text:
My Supervisors are not helping in writing recommendations letters
Maybe they are helping and I am the one who does not know how things really work and that's why I am seeking help here.
I am about to finish my Master in Computer science (waiting for the oral exam). And this is the time to apply for as many as possible PhD programs. The problem is that many of PhD programs ask for at least two recommendation letters (sometimes three) and they do not accept general recommendation letter. Rather, they send to the referee's email and ask him/her to write. Therefore, for each of them my referees should write a separate evaluation. So far I got them to write for three applications (two got rejected already). However, I feel I am still at the beginning and there are so many programs I need to try. I am totally aware of the program suitability and I should not apply for a program that I'm not 100% sure I have good chance.
Now the problem is that I chase my referees to write one letter and sometimes I miss deadlines because they are busy or not responding.  I found only this question is very useful here but the issue is I follow all steps there to help them to write my recommendation letters, but they mostly do not. I am one of top 5% students of theirs and I published three papers with them.
I feel like I am stuck between the hammer and the rock here. My question is what is the best tactic I can follow at this stage? Cut down the number of programs I apply for? Or talk to the supervisor about the issue. What advice do you have for me? I really appreciate your advice.

Should not be some rule that does not allow down vote without a comment ?!!

@CharlesMorisset Thank you for both of you. I tried to update my question. I hope it is less of a rant-like question now

I don't know how many letters you're asking people to write for you. However, when there is a separate form that needs to be filled out for each letter, that is asking for a considerable expenditure of time for your advisors. You need to be aware of this, and plan accordingly. You can't ask people to fill out fifty forms for you at once, and then complain when they can't get it done!
So it's not really about applying to "as many PhD programs as possible." Your advisors should be working with you to select the schools and programs you are going to apply to, and you should be working with them to ensure that you are not placing too large a burden on them. This includes giving them a list that clearly states all the schools and programs to which you are applying, as well as the deadlines, as early as possible, so that they have time to plan accordingly. Then, if there's no response a few days beforehand, you need to send a polite email.
But to keep sending out request after request for more letters in a season is a good way to annoy your letter writers. Organize and plan in advance.

Whether this answer is applicable to the OP's problem depends a bit on the country. There are some where "Your advisors should be working with you to select the schools and programs you are going to apply to" would be very uncommon (e.g., Germany).

I'm working in Germany. The professor might not be able to help—but the student's direct Betreuer (supervisor) should be talking with the student about this! [Of course, if it's a good student, they'll want to keep them internally, but that's a difference between "does" and "should."]

@aeismail Thank you for the advice. Over the past six months I asked for four recommendation letters though. I am battling to get it for the fourth application now. I missed the third one's deadline. I informed them with all details a month ahead and sent reminders 2 weeks ahead. Three days before the deadline they promised to send. I ended up to find only one has sent while the second has not. My application has been discarded as a result. Today I am only four days away from another deadline and none of the three letters has been sent. My calls, SMS and emails are not being answered.

@aeismail I must say that I am still working under their supervision and two papers published with them another two are pending. I have written all papers entirely with implementations and everything without even a guidance from any of them. Naturally, I do not expect them to help me in PhD application. I am fine with that but I am disappointed because I feel I need to apply for many programs (taken into account the suitability) before I get admitted to one.

OK—four is not an unreasonable number. I'm sorry to hear that they're entirely abrogating on their duty (it is their responsibility to write letters of recommendation for students they supervise!). This may be one of the cases where you might just have to track them down physically, sit down with them, and have them submit things while you're there. (Having everything prepared in advance, unfortunately, even though it's unethical, is still less unethical than what they're doing.)

I think that you should not worry too much; you mentioned that you have already published three papers with them, and that is the important part. For a PhD what it counts more to the admission committee is to see if you have research skills, and that number of papers it is pretty good.
Maybe you should try to approach one of your past professors directly, I mean to drop a visit and tell them about your problem. Take in consideration that most of them have a heavy duty work and that is why they are forgetting about your recommendation letters. Bottom line, approach to them directly and try not only with one, but with every professor that knows you and that have worked directly with you. I believe that they will be more than happy to help you. So relax and good luck!

I disagree with the first part of this answer. "Number of papers" alone is not a great indicator of research skills. A few papers co-authored with a professor mean a lot more if accompanied by a strong reference letter saying "hawk made the following essential contributions to our co-authored papers: ..."


text:
What to do when a PhD supervisor is not collaborating on publications after the PhD from it?
If someone's (SO) PhD supervisor is not collaborating on publications from SO's PhD. The problem arose as SO raised his mistrust (for the supervisor) on other academic issues. The supervisor treats student's work as his, and SO does not agree with that.
SO has one paper just rejected from a journal but could be submitted in another journal. This is from SO's PhD, so he would like to publish it and more from the PhD. SO is not sure how to go ahead with this, (with the supervisor or without). The paper is intellectually SO's but the supervisor helped in improving the writing (of the rejected paper). As the supervisor is refusing to collaborate, how can SO publish that? Can SO do that without supervisor name? What could be the consequences?

If the advisor made a substantial intellectual contribution (or, in fields where it's relevant, procured the grant supporting the work), there's not much the author can do to publish the paper without the advisor's permission. The advisor would have claim to authorship rights if:

the paper grew out of work proposed by the advisor, or was supported by funds accrued by the advisor;
the student discussed the work with the advisor and gained useful feedback or guidance about the direction or results of the project;
the advisor contributed to the writing of the paper.

The last point is definitely true; it's not clear if the first two points hold, but they very well could, given the situation described.
Basically, if the advisor has authorship rights, the student is more or less screwed if they try to publish. If they publish the paper, with an author who has not given permission for submission or without an author who has authorship rights, then that is sufficient grounds for retraction of a paper.

Unless the author received no support from the advisor — I think you misspelled "Unless the advisor made no significant intellectual contribution to the work".  I do not automatically have authorship rights to my PhD students' work, even if I paid them to work on a problem I proposed. (This is field-specific.)

@JeffE: It is in part field-specific. In engineering, it's essentially unheard of to publish a paper without your advisor's name appearing on it. But I've made it clearer—I meant support in all its forms, intellectual and financial.

Um... According to my university, I'm an engineer. And the revision doesn't really help, since financial support does not necessarily buy coauthorship.  What you presumably mean is "If someone has contributed enough to be a coauthor, you absolutely cannot publish without their permission, even (especially?) if that someone is your former advisor."

I will try to add my perspective, since I have been in sort-of an opposite situation. In many places and fields, improving the writing is considered as a part of the job of your supervisor, and if the result is yours, it is yours. I mean, your supervisor is there to learn you how to write papers, and only if you do the research together, it is necessary to include his name on the paper. (Disclaimer: this is only one point of view, and only on the ethics, not on the legal view).
Example: I have a paper where I'm the only author. We were writing the paper down together with my supervisor, and it was certainly her who had more ideas on how to write things down (especially the introduction and the conclusions), which articles should be cited etc. Still, all the ideas were mine, all the proofs were mine (it's theoretical CS), so she said that I should be the only author.
What should you do? No, you should not, in my opinion, submit the results without your supervisor's consent. IMHO you can:

Try to approach him again.
Ask someone else at the same department for help. Just be careful who you choose, either it should be someone you know well and who knows you well, or someone who is dedicated for these cases: someone who should be approached in case of conflicts. The solution is not clear at all, and having insight from someone close in topic, scientific habits etc. could be helpful.
Publish your thesis electronically on some public repository; this is at least a step how to make your result visible to the community, and you certainly doesn't need your supervisor's permission to do that. For instance arXiv accepts theses.

