text:
Hosting a graduate student on a campus visit
A prospective graduate student is coming to visit a program and does not have a place to stay. As is sometimes the case, the program is not funding a hotel for the student and it seems likely that it would be an economic hardship for the student to host themselves. Let's say that the student is accepted to the program so this is more in the context of trying to impress the student and get her to join the program (although I'd be interested to hear if a similar situation with a non-accepted student would be different).
Is it appropriate for a faculty member to try to arrange for a host stay with a current student in the department?
Would it be appropriate for a faculty member interested in working with the student to offer to host the student in a guest room in their home?
Are there other or better options?

Always follow your school policy on the matter, if there is one.

Is it appropriate for a faculty member to try to arrange for a host stay with a current student in the department?

It's appropriate for a faculty member to ask current students if they can help, then tell the visitor, "Here is the email address of a current student in the department who can help you arrange a host stay, if you're interested."
Then let the visitor make contact with the student. Don't be pushy.

Would it be appropriate for a faculty member interested in working with the student to offer to host the student in a guest room in their home?

I vote "no" unless there's really no alternative - especially if the faculty member makes the offer directly to the visitor.
I have seen something similar (students living in the guest room of a researcher in industry who they are working with for the summer). Those students apparently were OK with it.
However, I have been offered this (visiting a professor in another country for the summer, he offers me a guest room in his home). I did not want to live in this professor's home, and it was mildly uncomfortable and awkward to turn down the offer. There is a power imbalance here that can be a problem.
If you decide to offer a guest room in a faculty member's home, definitely do it through a third party (e.g., have a student contact the visitor and say "Here are some possible hosts, including a guest room in this professor's home"). This way the visitor can turn it down without having to worry about offending the faculty member.

Are there other or better options?

If your school has a dorm with spare rooms (or if a nearby school has a dorm), this is a good option.

Yeah, I'm afraid that's been the case at my alma mater more often lately due to budgetary issues...Kind of a pity we can't even afford to host prospective, accepted recruits when they come from out of state/country.
What I've seen done is for the department staff to coordinate with the department's student representatives in organizing the whole recruitment visitation event, which has included making hosting arrangements for visiting recruits. Usually it has involved sending emails around to current grad students asking if anyone can host a recruit. Responses and outcomes have been pretty good from what I've seen. I think that's something of a small miracle, considering most grad students live rather modestly. I don't think I was ever in a position to host anyone, but it seems enough other students have managed to make it work that the department can get away with not supporting visitors' lodging needs financially.
I'd expect faculty to have somewhat better accommodations available, judging from the few whose houses I've visited – much more spacious than any grad student's I've ever known. I'd also expect faculty to have a more vested interest in cajoling good recruits into enrolling, and also more interest in getting to know these students ahead of time. Faculty might have longer histories in the area as well, and therefore make better hosts and offer better introductions to the city outside the university. Some faculty are very busy, but some are tenured (insert joke about sea cucumbers here, but the implication that tenured professors aren't busy isn't to be taken too seriously), and no grad student has this luxury – they're all busy, or at least should be. For these reasons, I'm inclined to argue that faculty would actually make better hosts than grad students overall, if they could just be convinced to take that extra responsibility.
However, I'm not sure a faculty member should host his/her own recruit. Personalities can clash in unpredictable ways when people share their personal spaces with one another, and a long-term advisor-student relationship is not one with which to take such risks lightly. People sometimes depend on a sort of professional distance in relationships with authority differences (i.e., superior-subordinate relationships, to whatever extent that fits the advisor-student scenario), and learn to regret lowering their personal boundaries through particularly bad experiences. These are easier to put behind oneself if one doesn't have to work with the other person continuously over several years thereafter.
Furthermore, one wouldn't want to create an implicit expectation in a department that faculty should host their own recruits. Many people choose not to live in tidy, spacious, or peaceful places that a visitor of unknown sensitivities might need just to be able to relax and sleep. This is why it's important to request volunteers for informal hosting if it can't be done through a professional hosting service such as a hotel (or even a hostel). Some people are reluctant to host others for very good reasons, and shouldn't suffer others' judgment for failing to fulfill their expectations when they would be unreasonable. It's all too easy to produce a culture of implicit obligation inadvertently like this, so this justifies preventative precautions.
@ff524's points are well-made on this matter too, and the dorm suggestion isn't a bad idea either, but from a recruit's perspective, I would prefer to be offered a room in a grad student's house / apartment / foxhole. Dorms tend to be dominated by undergrad culture, which at some universities won't make the best impression on recruits. There's enrollment-incentivizing value in being welcomed into a tight-knit, professional environment that gives a realistic impression of what life is like for other grad students, who presumably don't live in dorms (unless they're RAs). Staying with other grad students is a chance to talk about the university or the city over breakfast or dinner, whereas undergrads might make somewhat less useful company.
I'm not sure whether I'm giving undergrads too much credit or too little in saying no more or less than this...Some dorms and undergrads could make very nice environments I'm sure, but others could be downright awful. It seems to me that there's much more risk involved in the dorm proposition than in having other grad students host recruits.


text:
Do I need to get my supervisors to double check the article at the copyediting stage?
Basically I'm at the last stage of the article review process. We've already been through 2 rounds of copyediting (after the peer review stage), which none of my supervisors read as they trusted me to do the donkey work. (I don't blame them).
So far I've asked them to notify me at every stage of the review process, which has slowed down the process as I've had to wait for all 3 supervisors to confirm they are happy before I send off the article for another round. At this last stage I have read the paper thoroughly and can't find any issues and am keen to get it published asap. Am I still obligated to get my supervisors' approval at this stage, or should I just send it off?
I'm asking so I know the etiquette for future papers as well - I don't want to waste my (and my supervisors') time any more than necessary.
EDIT: all of the supervisors are on the authorship team.

Are any of them authors?

@AlexanderWoo Yes they are all on the authorship team. Updated.

Also, are there other authors who aren't supervisors, and have they reviewed it (a second pair of eyes is always good, and whether or not you've had that opportunity may affect your supervisors' thinking)

No we are the only authors. But that's a good point.

Can you define your terms (much) more clearly? In your institution what, exactly, is the last stage of the article-review process?
Broadly, copy-editing is about spelling and grammar; editing is about meaning. From that perspective, what two rounds are you counting?
Separately, if no supervisors read your work after the peer review stage, does that reflect well on their supervision?
If you're in your right mind, you very clearly need your supervisors to check any article at its final stage.
Calling that "double checking" or "the copyediting stage" should hurt, not help.

You would be wise to at least offer to let them review it again. Tell them it is done in your opinion and ask if they'd like one more quick look.
All authors need to agree on what is published and, as a junior member of the team, it isn't a good idea to make assumptions.

Since they are co-authors you should definitely give them the chance to look at the manuscript again. But you also don't want to waste more time - this is reasonable. I would therefore suggest to add a deadline. Something like

Here is the latest iteration of the manuscript, please have a final
look. I plan to submit it in one week unless I hear from you.

This gives everyone enough time to check the manuscript, or at least to inform you that they do need more time.

Since you ask about etiquette. As other answers stated, you need to let them see the manuscript. But the time is also very important. Sometimes publishers also encourage quick feedback. You can do the same with respect of your collaborators. Put a deadline by saying:
"I am going to resubmit our manuscript on xx.xx.xxxx, please let me know if you are having any further comments/suggestions by that date".

Given that:

they trusted me to do the donkey work

You don't have to send them the article again. With another set of collaborators who want to be involved with every step, then yes you should send the article to them.

And if they find something that they strongly disagree with only after publication? What then? You put the OP at risk with such advice.

@Buffy then they should've identified the problem before submitting the paper, when the paper was revised (if applicable), etc. OP is referring to copyediting changes, which should not change the meaning. If it does, then OP should be able to tell (they did say they "read the paper thoroughly") and involve the supervisors if necessary.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, but it is still the OP that takes the heat.

@Buffy are you suggesting that making sure one is blameless should be a priority? https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/146216/how-to-deal-with-people-whose-priority-is-to-not-get-blamed

No, I'm saying that the OP needs the absolute good will of their supervisors to get their career going. It is about self preservation along with ethical practice. I'm sure you understand that all authors need to agree with what is published as you were once an editor yourself. As an editor, would you publish something for which you didn't have that explicit assurance?

@Buffy Your comment brings up a memory. Once we were setting up a new journal, and the question came up of whether we should show the editor-in-chief a fully-finished paper (after typesetting, copyediting, etc.) before publishing it, just in case they wanted to make changes. The argument for doing so is very similar - if something goes wrong, it's good to be able to blame the editor-in-chief. I was strongly against it, because the EiC is overwhelmingly likely not to make changes, I'm not sure if they even check the paper after a while, and it adds processing time.

You are missing the point. The question isn't about editors. It is about authors. I'm really not understanding your point of view here. Aside: If an editor actually "edits" a submission then they need to get acceptance/permission from all authors. Yes?

