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Should I revise and resubmit?
I have just received a decision letter for my submitted manuscript to an Elsevier journal. It was a revise and resubmit (R&R). Two reviewers comments were included in the decision letter. One of the reviewers suggested minor revisions. The other reviewer on the other hand recommended rejection and his comments were really unfair. Evidently, he hasn't bothered reading the manuscript completely.
I am really disappointed and don't really know how to even respond to his comments. what do you recommend me to do? I am really frustrated.

If the reviewer recommends rejection, then they may indeed not read the entire article. As an author, you have to write in a way that hooks the reviewers, as well as you can.

There was something later in the paper that the reviewer didn't see?  (I guess that is why you say he didn't read the paper completely.) Something important?  Maybe it should be mentioned in the abstract.

I some times do not finish reading a paper. Usually it is because there are so many things wrong with the paper that I gave up.   For examples, false claims, poor English, the authors show lack of knowledge, poor methodology, problem is old and not interesting, lack of motivation, etc.

Most journal articles are often a revise and resubmit before they get published.The final article that you see in journals is often never the first submission attempt but rather, crafted through continuous revising and editing.
You should revise and resubmit, you would be doing yourself a disfavour if you don't.
The editors had two very contrasting reviewers for your piece, one who suggested a minor revision and the other an outward reject, so a Revise and Resubmit is a pretty good outcome from that, but also highlights a stark contrast of views.
When you receive harsh comments, it's good to take a step back for a few days and let the anger and frustration that you undoubtedly feel to disappear. At the moment you might feel like it's a bit of a personal attack, and have used language such as 'it's unfair' and 'he hasn't read the article completely.' These are emotional responses and are not helpful for your success.
Why are the comments unfair and how can you determine whether they've read the article completely?
When you are ready, sit down and read them with fresh eyes, highlighting what you can do to improve the article. There will be things in there (difficult to find) that you can utilise to strengthen the quality of your article. You don't have to address everything the second reviewer says but you might be surprised that once those personal feelings die down, the number of things you might find helpful from that second reviewer.
When you do your revision, you'll need to prepare a summary report regarding all the comments, highlighting what you changed, and what you didn't. The things you do not change you provide justification for in your summary report.
You would be surprised by the number of academics who never bother to revise and resubmit a paper to a journal, the numbers are outstanding. Revising and resubmitting allows for you to continue to improve your ideas and produce something of high quality.

one of the reviewers suggested minor revisions. The other reviewer on the other hand recommended a rejection and his comments were really unfair.

Welcome to peer review. Yes, it sucks to have a reviewer criticise your work so much, especially if you feel the comments are unfair. However, both, the editor and the other reviewer seem to give the manuscript a chance. You cannot throw your work away as soon as somebody disagrees with it.
As a sidenote, try to get a bit perspective and figure out why the second reviewer hated the paper so much, without thinking that (s)he is just an idiot. The reviewer didn't bother to read the paper to the end? Yes, that's bad form, but clearly your paper wasn't exactly compellingly written either. The reviewer didn't "get" the paper at all? Maybe your descriptions are not that great. The reviewer thinks your contribution isn't strong enough? Explain better how your paper improves the state of the art. Oftentimes, the most negative comments are the ones that help you most in improving your research, even if they are clearly the ones that hurt the most.

Should i revise and resubmit?

Yes!

Yes, you should revise and resubmit, if you still want the article to be published in the journal you originally targeted.

Evidently, he hasn't bothered reading the article completely.

This may be true, but once you've waited a day or two and digested the comments, look at it again. This kind of review might highlight that some readers of the journal would not understand your paper properly! Even if you think the comments are unfair, be sure to include them in your response. Treat them thoroughly, with evidence from your article and the literature, or include supplementary material with the response letter. Then, ask a co-author or trusted colleague to read over the revised article and response, to check the tone. Good luck!

First, remember reviewer's "verdicts" are only recommendations. The handling editor evaluate these reviews along with your original submission to see what is a fair balance. Deviating reviews are not uncommon. Editors have two solutions at their hands, either, as in your case, make a decision based on the two, or to add a third reviewer to the mix. The former will likely happen if the editor has good insights into the topic, the latter if the editor may require more input to feel safe with a decision. After all, the editor is chosen to have broad knowledge but will not master everything.
So, you have received a revision decision which means the manuscript is very likely accepted if you provide a good set of revisions and a good account of how you have treated the comments from the reviewers. A "bad" review, can emerge from a nebulously written manuscript so if you think the comments are unfair or even rude. Take them with a grain of salt and focus on whether or not they emerge from some misunderstanding or unclear writing and revise accordingly. The editor should have given you some pointers on how to view the reviews but this does not always happen, You are then left to your self to handle the revisions. Important is to not dismiss any of the reviewers just because they disagree or criticize your work. You need to consider their comments and provide a rebuttal to the editor so that any grounds for disagreement is firmly described.
So carefully revise the paper, provide a detailed and polite letter outlining your actions, make sure the revision fulfils all the journal's instructions for formatting and resubmit on time.

I would revise and resubmit. Not only that, I would implement as many of the harsh reviewer's comments as feasible and truly warranted. At least it will show that you are taking the journal and its personnel seriously. Remember, only one of the two said "reject". Show a good faith effort to satisfy both of the reviewers. Keep up the effort my friend!


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What is a good system for generating BibTeX reference keys?
When using a reference manager (or even when tracking references on a handwritten draft), it is common to have a key for each entry when referring to items, which the computer (or you in a final form) replaces with a properly styled reference later (in the style of the journal).
E.g., in BibTeX, which I am most familiar with, writing \cite{Box2015a} might be replaced with "[1]" or with "(Box, O. 2015)" or with "(Box, O. 2015, Meaningful reference key format)" depending on style -- the key in question being the Box2015a part.
Having a good format for the key seems useful, since one would spend a lot of time only seeing the key, rather than the full reference. Simply the author name and date, and a letter to break conflicts doesn't seem ideal.
Was Box2015a Box's work on Meaningful Reference Key formats? Or was it his work on Bicycle Speed Dependency on Weather? Getting that wrong would be embarrassing, and also accidental plagiarism (since credit was not given to the right paper).
What is a better format for reference keys?

I personally use "AuthorYear-FirstWordOfTitle" format, it's enough to resolve conflicts and remind me which paper this is.

@fjarri: I presume you do have a fallback plan for cases such as Barbará2000-Using, Stonebraker1993-The, Roucairol1982-On, Wang2000-A, Shin1998-A, Jain1996-Similarity, Yu1998-Online, Han2000-Mining, Liu1987-Performance, Yu1994-Scheduling, etc., all of which identify at least 3 publications ;)

Related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4026/recommended-citation-key-construction

@O.R.Mapper: of course, if the title starts from an article or a preposition, I take the next word. I don't see any problem with "mining" or "similarity", it's enough to remind me which of the two or three papers is it.

@fjarri: I was rather referring to the case where you need to distinguish several of the publications for which one of the keys - e.g. Jain1996-Similarity - is valid.

I use the same system as @fjarri, but multiple words from the title that make it both unique and easily recognisable for me. The keys get a bit long, but since I'm using RefTex (part of AUCTeX for emacs) anyways, that doesn't impact my workflow at all. For example 'Poincare1892:mech-celeste1' refers to the first volume of Poincaré's famous "Les méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste".

Probably, the only general rule to follow is that the key should be something that well characterizes the document. Anything more specific will depend a lot on the topics you are writing about, and vary from reference to reference:

Is the title very unique, or rather generic? In the former case, a shortened version of the title could be integrated into the key. (As a random example: The title The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics might be shortened to something like TriangleProcHighPerf.)
Does the publication describe a product or technique that has a name (which you might also use in your text)? If so, that name could become a part of the key.
Is the publication connected to a recognizeable author name, or do you rarely see the same author name twice in the literature you deal with, in particular with respect to specific approaches? In the latter case, author names may just be arbitrary strings that do not help you remember anything particular, while in the former case, you might think about including the author name the work is associated with the name in the key.
Is the year in any way special for the work? For example, is it an exceptionally early example of a supposedly modern invention, or is it the variant that has become known as "the 2011-version" of a particular approach? If so, the year could reasonably be a part of the key, otherwise, it seems superfluous.
Can the publication be categorized? For instance, you may want to indicate in the key whether something is a concept draft, a user study of a concept presented elsewhere, a survey of several techniques, or a design rationale for a given concept.
Are there various versions of essentially the same work published by different publishers? Different layouts and presentation forms (monochrome vs. color, ...) may have different strengths, so you may end up wanting to specifically refer to (w.l.o.g.) the Springer version and the IEEE version of some work that for some reason was published twice. In that case, including the publisher name in the key might be reasonable.

