ?
That's a moral question without an objective answer. I personally
would regard it as unethical as you're not doing that part of the work
yourself and it's important work.

I believe @StephenG is wrong and moralistic.  This is an ethical question, not a moral question.  Morality and ethics are different subjects never to be confused -- do so at your own peril and risk of your reputation being labeled as a pariah.  Ride out of town on the same high horse whence you came.
The institutional bans are highest priority to observe and obey; the "functional" questions are second most important.  There is no longer a moral obligation to suffer when learning how to write.  Learning how to write can actually be done faster using AI tools like ChatGPT.  Gone are the days when people have to struggle with syntax and grammar.  Now people (young and old) can focus on higher cognitive activities.

...because...
Is it OK to use ChatGPT to help with the abstract ?
I would say NO for an objective reason.

Your "objective" reasons are not objective, they are personal opinions imposed on others.
If the academics in the room think people should suffer just because you or I did when we were growing up 20+ years ago, don't impose your moralistic suffering on someone else.  Be practical, not canonical.

Writing an abstract (or summary) is a valuable skill beyond academia.
Learning to write these types of summaries is a hugely valuable skill
which has applications in all sorts of ways. The reality is that when,
e.g. your boss wants a report, you'll be lucky if they even read the
summary ("abstract") so that bit of writing has to be good. Learning
to do this is enormously useful in careers, in business even in
private life.
Using ChatGPT or similar does not teach you anything and leaves you at
the mercy of it's (considerable) limitations and (frequent) errors.

The last statement is flat out wrong, just preachy criticism of technology you don't understand well enough yet.
It is up to the user to learn from their use of the technology, and learn how to use it most effectively to write good prose, abstracts or whatever the task at hand is.  It is a huge (and ethical) time saver when used correctly.  The limitations are disappearing everyday.  The frequency of errors is going down fast as the LLM models ingest more good examples of writing and source code.
If the author uses it as a writing "assistant" (aka copilot, NOT substitute) and supplies the main thoughts and gets a first draft, then learns from it, and improves it, what matters is that the end product (summary) is accurate and good writing.  Pairs programming is the MOST effective way to write good quality code and pseudocode, so why not pairs writing.
In two to three years, the quality of writing by AI writing assistants will be almost indistinguishable from some of the best newspaper writers.  Ye who resist how to apply it well shall perish!

It looks like this is a criticism of another answer, and not an answer in and of itself. Is my assessment true? If it is, I suggest adding an answer, and making that the focus. If it's not, I suggest making that obvious (because it's not currently). One way to add super long comments to other people's answers is to write them out on a pastebin.com paste, and put the link as your comment (should you not want to answer the question). FYI: I'm not the one who downvoted your answer. Also, make sure to be friendly and such.


text:
Co-organizing a workshop, does diversity matter?
I am planning on organizing a workshop as a part of a scientific conference (neuroscience). I have observed that some workshops are organized by a single person, and others are organized by multiple people. When it is organized by multiple people, they were associated with different institutes, and were not from a common academic family.
My question: is it preferable to have people from different institutes as organizers? Does it look "bad" if people from the same institute/lab organize a workshop together?
I am planning to invite around 10 people as speakers, and the organizers will have at most 1 talk altogether (except introductory/organizing short speeches).

You mean: diversity of organizers, speakers or participants? (They are 3 separate things.)

@PiotrMigdal organizers. speakers will be diverse. I clarified the question.

EDIT: To add after an edit focussed the question:
The convener line-up will be important to attract people to the workshop so getting good names is not a bad idea as a starting point. Having conveners from several institutes may be beneficial since it shows prospective participants that the workshop has wider support. It may also mean that the advertisement can be improved, particularly if conveners come from different continents. Such signals should not be udnerestimated but will highly depend on the field and where research is carried out (geographically). There is of course nothing wrong with having conveners from only one institute. In the end it will be other factors such as convenience and interest that will determine the line-up of conveners.
Answer to the original question as it was interpreted:
The first question you should ask yourself is what is the goal or purpose of the workshop. I am used to workshops focussing on specific questions, perhaps leading up to common paper or document detailing  a problem formulation or providing recommendations for the future. In any case, the persons to invite would be the most suited to provide input to the goal. I have run very small workshops where I could only accept one person from any department/research group due to limited physical space. In other words, getting representation was more important than getting certain names in.
So depending on the goals you have you will probably see how you distribute invitations. If you have the space and time then it may be open but that may not be the most efficient way and invitation only may be the way out. That requires careful thinking so that you can achieve the set goal(s).

This doesn't answer the updated question, which is about choosing organizers rather than speakers.

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text:
Should academic papers necessarily carry a sober tone?
I was reading this paper titled "Optimal Symmetric Rendezvous Search on Three Locations." While talking about the history of search problems, the author mentions the following anecdote in passing.

In 2007 a letter writer to the Guardian newspaper queried, “I lost my wife in the crowd at Glastonbury (a music festival). What is the best strategy for finding her?” A reader replied, “Start talking to an attractive woman. Your wife
  will reappear almost immediately.”