@Buffy in that case I don't understand your point of view either. As the publisher, you send proofs to the corresponding author, and you trust that whatever they send back is publishable. As for editing a submission, we make tons of edits that we never point out to the authors. For example, take the sentence "General Relativity allows to do this calculation". In this case I would just insert a suitable pronoun (most probably "one", depending on context) between "allows to". There's no need to point this out to the authors and get all of them to approve; there is no way it changes the meaning.

If there's even a chance that the copyediting changes the meaning, then yes I would point it out as the copyeditor. If the OP's copyeditor also returned a list of changes to look at, and OP is not sure if the changed text is accurate, then yeah, approach the supervisors. But if the OP knows the answer already (they did the research, they're an expert, perhaps even the expert) then there's no need to. It just adds processing time.

@Allure I think most are familiar with and frustrated by copyeditor changes that the copyeditor thinks is a superficial edit that makes no change to meaning, yet totally butchers things. If you're working as a copy editor, please tell the authors about all changes you make (or at least give a marked up document).

@BryanKrause I did something like that once. The list of changes took an hour to prepare, and they were all OK. After several more lists of changes were all OK, I decided it wasn't worth the time invested. The first and last time I had authors say my copyediting changed the meaning was for the 4th(?) ever manuscript I handled.

@BryanKrause I also don't see the relevance in this situation. The OP says they "have read the paper thoroughly and can't find any issues" - so even if the copyeditor is inexperienced or unfamiliar with the field or made some stealth changes that they shouldn't have made, the OP should have seen them.

@Allure You can easily re-read something and not find an introduced error, as your brain substitutes what you expect to find there rather than the change made. For most journals I've worked with the authors get an extensive list of all changes made by the copyeditor. I really don't see how this is a problem, if you find it tedious to do as you go, you can easily use software to identify them. I'd expect these to be everyday tools for a copyeditor.

A small addition: To speed up the process of checking updated versions you could add an explicit list of changes when asking supervisors/collaborators/coauthors for approval. If you don't have changes tracked in your manuscript you could even point to line numbers and explain what has changed and for which points (if any) you would like additional input from them. This will make it easier for others to budget time and make it less daunting than going through an entire manuscript (& supplements) again.

I agree with those that say there's no pressing need to pass the document around again.  If you don't trust your own review to catch every mistake, you might ask one of the authors to give you a hand.
Beyond that, I, personally, would probably send around the galleys to all the authors, with a note to say "I think I've got this, and I intend to return this by date X.  If you see any issues, please let me know about them by Y".  It is a bit of a courtesy.

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Is paraphrasing with citation considered plagiarism?
As part of a thesis, I paraphrased a text from a peer-reviewed research paper and cited it at the end. But one of my friends thinks it's plagiarism. I wonder if anyone can make a comparison between the source and paraphrased sentences and let me know if that can be considered plagiarism.
Main source

Resorption begins with the migration of partially differentiated mononuclear preosteoclasts to the bone surface where they form multinucleated osteoclasts. After the completion of osteoclastic resorption, there is a reversal phase when mononuclear cells appear on the bone surface. These cells prepare the surface for new osteoblasts to begin bone formation and provide signals for osteoblast differentiation and migration. The formation phase follows with osteoblasts laying down bone until the resorbed bone is completely replaced by new. When this phase is complete, the surface is covered with flattened lining cells and a prolonged resting period begins until a new remodeling cycle is initiated. The stages of the remodeling cycle have different lengths. Resorption probably continues for about 2 weeks, the reversal phase may last up to 4 or 5 weeks, while formation can continue for 4 months until the new bone structural unit is completely created.

Paraphrased text

The migration of partly differentiated mononuclear preosteoclasts to the bone surface, where they become multinucleated osteoclasts (OCs), starts the resorption process. There is a reversal process after osteoclastic resorption is complete, where mononuclear cells emerge on the bone surface. These cells provide cues for osteoblast (OBs) differentiation and migration, as well as preparing the surface for new osteoblasts to begin bone forming. Osteoblasts lay down bone until the resorbed bone is fully replaced by new bone in the development process. After this process, the surface is coated with flattened lining cells (LCs), and a long resting period occurs before a new remodeling cycle starts. The lengths of the steps in the remodeling period vary. The resorption process lasts around 2 weeks, the reversal period up to 4 or 5 weeks, and the forming phase up to 4 months before the new bone structure is fully formed \parencite{hadjidakis2006bone}.

You should consider reading and understanding the original text, then keeping only the parts that are directly relevant for your research. It is unlikely that both the details of the bone regeneration process at the cellular level, and the precise timings of the resorption phases are relevant for your research. This may not be plagiarism, but it is most likely an indication of lack of understanding and / or lazyness. On top of that, you have made the original text worse by paraphrasing it (harder to read and understand).

Why would you do this?

I do not think it is plagiarism. If it is, then we should normalize quoting complete paragraphs taken from other research papers. If the original text is simpler to read then why to make it complicated by paraphrasing it.

Plagiarism requires intent to deceive or at least reckless disregard for the impression you're giving the reader as to whether or not work is yours. At worst, this is just poor citation hygeine. Although in this instance, a block quote is probably worthwhile

The single citation mark at the end of the paragraph does not fully convey just how close your paraphrased text is to the original paragraph. It would make a lot of sense to assume that the reference is just the source for the numerical values in the last sentence. As such, the charge of plagiarism isn't absurd here, as one could consider you to be misleading the reader into thinking that much more of the paragraph should be credited to you than it really should.
If you take an entire paragraph almost literally from a source, you should ideally make it much clearer. I'd usually recommend having a (half)-sentence at the beginning of the paragraph explaining its relationship to the source material.

This is where different styles of writing and standard bump into each other in unpleasant ways.
In scientific writing, we generally do not directly quote unless the exact words of the original author have some importance.  The strong preference is to paraphrase and cite.
That said, some assert fairly arbitrary rules, such as "four words that are the same require direct quotation".  I think that's silly, as sometimes there really is no other cogent way to say something,  but if a prof, institution, or journal wants to write down such a silly rule in official guidelines, I'll certainly enforce it that way if it comes before me in an honesty hearing.
Arno offers a perfectly valid point.  I think in this case, because the synopsis offered by your source is so succinct, and it looks like you're bending over backwards to avoid directly quoting, a block quote might certainly be in order.  To make it look less silly, I might start it with something like: "Source X offers a succinct synopsis of this process:"
and then go on to block quote.
If you choose NOT to block quote, you can address Arno's point by starting out the same way, and then adding "In brief, ....", and that way everyone knows the whole summary comes from your source (though, in this particular case, that looks a bit silly to me, as well).   Just make sure that you're not working under a silly set of "not four or more consecutive words"
Copyright and plagiarism are two distinct issues having little to do with each other.  You can violate copyright without plagiarizing, and vice versa.  I don't see any real copyright issues in any approach in this particular thread.

I suppose there could be a copyright issue if the copyright owner of the paraphrased source argued that the paraphrased paragraph is a derivative work of the original. But for such a small piece of content, being distributed on such a small scale, I wouldn't expect that to happen.

@DavidZ Even a verbatim quote would probably be judged to be fair use, since it's just one paragraph of a large work, there's little commercial value in the original work, and it's for nonprofit educational purposes.

@Barmar: Elsevier is a for-profit company. You may not be making a profit, but they are.

@Kevin IANAL, but I doubt that's relevant. They're not the infringer, the author of the paper is.

@Barmar: Both the author and the publisher are infringing, if infringement exists (I agree that this is probably fair use). See 17 USC 106.

@Kevin AIUI, the test isn't whether the infringer is making money, it's whether the infringement has impact on the commercial aspects of the original.

@Barmar: That confuses factor (1) with factor (4). They are two separate factors which are evaluated independently.

@Kevin Is publishing something in a scholarly journal generally considered "commercial use" because the journal is for-profit?

@Barmar Probably will depend on the details of the case: I would expect there to be a difference between classic publishing and open access publishing, but I am not aware of any cases to back that up.

No, citation is proof against charges of plagiarism. Plagiarism is misattributing the ideas of others to yourself. It has nothing to do with whether you quote or paraphrase. It is about the underlying ideas.
So, if you say, more or less, that idea x comes from author(s) y, then you haven't plagiarized.
You still need to consider copyright, however, and some forms of paraphrasing can violate copyright. Usually this happens when too much of an original work is included. Perhaps your friend is confusing copyright and plagiarism, which is too often done.

WRT the final paragraph above. Note that lots of "fan fiction", especially videos and games get DMCA takedown notices for copyright violations.
Also note that this is an answer to the general question. Biology/medicine isn't my field, so I don't attempt to analyze the specifics of your paraphrase.

I assure you, the downvote didn't come from me, and I don't really understand it.

I also didn't downvote, but I think this answer is incomplete because it misses the point made by Arno: a citation mark at the end of a long paragraph is not typically understood to mean that the whole paragraph is attributed to that source. Another issue is that when submitting coursework, there is an implicit (if not explicit) claim that the work is substantially your own; so suppose you submit work which is entirely paraphrased from somebody else's work, then however you attempt to properly cite it, you are still also claiming it as substantially your own work by submitting it.