I have a paper where I'm the only author. However, my supervisor likely wrote more of the text than I did, especially the introduction, she chose the references etc — Please tell me this is hypothetical.  Because if it's not, your advisor has seriously failed you. Never let your advisor do work for you, (Yes, I'm also in TCS.)

@JeffE It is true. I was probably exaggerating. I basically mean that we were sitting next to each other and she was showing me the way how to do it. And needed to say, it was during my masters, and it was the very first publication I've had. I'll try to make it clearer.

From an objective point of view, this is a matter of publication ethics. You appear to clearly be the first author, meaning you have provided most of the input from original idea through intellectual work including drawing conclusions.
It is not clear to me if you are past your PhD or in the middle of the PhD. Again, objectively, this would not make any difference but in practise, it involves more. If you are past your PhD, your advisor is not much more than any colleague and you as first author should be able to decide what to do with your work, still considering any co-workers who has made sufficient input to warrant co-authorship. If, on the other hand is still in your PhD you need to think about what you need to do to finish your degree. There must be people around with who you can discuss your situation and the way forward. Providing clear advise on this is quite individual and involves much more than can be deduced from your question.
In both cases, you should make an attempt to properly assess the contributions from all involved in the work. This will provide you with something tangible to use when discussing or defending your rights. Note that you need to include all parts of the process from original idea to the finished product. Many forget the initial question which is where an advisor usually provides much insight. At the same time, providing non-scientific input on writing, is not worth as much as many would think. After all, you could probably buy such a service and no-one would dream of co-authorship. It is as you have indicated the scientific intellectual work that counts.
A difficulty arises when someone, in this case the advisor, refuses to publish  the material. Of course if the reason is that the material is not good enough that is one thing, if it is a personal conflict it is another. The rejected paper is a non-product as I see it. To resubmit, you need to make revisions and then resubmit. You need to send the manuscript to your co-authors (advisor) and state that you are planning to submit to another journal and that you would wish to retain him (and the others) as co-author(s), and invite comments and input.
I recommend you to look at the following links ICMJE, APA, Am. Psych., PARE and Union University, AuthorOrder.com to provide a few. the point is: build your own view and knowledge about authorship/contributorship to strengthen your position.

All authors of a paper need to agree to submission of a paper. Failure to secure everyone's agreement for submission of a paper is usually sufficient grounds for retraction.

Yes, but the question I am getting at is who should be on it.

You also said: "you as first author should be able to decide what to do with your work." This is not true.

Do you see anyone else deciding what to do with the PhD material than the PhD student? I do not intend to start a discussion but will think about rephrasing the points you in my opinion have have extrapolated a little too far.

The co-authors of a paper have to decide that jointly—including the advisor. All of their names appear on the paper, so they all have a right to decide what should happen with the paper.

Thanks for the critical comments. I have revised the answer but it seems we are approaching the post from opposite directions, advisor's rights vs. student's rights and only the OP will be able to assess the real case.

The question will benefit from some more clarification. Basically, I feel that just because he has a reputation to claim others' work does not grant you the right to bend the logical decision of assigning authorship.
"Improving the writing" can generally be considered as significant input and thus should lead to an authorship. Whether it may be downgraded to being acknowledged depends on the degree and magnitude of improvement. Changing a couple words here and there probably should go to acknowledgement; anything on par or beyond line editing should conservatively go to authorship, unless it's done by a paid editor/copywriter.
Another information we need to know is what is the supervisor's status in the rejected paper. If he was listed as a co-author, then in subsequent revisions he should be retained as a co-author even he can no longer contribute. An exception is that he explicitly refuses to be listed as a co-author in the next round and on.
Lastly, we'd need to know how did this adviser "refuse to collaborate." Did he refuse to do anything because he believes the first version is good enough? Is he too busy? Or did he say you should drop this article? The stated action is up for too many different interpretations.
Without too many details, I'd say keep him, resubmit and then move on without this person. And should you so loath the idea that he may claim your work, then cut the connection, forget about this paper, and publish independently from him on something new.

This raises a question of what to do if a collaborator has made significant contributions but refuses to be listed as a coauthor.  Perhaps that is a question in itself.

I'm no expert on the legalities/ethics of academic publishing. However, here are my 2 cents.
I think if you want to publish papers based on your PhD you should do so.
As far as I know, there is nothing that requires you to get your supervisor's permission to publish your own PhD work. You are also not required to work with him if you don't want to. I think there may be some pressure to put his name on the paper, even if he has not done anything.
So, if I want to go ahead, I would do so. If/when the paper (or papers) get to the point of submission, it might be a good idea to ask him if he wants his name included on the paper.
It sounds from what you say that you already don't have good relations with your supervisor, so you don't have a lot to lose.

This is completely wrong: the author has a lot to lose. If someone else has authorship rights on a publication (as is likely the case here) and you do not list them as an author, the excluded author can get the paper retracted.

@aeismail: According to the question: "The paper is intellectually SO's but the supervisor helped in improving the writing (of the rejected paper)." The supervisor is now refusing to collaborate. I think the author is well within his rights to proceed. I said "it might be a good idea to ask him if he wants his name included on the paper". I could strengthen this to "it is advisable to ask him...", but the point remains that the author does not require his supervisor's permission to publish his own work. He is not the supervisor's slave or servant.

The excluded author can't get the paper retracted if the author can prove (a) the intellectual content of the paper is mostly his (b) that the supervisor was unwilling to collaborate (c) that the supervisor was asked whether he wants his name on the paper and said no. Documentation in this cases is obviously a very good idea. He could (and likely would) make himself unpleasant to the author, but that is another issue.

If an author renounces a claim to authorship, that's one thing. But so long as she retains those rights, she has the right to block submission if she feels that the manuscript is not ready. Refusal to collaborate does not excuse the corresponding author from securing permission. And "mostly his" is not sufficient: it must be entirely the student's work.

@aeismail: I'm not aware of any such rules. Do you have any citations/documentation for this? One question to ask here is how would one determine the validity of a claim on authorship? In practice I suppose this is something the journal would determine.

Just take a look at Retraction Watch and the articles related to authorship issues, which are about 5 to 6 percent of the total set of articles they've covered.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How to Cite With Inconsistent Use of Initials
There is a paper I want to cite where, on the title page of the article, the authors names appear without any middle initials (i.e., one of the authors is Mark Smith).  However, this one author frequently publishes using his middle initials (i.e., Mark E. Smith).  What is the appropriate way to cite this-with the name as it appears in the article, or the name as the author typically uses it?  For what it's worth, the source article appear in a mathematical journal, and I want to cite it in a paper that will eventually appear in a mathematical journal.