I hope this helps to get the idea - I do not see a reason for a uniform key format here; instead, this case-specific format highlights the peculiarities of each referenced work and therefore seems to help best to remember which reference points to what work in my experience.
For me personally, the above system generally leads to keys that never include an author name or publication year, and almost always a concept name, otherwise some fragments of the paper title. Depending on your topics, you may well end up with different preferences.
I have never had a problem of key collisions while using this approach; if anything (not that it would actually cause any problem), I may have ended up with several different keys in cases where I created bibliography entries for the same publication several times rather than copying the first one to later works.
To summarize:

An advantage of this system is that you do not need to remember any information that is not descriptive for the content of the paper (publication year, author name, publication venue, ...) to understand the reference.
A disadvantage may be that the key cannot be generated automatically, though I use one .bib file per project and my workflow is usually decide to add reference -> search for reference in JabRef to check whether it is there -> add if it does not exist -> Ctrl+K to get insertion-ready \cite-command in the clipboard, where automatic generation of keys is a non-issue.

I'm using (BibTeX) reference keys that consist of three parts:

the last name of the first author
the last two digits of the publication year
the first meaningful word from the title

The idea of "meaningful words" is a bit vague, of course. Usually, that's the first adjectiv, verb (except "to be"), or noun in the title. For example, I would use box15meaningful to refer to a paper entitled "On Meaningful Reference Key Formats" but box15bicycle to refer to "Is Bicycle Speed Dependent on Weather?".
(I think there is a term for "first meaningful word from the title" as the concept is used or was used in catalogues of libraries, but I forgot the term).
From my perspective, the main benefits of this system are:

Given the full reference, I can predict the citation key. For example, when I'm looking at the printed paper and want to cite it, I know the citation key without looking it up in the BibTeX file or using any software tool to look it up for me.
Given the citation key, I have some idea which paper it is, because the key includes a meaningful word from the title.
The keys are reasonably short and don't clutter up my text too much.
The citation keys can be used as part of file names, so I can also name pdfs like that if I happen to have a paper available as pdf on my hard drive. For example, I would have box15meaningful.pdf and box15bicycle.pdf.
The citation keys can be used as part of URLs, so I can name websites about my own papers like that. For example, if I would be Box, I might have a website like http://my-university.edu/~box/publications/box15bicycle/ where you could donwload the raw data used for my research on bicycle speed.
Given two BibTeX files that both use this scheme, I can merge them by merging entries with the same key, because the same paper will always get the same reference key.

The mapping from "full citation information" to "citation key" is, in many ways, a hash function, and usually are by construction easy to apply but hard to invert. We do this because we don't want to have to type 50 to 100 characters each time we cite a paper.
The easiest way, frequently, to reconstruct the data from the hash key, is by looking up it up in a dictionary/table. If your bibliography database is big enough this makes it something much suited for software than for your brain.
So my workflow does the following:

I use JabRef as my primary bibliographic data manager, as well as to keep track of my growing collection of PDFs.
The citation key format is ABCDEF1234? The first six characters are formed by the names of the authors (following some rule), followed by four digit year, and followed by disambiguation suffix.
I use Vim as my editor of choice.
I export my citation database from JabRef using a custom-written export filter to become a Vim completefunc, which I load through my .vimrc everytime I edit a TeX file. This allows me to use it two ways:

I can type the start of the citation key, say Won, followed by <ctlr>-X <ctrl>-U and it will show me a popup list of all entries with key starting with "Won" which includes, in my case, all of my first authored papers with at most two authors. Highlighting selected entries in the list will show a "preview screen" showing the bibliographic information about that entry. I configure mine to only show the full title of the article, but it is easy enough to includes also publisher info etc.
Seeing an existing citation key in the document, bringing my cursor to the end of the key and hitting again the combo <ctrl>-X <ctrl>-U the list now has just one element, but the preview window still comes up showing me the bibliographic information.

If I need to insert a citation to an article whose complete author list I cannot reconstruct in my head (and hence cannot know even the start of the citation key), I can either browse through the full list provided by the completion function in Vim, or just search in JabRef.

For illustrations:
Before invoking the previewer: Note the \cite{...} string in the middle of the window.

Putting the cursor on Alinac1999 brings up a pop-up menu (turns out Serge Alinhac as at least three papers in 1999) and a preview pane on top.

I think you missed OP's point. What they say is that an author-year is a bad format, because one cannot disambiguate immediately between papers with similar author-year codes when reading the paper. I assume that having some automated tool to search and insert bibtex keys is already a given for them. (It isn't so for many researchers, though, especially the older generation).

@FedericoPoloni I think you are the one who missed the point. (a) They are asking about the BibTeX key, not its presentation in the final PDF. (b) The OP asks about a good format for a BibTeX key for when editing the manuscript; my point is precisely that that is the wrong question to ask. What one should ask for is a good tool that alleviates this problem entirely. An editing tool that allows you to, after selecting a BibTeX key that is in the running text that you are editing, immediately shows you the corresponding Bibliographic Information is about as unambiguous as you can get.

@FedericoPoloni: in particular, what I describe is more than just search and insert. But also on-the-spot reverse lookup via a popup menu. Let me include a picture of what it looks like.

I think I have clear what you are writing about. Sublime Text 3 has something like that. The key sentence in the question, though, is Having a good format for the key seems useful, since one would spend a lot of time only seeing the key, rather than the full reference. (By "reading the paper", I meant "reading the LaTeX source".)

This is almost a non-answer. The reason is that I use a similar format to what you find inadequate: "FirstAuthorLastName:Year". In my field we use Harvard style referencing so this is almost what appears in the text. The colon is not a key ingredient, it is just that I use the form "tab:xxx", "fig:xxx" and "eq:xxx", where "xxx" is the unique name I want for the object, for labelling floats and equations. My point is that for me being short is a necessity since I do not want unnecessarily long BibTeX keys or labels hanging around the document. I tried for a while to add number of authors, for example "Smith+4:2005" to distinguish from single authored "Smith:2005" but that ended up being to tiresome to set up I also shortened the multiauthors to "Smith+:2005" for a while. I use JabRef (no promotion intended) and have now simply resorted to specify that the preferred automatic key generation is "FirstAuthorLastName:Year" where JabRef will add "a", "b", "c" etc. where similarities appear.
So why do I work with the shorter form. First of all, I know what material I reference. I also know the material in the field. I later also double check the references, as they appear in the reference list, certainly before I submit a manuscript. So the key point here is the trade off between adding a lot of information to a label with lower degree of "mis-referencing" and short forms with potential risk of more misses. In the end you use whatever suits you but with time you probably end up simplifying.
Having written both papers and very long reports/books, I have never found this to be a big issue. I can understand that it becomes a problem if you for some reason are using a lot of references with which you are unfamiliar. So "better" is what you find best. If I understand correctly from your profile you aim to get into a PhD and I am sure your database will grow in a specific direction during the PhD, you will become intimately familiar with that set of literature, and you will perhaps change the way you BibTeX key label your references.
So better is what works best for you at the moment. In the long term, the simpler the better in my experience.

My system of choice is to let my reference manager, or some external database, handle the key generation. Every time I need to insert a citation, I go to the external tool or database, look up the reference (thus avoiding most of the risk of using the wrong key), and copy the citation key into my document. It sounds impractical, but actually I've found the process to be pretty smooth and not that inconvenient. The few keys that I use the most often in any given paper, I wind up remembering anyway.
I use Mendeley as a reference manager, which presents metadata next to a view of the PDF of the paper. So when I look up some information in a paper, it's easy to copy the citation key directly from Mendeley into my document. I imagine there are many other reference managers that have this same feature.

I primarily use Jabref and LyX. Hence, the need to encode every bit of meaningful information in the key does not arise.
Hence, I have a simple mechanism of key naming, which is
<FirstAuthorLastName>:<Year>:<JournalAbbreviation>
If it is a book, then I replace the last part with Book. I have set up Jabref that it creates the first two parts automatically when importing. Since the journal abbreviations are not standard (yet), have not automated that.
Since LyX is used to write the document and insert entries, I can do a search to find out which articles need to be cited and the key is not hugely important ...

Welcome to the site!
It might be worth incorporating into your answer something pointing out JabRef has LyX integration, so you can do the search in the JabRef end.
(I assume that is what you mean? Or does LyX also have search? I myself sentled on the Search Jabref, click to insert into LyX method. Its been a while since i used LyX's manager)

Thanks @Oxinabox. Although Jabref does have LyX integration, I do not use that. I use Jabref primarily as a glorified citation manager. Used to use Zotero - it is great, but got burned by the sqlite db, instead of plain text. What I do is use the "Insert Citation" functionality of LyX, which brings up a menu where you can also do searching, inserting as well as selecting how teh citation will look like.