Both of those issues run up against the question of mens rea, i.e. does it have to be intentional to be called plagiarism? Suppose you believe you have properly cited something, but you did not realise that other people would either (1) not understand that your citation mark was meant to apply to a whole paragraph rather than a smaller part of it, or (2) presume that submitted coursework is claimed to be substantially the submitter's own work. Does that count as plagiarism, or does your belief that you had cited it properly make it not plagiarism? I think reasonable people could differ.

@kaya3 That is probably a valid excuse for young children. By the time you're writing anything that could be described as a thesis, people are generally unamused by claims of ignorance.

@kaya3, what a thing "is" and what it "is called" don't always align: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks'_Eyes

@kaya -- FWIW, our academic honesty hearing boards and our students are specifically instructed that plagiarism does not have to be intentional.

@ScottSeidman, I would find that very hard to justify. Is a student required to know everything before they write anything?

Every orientation session for every US uni I'm familiar with has strong academic honesty guidelines.  Students are told up front what constitutes plagiarism.  We simply hold them to that standard that they agree to adhere to.

@ScottSeidman, still, plagiarism requires intent. Suppose Ford Prefect, living somewhere near Betelgeuse (about 180 LY from earth) "discovers" Special Relativity just "now". Has he plagiarized Einstein, given that it would be impossible for news of Einstein to have reached there? Do you always discount parallel discovery? "Copying", of course, requires knowledge and intent, but plagiarism is about ideas, not text. I have no problem with strong academic honesty guidelines but they have to make sense. And if you equate "plagiarism" and "copying", the definition is weak, not strong.

I don't understand how this requires a student to know anything beyond the definition of plagiarism.

@Buffy --  No, your example CERTAINLY is not plagiarism, and the reductio ad absurdum isn't apt.  A student has NO OBLIGATION, in terms of honesty (they they certainly do in terms of rigor, and lack of rigor deserves to be felt in a grade), to check to make sure an idea the student writes down hasn't been had and published before.  This would be plagiarism if the student read about special relativity and wrote it down without attributing it as someone else's idea.  We're talking about apples and oranges.

Parallel discovery, even if they happen decades or centuries apart, is NOT plagiarism, and I haven't seen many, if any, assert that it is.

@ScottSeidman, I agree that students need rigor, but that isn't the same as plagiarism in any sense and needs a different penalty. So, do you agree, at least, that plagiarism requires intent? Sadly, the wikipedia article doesn't mention intent.

No.  As a really simple example, suppose a student does a cut and paste, minimally modifying it, and "forgets" to include quotes or citations.  A hearing board should not be in a position of determining whether this "forgetting" was intentional.  It's a moot issue.  The plagiarism happened.  The student knew the definition of plagiarism.  I wouldn't care a whit when casting my vote for responsibility whether the student really intended to omit the quotes and reference or not.

We remind the students of their responsibility by sanctioning, starting with relatively mild sanctions, and moving up to course failures with or without notation of honesty violation, suspensions, or expulsions if the behavior continues.

Where I would assess my feelings of intentionality would be during the sanctioning stage, but there will always be a sanction for plagiarism, whether intentional or not.

From our honesty guidelines, (https://www.rochester.edu/college/honesty/students/tips.html)
"Learn the rules upfront. Since the Arts, Sciences, and Engineering (AS&E) policy does not take intent into account, you are responsible for knowing and following the AS&E and course policies."

@ScottSeidman, actually you give a clear case, not a difficult one. The student "knows" they are copying even if they don't "think about" plagiarism. They know the source exists and so do you. But plagiarism isn't copying, even with paraphrasing. I can plagiarize and use none of the essential keywords of the originator of the ideas. You seem to be conflating plagiarism and copying. But students actually need a more complete definition of what plagiarism entails. It is beyond copying and it is beyond sloppiness. You can punish those, of course.

Those are just the cases we see, because they're the ones instructors can make a case for, but does not rule out other situations.  The definition of plagiarism we use is "...the representation of another person’s work as one’s own" (https://www.rochester.edu/college/honesty/policy/index.html).  Note the subtle difference between that and the working definition you offered above.  The bigger point is that we specifically remove intent from any determination of honesty violation.

From the same source as my previous comment: "Intent—or lack thereof—should never be taken into account when deciding whether or not an action or set of actions violated the honesty policy. However, fairness dictates that intent may be considered when proposing penalties (for individual instructors) or when applying sanctions (for hearing Boards)."

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text:
Faux pas to send personal email along with letter of reference?
I'm a new professor and am writing my first letters of recommendation. I have an undergrad student that is truly quite good applying to a summer research program at an institution where I have people I know. I don't think these colleagues are on the selection committee of the internship program and would not see my letter of reference and notice it's from me.
Would it be a faux pas to send a personal email to the people I know and make sure they know about my good student applying? Maybe they can help make sure my student's application is noticed in the pile. I can't decide if this is strategic networking of a mentor or pushing nepotism...
Have you done this or encountered this before? What's common? Note this is in the USA in biology field.

Whatever you do, if you want to support your student, don't write he's "truly quite good".

@user151413 In the UK, "quite" has changed meaning over the years to mean "moderately".  ("Quite cold" means you should think about putting a coat on, not that you're getting frostbite.)  The US has kept the original meaning of "quite" being a synonym for "completely" or "absolutely" though.  (Think of ladies in period dramas saying "He is quite the best dancer I have met".)  It's easy for both sides to get caught out with this!  For the OP who's in the US though, it's not necessarily a bad choice of words.

Thanks! Haha. I figured this was a cultural difference but did not know that usage in the UK. Good to know...

It's not really nepotism if they're not a relative or close personal friend. Also, you're not giving them the job, you're just recommending them -- it's up to your colleagues whether they do anything with your recommendation.

UK person here - we do have the other meaning of "quite" in some contexts, and "truly" is like "very" here, so I don't think "truly quite good" is likely to be misinterpreted unless you emphasised it like "he's truly quite good" (in which case it might look like damning with faint praise because you're drawing attention to the "faintness" of the praise). Also keep in mind that in the UK we have a habit of understatement, so even if a professor said a student is "quite good" that could easily mean the student is very good indeed.

@Graham Very interesting, thanks. However, especially in the light of this I would like to re-iterate my comment: If even native command of English is not enough to properly parse this statement, then there will be plenty of professors also in the US who are non-native speakers who will not properly understand that. Also, my feeling is that (indep. of the "quite") "good" leaves a lot of room at the top: If the student is outstanding, use "outstanding", "excellent", "exceptional", or the like. "Good" sounds like the top 50%.

TLDR: not a faux pas, if done with appropriate tact and consideration of the ethical issues underlying this situation.
Long answer:
We should distinguish between sending an informal email outside the official LOR channel that says “please look at my student’s application file, it will be worth your time” and sending an email that says “please accept my student as a favor to me”. There is a big ethical difference between those two actions IMO. The latter action is definitely unethical. But the former action can be viewed as ethical when viewed from certain perspectives.
Here’s my analysis of the “please look at this student” email. The issue in the background here is that we all want application processes to be as meritocratic as possible, but at the same time, a true meritocracy can’t actually be achieved when there are so many application files and the people looking at them have so little time to do their work that the end result is that not all applications actually get seriously looked at.
In such an environment, even the mere “benefit” of having one’s application file looked at feels like getting an unfair advantage. And indeed, an application process that doesn’t even look at all applications is definitely unfair, since it seems quite likely that it will miss some worthy candidates (maybe even the best candidate). But to me that unfairness seems intrinsic to the time- and resource-constrained environment in the department running the program, and will exist whether or not you send the informal email asking for your student’s file to be looked at. The only thing that might change is which students end up being the victims of that unfairness. So we have a “trolley problem”-type situation in which your email might divert the department’s attention towards your student (whom you deem very worthy indeed), at the possible cost of “sacrificing” another — statistically, less worthy on average, I’ll assume — applicant whose file won’t get looked at as closely.
Is this action ethical? Well, that depends on your views about trolley problems — these are ethical dilemmas on which people tend to have a broad range of views. But one can reasonably argue that you are simply helping the department use its scarce attention more efficiently, and in this way are helping it get a better admission outcome overall. This is the utilitarian view commonly taken in many trolley-type situations.
To summarize, I personally think sending the email is ethically reasonable and not a faux pas as long as you truly believe in your student being a highly meritorious candidate, and don’t suggest that the decision regarding whether the student is accepted should factor in your personal friendship with the people you’re sending the email to.

Excellent answer, I think this covers all aspects in great detail.

I think another aspect in favor of sending a nice note, is that other advisors may be taking this step, and IMO you owe it to students you want to succeed to do everything you can to help them compete in the job market. Since you have very little personal control over the system as a whole, and no control over what other people do, I would personally weigh this consideration higher than trying to make "the system" into a meritocracy in an abstract sense. (Assuming that you believe the student really is a good candidate and you aren't abusing personal relationships, as you said).