You should use the exact information which is provided on the published paper, not the real or current information of the author; even if his name or affiliation1 is change at the present time.
Moreover, the correct way of citation of each paper is provided in the webpage of its publisher and you can check how they have mentioned the author's name in the citation example (you may also download the bibtex or other outputs to be used in citation manager softwares). At least, by checking the publisher website, you will be sure how they prefer their published paper to be cited (even if other possibilities/doubts for correct citation exists).
1I know that affiliation is not mentioned in citation, but if somebody wants the affiliation of the author at the time of publishing the paper, the best source is the information written on the paper and is provided in its publisher's website.

I've never seen a citation to a paper that included the affiliation of any of the authors.

@DavidRicherby Me either, but I wanted to say that the correct affiliation of the author at the time of publishing the paper is mentioned in the webpage of the paper in the publisher's website; besides to his correct name which is mentioned on the paper and an example of citation which publisher prefers to be used in other sources.

You need to cite articles the way the name is expressed in each article. The purpose of the reference if for others to be able to locate the source you have used and so making the reference accurate is essential. It may seem like nit-picking since most of the reference will be correct except for one initial but it is better to simply follow the the generic rule to follow the article in all details than to modify it. One instance where this may matter is when article references are listed in, for example, Web of Science. There an article may end up as two entries if there is a difference in the way it is referenced. I have seen and personally have articles that have multiple entries because of this and because people wrote the wrong year, volume etc. Still, the importance lies in being able to trace your sources and being correct makes that easier.

I'd recommend to use the DOI in any case, especially if the journal you publish in converts DOIs to clickable links, which should fully address Peter's utterly valid point (+1).

What if the journal/conference paper does not have a DOI?

I strongly disagree; see the upvoted answer in the duplicated question. Citation practice should not depend on bugs in Web of Science's software.

@JeffE, that is not my main point either. I can remove that part if it irritates you.

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


text:
Is scanning an handwritten peer-review suitable for editor/authors?
I peer-reviewed a manuscript and am about to send my conclusions to the editor. It occurs to me, though, that because there are many details to be checked/changed in various places of the paper (mathematical notations, in particular), it will take quite some time for me to type it into a proper review (probably using TeX, because it is math-heavy).
So, I am wondering: since my hand-writing is decent and people don't usually find it too hard to decipher, could I simply scan my annotated copy of the paper, along with one page of notes, to the editor? Or will that be unacceptable to them?
I think it raises a few questions, going from practicalities:

will it be as useful as a thoroughly written-down review?
does it give more work to the editor?
should I also include a summary of my comments, in computerized form?

to ethical questions:

does handwritten notes breach rules of anonymity?

I suppose people used to do that in older times, but it have never received a hand-written review so far, so it is (at least in my field) unusual.

So: should I do it? if I do it, what precautions should I take?

Is your handwriting so distinctive that you suspect the authors will be able to identify it?

I have received hand-written reviews twice, on a sample of ca. 20 submitted papers in applied mathematics. Once it was comments from a (not-anonymous) editor; the other time it was supposed to be anonymous. It ended up quite easy to identify, but it probably would have been identifiable even from a pdf. The two were from the same workgroup, so they are not really "independent samples".

Many reviews, at least in math, are of mediocre quality -- based on a skimming rather than a thorough reading of the paper. In contrast, it sounds like you are writing a review that both the editors and the authors will be extremely grateful for.

Re your last point: you could also worry about anonymity being breached not because of your handwriting, but because your scanner will quite probably add metadata to the scanned image.

@BSteinhurst The style of handwriting can give away a lot about the writer, including: where they learned to write (country/region), how old they are, their gender.  If the field they work in is small enough, it will surely help in guessing their identity.  But then there are plenty of other things that can give away the review anyway, compared to which handwriting might be a small thing.

Is your handwriting clear enough that a possibly-non-native editor and/or author can read it? I wouldn't dare use my handwriting for business correspondance

I do not think that there is anything wrong with a scanned handwritten report. As for anonymity: you may even sign your referee report as it is your decision to stay anonymous or not. As for usefulness: I once received an annotated scanned manuscript as a referee report at is was tremendously helpful (as there were several suggestions for formulations which greatly increased the readability). A computerized summary would also be helpful for the editor to form the decision and also for the authors to find out what you main points are (so that they can distinguish between just typo corrections and serious remarks).

In a blind peer-review process, I think revealing your identity without the editor's consent is not allowed

Not sure - I've heard somebody say that he always writes reports non-anonymously (see the answers to the questions here http://mathoverflow.net/questions/98308/when-if-ever-disclose-your-identity-as-a-reviewer).

then that would be a nice separate question (/me winks)

A hand written scanned review is acceptable, if readable. But, the time spent on typing it into LaTeX (or any other suitable format) to produce a pdf is strongly advised. The reason is that even the most neat hand-writing, can include letters, symbols, writing details, that can be ambiguous to others (particular of other nationalities). So although, such reviews are acceptable, providing it in digital format reduces the risk of misreading and misinterpretation. In addition, a scanned hand-written review may be conceived as the result of someone not caring too much (however wrong that conclusion may be). So in the interest of clarity, I would suggest spending the time typing the review in.

If your copy of the paper is in pdf format, then you can attach typed notes to it fairly easily. A program called Skim does that, and I think modern pdf viewers also have that capability. (It would be good for me if more people used that option, so that authors who get a referee report of that sort can't easily infer that I'm the referee. My own handwriting has become so lousy that handwritten notes are no longer an option.)

Are you sure that people can't identify you from a Skim'ed PDF? I'd wonder about Skim silently adding metadata.

If your handwriting is clear and you make a lot of small corrections, I would personally prefer to get your notes in the paper itself, scanned. The reason is that it's much easier to understand what's going on, and much easier to see where the mistakes have appeared. I would say that adding a separate report that contains long remarks (on structural things, mistakes in math proofs etc.) is a good idea and should be done, since long text is hard to squeeze into the page margins1.
Just a remark to finish: please, use a red pen and make a color scan.
I don't agree with people saying that doing a lot of corrections is necessarily wrong (well, it's another question). Many reviewers do a poor job, and many reviewers are too sensitive. But it's very likely that a good paper needs a lot of corrections.

1 Ask Fermat, he knows something about this.

I have received hand-marked manuscript review previously, and it did not raise an issue to neither the editor nor myself and my co-authors. However there is a point you should consider:
Is it really a substantial and reliable paper if it needs such an extensive correction even in mathematical parts? I have been rejected on the basis of too many typos or too poor grammar, which I don't think should necessarily be a deciding factor. I will only reject people based on bad grammar only if it significantly hurts the understanding of the paper's material.
Extensively erroneous mathematics sounds something like a substantial problem with the quality of the research and not only the quality of presentation.