Fair enough, I suggest (for your own benefit) looking into the integration, its great. Instructions for setting it up are at: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/148287/lyx-and-jabref-problem/239572

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Resubmission of paper has been "under consideration" for 30 days. Request update?
I (re)submitted my paper to a Nature related journal (after revisions) and it has been "under consideration" for about 30 days. Should I ask for an update? If yes, is this too rude?  :

Dear editor,
I hope you are doing well. I have noticed that the status of our paper titled “ “ has not changed for about 30 days. I am not sure what the time frame is for resubmissions. Is it possible I have missed an update? If there is anything I need to do at this stage, please let me know.

What did happen in the end?

Journals such as nature and Science and their related publications run on tight schedules. Not hearing from them quickly is usually a good thing since rejections are made quickly. Yes, a month may seem long but for me is too early to worry. It is difficult to say what time frame is reasonable but two months would be on the long side.
Having said that, these journals have professionals working full time with the journal, unlike many others where editors work on the journal along side regular academic work. This means they rarely let any job lie around for very long. Of course, a mistake may happen, but I would not make such an assumption as a first choice. So take it easy for another couple of weeks. If there is any pressure on you for getting advance notice of publication, for, for example, job applications or salary discussions, a mail providing the cause of urgency would always be possible but if it is only pressing anticipation, sending mails to editors early is not a great idea. But in this case, estimating the time frame is more difficult than for regular journals but give it another couple fo weeks at least.

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Can I understand the rejection reason of an article by reading the reviewers' comments?
My paper is rejected with this comment from editor:

Unfortunately, the reviewers generally agree this paper should not be
  considered for publish in....

My question is do all the reviewers reject the paper?
While, I read the reviewers's comment, some of them suggest some notations in order to improve my paper.

A serious editor makes a decision based on the reports from the reviewers along with their own critical view of both the manuscript and the reviews. This means that both reviewers may not have made the official recommendation of reject, it sometimes happens reviewers give a "major revision" officially while in their confidential comment to the editor they provide their reasoning for providing that recommendation instead of a reject, which they think would be equally appropriate. Hence there is communication "behind the scenes" that is not visible to the author(s). It is also possible that an editor makes a decision for a reject based on reviews that recommend otherwise. In such cases the grounds may, for example, be that the editor sees that the revisions will be too complex to fit the time frame of a regular "major revision". Or, that there is some formal issue that reviewers will be unable to detect. The latter should, however, not be very common since such issues, including suitability to the journal, should be weeded out at the time of submission, not after review (thereby wasting reviewers valuable time).
In the quote you provide, it seems as if both reviewers have found grounds for rejecting the paper. It is probably not very common that an editor changes such overwhelming recommendations (although it can happen). The fact that reviewers provide comments is not in any way unusual. Any serious reviewer knows that part of reviewing is to provide feedback on what is thought should be revised. Hence there is normally no major difference between reviews resulting in a recommendation for "reject" than those resulting in, say, "major revision". Any first round review that is returned without any comments and providing either an "accept" or a "reject" will, in my opinion as editor, be signalling a reviewer not willing to do the job and in fact useless for the process (manuscripts so good that they can be accepted without any action are very rare indeed).

You can't really tell, unless it's explicit in the referee reports you receive. A referee could well give suggestions for improvements even if they advise rejecting the paper - they don't assume that just because the paper wouldn't appear in this journal it won't appear anywhere. It also doesn't matter whether all the referees recommended rejection - it is the editors that make the call, and that is what stands.


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How should I admit a teaching mistake without losing authority?
I made a small mistake while teaching a very simple concept. It was mainly a numerical mistake, and the essential parts of the concept were well illustrated. I want to admit my mistake and even though most students will receive it well, I fear to lose my authority with some students, mainly the ones that think that they could teach the class.

Please don’t write answers in comments. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, as well as having other problems detailed on meta. Comments are for clarifying and improving the question; please don’t use them for other purposes. Especially when there are already 16 (!) real answers. Existing answers in comments and other extended discussion has been moved to chat.

As a student, I actually learned a lot from watching how professors handled mistakes. In a lecture, if you didn't intentionally make a mistake, this is an unscripted moment, and therefore a glimpse into how an experienced person deals with something unexpected. I came to respect professors who were able to make a mistake and fix it; it taught me how to think, and how to be honest.
By the same token, I lost respect for professors who were more concerned with the appearance of authority than just admitting to and fixing the mistake.
Addendum After reading some of the other responses here, I feel I should add that I'm a white male from the US, and didn't consider other cultures or underrepresented groups when writing this answer. I certainly see how perceived authority among students could become more of an issue if the cultural norm is that a teacher shouldn't be challenged, or if the teacher is working to overcome implicit bias. I still feel, on balance, that admitting to and fixing mistakes confidently is intellectually honest and will engender more confidence and trust than ignoring mistakes, and actually provides an opportunity for a positive learning experience. However, I am not an expert on these issues, so I wanted to highlight that as a caveat.

This. I really liked those lectures where a professor was asked a question that made them think on their feet because I got to see how a professor thinks. It is something I like to model these days, and it's the most fun classes where I get to do it. Whether I get the answer right or not is actually a secondary consideration; there is always the next class period where I can show the complete and worked out proof.

On the flip side of this, I had a TA for physics that made a mistake that said weight increased during freefall and was removed while lifting something. That's obviously backwards, but they didn't catch it. It took a student to point it out and then the TA refused to understand it so the student had to explain it. I lost all respect for that TA, not because they made a mistake but because they couldn't understand it. I'm sure other profs & TAs made mistakes, but that's the only one I remember after +20 years. Definitely own up and people will forget the mistake.

@computercarguy I think that's a great example, although I would classify that as on the original side instead of the flip side :) It actually does take a lot of skill and confidence to be able to fix a mistake in real time, which is why I learned a lot from watching experienced professors who could do it, do it.

It is not sexist or racist to note that sexism and racism continue to be unfortunate factors in the level of respect afforded to different sorts of people -- it is entirely the opposite.

My original answer assumes that fixing errors is cost-free (besides a hit to your ego) and so one should just fix errors without worrying about authority, which was the OP's question. But I think there are classrooms where there is unjust bias against the teacher (of course not all teachers in a given group will face this). What do you do then? You should probably fix mistakes, but maybe it is important to think carefully about how to communicate corrections without ceding authority. I wanted to acknowledge this scenario, while also stating that I have no useful advice to give about it.

I would like to note that mistakes should be the exception. If a teacher is consistently making mistakes and correcting themselves, then that is a problem. Making the occasional accidental mistake and correcting it is fine; making constant mistakes is not regardless of whether or not they make mistakes.

I think the genuinely legitimate authority of "the teacher" is that they have far more experience than their students. Not that they are perfect, etc. Yes, experience does tend to diminish mistakes, but does not eliminate them. In fact, part of "the lesson" can/should be about how to cope with inevitable errors! :)  (as opposed to pretending that no errors will be made...)  In particular, the teacher should not pretend to take up a "position" that requires "defense". :)

Unless, of course, the class is a chess class.

@LSpice, ha. Well, yes, and, for that matter, it is always possible to interpret any human interaction as combat. :)

I've found that my own perfectionism has acted as a crutch. A way of avoiding challenge which I felt I couldn't handle. If my presentation wasn't perfect, then there'd come scrutiny and I couldn't stand up to the scrutiny. Similar to the way a smuggler drives the speed limit. Perfect presentation because they can't handle scrutiny. Unfortunately, just with like a car going exactly the speed limit, a policy of perfect presentation tends to irritate people and create friction more than the intended effect of making things go well.

@LukeGriffiths, a smuggler of knowledge into students' minds?

I  make mistakes in class - not often, but more often than I'd like. I note them and correct them as soon as I see them (or a student points them out to me).
Sometimes I'm asked if I do that on purpose to see who in the class is awake. I reassure the class that there's no need since I err often enough by accident.
You may annoy the few troublemakers who think they can teach the class better than you, but you will earn the respect of the true learners.

Whoa, there is actually a lot to unpack in a post that short.
Presumably you're teaching in a university setting. What "authority figure" are you even talking about? If students look up to you, great! But it is not even remotely a part of your job to make sure you're "above" them in some imaginary hierarchy; your job is to teach them. Trying to enforce it in some way is usually unproductive both for the teaching and your "authority".

mainly the ones that think that they could teach the class

Do you actually feel contested? Why? If they want to teach the class, they are free to apply to the department asking to do so. If they don't, but feel like you're doing a poor job - why don't they serve as TAs helping other students? There are plenty of ways to handle this tension if it exists, and productive ones don't involve wrestling with the troublesome students.
Finally, when correcting mistakes, consider how impactful they were. If it is something silly like 2+2=5, either don't bother or mention it at the start of the next class briefly asking students to go over their notes since they didn't catch it earlier. If it is more impactful, dedicate some time to it. You have still delivered value to them, so chin up and try to see the situation through their eyes. No one wants to spend ten minutes on someone addressing insecurities more so than they do the actual content of the lesson. Stick to the point, and keep educating them: respect is earned by doing your job well. Your job is teaching, not some sort of power play.