@Andrew: Actually, your point is in line with the notion of desiring fairness. To have fairness, we need to give each candidate a fair share of the attention. If others are on average sending emails to bring attention to their students, you would also have to send emails to make it a fair competition. Obviously, you shouldn't do unethical things, as Dan already mentioned above, but a factual email, why not?

I suppose that opinions can differ, but I find it entirely appropriate to send a supporting letter to people you know. You are putting your own reputation on the line, of course.
I've done something similar for a couple of students, though related to graduate admissions. One was excellent in all dimensions except, being an immigrant brought up in a different culture, did rather poorly on standardized exams. The letter was to someone at a top school. His is now a professor in CS at a top school. My letter just caused them to take a second look and they were happy they did.
The other case was sad. I personally recommended another student to a different top school and he was accepted but did terribly. None of us knew at the time that he was dying of AIDS. My own reputation there was in question until we learned the truth of it.
In the US, letters are taken seriously. The committee may only be able to look at official communications and needs to be fair to all applicants. So it isn't a case of "I'd like you to do me a favor, though.". It is more like "There is more to see with this student than you might expect." It can have an effect or not.
How the letter is received and any ethical decisions are up to the recipient and the committee. But sending a supportive letter is fine.
Sending a letter to sabotage a student is another matter entirely, of course.

"There is more to see with this student than you might expect"- couldn't this be conveyed in the formal LOR itself?

@AppliedAcademic, yes, and it probably should be.

Given that this is an undergraduate research program, it's totally possible that your friends have absolutely nothing to do with the selection process or the actual running of this research program. A lot of these programs essentially run completely orthogonal to their home institutions (and are more passion projects for the couple of professors actually involved). That being said, there's nothing to lose by sending a letter, and if your friend is not willing to tell their colleagues about your student, then that is OK.

That solely depends on your relationship with the recipient. Send personal emails to people whom you normally would send personal emails to. The field i worked in was quite small and cozy back then - it may have been even some kind of affront not to communicate personally.
Otherwise i would imagine that increasing the email load of some busy person whom you don't know and who maybe even doesn't deal personally with what you sent (i.e. Assistant may forward the letter to the postdoc) it may be inappropriate.

I can't decide if this is strategic networking of a mentor or pushing nepotism...

There's a slight duplicity inherent in the ethics of these questions, namely that we have an exaggerated notion of fairness and still want to tip the scales towards a favorable outcome.
The entire point of networking is to gain some advantage that would not exist by being outside the network. In that sense, strategic networking is already oriented towards some inequity. So is almost every action we do to gain a competitive edge. Nepotism just shifts the inequity from a win-win to a win-lose (candidate-university).
It doesn't seem like there should be any ethical dilemma here. That is to say, sending the email is unfair to all the candidates who don't have an advisor like you, but that isn't your burden to bear. This would be self-evident if we accept that a large number of our daily actions are unfair, and that the exalted notion of fairness is an idealism that we don't live up to.

It doesn’t seem like there should be any ethical dilemma here. Can you clarify what you mean by that? Is the answer to OP’s question “yes” or “no”?

Thanks @DanRomik, made an edit.

I don't think these colleagues are on the selection committee of the internship program

If they are not, then personally I would not send an email to them about the student, not necessarily out of ethical considerations, but because I would expect sending an email to make no difference to the student's outcome.
If I were on such a committee, and a colleague not on the committee approached me to ask that I give different treatment to one applicant whom they know of via a professional contact, I would be inclined to ignore that request completely. I would expect that if their professional contact has anything relevant to say about the applicant, it should be said in their application, especially if the professional contact is the one who wrote the reference letter. So even if your email does result in your contact approaching somebody on the committee about your student, I doubt it will have any consequences for your student.
Now consider it from the contact's perspective. If I got an email from a professional contact asking me to make sure that a committee in my institution gave careful consideration to one particular applicant who is their student, and I was not on that committee, I would respond with a polite email saying something like: "Hello Professor X, hope you're well. I am not a member of the committee so I will not be involved in considering applications; if there is something you left out of your reference letter then you could try contacting the committee to send an updated reference letter. Best wishes to your student." I would not approach anyone on the committee about it.
On the other hand, there is a risk that your contact will think you are asking for some unfair advantage for your student, because an email asking for an unfair advantage looks exactly the same as an email that might be considered a legitimate request. A nepotist would never outright say "please lobby the committee to accept my student", they would write the same email you would plan to write, because that's plausibly deniable and if the contact is on board with it then they will read between the lines. So I am not sure there is a way of wording such an email which, from the recipient's perspective, totally eliminates the idea that you might be asking for nepotism.
Of course, you may know your contact well enough to know they would not think that, in which case there is probably no downside to sending the email, but I would still expect there to be no upside either.

I’d be extremely careful with any email you send. The current environment in the US is hunting for any tiny downfall to make people’s heads roll.
If I were you, I’d call the friend ( at work) and recommend directly your student. A short and direct conversation asking to please take a look at his resume and be assured that he/she is great.
Nothing in writing.


text:
Reply ‘no position’ while the job posting is still there (‘HiWi’ position in Germany)
I am third year undergraduate and I am not studying in Europe.
I plan to apply for a master at a German institute by the end of this year which is the time for application.
This institute advertised a ‘Hiwi’ (student assistant) position on their website.
They link to a PDF file which provides more detail, and in this file they refer to the job as ‘student assistant position’.
I wrote them an email asking about this position. But the group leader replied to me: ‘I could not offer you a position at this point’. This makes me a little confused. I know group leaders face many quite complex situations, but I don’t know how to interpret this. Is it just because he think I am not good enough at the first read of my email and make a polite refusal?
I did not mention that I intend to apply at this university and also that my main motivation is to get research experience (i.e., I am okay with not being paid). Should I mention these two points?

On an unrelated note - are you certain that this exact term "Hiwi" was used in an official job advertisement in a German institute? It's rather loaded.

@DmitrySavostyanov: in Academia, HiWi stands for Hilfswissenschaftler (assistant scientist/scholar) rather than Hilfswilliger (volunteer) and in my experience (having been employed with the former title) the loaded connotations of the latter seem to ignored or unknown in German universities.

In germany, a "Hiwi" usually means a position for people, who already earned a degree and jobs for students are called SHK ("studentische Hilfskraft"). There is a difference in the salary and they legally cannot assign a Hiwi position to a student without a degree. And these positions are almost always for people from the same university and usually not meant for working from home, see the answer from @henning.

@allo: That may depend on the place. There are certaimly universities where "Hiwi" is the term used for student research/teaching assistants starting in the 1st semester of Bachelor students, i.e. without any degree.

@allo: Usually, HiWi is used as an informal term for SHK. People who already earned a degree and are still employed by the university are WiMis (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter) if it's a full- or half-time job (mostly towards a PhD degree), WiHis (Wissenschaftliche Hilfskräfte) in case of a shorter-term commitment/a Minijob.

Student assistant positions in Germany are usually open only to students enrolled at a local university (often where the position is offered, but always in Germany). This is for reasons of social insurance and labour regulation.
You are not enrolled at a local university. In fact, you are studying outside Europe.

In this case I am writing to a independent institute, while directors are faculties of a closely cooperating university. I don't know whether the scenario you mentioned is also the case here. I guess if it is only for students enrolled in the institute, they are already in a research position, don't they?

@ConwL No, the students do not have to have to be paid to be at the institute. They may do their thesis (unpaid).

@ConwL The exact scenario doesn't apply then. But usually only students enrolled in Germany are considered, because they profit from special rates with the compulsory social insurance, which makes it much cheaper to employ them. Moreover, the institute might hesitate to hire someone from far abroad for a very junior and usually also rather short-term position, because they can't be sure about your commitment. There are probably visa-related issues too, as mentioned in another answer.

Is it just because he think I am not good enough at the first read of my email and make a polite refusal?

Most likely, yes. Note he didn't say the position has been filled; he's only saying he can't offer you a position (perhaps because you don't meet the minimum requirements, or he doesn't think you're suited to the role, there are better candidates who've applied, etc).

+1, my guess is that by "at this point", he means "while you're a third-year undergraduate"

...or it could mean that there are other applicants that are ranked more highly than OP; they can't offer OP the position until/unless those other applicants withdraw.

Well, OP describes "e-mailing to ask" about the position, which sounds like they were told not to apply rather than just getting a normal rejection. In any case, I bet henning's answer is correct, and it's more like "while you're a third year undergraduate at a different university outside of Europe"

Indeed, this email is almost certainly "um I don't know this person and have no real interest in looking into this so I will find a kind way to shoo them away"

This group may have a candidate in mind but forced to put an ad out for compliance.
For many temporary or contract positions,  full HR process is not required and a full hiring committee is not struck: the head of the unit is the sole decider.  Moreover, there might be seniority issues which guarantee the position to someone who was previously employed in this position - v.g. sessional instructor for a specific course.  One is still legally obligated to advertise the position, but the playing field is tilted to favour a particular candidate.  Basically, the person previously holding the position has to reapply.
This happens all the time because a contract might run over a set period, but the contract is open yearly.  Maybe one needs a lab technician for the academic year but not over the summer recess.  Alternatively, the lab technician who’s contract ends in April is asked to apply for a research assistant position to cover the summer months.  Contract are structured this way because part-time or contract employees gets fewer benefits than full-time ones.
There are all kinds of combination possible where an internal candidate has the inside track for a position still legally required to be posted.