I don't agree with the last paragraph. "Mathematical typos" are very common and are not necessarily cause for rejection. As a reviewer, I've submitted reports with multiple pages of mathematical corrections and a recommendation of "strongly accept". And if I were an editor, I'd be ticked off if a reviewer suggested rejection of an otherwise strong paper because of easily corrected minor errors.

One point that no-one has mentioned yet: after receiving your review, the authors will (probably) take your comments into account, make changes, and then write a letter explaining the changes which they submit along with the revised version.
In their letter explaining changes, it is common (at least in my field) to answer reviewer's comments point-by-point and to include verbatim the reviewer's questions, e.g.

Reviewer 1, Comment 2: "Jones et al. (2001) needed more froobiz to reach the wiznish point. Why do you find a different value?"

In this study we used an improved floopnosh technique which inherently requires less froobiz; see also the review by Smith (2004).

So, if the authors decide to go this route and you submit a hand-written review, they will have to TeX-ify your review document, possibly making errors in the process.

Well, I don't expect authors' comment on every small thing I pointed out. usually something like "We thanks for the minor suggestions from the reviewer, we considered them". After all, I don't expect the authors to agree with everything I suggest, but I expect them to want their paper to be good, so I expect them to check all my suggestions.

No, I definitely agree that authors shouldn't agree with every point a reviewer makes. But when the authors disagree, they should state why. And preferrably with something (like a citation) to back it up. Some times, the paper is improved by adding a sentence like "Here, one might think that , but as was shown in <recent paper/equation X/section N>, this is not correct."


text:
Is it possible to do good research on a certain area through self-learning the state-of-the-art of the area?
I’m currently doing my masters in chemical engineering in a relatively unknown university here in the Philippines. For my master’s thesis, I am planning to theoretically model transport processes of spray drying of nutraceuticals. Neither my advisor nor any other professors here are experts on the subject.
I wish to know:

Is it still possible to do publishable or even outstanding research by learning the state-of-the-art of the area, specifically about transport modelling, by myself?
How can I approach this dilemma? (I just need the extra boost in confidence since I am wading through unknown waters here.)

I do have experience on research and writing papers as I have experienced it during my bachelors. Also, I do think people in my current department will be able to understand my research since the topic that I want to pursue largely deals with basic chemical engineering principles. Although, I'm quite in doubt really in my current course of action since none of them are experts on theoretical modelling.   I didn't publish anything from my bachelor's work, and I am still relatively a neophyte at research.

My immediate reaction to the title question is "As opposed to what?!"  But that reaction relies on quite a bit of experience doing research at all.

Welcome to Academia SE. I edited your question a bit to remove the poll aspect of your question (“I'm looking for people who is/was in a similar position and succeeded”) as such questions are not a good fit for this site. Please check that everything is still according to your intentions.

At some point in a research career you will need to learn directly from papers. Even as a practical programmer, when I wanted the absolute state of the art in an area, I would read academic papers, not wait for the material to show up in textbooks. A researcher often ends up knowing more about their topic than anyone else in the world, not just in their university, and must learn by means that don't depend on access to more knowledgeable people.
That does not mean your proposed course is a wise one at this stage in your career.
As I see it, student research has three objectives:

Learn how to do research
Collect evidence you can do research, in the form of degrees and letters of recommendation.
Contribute to the collective body of knowledge.

You need to decide the weight of these objectives for yourself, but generally the earlier you are in your studies and career, the greater the importance of the first two objectives.
The risk you are potentially taking is sacrificing the first two objectives at a relatively early stage. If your professors do not understand the subject of your research, they may be less able to guide you. It may also be harder for them to judge the quality of your research, which they need to do in order to grant degrees and write recommendation letters.
If you already have really good research skills, the first objective is unnecessary for you. However, if you had that much research experience I doubt you would be asking this question.
You might consider a compromise: Pick some research direction that fits with the research at your university but moves in the direction you want. For example, do a theoretical modeling project that models something your professors do know about.

I'd argue (at least in my own discipline, mathematics) that establishing an up-to-date knowledge base is also critically important to "do research".

@paulgarrett Yes, a good knowledge base is necessary. I think that can be achieved by independent study, at least for my field, computer science.

Patricia, I am willing to believe your claim that the relevant knowledge base can be achieved "independently" in CompSci, and maybe other things. But the way "mathematics" has evolved is much like the stock market (in the U.S.), namely, if one plays by the rules (no insider trading), one will never make money (because everyone else has the same public information), and, by the "gambler's ruin" principle, one eventually goes broke. :) Although many people will not care, I do think it is the case that in contemporary mathematics one cannot get up to the ... [cont'd]

... [contd'] starting line without some mentoring/insider-information. In the U.S., the "REU" bit wildly misleads many people, not just kids... Srsly, if one can generate publishable papers in 8 weeks after one's junior year (3rd, in the U.S.) without having any abstract algebra or modern analysis... "why would a PhD take 5-6 years..." All of that. A very salient point is that "math does not become wrong/old"... which is part of its appeal to me... but is violently different from most other human endeavors.

I commend you guys for giving out such helpful answers. Although, I do want to add though that my advisor, a professor here in my university (in a sense that she has attained the highest rank of being an academic), wanted to branch out to very unfamiliar areas to her and to the department as a whole. As per your arguments here in the thread, you've said that I need an experienced researcher, one who can basically point me to the right questions. Would that statement still hold irregardless of advisor's expertise?

@Nicotinamide Branching out in collaboration and with the support of someone who is already an experienced researcher makes a difference.

As already mentioned, it is quite common that an experienced researcher learns a new topic from scratch – usually to somehow combine it with topics they are already familiar with. One way to do this is to give this extension as a thesis project to an advisee, whose main task is to learn about the new topic and connect it with the group’s existing work. It’s something that happens quite frequently in our work group and may be a good approach for you.
The advisor then learns about the topic through status updates, theses, writing publications with the advisee, and possibly visiting conferences with the advisee. On the other hand, the advisee learns to research through the advisor scrutinising their work – though it may sound a bit trite, a central aspect of research is to ask the right questions and to do this, your advisor does not need to be the foremost expert on your topic. The advisee can also learn about writing, since it does not depend on the subject that much and good papers should be understandable by a broader audience than just experts on that particular topic.
However, this approach may not be suited for everybody and every topic. A few points to consider:

Is your advisor willing to do this and does this fit his style of advising?
How large is the topic that you would have to learn? On a related note: How important are method knowledge, specific subject knowledge, and a wide overview important in your field (or with other words: How strong is specialisation in your field?)? For example, in my interdisciplinary area, new ideas and research often come from people combining concepts of different fields, on which they are not the foremost experts.
Is there a connection between the topic and your advisor’s topic that you can build upon?
Do you have some connection (e.g., via your advisor) to an expert on the topic, who can give feedback on your work every now and then?

All of these things can only be decided who knows your field or supervisor, respectively.

She actually agreed and liked my proposal in doing theoretical modeling on spray drying since one of her projects involve spray drying of nutraceuticals from fruit extracts. I have had some experience on theoretical modeling in some of my courses (transport phenomena and process control) but none of this scale.