I'd even consider asking the student to try teaching. The might just find out how hard it is. People are more afraid of public speaking than death. And trying to teach people while doing so is that much harder.

Students who think they could teach the class aren't the ones who are afraid of public speaking; they are, however, the ones who overestimate their qualifications. Inviting them to teach would be a huge mistake in my opinion: bad for the audience, no lesson learned for the student.

+1 for "mention it at the start of the next class briefly asking students to [correct] their notes"

I think the word "authority" here is not meant in the sense of somebody who has power over another, but in the sense of somebody who is authoritative on a subject, i.e. a subject-matter expert, knows what they're talking about, worth listening to. (Definition #3 here.) Educators have a legitimate interest in maintaining the appearance of being an authority on the subject they teach, because it means students are more likely to pay attention.

@GregMartin, believing yourself to be correct and having the ability for public speaking aren't necessarily related. Plenty of people will back down on their assertions if they are asked to publicly prove it. Also, when the student makes mistakes when they try teaching, they can be pointed out, too. Done correctly, the teacher can show how easy it is to make a mistake. And as long as it's done without malice, this can be a valuable learning lesson, instead of retribution, shaming/bullying, or otherwise be harmful to the student.

@kaya3 That's fair enough. My point was that you as an educator should appear authoritative on the subject, but it is not a competitive thing. In most cases this perception appears naturally because you'd be more knowledgeable than students, but there are unfortunate fringe cases where the class is taught to students who excel at the subject already. In the university setting this is uncommon and usually happens when freshmen overestimate their abilities, but happens still; IMHO, sorting it out with the department is the best then. Otherwise, just keep teaching!

@GregMartin I agree that "Oh so why don't you smartass come to the blackboard and explain it in my stead" is a terrible practice and backfires one way or another pretty much always. Inviting them to teach in general, however, is not necessarily as bad, provided they execute due diligence in preparing for the class, you go over the notes/presentation together and so on. Some profs organize classes in this manner from the get go even. I find it mostly applicable for advanced topics/small classes, not things like Calc I. It is a viable strategy when they feel they lack engagement.

@Lodinn Maybe depends on your subject, it's not that uncommon in early CS classes, for example, especially if the department is in the unenviable position of having to teach mixed CS/non-CS students in the same class. CS seems quite behind in class placement here, the absolute beginner class is usually mandatory even when a lot of CS-track students are coming in having had an equivalent class in high school plus extracurricular programming (sometimes they have really impressive hobby projects, even). Whereas non-CS track students often find even "this is a for loop" to be overly demanding...

@user3067860 Been in this situation when taking CS classes as a student. The solution is really simple: don't make it compulsory for students to do stuff they have no business doing. While new to programming people were studying for loops, those with experience were assigned some small projects and given permission to not attend classes for the most part. As a professor, 1) Raise this issue with the department and make sure they approve of your chosen course of action 2) Find alternative ways to create assignments/grade the course for vastly different student backgrounds. That's it!

Back when I was in high school I remember situations where the teacher makes an obvious mistake - obvious enough that even students who haven't mastered the topic can spot it, such as a simple arithmetic mistake - and doesn't admit it. Some students joked about it privately afterwards, but the underlying reason for the jokes wasn't that the students think they understand the material better than the teacher. It was because suddenly everything the teacher says is suspect.
For example, suppose the teacher says X. The students think about a homework problem unsuccessfully, and guess that maybe X is wrong. But the teacher insists X is right. Can you trust that X is right if the teacher never admits they are wrong? Even worse: at this point, the teacher is definitely not an authority figure.
You're better off biting the bullet and admitting the error, especially since it was mainly a numerical mistake and the essential parts of the concept were well illustrated.

Excellent point. Sort of similar to parents lying to their children about something. When the child figures out the truth, respect is lost and it is natural to question what other things they might have lied about.

Frankly, you would lose respect from those capable students far more quickly by not admitting mistakes or worse still trying to cover them up. This is because they probably already know your mistakes, so their respect or disrespect would be based not on your mistake but rather on your honesty regarding mistakes. Students can often tell if you know you have made a mistake but try escaping without admitting.

The best policy as a teacher is to ensure the students know that you are human, just like they are, and can make mistakes.  Let them know, also, that the best learners, and most knowledgeable people, are those who never close their minds but continue to learn.  Those who think they know everything, besides being wrong, are destined to remain ignorant of many things they might have otherwise learned had they been willing to make corrections to their own preconceptions and mistakes.
Respect is earned, not commanded; unless you are teaching at the lower elementary school level (up through about the fourth grade).  While you can always receive a certain level of respect by imposing it on the students, they will not have actual respect for you unless you have earned it.
In Asian societies, students would never dare to correct their teacher because it is taboo to cause one's superior to "lose face."  But this, while maintaining a certain form of "respect," loses the advantage of teaching independent thinking.  Students merely copy their teachers, generally finding little advantage to recognizing a teacher's potential errors in the absence of an acceptable way to disclose them.  When an error is noticed, the student just stays quiet about it.
In Western societies the pendulum is at the other extreme: respect for teachers is secondary to one's own "right" to independent thinking--and correcting a teacher can become a matter of one's personal pride.  I recall the story of a European boy whose family had moved to America.  He was in primary school but was far advanced (a genius) in math.  His father saw fit to enroll the nine-year-old in a math class at the local university.  One day, the mathematics professor incorrectly worked a problem on the board, and the child corrected the professor--undoubtedly in the less mature manner of a child.  The professor took umbrage at being corrected by one so young, and got very angry.  The father ended up defending his son to the professor, and the professor had no defense because he had made a mistake.  (Mathematics is somewhat more black-and-white than some subjects might be.)  The professor had only made things worse for himself by attempting to hold himself up as infallible.
When an Asian student of mine corrected me in class one day, I was so surprised that I praised him!  It is great for the learners if they are alert enough to catch a teacher's mistakes, and I preferred to have it corrected than to have inadvertently taught something which might be incorrect.  I always invited my students to correct me--though it was often the case that I had, instead, opportunity to explain why their  offered correction was mistaken.  I would appreciate them for trying, and it was a teaching moment from which all of the class could benefit.
In Asian societies teachers are not supposed to appear fallible.  They are not expected to admit any mistake.  They are expected to maintain their superiority always.  But, in my experience, the principle of earning respect in place of commanding it actually works very well with Asians, and being humble enough to accept one's own mistakes helps to earn their respect.
In the end, if your authority is based on the students' respect of you, you will maintain your authority best by putting the students' learning ahead of your own pride.

This is a fantastic answer (as in awesome)!

In Asian societies, students would never dare to correct their teacher because it is taboo to cause one's superior to "lose face." - Not entirely true, at least nowadays.  Also, Asia is big and contains multitudes.

@Kimball I've lived and taught for years in several Southeast Asian countries and when I say "Asian societies" I refer to their tradition and not to the current trend toward Westernization.  America is doing a good job of exporting its culture through Hollywood and other influences and Asia has changed considerably in just the past two decades.  The new mixed-culture society can cause some ambiguities.  Taiwan and Hong Kong are among the more Westernized countries of the region.

I used to make a point of giving house points (credits) to students who picked up on my 'mistakes'. Some were glaring, and soon noticed (not accidental errors), but occasionally real errors were found. We worked as a team!

I doubt it’s a good idea to demand respect even at the lower elementary school level. Respect exists in the opinion that they have of you and is nothing that you can affect more than by behaving in a respectable manner. But you may demand a specific behavior in the classroom.

@HelloGoodbye Agreed. Small children are excellent observers with keen perception and sense of fairness. But they are not usually gifted with the kind of judgment needed to distinguish between good and bad role models--they simply accept whichever role model and/or authority figure who may be in their life, without question. Children may choose to like or dislike someone, they may misbehave or rebel out of selfishness, but they will not typically base their respect of someone on the characteristics that a more mature person sees. However, if authority is unjustly "demanded," they may fear.

You can flip it round, and use it as a teaching moment, which also takes the wind out of the sails for anyone who might act up.....
Instead of focusing on your mistake, focus on their learning. I'd tackle it like this:

Before we carry on, I want to teach you one of the most important lessons in (subject).
How many of you, feel you've got a good grip on the material so far?
(pause)
Excellent!
So, how many of you spotted the mistake I made last time/last week?
(pause, some hands go up, some people look down)
Excellent!