Could you give a little more detail about Who would force them do so and why? I know little about this:)

@ConwL It’s obvious - they have an internal candidate, but the law requires them to advertise the position - which they have done... So either you did not match what they wanted or you did and they gave it to the internal candidate anyway.

That would be unethical, and in some places illegal.

But happens often.

@Buffy maybe so, but they have to be caught...

@SolarMike. It is a pretty public situation. Requires collaboration. I wouldn't touch it. If I had a preferred candidate s/he would still be in competition with any applicants. I might write the advert to favor them, but would live with the consequences. I've seen it happen, actually, with a very specific ad written to favor a post-doc, but the applications received made it harder to hire him, though he did get the job. But the process was open and honest.

This answer might apply to some positions, but definitely not to HiWis at German institutes. At my university we can put up open position ads pretty informally and we do not have to follow any procedure apart from doing the paperwork. Therefore I think that this answer is based on conjecture without knowledge of the specific case, given the tags of the question.

Normally it works like this: The requirement for the position arises and the Professor/Research Team Lead has a candidate in mind. Either from previous positions (that were cancelled due to temporally limited contracts) or they are known from courses, good exams, etc. They are told something along the lines of "You can have the position, just apply to the offer, write something reasonable in the cover letter and CV, but don't put too much effort in it." Typically the job offer is left on the home page for the shortest legally possible time.

There is a stronger version for higher ranked positions, like for WiMis or tenured lecturers (which are seldom in Germany): The applicant and the Lead agree on a list of required specializations and skills that the applicant has and most likely no other applicant. Then it is clear which one is to be chosen. Not difficult cover by the way.

@kap: I still think that description is not accurate when it comes to Hiwis. From everything I have seen, most of these positions are never posted online anyway (just in print in the university buildings), or only as a generic ad ("We may be able to offer Hiwi positions, contact us!"). Then, maybe it's different for "popular" groups in a university, but mostly, university staff are happy to find anyone at all filling the position. Hence, as soon as an interested student drops by, the position may be taken. (The inverse may be true as well, as sometimes, students just suddenly lose interest ...

... in prolonging the contract, or even in working any further).

@O.R.Mapper that probably depends on the university. Here is quite some list: http://virtual-prsb.service.tu-berlin.de/AD/list.php for example.

@kap: Given that this list seems to cover several departments and only lists some five to ten positions for each of them, I'm inclined to think the list does indeed show only a fraction of the actual Hiwi positions around.

Another possibility is that the respective research group leader simply ran out for funds for "Hiwi" positions. Getting good student assistants is hard, and they may have the advertisement on their web site continuously. This could be the case if they are willing to use precious grant overhead money for very exceptional candidates. If the research group leader felt that this does not apply to you and the regular funds have been used up, he/she...may be unable to offer you a "Hiwi" position at this point.

Indeed. If this is truly for a student research assistant position, do not assume that the online info about it is always up to date (rather than serving as a semi-permanent encouragement to capable students for getting in touch). Possibly, there are even various layers of bureaucracy between the person advertising the position and whoever can and will edit the website.

One more possibility:  I used to get tons of e-mail from random parts of the world and random departments not my own, asking to be my TA or RA.  I'm in Texas.  I get an e-mail from Sri Lanka from some guy I never heard of, which includes his vita and copies of publications, and what am I to think?  I think that he has probably e-mailed every math/science/engineering professor in world.  I wasn't even advertising nor was I in the market for grad students.  So these just got deleted.  I would get similar bombardments from grad students in engineering (I was in the Math Dept.) mostly foreign students, wanting the same thing.  They were also ignored.
If a student can't get support in his own country/department, then that's "strike one" for sure.  Sending spam to a country/department that shows that you don't know "how things work" in that country/department, is "strike two."   Our department admits and hires our TA's and RA's.  The faculty have little to do with who gets to occupy those 3-or-4 person offices.  So when I open such an e-mail, my first thought is "Dude, you're asking the wrong guy."  It's especially telling if the grad student is in the engineering building across the street and, having been here for at least a year, doesn't have any friends or mentors who can tell him good ways to find support.  Specifically, it seems that the grad advisor in Electrical Engineering would know who the student should e-mail in the Math Dept.   Yet he e-mailed me.
So my suggestion here is that, perhaps, your application came in with a few hundred other fishing attempts and you got the form response back.

It may be that the job is subject to visa regulations and the group leader recognised/assumed that it would take extra steps to secure a right visa for you.

Besides what everyone else already mentioned, it may also be that the job posting on the website is simply out of date. Thesis and Studentische Hilfskraft (informally, HiWi) openings are often either "privately" advertised in lectures, labs, or seminars (with the lecturer telling stuff like "By the way, we need a HiWi for ***, send me an e-mail with your CV or come to me after class if you're interested") or reserved for students proactively applying for them - in a "if we find the right person, we'll find the right project for them" fashion.
In most university chairs in Germany, openings landing onto the chair's website are either outdated, the ones no one wanted to fill or both - just take them with a grain of salt, as an indicator of which kind of projects may be offered to applicants. And weeks/months may pass until an outdated job opening is taken off.
Yet, since you aren't currently studying in Germany, Henning's answer most probably covers your case. The best advice would be to wait until you're enrolled at your new university and only then proactively search for HiWi openings.

authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


text:
Is it okay to use somebody else’s methodology in my own paper (with proper citations) or is this plagiarism?
My research is a content analysis about portrayal of mental illness in films. The research I wanted to base my methodology is also about mental-illness representation. My research questions differ to the other researcher’s questions. We also have different sets of films to analyze.
I really want to know if it is okay if I use the same methodology? Or is it considered plagiarism?

From the question is more about judging the novelty or importance.  And this is really field or topic dependent. For the ok part see answers. Normally first proposers should be even "happy".

Do you want to apply the same methodology as other researchers, or do you want to copy an existing methodology section from another publication to yours?

Yes, it's okay to reuse other people's methodology to address an original research question.  It is not okay to copy the methods section of their publication.  You must write your own, in addition to citing them.

One could even say that the methodology described in a paper is part of the scientific contribution, and then others using the same or a derived methodology is how science is supposed to work.

It's not so uncomon in my field to see a methodology section that is quite short. Along the lines of; "We did the first step with the Kitten method as in paper [A], the second step followed the Tiger technique of paper [B]. We then groomed the cats and counted their whiskers.". The bulk of the methodology becomes citations, often self citations, but not always. Some processes are so common that there is no sense in writing them out fresh for each paper. Would that be acceptable here?

No it's not...you'd better make your own methodology of your research to help yourself how to deal with your data analysis. Maybe you can use them only as reference becsuse copying and using the research methodology of others are unethical, plagiarism and that is a scientific misconduct..

Sorry, but no. In some fields the methodology is pretty standard. One could even say "common knowledge". And, citing is an absolute guard against plagiarism. One has to consider copyright, of course, in addition to plagiarism. But they are not the same.  If you think they are the same, then you should explore the two ideas more deeply.

This is also not necessarily a science question.

@AzorAhai-him-, it could be, actually. We don't know the details. But, for example, misinformation in film can have real world consequences.

@Buffy Fair enough, edited


text:
How do research papers differ from research articles?
What is the difference between a research paper and a research article? Frequently these two terms are considered in the same category. So, what features distinguish these two terms?

I always thought paper to be a kind of slang :)

Research article refers mainly to research published in a journal, whereas research paper refers to a research report whether it is a published one or not.

I don't think you will find a general definition that is universally applicable. But a research article could, in some cases, be a work that covers a number of papers, or the work of many people, and that attempts to bring ideas together, rather than to present fresh research itself.
A research paper, probably is more specific, presenting the work of some particular author(s) on a particular project.
Thus a research paper, presents an advancement in a field, whereas an article can be more general, not tied to a specific project, but generalizing a bit to give context to other work and bring it together.
But others can have different definitions, and this is just a personal observation. Your usage may vary. And I notice from other comments made here, that there are other views. Some will use the terms interchangeably, of course.


text:
Student found guilty of plagiarism is also academic at other university
I am an administrator of a university in U.K.  A student has been found  guilty of plagiarism and is facing the harshest punishment – 0 in the  course and no opportunity  to retake which will get him out of the school.
However, he is also an academic at another university.  Do we need to inform the department  head at his university even though it is a completely separate entity from ours?  The course is different from what the student teaches at the other university.
I am concerned  about the data breach and confidentiality issues.   As academics do we have duty to report this?

Doesn't it go on his transcript as a violation? I would think he has a duty to provide all transcripts to his employer(s) putting it on him not you.

He  already is employed in this other university.    I don't think they need  to consistently provide transcripts as he's already hired. Plus this course is different from  what  he's teaching.