Note that probably none of us can make a useful statement about your particular topic, as we are not familiar with it. This is something only you and your advisor can decide.

Yes, I am aware of that and I am also fairly confident that I can see this thesis through. What I am afraid is if I can produce publishable results/papers since I'm basically on my own in doing it my way. Some of the projects in my university are largely experimental and thus most of the professors here are experimentalists by training. I'm doing the opposite.

Not only "experienced", but "well-informed" researcher?

@paulgarrett: Well-informed with respect to what? I fail to understand what your comment is aiming at.

In some fields, for example mine (mathematics), there is a large body of background material necessary to make sense of either currently "live" issues, or the true state of long-standing problems. To exaggerate, it's not enough to "try hard" or to have experience "trying hard" (as some people imagine "research" to be). Although effort is a necessary condition, often there is a large body of information without which one is merely a crank.

I'd stay away from that approach.
Reason: while the papers you consume will contain the cutting edge information, they will not contain the mundane basics of the field, i.e., things that "everybody" knows by practice, just by being around other people. Things that are too trivial to write down.
Ask yourself how important it is that you do a topic that is not common at your university. If you have such strong reasons for it, are they good enough for you to move to another uni (maybe abroad) where there are experts on it? If not, are there really not any experts around which have their own topics you can fit in with?

This answer raises very important points!!! All those unspoken things that "everybody (meaning "insiders") knows" are not easy to see in "the literature"...

Yes, it is possible to learn everything by yourself without expert help, but it will be very inefficient.
I'd pick another subject. Science is full of researchers and entire research groups that are doing qualitatively good work, but are just not at the cutting edge because they have an insufficiently developed overview of the field they are working on.

My prediction is that you will spend too much time learning new things, not enough time actually researching. You'll write something that might be good enough in the end (if you're good), but very likely it will not be anything groundbreaking, and probably will be something that has already been done before or turns out to be trivial.
My suggestion (as you obviously want to do something special) is to pick a normal topic, on which your supervisors are experts, and then try to expand from there if your initial steps are successful.

Beyond learning the state-of-the-art (something that university prepares you for), research worth publishing, especially outstanding one, requires a few other skills. For instance (from my experience):

Can you identify the key relevant papers in the area where you plan to do research? An expert can point you the right direction.
Can you identify the implicit rules in the area that you'll need to follow? Experts might not be able to identify them, but will at least tell you if you're violating them.
Theoretical modeling picks some assumptions and approximations and develops the consequences of those. A good student can do the second part. But it can take more experience to understand well the first part and the implicit rules to follow for a paper (in relation to (2)). Otherwise, you might do perfect work and have its starting point challenged by reviewers.
For outstanding research, can you identify the questions and approaches the community sees as worthwhile?

In my field (programming languages, across computer science and maths), some of those are things I learned during PhD and that aren't written or collected in many places, they're just folklore to experts and are transmitted from advisors to students in a system that resembles in some respects a medieval guild (without any malice implied). I understand that's common in research across fields: that's one reason this website exists, but it's of course not a complete advisor ;-).

Definitely Yes!
The way people do research is changing so rapidly that by the time you finish reading this answer it will probably be out of date. I'll make the intro short and go straight to what you need to solo your (theoretical) research project.
1. Time. When you work in a team of experts in your field, you get things done much quicker. If you work alone, everything takes much longer.
2. Money. You need money to buy time, mainly. If you need to pay off a student loan or work part time to pay the bills, you will probably not have enough time to finish reading all those articles and books in time.
3. Google Scholar. You can find full texts of most of the papers you will ever need there, and an abstract of virtually every paper.
4. Access to book torrent trackers. Legally, this is a grey area, but it puts everyone on the level playing field, whether you are a student from Harvard or some local college in India. Hey, there was a time when it was illegal for women to read. It still is in some countries.
5. Stack Overflow. Present your research results with working code, making it easily reviewable, replicable, and implementable for industry and other researchers. Leveraging the current tech will catapult you to the top.
6. E-mail spam. Once you have the results you suspect someone might be interested in, find them and let them know. These potential targets can be universities you want to apply to for a PhD program, companies that you want to work for, or journal editors that you suspect might be interested in publishing your work. Send a few emails per day, wait for their response, improve your letter (taking into consideration the responses of previous targets), keep sending your cold e-mails until you get a positive response.
There are so many tools out there for you to do the research independently nowadays, all you need is passion, a lot of time, and a little bit of money. Hey, Einstein figured out his theory of relativity in his patent shop without computers, Internet, Google, Stack Exchange, etc. etc..
Two more things I would like to add. The recent wave of progress is leaving a lot of "old school" researchers behind so you may not get a warm welcome when you cut a bunch of corners with your state-of-the-art tech and get their job with a higher salary just by punching a few keys on a keyboard and clicking some links. Another thing is, a lot of people are doing the same thing. People from South America to Europe, to Africa, to India, to Asia all of a sudden have all these tools to do research that for centuries was only accessible to the western elite. State-of-the-art doesn't stay state-of-the-art for too long so you got to keep up with it or you will be swept aside by the same force that you exploited on your way up.


text:
Presenting and disseminating research results before submitting a paper
I got a PhD in math in another country years ago. Recently I moved to the US and have a tenured position. Assume I wrote a paper and want to publish it in a journal. Is it considered OK to present the work and/or post an electronic copy on arXiv, before submitting the paper to a journal?  In particular, does it matter in what order I do the following things?
1) Present the work in a seminar at my department.
2) Present the work in a conference in my field.
3) Present the work in a seminar at another department.
4) Post the paper on the electronic arXiv.
5) I submit the paper to a journal.

In some (mostly STEM fields), conferences serve as publication outlets. In others (mostly humanities and social sciences), conferences serve more to facilitate networking and to gather feedback on a draft before preparing the actual publication. The sequences thus depends on your field.

Overall, I don't think there are much such rules; but I am not in the US, so my expertise is limited.
I personally refrain from presenting a work in seminars (in other department notably) or conferences before it is on the arXiv. The deposit is indeed the moment I have checked everything, and I am confident it holds together. Before that, I may have doubts.
In rare occasion, the preprint takes some time to be finished, or deposited, and I am still confident enough to present it, but it is very rare.
I usually put it on the arXiv before submission, because it is a time stamp and I want my work to be available. Referees rarely check proofs in detail, so you need to make yourself confident about your work anyway. You should however remember to update the preprint to a so-called postprint when the referee reports come in (note that some publishers inexplicably don't allow that, OUP for example).
Another reason to deposit on the arXiv before submission is that Elsevier allows you to update a preprint to a postprint, but is quite unclear whether you have the right to deposit a postprint or preprint for the first time after acceptance. Well, not that I particularly urge anyone to publish with Elsevier, but that is to be known.

Putting your work on arXiv also makes it clear that you post a preprint there, which may be relevant from legal standpoint. While embargo on posting postprints in repositories is not that rare, forbidding preprint publication is very unusual in mathematics.