At this point, you can either ask someone to explain what it was, or tell them yourself, followed by the punchline, where you ask why people didn't say something. They probably won't speak easily. It's an awkward question but a really good one. If needed, pick one of your bright sparks who says they saw the error, and ask directly, why they didn't say something. It's a very valid, legitimate question.
Do this in a cordial, supportive way. So they don't feel picked out for bad reasons.
Then, draw the lesson from it. People in authority will make mistakes at times, whether in academia or commerce or other areas. And often, nobody will say a thing. This will happen periodically throughout their entire lives.  "I want you to think about that, and decide, what you feel should happen, in situations like this." Or whatever else you feel is the lesson you want as a take-away.
In this way, you flip it round. You maintain authority and initiative. The people most likely to feel they know it all, are in the position of "well, why didn't you say something?", which deflates them and reduces scope for issues.
And most importantly, everyone learns a really important point, in the best way possible - seeing it taught, by their teacher.

I wonder how many would post a comment on a video but wouldn't say anything in person.

This will/won't work, depending on the personality of the teacher/lecturer. Some cannot be seen to be wrong, and nobody loves a smartarse.

@Tim - In this case the teacher is asking, and the solution is very likely to be seen as a valid lesson and self correction. I don't think your concerns are an issue in this specific case, given that the teacher wishes to self correct, and only "fears" loss of authority (its a fear only). Also consider that ultimately all solutions depend on the person who will do them, so that could be a comment on every solution of every question.

I do a lot of live programming demos in my lectures (I'm about to do another one in about 10 mins※ ;o).  I make mistakes each time.  It's no big deal, and it is why compilers give error messages.  It gives me a chance to show how things are done that can't be adequately explained by conventional lectures, such as how to go about programming in such a way that you minimize errors and ensure that the ones you do make are found and corrected quickly and easily.
I had the same approach with my chalk and talk lectures back when I taught maths.
If you are not making mistakes as a learner you are too far inside your comfort zone to learn efficiently.  As a teacher it possibly means you are too far ahead of the students to find their difficulties easy to anticipate.
In short, don't worry about mistakes, and try not to worry about authority.  You have demonstrated that you have a good grasp of the subject by the fact you have been appointed to teach it.
Having said which, as a middle aged, white male marsupial, it is easy for me not to worry about authority, which is something that society needs to be working on.  I suspect it is a lot less easy not to worry about authority if you don't automatically get the respect that your ability deserves because of qualities that have nothing to do with your ability to teach the material.
※ I provided several "learning experiences" during the demonstration ;o)

I like to use characters ※ and ⁂ for footnotes, because the dagger doesn't resolve well and these are not characters that will be found in the programming language.  You can also use superscript in posts here, even though there's not a markdown shortcut for it.

@JDługosz good to know. How do you type these characters?

@EarlGrey copy and paste from the above note.  Keep them (and others) in a text file for handy copying.  Use the Character Map applet to find it.  But I like the program called BabelMap.  Build a custom keyboard.

@JDługosz: I usually use numbered superscripts for footnotes.  No markdown support, but you can use HTML <sup>1</sup>.  Then for the footnote itself, I put a bold "footnote 1:" at the start of a paragraph someone.  (In a long answer, often at the bottom of the relevant section, not all the way at the bottom of the answer where readers would have to scroll far and then find their way back.)

I also use the superscript code: humorous example

You've received a lot of very good answers already. I'll just add that one more possible way to maintain authority and still correct the mistake is to make a joke about it. Which one depends on your sense of humor. When asked by a student why I wrote something that is wrong or misplaced or noticing that myself, I just say "because after 50 I have a brain-mouth-hand coordination problem, so occasionally I think one thing, say another, and write/do a third one". I usually add that "unfortunately, some younger people suffer from this disease too". It may look somewhat lame to you (or it may not), but usually it causes some laugh and smiles and if you can manage to make your audience smile at your will, you may be sure that you are still in full control. I also tell my students in the beginning of the class that "people usually look most stupid when they are afraid to appear stupid". The same applies to losing authority: one loses it most exactly when one acts of the fear to lose it.
Just my two cents.

You can also be serious and note it's especially easy (and very normal) to make mistakes at the board because you're focused on explaining, not on computing, and invite students to point out errors when they see them.

@Kimball Of course! But that possibility has been mentioned several times already, hasn't it? ;-)

well, maybe I missed it, but I didn't notice the other answers explaining why it's easy to make mistakes, and I imagine this is not obvious to most students

You really should admit to the mistake. As others have pointed out, the absolute worst thing for a teacher's reputation is to make mistakes that students can see, and not admit them; or even worse that that, to argue with, deflect, or browbeat the students who point them out.
That said: Time is of the essence. The quicker you can fix the error, the better. Within seconds, by yourself, is ideal. If a student points it out in a few minutes, or anytime in the one class session, then that's perfectly fine; usually easy to go back and fix it.
But if it's outside the class session then the half-life on how useful this is starts to tick down. The particular numbers may not matter a whole lot if the essential concept or process was shown correctly. It becomes more of a burden if you need to recreate all of the work (board work lost, etc.) from scratch. If days have gone by and no student noticed, I'd be prone to let it slide for time-efficiency purposes; if a student does point it out or it's really crushing my conscience, then I've written up a handout document showing the correct solution. (Although Krantz in How to Teach Mathematics argues against even that, specifically.)
When I do make a mistake in class, and a student catches it instead of me, then my standard framing response is like this:

Thank you so much! I usually make about one mistake a day, and there
it is. That's why we need to do the hard stuff in teams, and I'm
depending on you to watch what I'm doing for mistakes like that.
I'm so glad we're doing this together!

One of the best solutions I’ve seen used by a math teacher of mine is to reward the students for catching your mistakes.
My teacher set this up by making it so that if a student pointed out a mistake during class, she added a point to the running tally. When she reached ten mistakes caught by the class, she bought treats for the entire class.
Without needing to expend money, this could also be done by giving extra extension days to the class, or any other reward.
This completely changed the dynamic of the class, which did a few things:

It made it so that students were proud to share their expertise and were happy to understand the material and point out mistakes. The mistakes made the student who pointed them out look good, rather than the teacher look bad, because the students were focused on the reward.
It provided a clear mechanism for the teacher to fix mistakes and the students to correct mistakes. If the teacher corrected a mistake before the students noticed, she was saving herself from giving up a point to the class, and her doing that re-engaged the class to pay more close attention. If a mistake was made, a student catching it was a success for the class, rather than a failure of the teacher, and so students were quick to point out mathematical errors and it wasn’t awkward or degrading to do so.

Drawbacks:

Writing math could be stressful for the professor at times because she was worried about giving up too many points. I believe this was due to setting the point requirement too low.
Finding a suitable reward mechanism can be tough, especially since the most motivating rewards are often those which require extra money or time spent to set up.
It can be awkward or difficult to set this up in the middle of a semester since it introduces a whole new mechanism into lecture, so I recommend setting it up at the start of the class. However, if needed, this can be done later. In fact, in the OP’s original case, it could be introduced with “here’s a free point because I made this mistake - see if you can catch the other ones!”

Several of our math professors would give out chocolates to people who caught a mistake. Sometimes they would run out, but the dynamic in the class still stayed the same for the rest of the lecture.

I like the giving out chocolates, but, as a student, it creates a "goody-two-shoes" or "teacher's pet" dynamic if there's only a few people who keep catching mistakes. The rest of the class doesn't benefit. I particularly liked the group reward mechanism because it made the entire class support the people who pointed out mistakes rather than becoming envious of them or seeing them as annoying.

If a student made such a mistake in a graded piece of work then you would probably take points off for it. That makes this a good teaching opportunity to show why one should always check one's work, because anyone can make some minor mistake. Depending on how much time you have for that topic you can go into greater detail about how you could have checked your work (estimated the answer and compared, using your answer in the original equation and verifying, etc.). Or if you don't have much time, you can just mention it in passing: "Minor correction for yesterday's problem, here is the correct result. This is an example of why you should always check your work. See xyz resource for examples of how to check your work."
It's important to explain that one actually needs to check, and ideally give strategies for checking, because otherwise students tend to conflate "being good at math" with "never making arithmetic mistakes"...if you can separate those two in their minds you will both preserve your dignity and show them that even learners can produce routinely correct work, since catching and fixing errors comes from diligence rather than some stroke of genius.

Just so it's said, authority is a function of attitude, not a function of action. One person can do everything perfectly and still be unable to command authority; another can goof left and right and maintain it. The key is to be calm and assertive. Don't question yourself or your capabilities, and students will naturally fall into line.
With respect to the specific problem, my approach has always been to turn it into part of the lesson. Walk into class the next day and lead with: "How many of you noticed the mistake I made in last lecture?" Get a show of hands so you have an idea of how many people actually did notice (which won't be as many as you think); explain and correct the mistake; move on. There's no need for you to 'admit' you goofed — treat that as a mere obvious fact — and no need to explain anything beyond the basic issue and correction. You on't have to 'make it up' to the students, you just have to fix it. Hold in your mind the fact that you are an expert on the material and the goof is inconsequential; the force of your own self-assertion will move people past it.
Yeah, I know it's a lot harder in practice than it sounds, but it does work.