I think you need to refer to your local laws and university policies on privacy of student records.  I don't have a strong feeling as to whether you have any sort of ethical duty to report this to the person's employing university, but it certainly wouldn't be such a strong duty that you should violate the law or risk your job in order to do so.

Please do not change your question substantially after it has been answered. If you for some reason want to anonymise your situation, please 1) be aware that all the details are still available in the question’s history 2) read this FAQ 3) think about whether this post could really pose a problem to you.

I wonder first of all why as an administrator you felt to ask here as for just your university should know what your behaviour must be.  Also, if cheating at your university didn't involve anything that extent into more general laws violation, and all consequences were decided within the university, I do not understand why you even feel the necessity to communicate with the other university. Being in acadamia doesn't make us special individuals, nor the ones to ask for perfect behaviour. If a student is guilt of plagiarism, taking away the mark to the point that s/he must leave the school/clas

...class seams to me much enough.  So your further step shall be dictated by your university policy, I don't even think you must see a lawyer. I wonder in which other environment such a doubt could have even being surging. Sorry for the long comment.

This may be covered by privacy law in UK as it would be in US. You need to consult with a lawyer before you take any action that isn't already embodied in your policies, which I assume have already been vetted.
If you are permitted to inform the other university you should also consider whether you are liable to civil action if you do so. But your lawyer will have advice about that as well.

Good question, good answer. An interesting case where law and academic code of honour may be in conflict. If in conflict, law supersedes academic code.

@CaptainEmacs: I would not say "academic code of honour" dictates that you should tell the other institution.

@Holla If someone were to fake data, would it not be appropriate for another academic institution to be warned of this? If the person plagiarised, isn't that not similar? That person has to mark students in their other institution and clearly does not know or respect the rules on plagiarism.

@CaptainEmacs: I didn't see any indication that it was such a serious problem. I know many people who would openly admit that at some point in high school they cheated at some exam, but would not do the same in their jobs. Being a student and being "in the real world" are different settings. My rule of thumb: If you would not tell a future industry employer (if you could), don't tell the other academic institution.

@Holla A normal employer doesn't care about plagiarism. However, if I am a hospital and a doctor has had a number of malpractice cases (or worse), the question is, what will happen if he goes somewhere else and continues to have these, and it comes out? Who does the responsibility lie with? How about a dishonest accountant or cashier moving to another bank? Ok, an academic offence such as plagiarism is not at the same level of damage, but it constitutes a material breach of the profession's conduct. Anyway, I believe that it's the primacy of law here, so our discussion may be moot.

@CaptainEmacs: I do think "plagiarism as a student" (cheating in some homework or exam) is a different category than "plagiarism as an academic" (falsifying data which will be published). (This may be also the idea of the law protecting their anonymity.) And normal employers should care about plagiarism also.

@Holla, falsifying data isn't plagiarism. It is a different kind of misconduct.

Yes, Buffy, sorry for that. I wanted to answer to C.Emacs thrids comment and mixed the two offences.

The point is in the US there are indeed things which academics have a "duty to report", such as certain crimes reported by students. There are also things which we are bound not to ever report without a student's consent. These strike me as very particular to the country. Certainly the crushing fear of lawsuits and resulting "CYA" policies schools have piled up is probably much more of a US-centric thing.

@Holla What makes a material difference between "plagiarism as a student" and "plagiarism as an academic"? Especially as students can be considered as potential "budding academics". Why should we trust Plagio the academic more than Plagio the student? Again, I think that laws (of privacy, in this case) need to be respected, but I cannot see why - in absence of such laws - Plagio should be protected from his academic misconduct spilling over into his academic position. In Germany, politicians lost title and sometimes even political position because of academic misconduct.

People act differently in different contexts.  And I guess it is important one adheres to school's policies..


text:
Affiliation on the papers extracted from the thesis
I graduated from PhD almost 2 years ago and I am a full time assistant professor in another country.
A paper of mine was accepted recently (main paper of the thesis).
1- Now my supervisor asks me to use my old affiliation (i.e. the university I studied) because she thinks I have completed the thesis while I was there. I received financial help for my PhD which I have acknowledged in the paper. I responded that I am legally bound to my new university and I could not do that. Am I supposed to do that?
Btw. both my supervisors are included as co-authors (with their affiliation which matches my old university).
2- Now again she asks me to at least put my old university's name first. I am the main author (and honestly have done all of the work. My two supervisors read my work, gave comments and possibly corrected English mistakes).
If I am the main author, the correct format requires me to mention my own university first. If I just change the order of affiliations list (a. old university, b. my university) and still keep my name as first author (my name *b), is that acceptable?
3- What is your suggestion for the remaining papers that come out of the thesis?

Your advisor is correct that papers published as a result of your thesis work should include the institution at which the thesis was done as at least one of the affiliations.
The role of your present institution depends on whether or not you did substantial work on the paper there. If so, then you need to include that as an affiliation as well; if not, then it should be listed as a "Present Address."
What you cannot do is list just your new affiliation, with no recognition of your graduate institution.

Both supervisors are included in the paper as co-authors  (with their affiliation which matches my old university). Isn't that enough?

No, it is not enough. Not listing your graduate institution implies that you did the work at your new institution, which is a misrepresentation. You may be able to choose to list your new affiliation first, if it's appropriate to be included, but you must include the graduate school affiliation regardless of what happens with your present affiliation.

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


text:
Is creating your own "experiment" considered cheating during a physics exam?
Consider a qualitative question on a physics exam such as, draw the path of an object's center of mass as it is dropped. I have included a graphic here:

Would it be considered cheating in practical terms if I were to make a mark in my pencil and drop it on my desk to observe its path? This is just one example of something that could be helpful on a mechanics exam.
In general, would a professor consider the act of carrying out a small physical experiment during an exam as cheating as long as it is with reason and does not interfere with other students? By experiment, I mean something of the nature of what I mentioned earlier; I am talking about something that can be done with the instruments you are allowed to have during the exam. I do not mean using lab equipment.
To clarify, I something like this would be to gain a physical intuition of a solution. For the example listed above, simply dropping your pencil can give you an intuition as to the path its center of mass takes. This isn't intended as a substitute for work for a more complicated solution.
I ask because I doubt and am currently unaware of any rule that prohibits this.

If the question is should it be considered cheating, then my opinion would be no. But my opinion counts for exactly nothing. The question of is it considered cheating can only be answered locally, probably by your professor. Don't assume that a permissive answer is correct for you and get penalized.

Fine within reason, just use common sense.

Rather than being cheating (which the professor would frown upon) an answer obtained in a non-standard way but which evinces a genuine understanding of the question would probably impress most professors. Having said that, it is impossible to know how a particular professor would react in your particular case.

I am reminded of a story that anatomy prof friend told me about an exam question about "Which muscles are involved in such and such a movement" and watching students carry out that movement during the exam to work it out.

Let us hope you don't try to solve something about water flow through a fire hose ;))

I would point out that the precise circumstances specified in a test question are usually not those available to you during a test;  so your "experimental data" may be misleading.  For example, a pencil on its point that falls over is usually assumed to have either zero friction or perfect friction against the tabletop in physics problems; but real pencils and desktops are probably somewhere in between these two cases.

No, this is perfectly fine. In physics, it is common to see students making odd motions as they think through the problem or apply rules like the right hand rule. The usual caveats apply: you must not be distracting or obnoxious, must not broadcast data that other students could use to cheat, and must follow all announced regulations.
Yes, like with anything else, there are a million corner cases and caveats and unreasonable proctors that we could have fun trying to anticipate -- but I suggest we find more productive ways to spend our mental energies.

I wouldn't go so far to call it perfectly fine. If the test asks students to show their work, it is unlikely that this "experimental data" is what the instructor has in mind. Further, one might well get accused of cheating for giving the right answer without showing any math. Indeed that might be the hidden motive of such a question about simulations; the student was busted giving answers they couldn't justify, so they make up a little story about doing a simulation.

The question was about whether it was cheating -- and indeed, from an ethical perspective, it is perfectly fine. The question was not whether one could do simulations instead of answering the stated question -- obviously the answer to this totally different question might be different.

+1 for the right hand rule. I even tell my students that I want to see them do it during the exams!

16 years and a PhD later, and I still do funny hand contortions to figure out vector orientations.

@tpg2114 sadly, I often do it with my left hand while I'm holding my pen with the right hand.

If there isn’t any rule that prohibits it, it isn’t cheating. It’s the university’s job to make the rules, and it’s your job to follow them - it’s as simple as that. A professor who complains because you solved a problem using a creative method that they didn’t think about should be more careful the next time they write an exam.

I think the first sentence is not strictly true...there are all sorts of ways to get in trouble that are not explicitly called out in any policy as being disallowed. Further, I don't think this answers the question - OP is not asking about formulating an answer in an unorthodox/creative way, but about the ethics of using allowed materials for purposes other than their intended use.