While I found it quite amusing to read this, I do not often come across papers with such witticisms. Is there an unwritten rule about the tone of sobriety that is considered appropriate in academic papers? Are jokes or anecdotes fine as long as they do not appear forced?

The most daring witticism I made was an Acknowledgements to the local grocery store for serving tasty muffins at half-price before closing in a workshop paper. My advisor recommended I take it out. However, in a conversation with a colleague, he said that it would have been a nice personal touch if you were able to learn a little more about scientists and see them more as humans if such benign comments were left in.

Incidentally, the published version of the article has what appears to be a corrected version of this story: "In 2007 a correspondent to a newspaper wrote, 'If I lost my wife at, say, Glastonbury, would our chances of being reunited be better if I stayed in one spot, hoping she passes by, or if I wandered the site, hoping to bump into her?' (letter from Nick Crossland to the Guardian, June 19, 2007). A reader replied, 'All Nick Crossland would need to do is to start chatting up some other woman and his wife would immediately reappear. As if by magic' (Marjorie Moulding, June 26, 2007)"

It's not a paper, but a glance into GKP's Concrete Mathematics convinces that some amount of (self-ironic) humour is definitely refreshing.

Tell me, are the following titles sober? (1) Sturmian Jungle (or Garden?) (2) Excluding slightly more than a cycle The 1st one is a full combunatorics article containing many examples of various stuff with a common denominator, the 2nd one is a PhD thesis.

You might take a look at http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22299 for a collection of mathematical examples.

Are jokes or anecdotes fine as long as they do not appear forced?

To me, there is a single measure for this: does a sentence X contribute to the paper, or not. If the answer is no, it shouldn't be there at all.
To apply the principle to the joke: if the joke illustrates a common problem which needs a solution, or illustrates a common (perhaps insufficient) solution to a well stated problem, then it certainly has a place in a research paper.
I understand scientific writing as a form of literature. I do not see any reason for literature (including scientific discourse) not to be entertaining as well, when appropriate. But everything has its time and place. However, it shouldn't be forced and has to fit the main contribution of the paper, hence the filter rule above.

Quoting Terry Tao:

Overly philosophical, witty, obscure or otherwise “clever” comments should generally be avoided; they may not seem so clever to you ten years from now, and can sometimes irritate the very readers you want to communicate your result to.

However, you'll always be a little embarrassed looking back at yourself, so this is a pretty mild warning.  I think there's nothing wrong with a little humor in papers.
That said, your example joke is definitely inappropriate to put in a formal paper because it's a joke that assumes the audience is all straight men.  There may be a place for mildly sexist humor, but that place is not the workplace.

And if you don't think that joke assumes the audience is straight men, ask yourself "Would I tell this joke in front of an audience that was all women?"

In this vein, note that your paper will be read by people of all ages from many distinct cultures. What you find obviously funny may  be completely opaque to someone from a different culture.

Since the witty answer was given by a women (if I get the name right), I think it's save to assume sexism is not an issue here. It's more a play toward a common cliché. Cultural difference can be an issue, although I think the responsibility lies more with the reader (recognise and adapt to the author's culture) rather than the writer, otherwise we'll have only bland PC common denominator texts.

@Raphael: women have sexist behavior too. Sexism is deeply rooted in many aspects of our societies, as is indeed shown by a lot of "common clichés".

@Raphael: the responding reader is not a representative for all listeners at all points of time. Whilst she may have felt that comment appropriate at the time of writing, that does not guarantee that no one will ever criticise such a comment for sexism. On this thread, several have already done so. There is plenty of humour that's both relevant and unoffensive, I don't think that omitting offensive jokes presents any cost to scientific literature

To add to walkmanyi's good answer: To make jokes in a scientific article is "dangerous". It is similarly a bad idea to use "quotes"! In both cases the reader may interpret the written text in many different and unforeseen ways. It is particularly problematic since readers come from many different cultures and different ways of expressing themselves, for example, figuratively. Since clarity should be a key aspect of an article, it is best to stay clear of jokes and such, keeping the somber tone you refer to.

Answering from a Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) focus, to contrast the STEM focus of previous responses:
Humour may play a vital role in both the dissemination of, and methodology of HASS discoveries.  HASS fields tend to deal with multiple overlaid meanings, whether they reference social meanings or cultural meanings or pure ideas.  Things that simultaneously mean many things tend to be funny.
Umberto Eco's sly fable, In the Name of the Rose is a useful case here.  Eco is otherwise a scholar in a field where multiple meanings are vitally important.  His novel is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a piece of pulp fiction, while also being a sly attack on Stalinism and Academic life.  Perhaps most importantly for this question, the issue of whether the innermost nature of reality (God, art / the least worst empirically tested description of external reality) can only be approached in a reverent and serious fashion, or whether the seriously funny kind of levity also gives us access to reality?  Now In the Name of the Rose may not have been the best way to communicate new linguistics findings; but, a serious exegesis of In the Name of the Rose as a post-modern novel might reasonably try to recreate some of the levity of its evidentiary text.
I wouldn't suggest writing a paper full of the Big Bumper Book of Jokes, but if your evidence is naturally funny (anti-government jokes as representative of public sentiment); or, if there's an obvious irony in the case study that you can state clearly for the reader; or, if the proper presentation of your findings calls for wit; then, use it within the broader genre conventions of your discipline's writing.