I would say you are making too much of this. Students do not expect perfection from their teachers. In the first few minutes of each class I always run over the most important things to remember from the last lecture, clarify things I think I didn't teach well, and present errata. In no way has this ever caused me to lose face.
If you seem embarrassed when discussing the mistake, perhaps the students will think less of you. But if you just present it as a correction or clarification to the last lecture, if anything it will improve you in the eyes of your students. You set the tone in the class. Mistakes on your part or theirs are great teaching moments, not a source of shame. If your students are not respecting you much, your tone and confidence may be areas in which you can improve. Confident people are comfortable talking about mistakes they have made.
Being accessible and teaching at the appropriate level are important considerations in students' evaluation of their teachers. Perfection or seeming to know everything is not.

I absolutely agree with the idea that it's a better lesson to admit mistakes, show humility and adaptability, as that's teaching the students many of the skills they'll likely need in complex maths and sciences.  Many could use help learning how to spot errors or thinking outside the box (such as you would show by revisiting it, since it's going off script some)
That said... if teaching a course with a fairly limited timeframe, I very much encourage you to carefully consider what your personality is handling a revisit in class, how to handle it best timewise, and perhaps even consider other ways.  What I mean by that is that I can remember quite a few classes where a teacher\professor made such a mistake... and then we ended up wasting a lot of time going back over it, getting lost in additional mistakes, etc.
I know when I taught, I might be a little more nervous going over such mistakes, and that might open me up to more tangents or minor questions spiraling out of control on the topic.  That's kind of the thing, it may indeed be a bit of a shakeup in the environment in the class, and that can indeed lead to make some students feel freer to be challenging and disruptive going forward, depending on the course level and such.  It is indeed a chink in the armor.  It's good to show you're real and human.  But do keep wary that some students may take it as an opportunity to become too comfortable and derail your direction some in the future.  Or invite many more questions of "are you sure you aren't making a mistake here as well", I got X, which in some situations can derail other students from understanding if they become too pervasive, rather than keeping quiet and reviewing their work, and usually finding they made an error.  You have to feel you can maintain authority in that sense.  You may well have to be stern at some later point if such questions or disruptions kept coming.  And so if your concern is you may not have the confidence and force to handle that, you may want to avoid making a big deal of it.
In addition, in courses where time is at a premium... you have to balance that aspect.  At the least, if it's a long concept that brought you to the mistake, you may want to have the bulk of the notes rewritten up on the board before class so you can quickly remind them where you went, they can refresh through the notes for a few moments, and then you can point out the issue, and hopefully move on in pretty short time.  Or it may be better if it's going to be real time consuming and complex to do like a handout (students probably won't mind that, notes they don't have to write!).  You can point to that, or hope they'll look at it in their own time (very much dependent on the course level\passion for the subject again).
Perhaps offer to talk about it more in office hours (or whatever concept you use for outside of class help) if anyone is one or two struggle with the idea, and the others have no issue.
Or if it's more minor, you can mention in it brief passing to start the class, just that you made a minor [numeric/conversion/equation/whatever] error...
Or indeed just skip it entirely if it's just not notable enough to be worth the trouble.  Humility and teaching the students how to find mistakes is great, but at the same time, there's no need to try to reflect perfection.
But don't worry about the students who "think they can teach the class".  Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but you're paid to, and your duty is to the students who are trying to learn.  There are certainly courses where I've had to make that clear to difficult students.  You can't let the troublemakers shake you or overwhelm your thought processes.  If you're afraid of those students, that they may be show you up or such, it shows.  I'm guessing you know your stuff, you've got nothing to worry about from them, just focus on doing what your students as a whole need, and tend to forget those who choose to cause more trouble than trying to learn anything in the course.  They aren't your central concern, even if they're trying to make you such.  If they feel too smart for the course, they either shouldn't be taking it, or they can up the inability to test out of it with administration or whatever.  But it's not your issue.  They can doodle or read the paper or something else that's nondistracting.  But the world doesn't revolve around them, and you shouldn't stress over such ones that think they can teach the course.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Can a department renege on a student's "guaranteed funding"?
I was admitted to a PhD program last year with guaranteed funding for 4 years. The funding offer was structured as a fellowship for the first year and an assistantship thereafter. I'm done with my first year now, and I will be on an assistantship from this semester onwards. I was asked to sign a contract which states "although we will be able to renew the assistantship in most cases, renewals are contingent upon the availability of funds".
Given my initial admission offer guaranteed funding, while this new contract is a bit more ambiguous, which of these contracts will hold? Is it possible that the grad school will renege on the assistantship citing a lack of funds? This is quite concerning to me, and I would appreciate any advice on this issue.

I am the Graduate Coordinator of my department, so I have some experience both reading and writing letters like this.  I find the phrasing

"although we will be able to renew the assistantship in most cases, renewals are contingent upon the availability of funds".

strange.  It is not clear to me what "most cases" is quantifying over: you are only one case.
But here's a key point: what is being taken away from you in going from a letter in which funding is guaranteed to a letter in which renewal is contingent upon the availability of funds?  In all cases the renewal must be contingent upon the availability of funds, right?  Within the culture of American universities it would certainly not be acceptable for your department to, say, go over budget on renovations and then tell a student "We're sorry, but funds are no longer available -- we warned you!"  Not having the funds to cover promises made to students would be a nightmare scenario in any department that I know of.  A subtle linguistic change in a contract would not affect that.
However, I agree that the new letter is not exactly encouraging.  In my view you are well within your rights to inquire about the meaning of it, and you should of course do so before you sign the contract.  I would discuss this with the department official who wrote the letter, unless you feel uncomfortable doing so, in which case you could act through a suitable intermediary (ombudsperson, faculty advisor...).
In conclusion, I think it is highly unlikely that your funding will get cut, but they are taking from you some peace of mind -- which is also worth something!  I'm sorry for that, and I wish you the best.

Pete: did you see this old(er) question? https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/105100/

@Yemon: Yes, I did.  I don't find the language used in the other case to be so great either -- again "availability of funds" doesn't add much.  In the other case, taken as a whole the language expressed to me that funds were possible but not to be counted on -- however the OP did not seem to appreciate this.

You may want to review the initial offer letter that you received from the program. You may find that the language there is not absolutely "guaranteed"—there is almost always a bit of "wiggle" language such as "subject to adequate progress" or something similar that does not completely commit them to paying you for the full term no matter what. (What if you just decide to take the money and do nothing the whole time?)
However, at public schools, one must also remember that they are subject to state laws and regulations that a private school would not face. The change may be coming at a policy level higher than that of the department.

Yes, the initial offer letter states that funding is guaranteed contingent upon satisfactory academic progress. However, it makes no mention of the availability of funds.

I upvoted this answer.  The second paragraph made me think of a few relatively benign possible explanations: (i) A different person wrote the letter the second time around so used different language.  (This is still possible even if the person signing the letter is the same, alas.)  (ii) Someone from higher up the administrative food chain insisted on more careful language across the board.  In this case, the change in language may not correspond to any actual change of facts, funds, intentions...

While labor laws depend on the country/state/region, your contract that guarantees funding probably doesn't really guarantee it. From a labor law perspective, if you are even classed as an employee and the letter is seen as an employment contract, what do you think your recourse is if they do not pay you? If you were in a union position you might have a collective agreement that would provide a means of enforcing the contract, but in reality the guarantee is worth only as much as the reputation of the university.
That said, it cannot hurt to ask your graduate student faculty chair about the wording.

The way these sorts of things work in the US never cease to amaze me. If we offer a student a studentship contract and then said "oops, no money" 2 years down the line, we'd be expecting a law suit for breach of contract to arrive in short order.

@IanSudbery sure, but what would they sue for? My, US centric, view is that there are no damages and the University would let you out of the contract.

@StrongBad: not remotely a lawyer, but from a layman's point of view the damages are clearly of the amount of lost income that was promised to you... If I want to leave a 2-year mobile phone contract early, I have to pay off the remaining monthly cost until the end of the 2 year term (unless I have some good reason to leave). Why should only companies get this privilege?

@IanSudbery: I think the point is that in the US system a "studentship" isn't a contract that binds both parties.  It's analogous to employment in the US, which generally works the same way: either employee or employer may end it at any time with few restrictions.  The parties could in principle agree on a binding contract, but they generally don't.

@NateEldredge: that's the part that never ceases to amaze us. That you can have a contract that talks about things like 4 years of guaranteed funding, or 1 year of fellowship followed by 3 years of assistantship, that can nevertheless be terminated freely at any moment.