@tomasz: actually, I think that the policy to allow the preprint to be posted but not the postprint is extremely wrong, and in fact unethical. It means that some people will have access to unreliable papers that are known to need correction. It may seem harmless in math (which it is not from a mathematical point of view), but imagine a preprint of a medicine paper whose claims have been asked to be moderated by the referee: that is a big issue.

I think forbidding either of them is unethical, although I don't think your argument is valid. In the cases I know, if you post a preprint (whether or not you post a postprint with it), you are obliged to attach a journal reference to the paper on arXiv after publication. In general, if you go to "production phase" (whether in an industrial context, or figuratively when citing theorem numbers in your next paper), you should rely on the peer-reviewed (journal) version anyway.

@tomasz: my last take on the matter "you should rely on the peer-reviewed (journal) version anyway": not anyone as(legal) access to it, and no one has (legal) access to all published paper.

Everyone has legal access to them, they just need to pay the 40$ or something per paper. ;-) Or you can just e-mail one of the authors.
Of course, it would be better if they were all published in open access, but unfortunately, it seems far off for now.


text:
Do UK universities have a special obligation to advertise jobs externally?
I often hear it said that all jobs have to be advertised externally before anyone can be appointed to an academic post in a UK university. However, this rule about having to advertise externally is certainly not true in general in industry where the only obligation one might have to avoid discrimination claims is to advertise the job internally.
Is there a special obligation on a UK university through some public sector regulations, maybe, to advertise all jobs externally?  I'm asking about UK universities in particular.

I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is often the case.  It can make for very frustrating interactions when people apply for a position that is de facto already earmarked for a particular candidate.

@jakebeal Is there a specific law that relates to universities in the US in this regard that doesn't apply to purely commercial enterprises?

There is also an interesting twist where the person has previously been doing the same job but on a fixed term contract.  It's not clear to me if a new position is created (which might require advertising) if they are then made permanent.

@Lembik See Bill Barth's answer for an example. It will vary state to state, however.

Even when not required by law, many institutions adopt this requirement as  a matter of internal policy, which may require high-level approval to waive.

@NateEldredge My suspicion is that you have hit the nail on the head but I am interested if there might be some public sector regulation which actually requires jobs to be advertised externally.

In the United States, at least, there are also very specific federal requirements about public posting of jobs if the person being hired will need a work visa such as an H-1B visa.

Yes, and sometimes to prevent things like nepotism, etc....

In which country?  You're asking about public sector regulations, so the answer is going to be very different for different countries.  As such, the question currently seems too broad.  I suggest that you edit the question to scope it more narrowly by specifying a particular jurisdiction that you care about.

Most French universities have actually a non-internal recruitment policy. More or less enforced depending on the field and the particular department.

@D.W. My question is about the UK (see the question itself and the tag "united kingdom").

In Germany public state-financed universities (AFAIK any other public authority too) have to publish job offers externally. (there exist some exceptions for religious institutions, they fall under different laws)

Marshall, thank you for the clarification.  In the future, you should include that in the question, as it's easy to overlook, otherwise.  (And as you can see from some of the answers, some respondents didn't seem to realize this.)  I've edited the question for you this time, but just letting you know for the future.  Thank you!

I think you are misunderstanding how academic job searches work in the UK. All jobs, and I believe this is not specific to universities, must be advertised internally first to individuals in the "redundancy pool". If, and only if, there is no one in the redundancy pool that can meet the minimum requirements with 6 months of training can the job be advertised externally. The redundency pool is available to people, I think, from 3 months before their contract ends until 3 months afterwards.
Current employees not in the redundancy pool, can get prompted within the same job family without having to advertise the job at all. At my university there is no system for moves, lateral or upwards, across job families. That said, if you really want someone, you can regrade and reclassify them.

Is it the same for state and public universities?

Thank you for this. I understand about the redundancy pool and how it works. As an example of my question, consider a lecturer on a fixed term contract who is more than 3 months from the end of their contract. Is the university legally entitled to simply give them a permanent position or do they really have to advertise it externally under some law or regulation?

@MassimoOrtolano in the UK there are really only public universities. I m not sure about the few private univeraities, but I think the redundancy pool is an EU thing.

@MassimoOrtolano The laws around redundancy that StrongBad refers to are part of UK national statute. They are the same for private and public universities.

@marshall I believe after 4 years on a fixed term contract in the same job you become permanent. When my department wants to convert someone from fixed to permanent we just extend the fixed term contract past the 4 year mark.

@StrongBad My understanding is that some UK universities get round this by claiming that when the specifically allocated funding for the fixed term post has run out then there is a legitimate redundancy.

@marshall just because a job is permanent does not mean they cannot make you redundant. I am not sure where you are going with this.  If you have a new question you should ask it as a new question.

@StrongBad Sorry for any confusion (and you are right there is another good related question to ask here).  I just meant that some UK universities don't interpret extending a contract beyond 4 years as making any practical difference at all. You acquire unfair dismissal rights after 2 years after all so you have to go through a redundancy process either way.

@marshall Aberdeen University tried this and lost their case at an employment tribunal.  You can read about it here: http://www.xperthr.co.uk/editors-choice/university-researcher-on-three-successive-fixed-term-contracts-declared-permanent-employee/104490/

Yes, in my state (Texas), there's a law that all government vacancies in positions (including jobs at state-run, public universities) must be posted publicly for at least 10 business days unless the position is to be filled by an internal candidate. It is often flouted openly.

This seems the opposite of what the OP is asking about. He is claiming that even if the positions will be filled with an internal candidate,  that you still need to post it publically.

Yes that is right. UK universities seem to claim that they have to advertise all jobs externally (except for the rule about people in the redundancy pool pointed out by StrongBad). I just found http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/aug/01/academics-anonymous-advertising-research-posts-waste-of-time  which does say "Yes, this whole situation comes down to fairness and having an open competition so that the best candidate gets the job. Universities are not legally obliged to advertise posts externally, but most choose to do so."

In addition, the question is apparently asking specifically about UK universities, so Texas laws aren't relevant to the question -- in other words, this doesn't answer the question.  (I realize that the original version was a bit unclear, but the original version was also probably too broad for that same reason.)

It depends on the country, state or the university.  Some university have their own policy. Some country or state may also have some rules about whether a university should advertise jobs externally. If you are not sure, you may contact someone from a given university to know how it works there.


text:
When does self-citation become citation padding?
While reviewing an article recently, I noticed that a substantial fraction of the papers cited by the authors came from their own research work. While some amount of self-citation is appropriate (and usually necessary) to provide an indication of what one has done in a field, in this paper, it felt that the authors went further than that: equations were given four citations from the authors' works, rather than simply indicating the one or two that derived the original result, and so on. (Notably, all the self-citations were in methodology and results, rather than the introduction.)
My question is to ask if there are any publishers or journals that have established standards for what is considered unacceptable levels of self-citation? [Note that this is different from this question, which asks if self-citation is acceptable at all.

Also related: How to discourage irrelevant self-citation?