Humor should be used sparingly, and when used, should not be obviously offensive. If you can imagine that someone could reasonably take offense to something, then it shouldn't be included in a formal research article. I would even avoid such a joke in a formal talk.
That said, humor does have its place in a scientific delivery. I often include a few wry remarks in my classroom lectures, but they are used sparingly, and only to lighten the mood. (I might make reference, for example, that you could do something, but only if you want your work to end up in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.)
But tasteless and overly lewd jokes should be saved for a stand-up comedy routine.

There was a physicist(?) in the Soviet Union who always cited a non-existent paper by Cheyne and Stokes ("irregular respiration brings relief"?) in all his publications (and also thanked them in acknowledgements). He had been imprisoned in the GULAG for several years when, on 1953-03-05, it was announced that Stalin had Cheyne–Stokes respiration. Another inmate, a physician, explained to him that this meant an inevitable death, and, thus, a hope for a change in their fortunes.
I am not sure if this qualifies as "humor", but I see no problem with it.
More to the point, you want your paper to be read to the end, and you want the readers to understand and appreciate the results. If a joke would illuminate your point, making it clear and unforgettable, go for it!

Also see the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper

The truth is that it depends on your institution. My college required us to keep a somber tone, avoid dressing up how we presented things, etc. In other words, it had to sound incredibly boring. We were taught that academic papers were meant to deliver factual information. These other things didn't contribute to the facts or analysis, so they were unnecessary. I'm sure many other institutions might have variations of these rules. Break the rules, your paper doesn't make it. :(
Here's why I think that's ludicrous. ;) The purpose of any written work (excluding entertainment) is to convey a message. The writer must get the reader's attention, adequately get the message across, HOLD reader's attention while doing so, and (optionally) leave a lasting impression. Requirements 1, 3, and 4 are all in the presentation. So, it stands to reason that a witty, funny, or just somewhat unique presentation of content is entirely justified.
The irony of it is that many other classes taught us these principles of effective writing and captivating penmanship, then the academic papers we wrote were to avoid these things to be more successful. Makes a lot of sense, yeah?
Bonus thought. Academic papers also don't usually happen in a vacuum: many papers published in journals are competing with others. Different institutions want to make the best papers, find greatest discoveries, have highest acclaim, etc. It's not all that different from people publishing books. In light of this, I think academics have even more justification for going the extra mile to make their work stand out. Just a thought.

You're equating "somber" and "not dressing up the presentation" with "boring" and "ineffective". This is not the case. It is possible to make exciting research sound boring, and it's possible to make it sound exciting, all within the "only the facts please" setting of academic work. The reason why academic papers should ideally "stick to the facts" is because the idea is that a paper presents results and the reader is invited to verify the results and draw their own conclusions to compare with the authors' conclusions.

Let's see if I can improve on my post. There are certainly papers with just research facts that come off as exciting. A paper might succeed just fine without extra presentation effort. Yet, decades of research into learning and psychology show a good presentation goes a long way. A paper can reach a wider audience or hit their intended audience harder. So, you could say I'm saying such styles are "more" effective rather than the only thing that can be effective.

I can agree with this. But I also think that there's a fine line between effective presentation and marketing, and one has to be careful to separate opinions from fact.

I totally agree with that. And walking that line can certainly take some discipline and careful thought.

The driest book I ever read was the revised report on Algol 68. It was liberally salted with quotes. The best one was the "Merely corroborative detail" line from the Mikado, used to introduce pragmas (a kind of semantically meaningful comment). Quotes like this stopped one wanting to slit ones' wrist while reading the meat of the document.

N.B.: This "report" doubled as a VERY STRICT standard defn of ALGOL68.  Full quote: {Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Mikado, W.S. Gilbert.} c.f. http://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/report.html#112 ... Another quote from the same report {Tao produced the one.
The one produced the two.
The two produced the three.
And the three produced the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang,
and through the blending of the material force they achieve harmony.
Tao-te Ching, 42, Lao Tzu}

Sometimes humor can help readers to remember the essence of an approach. The best example I can give in this regard is from Leo Breiman's original paper about bagging predictors* (paper available here). In the conclusion he summarizes the paper like this:

Bagging goes a ways toward making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, especially if the sow's ear is twitchy.

* Used to make a stronger model by combining a set of weak ones, which is particularly effective when there is high variability between the weak models.
On very rare occasions, authors go even further and write a paper about a humorous topic, such as WHEN ZOMBIES ATTACK!: MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF AN OUTBREAK OF ZOMBIE INFECTION. Humor can be a good way of bringing abstract matter under the spotlight for laymen to appreciate.