In actuality it is the student and not the university who can back out at any time.  It happens quite frequently that students tell their university that this semester will be their last.  It is not unheard of for a student to drop out in the middle of the semester, e.g. leaving the department scrambling to cover teaching responsibilities.  There are better and worse reasons for this, but I don't know any case in which the institution pursues a legal case against the student.

"that can nevertheless be terminated freely at any moment." Who said that?  I don't want to get into too many specifics about my own university and the advice of our legal department, but suffice it to say that I have specific experience to the contrary.

@StrongBad, the university has entered into a contract to deliver something (a studentship) and then not delivered it. The damages would be the remaining value that was promised. If loosing the studentship caused the student to have to leave the program, then there may well be loss of earnings as well. A judge may or may not see a contract as existing, even if there isn't a formal contract.

@NateEldredge of course you can't do that with employment in europe either.

@IanSudbery I am pretty sure that is not how US law actually works and US universities work really hard to avoid students being classed as employees, being allowed to form a union, or really having any rights.

@IanSudbery you can most definitely make someone (including students) redundant in the UK. I am not sure you could make a 3rd year student redundant and then given a studentship to a 1st year student, but I bet a school could if it really wanted to with an argument that a student doing X was no longer needed and a student doing Y was needed and that the student doing X was not suitable to do Y.

@StrongBad The university is offering a PhD in exchange for labor and satisfactory academic progress. If the contract is terminated without cause, the university owes the student either a PhD or compensation for the difference between the value of their labor on open market, and what they were paid.

Well, you can't make students redundant because they are not employees. As far as your contract with the student is concerned what the student is 'doing' is 'getting a degree'. In theory students do research because its a good way to teach them, not because the university needs the research doing (irrespective of how people acctually regard it). When you make someone redundant, you are technically making the role redundant, not the person. If a person hired to do a job turns out not to be suitable, then you are sacking them. This is hard, and comes with many hoops to jump through.

@Acccumulation that is exactly NOT what the university is offering and one of the reasons the whole student/employee thing is difficult. Even for unpaid graduate students who are paying tuition, there is no contractual agreement that the university must give the student a degree. The tuition allows students to take classes for credit. If you accumulate enough credits, then you can apply for a degree.

@PeteL.Clark, it's worth mentioning that you're at a university that has a grad union, and therefore grad students there genuinely have a contract (hence what your legal department tells you).  On the contrary, grad students at other universities do not have this level of security.

@MarcusM: Actually Georgia is a "right to work" state, which almost means that unions are illegal.  It actually means that unions have no collective bargaining rights.  In fact I am a member of the staff union at UGA, which was recently founded by a colleague of mine in the math department.  We really have very few teeth. I assure you that this has nothing to do with university contracts.

@nengel you are not required to pay the full mobile phone contract in the US. Only an "early termination fee", that drops over the life of the contract. The reason is in the US such contracts come with free or subsidized phones. You have to pay them back for that investment. A better example would be a rental contract (depending on the state) which you are often stuck with unless you can find a legal excuse to break (like termites or something).

You are in the unfortunate position of being employed in a super-precarious position, not enjoying a full recognition of your employee status, and living under the US' regime of heavily employer-biased labor law (in my opinion).
In the best case scenario, graduate researchers in your university are unionized, and the union is active, functional and enjoys backing and involvement from its represented public. In this case there would probably already be a struggle to remedy this situation and ensure 4-year contracts with the university having to bear and manage any issues it has with funding, making up for possible shortfalls from some sources with its general funds or inter-research-budget transfers.
If that's not the case, then as other answers suggest, this technically depends on the specifics of labor law in the state you're in. Note that in a landmark 4-to-1 decision in 2016, the NLRB recognized graduate researchers as employees, mostly regardless of how the university defines their status or the source of their funding. ... unofortunately, that's not good enough. Because even you could make an argument against your termination the university may well do whatever it pleases, and the main question becomes: Do you have the will, the time and the resources to fight it? More often than not, the answer is negative.
Thus, for most graduate employees - without bweing unionized, the answer is "Effectively, yes".

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Can Zotero collections be used as hierarchical tags?
Few answers under this question have inspired me with the interesting idea of using Zotero "folders" (called collections) as hierarchical tags. Zotero does allow to create folder (=collection) tree in the left pane, and one reference can be put in more such collections. But, is Zotero able to search references present in two or more collections? That would be super cool, because then we could use those collections as tags!

Why not use tags as tags? (I realise they're not hierarchical, but nor are collections so far as I can see)

@SimonW collections are hierarchical in Zotero - you build the collection tree in left pane. I tend to prefer organizing using collections over tags in Zotero, because collections can be used for organizing the references in the GUI in much more easier and comfortable way.

Huh. I stand corrected.

Actually, the tool is there))

Steps (look at the screenshot).

Open advanced search
Choose "Collection" as a search parameter
Choose collections to search in
Add more that one collection

That's it!


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Affiliation for a retiree
This question is similar to Rules for affiliation for student doing unpaid research in his/her free time?  and Is it acceptable to publish a paper using an affiliation with a former employer? except that I am a retiree.
I intend to submit a paper to a journal without mentioning any affiliation because I am no longer employeed. I have been thinking about a footnote in the paper indicating I am a retiree from my former employer for two reasons: I am receiving pension from the company pension fund and it is a well-known company in U.S. Using their name may make me look good. On the other hand, I feel like it's cheating because I am not their employee anymore.

Here is a recent paper published by someone affiliated as "Independent Scholar": http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00171.1

@mankoff Thanks for the info. Independent Scholar is indeed suitable for me.

Retired people often get privileges to the university resources like library etc. As a result, is it not ethical to mention university affiliation as a retired member?

The best source of advice on these issues are the journal editorial staff. Some journals may require you to list your last affiliation with the word "retired" added in parentheses; some journals may prefer you not to list an affiliation at all. Some others may not care.

The institution/company may have a strong opinion (or a policy) on whether their name would appear if you are no longer affiliated with them. (It probably depends on what the paper is about, what kind of company it was, and how it related to your former affiliation or responsibilities).

@Carol: but unless you signed a NDA, I don't see how an institution/company can prevent you from stating the fact that you used to work for them. That said, my answer is mostly pointing out that journals sometimes have odd and antiquated rules (perhaps one which prevents you from not listing an affiliation), and that before committing on any action, in issues concerning publishing where no universal rule is adopted, it is best to always check first with the publisher.

Some journals have a 'bio' with the article, and that could be an appropriate place to list former positions. Using the affiliation at the author list implies you have implicit or explicit authority to represent  the company (on that topic). The company or institution you were with may not care one way or the other. What were their policies when publishing articles when you were employed? (Did things go through an internal review process first). If you don't think it is a problem for your former company, perhaps it isn't.

Here's one approach: “(Ret.)”; subtle, direct, and in the literature (see 2):

1.Department of Earth Sciences University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
  2.Global Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institution (Ret.) Washington USA
  3.USGS Cascades Volcano ObservatoryVancouver USA

Welcome to Academia SE. Can you please [edit] your answer to reference the paper (or other source) where you found this?

What is your association with "Wunderman Writing Services"?


text:
How can I delete an article listed on my Google Scholar page that was not written by me?
On top of my Google Scholar page an article appears that was not written by me (increases my citations quite a bit, but I feel it reflects badly on me). For whatever reason, the article doesn't appear on my underlying profile page, so I cannot delete it. Is there a way to delete it? I send emails to Google Scholar help but no answer. Thanks.

What's the difference between your Google Scholar page and profile page?

when you go on the menu on top left of the page and click on "my profile" that is the underlying profile page I meant

Yes, but what's the other page then? The citation counts you see are based on the articles in your profile page, right?

the "regular" google scholar page. Perhaps there is some confusion because I had at some point two scholar pages, but not sure

That seems likely. I have no idea what the other "regular" page is, but if it exists perhaps someone else will answer.

Thanks, GoodDeeds, in any case.

Make sure to have only one single Google Scholar profile first. There should be only one version of a profile, not two different ones.


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phd admission- both professor from same university agreed to be mentor
2 professors from the same university same department have agreed to be my mentor. But none have funds, prof.1 may give me TA, while prof.2 can give me RA. Which one should I choose? Can I put 2 applications with 2 different SOPs and then decide later which prof. to go for?

How can a professor with no funds give you an RA?