"While some amount of self-citation is appropriate (and usually necessary) to provide an indication of what one has done in a field [...]"
This is not the purpose of citations in your typical paper. The purpose of citations is, for the most part, to refer the reader to relevant prior art. If a citation is not relevant to understand the paper's contribution or to put the contribution in context (e.g., how this contribution differs from prior art), I'd say it's approaching padding territory.

Surely the guidelines on self-citation are the same as any other citation - is it important/relevant? Is the result/method needed for this paper? I have a friend who said a reviewer suggested he add to his already fairly long list of self-references, because it was highly relevant.

I think it's certainly within the reviewer's rights to point out unnecessary references.  If I thought the paper were otherwise acceptable, I might discuss the padding issues with the editor before submitting my report.

I think this is easier to think about if we drop the "self" qualification.

When does citation become citation padding?

After all, people will also gratuitously cite colleagues ("I'll scratch your back so you'll hopefully also scratch mine") or likely reviewers. And I'd say that the criteria for self-citations should not be any different than for other-citation. Why should they?
That said, I stumbled over this part of the question:

some amount of self-citation is appropriate (and usually necessary) to provide an indication of what one has done in a field

As José comments, this is incorrect. A citation is not there to show what someone (the author himself or someone else) has done in a field. It's there to give context to the new work, to show what has already been done and how the new work relates to prior art. The causal arrow goes from the work to the author, not the other way around.
(Of course, this is contingent on this question being about an article. In a grant application, you need to self-cite to establish that you know what you are talking about. And if you are writing an editorial to celebrate Professor X's fifty years in a field, you will of course cite his work to show what he has done over his career.)
So the question should be: does this citation provide relevant context to the new work? Who the cited authors are should ideally be immaterial. In your example, it would probably make sense to cite the original derivation of the results. And possibly other applications of such results that were similar to the new applications reported on in the present paper, similar enough to be helpful to the reader.
The problem is of course that "relevant" is subjective, field- and situation-dependent. One field may require a lot more context to make sense of a new piece of work than another one. A review article written in a general interest journal will need more background than a submission to a highly specialized journal whose readership can reasonably be assumed to already have a lot of background. And even then, one reviewer may prefer you to give more background, the other to focus on the closest related work.
And all of these factors apply equally well to self-citations and to other-citations. You will usually work in one direction across multiple publications, after all, and so your previous publications will often indeed be relevant for later ones... just as previous publications of people you collaborate with (because you collaborate with people with similar research interests) and of likely reviewers (because reviewers of course should have worked in this field - otherwise, why have them as reviewers?). So a somewhat higher proportion of self-citations, collaborator-citations and likely-reviewer-citations than of other-citations are to be expected, even without any conscious padding going on.
Reviewers and editors will need to make choices and draw lines to curb excesses, in line with the field's and the journal's conventions and expectations. In case of doubt, you can always ask the author to clarify the relationship of the reference to Foo & Bar (2015) to the present work, or to "consider removing the reference in the interest of brevity".


text:
Is it accepted to cite an entire issue of a journal?
There exist review journals that every now and then publish a thematic issue on a given topic. For example, Chemical Reviews does so: one thematic issue (see e.g. this one) includes an editorial and a number of invited review on the main topic.
When writing the introduction of a research paper, one can start by summing up the recent developments in the field, and then explain the reasoning behind the paper being written (“People have looked at application of molecules X and Y to reactions A, B and C, but so far noöne has evidenced any benefit of using them for reaction D. We here show that they lead to a spectacular 270% improvement over current yields”). When writing the broader part of the introduction, one might be tempted to include many references to recent reviews on the topic. However, when many reviews come from the same thematic issue of a journal, it becomes a bit ridiculous. So…
Is it an accepted practice to include a reference to an entire issue of a journal?

Special issue of Chem. Rev. on “Giant molecules for catalysis”, 2010, issue 8.

Alternatively, is it adequate to cite the editorial of the thematic issue? Or do individual papers need to be cited, at the risk of making a long string of citations? Like so:

Lots of research has focused on applications of these molecules to A[1], B[2], C[3], D[4], E[5] and F[6]

where refs. 1-6 are all to sequential papers in the same issue of the same journal.

I expect the answer will have more to do with the policies of individual journals. I have wanted to do what you suggest (and especially with Chem Rev), but have had to choose articles, either the one or two reviews most relevant to my work, or occasionally the editorial if I want to show a growing trend in the field.

I, for one, would not allow such thing to pass the Copy Editorial stage of publication.

It seems tempting to cite only the issue of a journal when it contains several articles that you want to refer to from your introduction. Especially so if it is a special issue directly related to your paper. As to your question whether it is an accepted practice, I haven't seen so, but it could depend on the field of research of course.
Personally, I would advise against using such citations for two main reasons:

You should always try to cite as specific as possible. If you support a stated fact with a citation, the reader should be directed to this fact as directly as possible. In your example of the giant molecules, a reader may be more interested in application A than in giant molecules in general, so it will be helpful if you cite more specifically.
Citations are the basis for many measures of academic impact, and I doubt that citations to journal issues are counted in these measures. The authors of the articles that you intend to cite with a reference to a whole journal issue will certainly not be pleased with this, because you restrain a source of academic reputation for them.

As a side note: I think the bibliometric indicators currently used (number of citations, impact factor, etc.) are definitely ill-conceived when it comes to review articles. Such reviews, by the very nature, attract a lot of citations and gain an unhealthy weight in an individual’s scientific production.

On the other hand, if the 'stated fact' is something like "topic X has continued to attract interest", and the citation to support it is a "Topical review of X", then the broad citation could be warranted.

As has been indicated from other answers, it is generally not acceptable, or a good idea. When you reference materials you need to specific so that the reader cane trace your sources. There is, however, one exception that I can think of and it concerns thematic or special issues.
As you say, some journals issue issues devoted to papers adhering to specific topic or theme. This can be a set of invited papers around a specific question, or a selection of papers coming out from a workshop or symposia session. Often such issues are tied together by an editorial explaining the theme and the contributions of the individual papers to that theme.
It is possible to reference such issues rather than the individual papers if the issue can be seen as contributing a collective view. This can, for example, be a state of the art view of the topic. The point is that the issue becomes similar to, for example, an edited book rather than individual papers and the referencing concerns the collective contribution of papers, not the individual. As soon as something needs to be sourced from a paper within the issue the paper needs to be referenced, the issue reference is then not sufficient.
So it is possible to reference entire journal issues but only for very specific (or actually general) purposes, not to replace referencing a bunch of individual paper from which ideas have been gained. This makes the use quite limited and pointing at a source for information rather than the information itself.

Citations along the lines of see X for a review are meaningless in my opinion and should be avoided. I believe, you should only be citing novel and specific findings. I would even steer away from citing the individual articles in a special issue because they tend to rehash old material and you are better off citing the original source.

When you cite a single fact or finding, there usually is a single identifiable source. Otherwise, for citations like “yields in reaction X have improved dramatically over the last 5 years due to the incremental improvement of synthesis conditions”, it is hard to imagine citing one non-review paper. I do agree with you that it is tempting to avoid citations at all in broad introductions, but that is unfortunately not the opinion of the majority (in my field at least).