If it makes your point well, then a comment that is humorous can add to the paper.  The cutoff for this is rather more permissive in a conference presentation, though sprinkling a few semi-relevant jokes into a presentation is best left to the keynotes.
The more eminent the author, the more they can get away with in terms of grabbing the reader's attention:  How about the abstract to Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?

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text:
How can I convince my postdoc advisor to end my contract early?
I am currently a postdoc in a Computer Science discipline.
By some odd artifact of the way our university handles postdoc contracts, we are given fixed-duration (1 year) contracts with no exit clause. The only way to amend the contract (i.e. end it early) is through a mutual agreement with the advisor.
(Side note: this came as a nasty surprise to me when I started looking for jobs.)
I have found a job that is a great career opportunity for me, and I intend to take it as I believe it's acceptable to leave my postdoc early.
The job is in industry (again, my choice), and while I would much prefer to not burn any bridges I understand this is a lot to ask of my boss.
I am personally aiming for the smoothest transition possible,
with a reasonable notice period (1.5 months) and a plan for transitioning my duties, but obviously this mutual agreement issue is a big sticking point.
I am looking for good arguments to help my case, ideally focusing on the positive (it's great for them), for example:

it looks good on their "CV" to have lab members go to great places
This increases their visibility in the community
people are defined by where they've worked previously, this can increase the reputation of the lab

What arguments can I use to convince my postdoc advisor that we should end the contract early?
I realize there are many "legal" reasons why I can/should be allowed to leave, and I would have posted on workplace.sx to look for those.
My hope here is to look for some of the often-intangible "academic" benefits, and take a step in the direction of a win-win compromise.

"one cannot be forced to work". I am not a law expert but that does not contradict the "no exit clause"? Also, saying "this is a professional employer/employee relationship, not indentured servitude" is a sure way to burn bridges.

This may be location dependent - where are you located? Have you discussed this with your advisor? I find it highly unlikely that your advisor would make you stay against your wishes (but stranger things have happened).

As I understand it, everyone knows that a post-doc job is a stepping stone to a career and they shouldn't be expected to turn down career opportunities for the meager pay that post-doc life provides. My guess is this 'no exit' clause isn't enforceable. No job can 'make' you work for them. You can choose to leave but it sounds like it might burn a bridge as you say, since you did sign a document saying you would commit to some given time period.

Do you mean there is a "no exit" clause, or do you mean that and exit clause is lacking.  I suspect the latter, which would normally (not a lawyer, don't even know where you are) mean the relevant employment law is your only guide.

I realize there are many "legal" reasons why I can/should be allowed to leave, and I would have posted on workplace.SX to look for those.
My hope here is to look for some of the "academic" benefits (sometimes intangible) that turn this into a win-win (or at least closer to that direction). I'm editing the question to make this more clear.

The reason none of us are suggesting "academic" benefits is that at least to me (and I would guess to many other posters) this is just the wrong framing.  I would simply tell your supervisor that you're leaving; if they're a reasonable person, they'll support your decision, and you can ask them to sign whatever documents you need.  If they're not reasonable, then reasoning won't be very productive, and the bridge is burned.

Just explain your situation to your advisor.
Say that you are sorry to leave and explain why the new opportunity is great for you.
You do not need to come up with reasons why you leaving early is great for your advisor. (It isn't, but they will understand.)
Advisors worry about your future.


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How to show patents in my google scholar profile?
I have a Google Scholar profile where my conference papers are located.
Google automatically added one, while I had to manually add another.
See https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZveOfZYAAAAJ&hl=it
I'm also inventor for a few patents that appear on Google Patent.
See https://patents.google.com/?inventor=alberto+soragna&language=ENGLISH
I wonder why Google does not show the patents automatically in my Scholar profile. I see several users that have both papers and patents there.
BTW since a couple of weeks I also have a personal website where I listed the above publications (patents included), as suggested by Google scholar guidelines.
Thank you

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41412/updated-title-of-arxiv-not-recognised-by-google-scholar

"+" and "Add article groups" allowed me to add some of my patents including their citations.  Nicole's suggestion ("Add article manually") misses citations, and "Add articles" seems not to find patents.  Google's UI is not up to Google's usual standards here.
I also changed "Configure article updates" to "Don't automatically update my profile."  I am pretty sure the patents I added had been in my profile previously, and most likely Google's "auto update" had deleted them.

If a patent or any other publication is missing from your Google scholar profile, go to your profile and click the + icon at the top of your list of publications and select "Add article manually".  You'll get a popup with tabs across the top for various kinds of publications.  Click "Patent" and fill in the details.
If Google lists a publication that's not yours (it happens!), click the checkbox next to it, then Delete.

Super helpful response; as per Ulrich's answer, the manual addition was needed for patents specifically.

Your patents published on 13 August and 3 September 2020, respectively. I suspect Google Scholar will automatically add them soon.