@cag51 OP asked if the “experiment” would be considered cheating, and I said it wouldn’t be. How is this not answering the question? And anyway, who is to say what the intended purpose of a pencil is? If a student finds it soothing to chew on the end of the pencil, is this the “intended purpose”? I’m sorry, but unless the exam specifically spells out what you are allowed and not allowed to do with your pencil, you can do anything you want with it (assuming it does not cause a disruption or illicitly communicate information to other students, or violate some other explicitly stated rule).

@cag51 as for my first sentence, perhaps my imagination is too limited so I can’t say for sure that you’re wrong, but if you think the sentence is not true, I challenge you to produce a counterexample. I think you will find it harder than you think. Remember that student codes of conduct already have very broad rules against dishonest behavior, so it’s not enough to come up with some specific new and creative way of cheating that doesn’t happen to have been foreseen by the professor.

For the first sentence, I am thinking of professors who never formally define the rules - just because a professor never says either way whether an exam is open book, doesn't mean that students won't get in trouble when they open books. Or bringing a lens to an optics test when the professor doesn't specify "no materials except" -- university policies probably cover using phones / calculators / etc., but I doubt there's any rule forbidding lenses -- which does not in itself mean they are allowed. Moreover, I wouldn't advice students to jettison ethical reasoning and focus only on legalisms.

But yes, I guess your first sentence does answer the question, I retract that objection -- though it seems like your last sentence is answering a different question.

If it's qualitative there probably won't be a problem unless the rules of the exam explicitly prohibit it, similar to how some exams prohibit calculators.
That said if it's a quantitative problem you can expect to lose marks. I remember a math exam with a geometry problem which said something like, this length is A, this length is B, this is a circle, etc, what is this angle? A student who solved the problem by constructing the diagram and then measuring the angle would not get full marks.

Any scientist who would consider performing the very defining action of their art as cheating would actually be quite much of a contradiction...

Like with all variations of the question "is X considered cheating" the answer is that it comes down to what the professor in your current course decides, so check with them before the exam. There are no universally applied rules for exactly what qualifies as cheating and what doesn't.
That said, if you can carry out your simulation in a quiet way that doesn't disturb others, then I and (I think) most others would be totally fine with it. To me it falls under the same umbrella as using the right-hand rule, or rotating an eraser/book to check the effect of compound rotations. Basically, I don't have an issue with students creatively using items they're allowed to bring anyway. Now, if you start bringing lenses and prisms to a geometric optics exam so you can experiment with light rays, well, that's another story.

Nice answer, but this particular case seems so clear-cut that I wouldn't even say it's necessary to ask the professor (absent any exacerbating factors).

@cag51 You're probably correct 98% of the time or so (more than that if the exam is proctored by someone in physics), but I don't think asking can hurt.

Your lenses example is actually kind of interesting because a large fraction of people wear eyeglasses...

@NateEldredge Good point. I'd certainly make a distinction between using glasses to read, and using loose lenses for experimenting with ray optics.

Right, but what if you take off your eyeglasses and start using them for a lens experiment?

@NateEldredge so could you claim that you got your answer wrong because you have varifocals and so deserve the points anyway?

@NateEldredge Just goes to show that it's difficult to codify these things, isn't it. Ultimately, I feel that items I put on a list of allowed things to bring to/use on the exam can be used in creative ways. Other items that aren't listed, but that a subset of the class needs and that the rest likely won't have (be it glasses, prostheses, or whatever) should be used for their intended purposes. (Now, I think my lens example is kind of a bad example anyway, since it's hard to do that without disturbing others, but hey.)

If it's a closed book exam I consider it cheating to do physical experiments (unless specifically authorized) as you are consulting an external source.  I also differentiate a physical experiment from turning your fingers to do three finger rule as you are not consulting the physical universe but doing an implicit mnemonic versus getting external info.
P.s.  I realize this answer is contrary to the other forum responders, but you should think about my point.  Sometimes you learn more from a contrary argument than from several repeats of the same argument.


text:
Can I ask an author to send me his ebook?
I'm working on my research paper. My subject is quite original and I even had difficulties to find a supervisor. In short, I found a fairly recent book on the Internet (2017), which is exactly what I am looking for, but it is not available in the libraries of my country. Could I ask the author to send it to me by email or even to send me some chapters?

I recommend Interlibrary Loan for accessing hard to find books.

Anecdotally: I asked an author and they sent me a digital version of their book which was out of print and selling for $600 on AbeBooks. They didn't seem offended, but happy someone wanted to read it. But being out of print for a long time is quite different from a recent book which you just can't find for free.

Certainly you can ask. There is nothing wrong with that. If you explain a bit about your use and the restrictions you face it might make it more likely that the author might try to help you.
But the author might not be able to comply with your request due to contractual arrangements with the publisher (if any). So, you might get a reply that starts out "Sorry, but..."
On the other hand, I'm surprised that libraries don't have access. I would guess that if you take your request to the librarian him/herself, you might learn that copies of nearly everything can be borrowed. Librarians have a vast, legal, network of sources for academic/scientific works. Even my town library, which has no formal relationships, can find just about anything I need, though the sources are usually all in this country.
But there are no ethical issues about asking. Etiquette only requires politeness and being honest about your needs.

Actually I have asked a similar question some time ago (https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/96932/is-asking-an-editor-for-soft-copy-of-his-book-acceptable) and general consensus (to my surprise) seemed to be that asking for a copy is rude, even though in my case I personally knew the editor.

@lukeg, there were only 4 votes there, so maybe not a consensus, exactly. But the circumstances seem different here. The book not being available in libraries would make the situation different. I don't think I'd answer the earlier question much different from what I say here.

I recommend, as others have, starting with a librarian.  I'd follow up with looking for papers by the same author.  Sometimes, the reference list of books is available, and you can pore through that getting works that are seminal.
I'm not sure where I am with respect to asking.  I lean toward not doing it.  "You can always ask" is certainly true, but sometimes, merely asking is rude. I don't know where I draw the line.  I just asked an artist for permission to use a particularly apt cartoon, with attribution, in a course lecture.  The artist was absolutely thrilled that I asked for permission, and sent me a higher-res copy!  That said, here's an artist, who makes a substantial part of his living doing this sort of stuff, and I asked him for a free use. The way I justify this in my head was "I don't really need this, and it's not something I'd pay more than a few dollars for, and if he says no I just won't use it (and I wouldn't!)"  Perhaps the better way to have done this was to contact him with the question "Is there a reasonable way I can license this for this low-volume use?"

Working for a university library purchasing resources, I am asked this question by students and academic staff fairly regularly.
As others have implied, one of your options in getting access to the ebook is to contact the library with which you are affiliated, whether this is via an InterLibrary Loan request, an email to its resources department (which exists in all libraries in some form or another) or a question at the front desk. From my experience, these requests eventually get funnelled to a librarian, who is usually tasked with asking a book supplier to make the ebook available for purchase online, or directly asking the academic whether a copy could be made available to the library.
Importantly, the library will have the money to make a purchase for you, if necessary. However, whether it will pay for you may depend on its purchase and lending policies. Moreover, if copyright issues arise or the library decides that they'd like the book to form part of their collection (and therefore available for others to use), then they'll be in a better position to negotiate these processes on your behalf.
Of course, there's no harm in contacting the academic yourself... In similar situations in the past I've contacted academics expecting a hefty fee only to find they're all too happy to provide their materials for free!

Someone asked me once if I could send them a free digital copy of a book I had published recently and I was happy to send it to them for a few reasons:
A.) I'm happy that someone actually wants to read it as I put a lot of time and effort into writing it.
B.) If the person likes it, they might tell other people and so get good publicity for it.
c.) It's only one book.  The amount of money you would get for selling one copy of a book is negligible, so you are not really losing anything by giving them a free copy, especially if the person seems genuinely really interested and respectful.
So I would definitely just ask, they might even be pleased to send you a free copy.

If the book is that important to your research, you should be willing to buy it from a store or online retailer. If the book is not on sale, it may be reasonable to ask the author where/how you can buy it.

I don't see what relevance a political complaint about some foreign company has to this post. Beyond that, importing a book from another country can be quite expensive.


text:
How to arrange reading for a literature review and writing it?
I am a studying for a master of management. It is the first time that I will write a thesis.
I found the literature review difficult: I found several articles, but I do not know how I will do next.
Should I read the articles and highlight what seems interesting to me and then re-read them and start writing, or should I read each article and start writing in parallel?

As a professor in a French grande école de commerce, I am pretty familiar with the requirements of a literature review for a master's thesis.
I can recommend to you an article I wrote on the subject. In summary, there are eight general steps:

Identify the purpose of your literature review. In your case, it is to understand what scholars have said related to the topic of your thesis.
Plan the review. Outline the steps that you plan to take to carry out the literature review.
Apply the practical screen. That is, clearly decide what kinds of topics you will search for and which you will not search for because they are beyond the scope of your focus.
Search for the literature. Try to have a meeting with you your school library to help you understand how to use the scholarly databases and get you started in searching for the articles.
Extract the data. Read the articles and use a table to record the most important elements from each article.
Appraise the quality of the studies. This step is probably not necessary for a master's thesis.
Synthesize studies. Do not just summarize the articles one by one; rather, identify and discuss the most important themes that run through multiple articles.
Write the review. Compose and put everything together.