I would counsel against two different SoP statements. If they are compared then it makes you look like you don't really know what you want. The university might be fine with two separate applications (or not).
But more important than the source of funding and the activities to earn the funds is the question of what would the research be with each of these people and can one of them better support your career. Make your decision on that basis.
Bot the TA and the RA experience can be valuable for an future academic, but in different ways. But that is less important than the research opportunities.
I'll guess that the TA position is probably easier to manage your time than the RA position, but that isn't necessarily true, depending on the nature of the university and of the field and department.
You might consider trying to set up a three way conversation to see if the two profs have some advice for you about which would be more suitable and advantageous. But that assumes that you know something about them first and are sure that it won't generate bad feelings.


text:
Article-based PhD and advisor's (new) role?
My engineering university offers a relatively new option to do an article-based dissertation, where the primary research is submitted (and hopefully published) in several scientific journals (at my university it's 3). The dissertation is then shorter than a typical PhD, because it describes how the articles fit together to form the thesis, etc.
It's a relatively new idea (for engineering PhDs and for me), which I find interesting as an advisor because it engages PhD students more in the research experience (publishing). Also, it is theoretically more efficient for the advisor and student (as a co-author), since time and energy spent on revising could be more focused on getting publications, and not only on a big PhD dissertation that few people will ever read.
There are other advantages described here (not my university).
My question is not about whether it's good or bad, but how the role of an advisor on co-authored papers might change in such cases.
For example, when students write a traditional dissertation (masters or otherwise), they often struggle with communicating. Students grow and improve written communication and contents of the dissertation in an iterative and incremental process (draft revisions after feedback from the advisor).
In traditional grad-student co-authorship setting, I would take a more active role as an editor (as my advisor did when I was a PhD student) on a paper, mostly because of experience and to increase chances of getting an article published. Sometimes that role is minimal, if only a workshop or conference is targeted, since it might be easier to publish there.
But with an article-based PhD, it seems that the active approach in editing co-authored journal papers is essential, and in effect writing a big part of the dissertation for the student. I realize every case is different.
I'd be happy to know from experienced advisors in this setting to know if and how an advisor's role must change in article-based PhDs.

This is commonly referred to as a “staple thesis”.

"staple thesis" -- makes it sound not as good, somehow.  Is this true, or are these considered just as good as traditional theses?

@James I thought a staple thesis was a traditional thesis? It doesn't mean staple as in "basic" but rather that you staple 3 publications together.

@James I've also heard them called a "sandwich thesis". At least in my field, they're not only considered just as good, but the traditional "book" thesis is regarded as "Why would you do that?"

Another term used is "compilation thesis".

The system of article-based theses has been the norm in my field and university for as long as we have been in existence, although monographs are also accepted. We therefore lack experience with monographs, although I wrote my thesis as a monograph in the US system once upon a time.
The main differences, as I see it, between monograph and article writing is that with articles, you must reach a high level very early during your PhD study. With a monograph you can work on all of it until the very last moment. With an article-based thesis, articles must be planned and written up early on. I would say that it is both common and useful to have the first paper being mainly written by the advisor so that the student can learn from scratch in every part of the article write-up. Since the goal is to make independent researchers out of the PhD students it follows that the advisor involvement should gradually decrease over time. This is of course good in theory but difficult in practise. The point is, however, that it is important to get an early start with the writing and the structure of the work has to be such that it is clear that publishable results can emerge after the first or second year.
Article-based these need to be thought through so that papers can be produced. We let the advisor and student write up a time plan for the PhD work which also outlines the basic research work and the resulting papers. The plan is filed by the subject responsible. This plan is followed up annually so that changes can be discussed between advisor, student and subject responsible. This is useful since everyone needs to think things through on a regular basis.

+1 for "I would say that it is both common and useful to have the first paper being mainly written by the advisor so that the student can learn from scratch in every part of the article writeup". For me (a grad student), this has been one of the most valuable experiences so far. I wrote the first draft and then could compare it, sentence by sentence, to the massively corrected version. The goal, my advisor said, is to get less and less corrections as the PhD progresses. And indeed, I am now much closer to putting together something satisfactory for a journal publication on the first try.

putting together something satisfactory for a journal publication on the first try — If you ever figure out how to do that, please let me know; I've been trying to get to that point for 20+ years.

@JeffE - Well, something that would only require major revisions :) Or rather, something my supervisor would find mostly satisfactory. I don't even think of the alternative (a paper accepted with only minor comments) as a realistic option. I don't know anyone who manages to pull that off.

I'm not sure I agreed that one requires more advanced timing than the other - in many places, the papers are only required to have been submitted, or as ready for submission. Subjecting a student to the vagaries of the submission process seems contrived - are students who are "done" simply expected to cool their heals for 6 months to a year while journals ponder?

@EpiGrad at my uni the articles need only be submitted. On the other hand, it's bad advertising if a prof lets students send immature journal submissions (especially when they're co-authored). My limited experience as a jury member in one article-based PhD showed that unresolved issues in the research (that probably prevented journal approval of the first draft) turned up in the defense. Another reason for advanced timing, IMO.

This topic is near and dear to my heart, as the number of days until I finish exactly such a thesis is measured in a single digit number.
If you field is dominated by journal, rather than book, publications, I think its a vastly superior system, leaves you better prepared for what you'll actually have to do in the future, and leaves your CV in hopefully a stronger place.

But with an article-based PhD, it seems that the active approach in
  editing co-authored journal papers is essential, and in effect writing
  a big part of the dissertation for the student. I realize every case
  is different.

This has not been my experience - even the most active members of my committee who are co-authors on papers can't really be said to have written a significant portion of my work. Generally speaking, I would send them a fully fleshed out draft paper for their comments (which is exactly what I tend to do as first-author on a non-thesis paper), and then we'd iterate through the draft several times as they tinkered with language, added their own pet sentences, asked for additional analysis, etc. But the paper, in its final form, is very much dominated by my work and my writing.
One of the keys may be to not wait until the end of someone's graduate career to work on their writing. If someone needs you to fundamentally rewrite massive parts of their dissertation papers, in my mind they're not ready to defend. They should be at a stage of maturity where they can produce largely independent writing, in need of only the usual modifications a co-author would provide to a manuscript.

I am about to finish a thesis composed of papers published in peer-reviewed journals. I am the only author to half of the papers, and the others are coauthored with my advisor.
The process is as you describe, we do research together, discussing ideas, proofs (I am in mathematics), computer experiments, etc. and I usually write most if not all of the text, any my advisor makes suggestions on improvements.
I really think this process is superior to writing a monograph, since you get experience in the submission/review process, and being published really counts for something. Also, being the single author on some articles is usually a requirement for getting the phd, so people will know that you did some research yourself (of course, you discuss the progress with your advisor).


text:
How to arrange sabbatical leave?
Sabbatical leave is very common as it is nice to spend a year as a visiting professor in another university and experience a new environment.
It is very beneficial for the host university to have temporary faculty members free of charge (no salary is normally paid by the host university). (1) How do host universities attempt (if they do) to attract visiting professors? Of course, there are job advertisements for hiring visiting professors, but I think they are paid positions and different from normal sabbatical leave.
Visiting for research purposes should be arranged with the leader of the host research group. Thus, the arrangement is at a personal level (somewhat similar to hiring a postdoc researcher.
Visiting for education purposes should be arranged at the level of the department chair.
(2) How can a professor find a visiting professor? Is it chancy? to meet a colleague interested to host? Or s/he must contact many professors and department chairs to find a vacancy?
(1) & (2) Who should actually initiate this process? The guest professor or host university?
(possible 3) Is there a system to facilitate this process, as it is of mutual interest, or everything is left to chance? For example, European Union emphasizes the mobility of students/professors through different programmes. Is there such a system for sabbatical visits (in its classical form of completely working at the host university for a period of time, not guest lecturing as it is common in Europe).

Am I naïve to think that a sabbatical means not working? ;)

@gerrit: Yes, very.

@gerrit not working at home but working somewhere else. As the Sabbath day was not working for ourselves, but working (praying) for God ;)

It is common, in many fields, for the host university to pay part of the salary of the professor on sabbatical.

Also, many professors go on sabbatical to do something other than work at a different university: start a company, write a book, and so forth.

I do not have direct experience with sabbaticals, however the professors I've known that have taken them have been explicitly sought out for the respective sabbatical at a particular institution (as a visiting professor), by colleagues that they personally know professionally (i.e., from being in the same field and interacting via conferences, collaborations, etc.).
In other words, it boils down to networking, and almost certainly doesn't come out of nowhere.  If a professor is planning a sabbatical, he or she will probably already have colleagues willing to host, or will start the process by calling up a colleague and pitching the idea.  I would gather that it isn't likely that there are too many successful cold-calls to departments that lead to sabbaticals.

I can speak from experience that cold calls can work. If your employer is paying your salary (you only need space at the hosting institution), a lot of universities are happy to host, even if there's no past connection, because it's the mission of the university to have visiting professors. Since space can be an issue in universities where the research bar is high (or sometimes the administration insists on some measure of excellence like h-index for invited prof status), you might have to have a good enough CV to get in.

Each time I've taken a sabbatical, it has started with an email (or, in years past, a letter). Write to the person (or people) you would like to collaborate with, and let them know you have a sabbatical coming up. Of course, knowing them already will make it much more likely to be successful.