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Should I email potential supervisor when I've already applied
I applied last week for a PhD project at a European institution (the deadline was Friday 13-Nov). Due to seeing the position fairly late, I did not make contact with the project supervisor prior to applying (though it didn't say I had to do this).
I'm now wondering whether I should email the supervisor to say hello and let them know that I applied.
Pros:
Means I don't interact with them for the very first time at an interview.
Cons:
Seems slightly weird? Ideally, I would have emailed them before applying. I don't have much to say in the email, the project was fairly well described in the advertisement. I could ask for more detail, but I don't want to sound presumptive?
I'd love to hear what people think, and what they think I should include in any email.

Assuming that they are involved in your application process (which is common in some places but not others), then you should contact them now. Explain that you saw the announcement late and want to give them whatever information they might need at this time.
I wouldn't flood them with information in the first contact but be ready to supply information if they ask for it. But an introduction and expression of interest in their work won't hurt and might help.


text:
Potential PhD supervisor replied short but expressed interest, what to do next?
I wrote a relatively long email to a potential supervisor and they answered quite short, saying that they are delighted to hear of my interest in the program and they would be happy to work with me. I do not know how generic this answer is, but can you tell me what would be the good next step? Should I ask them for a skype meeting?
Thanks!

Where is this? In some places it means more than in others. It can also vary by field.

This is one of the universities of California and in humanities!

Word of caution: my answer below is based on my experience in Canadian Universities and may not apply to other countries.
The way I interpret this response is: your profile is interesting and you are encouraged to list this professor as one of the potential advisors on your application.
If you want further information regarding the lab's research, it seems you will have to initiate this. Just keep in mind that at this point, the professor is likely getting a lot of enquiries. This is the likely reason for the short reply. Some professors may (at this stage) decline extended conversations and refer you to their lab web page, while others will gladly take the time to talk to you. I would send an email thanking this person for their reply, letting them know that you intend to list them as a potential supervisor (if that is indeed your intention), and asking them if they think it is appropriate at this stage to discuss your remaining questions over mail or via skype.


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Changing my information in a published paper
How can I change my position/title that was mistakenly written in a published paper?

For print editions that is likely impossible. Ask the editor.

If the paper has already been published, you can't. It's too late. Even if the print versions have not been printed, the electronic version will have been distributed, and it's not possible to issue a recall.
If the issue is severe enough you could publish a corrigendum/erratum, for which you'd have to ask the journal.

Allure is correct that a published paper is generally considered a permanent artifact that can't be retracted. This dates back to when it was printed and copied and sent out everywhere, so essentially updating it would be impossible.
I think it is worth reflecting, though, on the future of scientific publication: today, the "permanent artifact" view is just not true, as any internet paper archive can easily publish updated versions while retaining the original history, and simply redirect everyone looking for the paper to the latest version of it. Some people may retain the original copy (saved as a PDF or printed somewhere), but the vast majority clicking on a link somewhere to your paper will get the updates.
With that viewpoint in mind, depending on your field, I think it is worth at least trying to issue updates when there are errors in your paper. This is especially important for technical mistakes (e.g., a fix to a computation or calculation will make life easier for some poor grad student trying to find the error), but I think it may still be worthwhile for your case of wrong author information. What is certainly in your power:

If your paper is published on arXiv or another preprint service, simply make the correction and publish a new version there.

If you have posted the latest version of the paper on your website, again, simply make the correction and publish a new version there.

If you have posted a the publication in a publications list on your website or CV, include a brief parenthetical: "Mahmoud et. al, Paper Title, 2020, Important Journal. (Erratum: institution of last author is incorrect in official published version.)"

What may not be in your power is updating the official journal version, but you can always contact the editors to ask. I think that it is becoming more common to allow official updates and corrections (for example, there is growing social pressure to accommodate transgender author name changes). I do hope this trend continues.


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Do academics charge for talks at student societies? As a PhD student, should I ask for some honorarium when giving a talk at a student society?
I am a first year PhD student. I have been invited to give a talk at a student society in my own university (so no travel costs, etc). I am wondering whether I should ask for a small fee when giving the talk. Some points:

I have been an organiser at other student societies, and generally we wouldn't pay when professors gave a talk with us, but we would invite them to dinner (prepandemic). There was someone who asked to be paid (she said she always charges) and we agreed (she is a public figure).
Obviously it may seem a bit arrogant that I (only a PhD student) ask for a fee, but during my undergraduate studies I gave quite a few student talks / seminars for other students (for free), so I have become a bit of a big name on campus, and I believe my talks are good.
I have been paid by the university when giving a sample lecture about my area of research to prospective students, and also when helping out at other outreach events.
It's a student society after all (not a conference), so I am not sure it would look particularly great on my CV, especially given that I already have quite a few of these on my CV (albeit I wasn't invited).
The society is about the ethics of X, where X is my field. I have been an advocate of ethical considerations of my field (usually ignored), so I am flattered to have been invited and I genuinely care about this.
I generally enjoy giving talks.
But it takes me time, and obviously my research, my teaching, and my personal life also require a lot of time.
It takes me about 24 hours to prepare a good talk (for example, six evenings). ((Is this way too much time?)).