The article linked above has details on each of these steps.
Reference
Okoli, Chitu, 2015. A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37(43), pp.879–910. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/43

General advice is below. In your question specifically, it sounds like you need to specify the particular area(s) of interest and specific research questions. Those will constrain what papers/sources to find and how far to look. The purpose is to connect what you've done with what was done before. This integration or synthesis depends on connecting the terms and methods of your work with the existing literature. So, the main task is to search and organise the previous work.
--
LITERATURE SEARCH
The purpose is a broad sweep to identify research that is relevant to a specific area or research question. When getting the scope of a literature, don't read closely, just take notes. Start by reading about the research question. If the area is self-esteem, read the article on Wikipedia to get oriented to the concepts and terms.
Also read about Boolean search logic, truncation, and wildcards. It’s especially importantly to use “” to form phrases. Notice how different your results are in Google when you search social memory vs. “social memory”.
If using a University library website, go there and choose the best database. PsycInfo is the central database for psychology. We also commonly use Google and Google Scholar. For medical papers, use PubMed. For economics, JSTOR. For education, ERIC.
Search! If you get too few results (usually <20), broaden your keywords. If you get too many (usually >200), use quotes, different terms, or more terms. The “right” number of results is a tricky issue to nail down. It depends on the research question. Communicate clearly with me about your search terms and database and what you’re finding and I’ll be able to direct you.
Good progress! Now search again using different keywords. For example, a project about randomness might include these different search terms, searched separately or together in various combinations, e.g.,: fate fatalism causation causal cause randomness meaning control “personal need for structure” “need for cognition".
Document your process. Include the database, search terms, and notes about the search process. Was it easy to answer the question? Of the citations you found, were there many more, or were you scraping the bottom?
When you find a good, relevant article, use Web of Science to check which articles have cited that article since it was published, and look for new material.
Document your findings. Using a Google document or spreadsheet, probably one that I’ve shared with you already, include the citation, abstract, and your summary of why you included this article, the central finding of the article, and any questions you have for me and our team about the citation.


text:
Is it acceptable for a referee to reject a paper for superficial reasons?
I recently got a short referee’s report on a paper I submitted.
They made superficial remarks concerning notation and writing style, and then admitted that they did not even read the main result.
Is this acceptable for a referee?
The editor took their recommendation and rejected the paper.

Are you asking a question, or looking for sympathy?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is more of a rant in the form of a question.

Not all people are identical in review efforts. What if your claim on proof being wrong was not strong enough.

Is there only one referee ?

why cant people understand me – Maybe because more than half of your original question was about something else. Also, while your question is answerable, I consider it most likely that your account of the situation is not accurate and thus the answers won’t help you.

"is it acceptable to reject a paper for superficial reasons?" No, not really. For example, it would be unacceptable to reject a paper simply because your last name started with "M" and the reviewer didn't like that letter. But, neither notation nor writing style are superficial attributes of a paper. Thus, without being able to see the paper and the referee report, it is simply impossible for anyone reading your question to know if this is a genuine instance of a paper being rejected for superficial reasons. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

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


text:
“Reject & resubmit” when all reviewers accepted manuscript
Recently I sent a manuscript to a high-level IEEE journal (Transaction on Cybernetic, IF=3.45). After my first submission, I received “reject & resubmit” as a response. I resubmitted my manuscript. This time, all reviewer’s answer were “accepted with minor revision”, but the editor decided “reject & resubmit” again.
I want to ask:

Is this situation normal?
How much is my chance for being accepted in a new resubmission?
With a new submission, is it possible that the editor does not send the manuscript to the reviewers but decides by him/herself?

Didn't the editor explain his reason? See also: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11362/why-does-editor-reject-when-reviewers-recommend-acceptance?rq=1

@Alexandros I doubt that is what the asker did.

Reviewers do not acccept or reject manuscripts.  They advise the editor.

Depending on the editorial system, it could very well be that reject & resubmit comprises all cases where the paper was neither accepted as it is nor finally rejected. So, in your case, it could just mean that the paper was rejected in its present form (because you need to make the minor revisions requested by the reviewers).
Of course, if the editorial system offers finer-grained status messages, it can also mean that the editor sees more need for revision than the individual reviewers do or estimates the revisions requested by the reviewers to be more substantial than the reviewers did. The editor’s letter may give you more information on this.
Either way, I would not worry too much about it, improve the manuscript as much as you can, and resubmit it. This way has almost certainly the lowest expected waiting time to a final publication.

With a new submission, is it possible that the editor does not send the manuscript to the reviewers but decides by him/herself?

Yes. If you replied to the reviewer’s comments in a satisfactory manner and did not insert a lot of new material, it may very well be that the editor expects that a new round of review will not yield any further input and accept the paper. Of course, the editor could also reject your paper without further review if they think that you did not even attempt to address the reviewer’s comment or similar.

@ChristianClason: I see. But that should arguably a different answer. It has nothing to do with my answer specifically. (And in fact, there now is an answer on this.)

@Wrzlprmft I was trying to answer your question (now deleted) regarding Vladimir's comment, not the original question (which didn't ask for "why", just "what to expect next").

@ChristianClason: I understand. Still, Vladimir’s comment doesn’t belong here.

Well, arguably it does, since it comments on the first sentence in your answer, giving an explanation why this might be the case. But if you feel that strongly about it, you can always flag the comments for deletion.

@ChristianClason: I already did.

I do not wish to sound cynical, but some journals (and their editors) are not above issuing a reject and resubmit well into the review process even though the manuscript is pretty close to its final form, and they themselves consider the manuscript to be almost acceptance worthy.
Their modus operandi is to to issue a reject and resubmit late into the review process, assign a new manuscript number to the re-submission and then accept it after one round of quick reviews. As a consequence,
(1) The journal seems more exclusive because it has one more rejection on record for the same number of accepted papers.
(2) The processing time (submission to acceptance) appears much shorter.
This happens across disciplines.

Multiple possibilities:

the journal (esp. as it is a high-level one) does ever only one round of corrections possible. If a second round is required, it turns automatically into a resubmission. Fix the issues and resubmit and you'll be fine.
Or the editor does really not like the paper - but usually you get the editor's detailed comment who tell you whether there are complaints there.

If 2. is not the case, you probably are in case 1. Fix the issues and resubmit, stating that you hope that the amendment according to reviewer's comments are now satisfactory.


text:
Should I insert a colour bar if arbitrary units are used?
In a journal article, is it advisable to insert a colour bar (i.e. an explication of the colour scale) in a figure if arbitrary units are used?
If the colour order is already stated in the legend, does a colour bar add additional information in this situation?
An example can be found in this abstract. Imagine that this figure was generated by colour-mapping a signal in arbitrary units, if the legend had specified that the colour scale goes from red (disordered) to green (ordered), would the colour bar have been useful?

Can you give an example of a meaningful figure where the color range isn't meaningful? I'd have a hard time of this as a reviewer unless the scale was 100% normalized 0 to 1 or 100%

I can imagine you are using different colours to distinguish categories on a nominal scale, but I am confused by "explication of the colour scale" and "legend" - aren't those the same thing? Hence, I second the request for an (abstract?) example.

I've edited my post inserting an example in order to address your comments.

I would definitely include the color bar.  It just makes things easier to read, since you can compare the displayed values directly with your eyes, rather than having to refer back to a written explanation.  The bar also lets you see how the colors shade into each other as you move along the scale.
If it seems awkward to have the color bar in arbitrary units, you can explain exactly how you came by the arbitrary units (such as "data scaled by the maximum deviation from zero").  Then you can give the bar scale a more quantitative meaning.  Or, you might go the other direction and just labels the ends "low" and "high."

An arbitrary unit is still a unit and while the absolute values of whatever quantity you are depicting are meaningless, their relations to each other are. For example, it may be relevant that a certain value is ten times as high as another one. A diagram without any scale does not only imply arbitrary units but also an arbitrary scale, which is not only useless in most cases, but it also makes me suspect that some sort of borderline beautification that was hidden from me.
This applies in particular to colour axes, for which there is no default scaling such as for geometrical axes, where I can at least suspect the axis to be linear if no further information is given.
For example take this colour axis from a paper of mine:

As you can see, the white and pink region are more narrow than the green ones and moreover the scale is logarithmic for values larger than 1 and linear for smaller values¹. While this makes sense as it allows the reader to better see certain phenomena, it only becomes legitimate through the numbers on the colour scale that inform the reader what is going on. Otherwise I would consider this choice of scale misleading regarding the intensity of certain effects.
For these reasons, I would only use a colour axis without a scale when I would do the same if the axis were a geometrical one, which in turn I would only do if I am not actually presenting data, but illustrating a concept. But even then I would prefer a colour bar with indicators for high and low to describing such things in the caption, as it is easier to read.

¹ To be precise, all values are integer, so the exact nature of the scale between 0 and 1 does not matter.