Should I give the talk? Should I ask for some fee?

Personally I wouldn't ask for money, in particular not in case of a student society. But if you do, please do not forget that such a fee would likely be taxable income, with all the associated paperwork involved.

I've never asked for a fee, and I generally decline honoraria if offered.  (When my own institution offers money, I take it.)

@mlk (and others interested): Your comment about "associated paperwork involved" reminded me of something in Feynman's 1985 book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, so I got my copy of the book to look it up. What I was thinking of wound up being the entry titled "Thirteen Times" on pp. 256-257. Googling a random phrase in it, I found a copy of that section on the internet.

At your own university, do not expect to be paid.  One exception: there may be a dinner at a restaurant after the talk, and your check may be covered by the society.

I appreciate you linking to COVID-19 in case no one had heard about it lol

@AzorAhai-him- That was done in an edit

Oh lol well then thanks @PeterMortensen

I did sometimes pay to give a talk.... (this one... in French. I paid the TGV train ticket)

For conferences I believe it is very rare that invited speakers get paid. Conference dues are always covered for invited speakers. Often hotel and transportation are too, but even that isn't always.

I would suggest to not ask a fee. It's a student society, and having served in the board of one, budget was always tight. Talks by PhDs and professors were always good since students could learn a lot and it was easy to organize and almost everybody was willing to talk about what they were doing, and always with a bottle of wine (or something non-alcoholic where appropriate) as 'payment'.
Regarding spending 24 hours on a talk - that seems like too much for a small gig at the student society. You know your field/research, and you probably have a feeling on the ethics around it, so it should be relatively easy to come up with what you want to say. I'd spend at most four hours on it, for a 30-45 minute talk. Two hours of structuring my contents, and two hours for creating the slides.
Thanks avid - For a PhD student, you should take into account your funding and whether you can spend your working hours on this, or if you should do this in your free time.

For a professor, at least, I would suggest that giving this sort of talk is really part of their 'day job', and so they should account the time spent preparing/delivering it against their usual salary. For a PhD researcher the situation may be a bit more complex, depending on their funding situation.

@avid you're right - added a bit to the answer.

You can also perfectly well re-use talks or parts of talks. You don't need a new unique talk every time for this kind of thing. Most professors probably have a few standard outlines ("this is the area I research") and then speak primarily extemporaneously. If you really want a brand new talk, base it on what you're currently studying or researching, since the work of putting together and giving the talk will also double as studying/researching. A really, really good topic for a student group talk is something that you learned previously but have partially forgotten and will need in the future.

As a grad student I had a presentation that was very much a living document. Every time I'd give a talk, it would come out of the drawer and get updated. Sometimes the updates were substantial, sometimes not, but it was never made from scratch after the first talk. Eventually it became my defense.

@avid In the US at least, PhD students are typically on a 50% appointment. If that appointment wouldn't cover this, I think it's well within the duties of the 50% studentship that you're technically paying to do, in the same way homework is a PhD student's "day job." But just IMO

Lucky you to have had a budget. I was the head of the physics students organization at a major university and when we needed money (for the bottle of wine you mentioned, or once a year to visit something), I was kneeling in front of the dean's office to beg for some money (which, I must say, he always gave without nitpicking). If somebody had asked for a fee to talk, I think we would think we misunderstood the request. But then it was in the golden years of French academia where money was not that important to us.

Treat such things as "service to the community". I'm sure plenty of people have "donated" things to your education.

@Buffy I imagine in OP's situation I would be willing to talk for free, but it is not a "service to the community".  Instead it is an opportunity to talk about something I am enthused about with an interested audience (maybe I should be paying them!?!).  As such, necessary preparation should be minimal.  If I really thought I needed 24 working hours to prepare the talk, then it would need money.

@emory, OTOH, preparing for the talk, give you an asset that you can deploy in the future. You have a talk "in the bag" that you can bring out whenever it is useful. The preparation actually improves you in a number of ways that are useful for any academic.

@Buffy it does improve you but so does exercising or spending time with loved ones.  I feel that OP could forego the 24 hour prep and give the talk extemperaneously (or with minimal prep).  Then OP could collect payment in the form of received constructive criticism.  Maybe we could agree that if the student society wants a smooth, polished, professional talk then they need to pay an honorarium; but they probably don't and OP is thinking too hard on this one.

The questions asks "Do academics charge for talks at student societies". The answer to this is generally no, I've rarely heard of academics charging student societies for talks, especially if they are local.
Note that this is not the same as saying should academics charge for their talks, that is a difficult and complex ethical question, but rather that, as a rule, they don't.
You can ask, but I suspect they answer will be that they have no money to pay you.

When I give local talks of any kind, I do not at all pretend to charge a fee, nor expect an honorarium, though a dinner (or free parking?) is nice.
When I give non-local invited talks, I would expect to have my expenses covered, more-or-less (I have to eat anyway), but not "make a profit" in money. In some cases there'll be benefits to me from giving the talk, or it promises to be a fun audience, so if my expenses are not completely covered, it's still desirable for me to do.
Yes, if one is in a financially delicate situation, these things loom larger... but I think the academic tradition (in more idealist milieus?) is to not expect to make a profit from telling about your own work.

Given what you’ve told us about yourself, you don’t seem to have the rep to participate in the “cash-for-public-speaking” business.
So, if you asked me for payment, I’d say “no”, I’d think to myself “who does this guy think he is”, and I’d go find another speaker, and I’d never invite you again.
Your local student society might be more generous and forgiving than I am (lots of people are). Do you want to risk it?

You don't say what discipline you are in; that may matter.
As a PhD student, especially in the first year, you should use this kind of invitation to practice giving academic talks of the kind you would give at a conference or as a job talk. In the first year you probably won't have much, but for students it can be an overview of a topic if you don't have research to present.  I know what that would look like in my discipline but not yours.
Because giving academic papers is a part of the work you are training for and will be absolutely necessary in the long run, these are good opportunities as long as you don't let them be a distraction from getting your other work done.
I sometimes invite students on the job market to give practice talks to my undergraduates (if their topic is relevant to the class) and these are really helpful.

Sorry but the thought of a first year PhD asking for payment from a student association at their own institution smacks of narcissism to me. I suggest you read Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyper Reality. In it he writes on the differences between academics and intellectuals. Essentially, he argues that being an intellectual comes with public responsibilities. There's a sense of duty to engage with society and, in my mind at least, this doesn't involve grabbing for money at every turn. I sincerely hope this helps. All the best .

Unless you are a prominent figure in your field, you might ask whether there is a fee - or even expenses - or anything else but that's what you might ask about, not ask for…

I have been paid by the university when giving a sample lecture about
my area of research to prospective students, and also when helping out
at other outreach events.

If I read it correctly, it means those events were beyond your duty stated in the contract, so you get paid.
First, ask permission to your university for being paid to give lectures to an external association .
Second, since giving the talk to the Student Association is beyond your duties, you have all the rights to ask for a compensation (talking about ethics ...).
However, your interest in promoting Ethics seems to be very strong, being in itself a reasonable compensation, so I would proceed this way: you can state to the student association that you would charge 200 quids for this talk, but knowing the Students'Associations are on a tight budget, and that budget is better spent on books and beers, ask to convert the 200 quids in one beer or one book (relevant to Ethics of X).

I don't think the association is external.

Ugh. Sounds petty (almost extortion) and a good way to get disinvited.

See, for example: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Bernard_Shaw#Shaw?_"We_have_established_what_you_are,_Madam"

@Buffy Seems reasonable to me. Give a talk in exchange for a share of the pizza and drinks afterwards, or some token gift like a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine.

@nick012000, if you don't say a word, you'd almost certainly be invited to a pizza get together anyway. It doesn't need to be a transaction. It can be their gift. A "token gift" that is asked for isn't a gift.

@Buffy do you mean that what I suggest to do can be misrepresented by a unreferenced crappy quote, possible subject of a dummy meme and so on with plethora of people sharing it over the various social media? Absolutely yes, I agree.

Ok. Good. So don't do things or get yourself into situations where your actions can be easily misinterpreted to your own disadvantage.

And please do not follow imaginary advantages and straw-men that led the academia at the point where is now, where work is expected to be performed for free.  Not for-profit does not mean free, asking a fee and proposing to convert it into something else is not extorsion (nor a gift, what is this crap about gifting people? are people monkeys or dogs being tamed?).

If “quid” is British slang for “pound”, then it’s plural is just “quid”, not “quids”.


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Is it legal if I print PDF files of Springer books for personal use?
As a Canadian undergraduate student, I have access to all Springer books on their website, provided that I log in with my institutional account. Springer books can be downloaded as PDF files.
Because I prefer physical copies of academic titles for reading convenience, I want to print the entire PDF file of a Springer book that I'm interested in.
Is it legal to do this?

Have you read the terms of use?

IANAL but in general if you aren't depriving them of revenue you aren't doing anything wrong, as there is no tort for them to action.

@ScottSeidman are terms of use usually relevant? do they not normally ask you to refrain from doing things that are actually perfectly legal?

@user207421:  But the answer to "Are they denying revenue to Springer?" is not clear.  Is the answer "No, because the alternative to printing the book is just to read it online." or is the answer "Yes, because the alternative to printing the book is buying a physical copy of the book."?

@user253751 What is "perfectly legal" from a civil sense can depend entirely on the contract you are under; of course, the enforcement of contracts imposed by website terms and conditions is an active area of legal dispute.

@user253751 An example that comes up all the time in academia is in agreements with publishers. As the copyright owner, you have all sorts of rights to make copies and distribute your own work. However, if you sign an exclusive publishing license with a publisher, even if you retain copyright, there are a lot of things you can't do thanks to that contract (like print and sell copies of your own paper) that you'd otherwise be able to freely do under copyright law. And that's your own paper, not even someone else's!

Fair dealing addresses exceptions to activity that would otherwise be copyright infringement, similar to "fair use" in the US.
I'm not a lawyer, and don't live in Canada, but it seems to me that the exceptions for private study would cover making a physical copy of a work you otherwise have access to. Some other reading:
https://www.lib.sfu.ca/help/academic-integrity/copyright/fair-dealing
https://www.ualberta.ca/faculty-and-staff/copyright/intro-to-copyright-law/fair-dealing/index.html
https://uwaterloo.ca/copyright-at-waterloo/faq-1-5
However, I think it is far more likely that you'd be infringing the terms and conditions of the website that you use to access the digital resources; even if you aren't infringing copyright, you could be violating something you've agreed to by using the site. If it's prohibited by the terms, you'll have to weigh the value of the physical copy against the risk that those terms are enforceable and the publisher chooses to enforce them.
I don't know what terms that apply to you specifically through the access you have through your institution, but on Springer's site I see this at https://link.springer.com/termsandconditions ...

1.2 You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content.

So, assuming those are the terms that you use the site under, it seems like they're explicitly giving you permission to print for your own use.
I would also consider that there may be existing physical copies in your vicinity, such as at your institution's physical library or a public library in your city. Using those resources, if the particular book you want is available, would save you the costs of printing and waste produced.

+1 Good find on the terms of use! I would expect that one's license to access the content would end when your user account gets terminated at the end of one's studies, but I can't find an explicit passage describing this in the linked ToS.

@DavidMulder Yeah, I also didn't find that, though admittedly I did not crawl through all the terms with a fine comb (who ever does?); that's one of the reasons that I wonder if OP's access (which I gather is part of some institutional subscription through their university library?) might have some additional limiting terms.

This will differ a bit from the good answer of Bryan Krause. I won't repeat what he says. And IANAL, so this is informal advice only.
There is one advantage of a printed copy in that you can easily annotate it by writing in the margins. There are electronic versions of this for PDFs, but I find them inconvenient at best.
Also, some systems make it difficult to read PDFs without actually downloading them to your own system. So, prohibiting downloads seems to be a lost cause.
But, if you are printing only for your own personal use and not for distribution, then, since you have been give access to the content itself, the medium you use to read it is of less (but not zero) concern.
The reason for this answer, however, is to point out a general principle of the law, observed many (most? all?) places and that is that "The Law does not concern itself with trifles."
Your personal use of a printed copy doesn't lessen the value of the material to the publisher, since you already have permission for the material itself.
So, I'd wager that any infraction would be so minuscule that no legal authority would think it worth any effort to stop it. This assumes a single copy for personal use when permission to use the material has already been granted.
Laws differ everywhere, of course, but here is some information specific to Canada.

And, some 40 years on, I still use several textbooks from my undergraduate days. Upper division classes, sure, but Ashcroft and Mermin, Sze, and Landau and Lifshitz are true classics.

"The Law does not concern itself with trifles" is, unfortunately, much more likely to be true for people with privilege (thus not for racialized minorities, for example). Laws that are enforced only at the discretion of individual (biased) human beings always exacerbates oppression.

Re Laws differ everywhere, of course, but here is some information specific to Canada. That info appears to be missing from your answer.

So Fermat noted in about 1637. But if you print single sided you have some room to expand thoughts of course. And often an asterisk next to a paragraph is enough for your purposes.

Ask them.

Is it legal to do this?

Who else would be able to sate definitively (apart from a judge) that this is allowed or not, except the copyright holders?
Now maybe you don't want to draw Springer's attention to yourself, so maybe you could ask the college to ask as a general rule. However, they're probably more likely to say "yes" to a single student than to a college.  But one way or another, they are the people to ask.  The Internet can't really give you a definitive answer.
An alternative
Ask the college library (by email so you have proof) if you can do this.  They might be very conservative about this, as they will be keen to avoid crossing Springer (or other copyright holders), but they may also be able to give you a statement of what you can and cannot do according to their agreement with them.

The copyright holder can be expected to answer "We prohibit you to do this" even in the cases where it's legal to do so without their permission and it does not matter if they prohibit it or not. They are not an unbiased party from which you can expect a truthful answer that is in your interests; they are not required to tell you if some legal clause grants you more rights than they wish you to have, and it is in their interests to advocate to the public that they have less fair use rights than they actually do.

@Peteris That's a very cynical viewpoint.  It's also a rationale for doing whatever you want to regardless of what restrictions may apply as, in your viewpoint, you can just ignore the rights holder if you're afraid they might assert rights - that's where your argument leads.

Quite the contrary, I'm asserting that certain copyright holders (of whom Springer in particular is a notorious example) have a habit of doing whatever they want to regardless of what restrictions apply to their copyright and is afraid that the public might assert the fair use rights they have in copyright law. Copyright law is inherently a compromise between the conflicting wishes of copyright holders and the general public, and the (many!) limitations the law makes to the copyright exclusivity are there for a good reason, even if rightsholders want to ignore the rights that the public has.