@F'x in your case the review paper is doing a meta-analysis (possibly/probably informal) and providing a novel and specific finding. Collections of papers/chapters with no synthesis do not provide that type of meta analysis.

I don't understand this sentiment. If I'm reading the paper and am not very familiar with the field, being pointed to a good review paper is helpful; and if I don't care about the background I'm grateful that the review is a citation I can skip. Moreover, if the author were to read a review paper, extract all the references, and then cite those without citing the review, it would be intellectually dishonest. I'm struggling to see any downside at all to citing reviews directly.

I appreciate that my answer is on the extreme side, but the down votes seem a little harsh. You might disagree, but is it clearly and possibly dangerously wrong?

@DanielE.Shub: “clearly wrong”, no — but it’s a provocative and debatable point which (clearly from comments) many people strongly disagree with you on.  // For my part, I believe that citations serve multiple purposes — not only to attribute credit to authors, but also to direct readers to relevant background.  Review citations are not important for the former purpose, but they can be very good for the latter.


text:
How many co-authors are enough?
I am doing research in an industrial organization. Now, I have written a paper describing my work and outcomes. The idea was completely envisaged by me and the paper was written solely be me.  It was an outcome of a funded research project, but the research done was no where in the scope of the work, and I managed to squeeze time to do this work.
Now, I am confused on whom to include in my co-authors lists.
I have only one teammate, with whom I worked in the project but didn't take any help for doing this area of work and writing the paper. But I think he deserves to be a co-author since we discussed various related things.
I also gave the paper for review to my reporting officer who gave a few grammatical suggestions and tips on paper writing.
Now, the problem is, I have two more level of hierarchy above my reporting officer one of them being the director of the organization. Would it be ethical to include their names as co-authors when no discussion was made with them regarding this or should they be acknowledged ?
Note: The usual practice in my organization is to keep your superiors name before yourself(some red tapism probably), and I have already violated that by keeping myself as first author(thanks to ASE).

People who have made no intellectual or scientific contribution to a paper should not be listed as authors. So, unless your upper-level supervisors have had an active role in designing the project, carrying it out, or writing the papers, they should be excluded. This is the practice normally carried out in corporate environments.

Regarding your teammate, it seems that you had exchange of ideas with him, and it is up to you to consider whether that consists of a scientific contribution to the final paper. Regarding your reporting officer, the description your currently have (“a few grammatical suggestions and tips on paper writing”) do not sound like significant scientific contributions (which
is the commonly-used threshold for authorship determination; check with the journal or publisher's guidelines for your specific case). Your hierarchy, well, this doesn't sound like they contributed at all.
That being said, there is real life to consider, your organization's policies and customs, and your own contract. In a way, it might actually be easier for you not to have your teammate as co-author, in which case it is clear that the paper is yours (while the outcome of the work itself was the company's).

The guide lines suggested by the vancuver Protocol lists what should be the norm. It is evident that not everyoone abides by this protol and in some cases deviations may be fine. Take some time to study the protocol (the one linked or some other version) and make your mind up how you should abide. It is not always easy to know who to include and excluding peoplemay be evenharder because of a variety of reasons from personal to financial. The protocol at least provides a platform against which any such decision can be judged.


text:
Real co-first authors?
I notice that in the physics field, there are sometimes co-first authors, both names being followed by a footnote saying "These two authors contribute equally."
Even though explicitly labeled as so, one name still comes before the other. Also, as far as I know, the one believed to contribute a little bit more goes first. Hence, these are actually not real co-first authors.
Imagine in some journal with an author-title header on every page. The name of FirstAuthorB, the co-first author who comes after FirstAuthorA, will not be shown, as in

FirstAuthorA et al.: Paper Title

So is there some other generally accepted ways to truly display two first authors as completely equal?

Within normal procedures the best way would be to list the two first authors in alphabetical order and then make a statement in the acknowledgement that the two have contributed equally. In this we assume that the way authorship is distributed in falling order. Many journals now also ask for a specification of contributorship of all authors to distinguish who has done what. One oddity I cam across was a paper by K & H (last name initials) where it was listed in the acknowledgement that both had contributed equally. In this case H was the PhD student of K and so K may have wanted the primary spot to get the full impact of the prestigious publication.
So the way to signal contributions by ordering authors is not without its problems. But, most of the problems come from the fact that first authorship is used without discretion to assign merit. So from this perspective it is a result of a flawed system. Attributing contributorship can even out the playing field to some extent but basically we will have to live with the systems. One should also remember that the most important aspect of the reference for most is the sourcing of information, not who did what. So an example of how a system built for one purpose has been adopted to solve another.

In this case H was the PhD student of K and so K may have wanted the primary spot — Bad advisor. No donut.

There are two distinct issues with "first" authors:

Tenure committees and others doing a detailed review of an author's record may use the author order (in appropriate disciplines) to determine how much weight to give to each paper. In detailed review settings such as this, a published statement "these authors contributed equally" has value, because the tenure or  review committee can see that the order of authors did not reflect relative contributions. Of course, in other fields the authors are alphabetical by convention, so the order is irrelevant.
There is also an "accidental" benefit to being the first author, which a published statement on the contributions of each author does not help. Because citations are often abbreviated, many papers are cited by the name of their first author, and thus this author gains prestige. This happens even in fields where the citations are strictly alphabetical and do not reflect the relative contribution of each author! There is published research showing that there is a bias towards researchers whose last name starts with a letter early in the alphabet (i.e. among accomplished researchers there are more with early initials than would be expected by mere chance).

So a statement about the relative contributions of each author will only help in particular circumstances.


text:
Status of the GRE exams for PhD programs in mathematics in 2023
I am writing to ask if there is any consensus on the role of (i) the GRE General Exam and (ii) the GRE Mathematics Subject exam in the PhD admissions process for Mathematics Departments in the United States...and I want information specific for 2023.
Some context: I spent many years involved with graduate admissions in my department (Mathematics at the University of Georgia) and was Graduate Coordinator (the faculty member most closely involved in graduate admissions) from 2016 through 2019.  At that time, most top 100 PhD programs required one or both of these exams, so I advised any prospective mathematics graduate student to take them.
As of this semester I took a role as an advisor to (many) undergraduate students in our department, and I will be giving a workshop on Graduate School in mathematics.  I know that following the COVID19 pandemic my own department no longer requires either GRE exam (nor does it seem to be much used anymore in our admissions process).  I am currently in the process of looking up what is happening with other schools.  From what I have found so far, the most common status is "Not required but can be submitted" followed by "Not required but recommended."  This makes me wonder what is the role of the GRE for contemporary students applying to graduate school in mathematics.  If you are involved in graduate admissions from the other side, would you advise prospective students to take one or both exams?  Why?
Added: Here is one example of something I found that seems to be staking out a rather subtle position:

GRE Mathematics subject scores are not strictly required for the application. You may submit unofficial scores if you wish. Omission of the GRE test score will not negatively affect your application.

Hi Pete, I haven't done grad admissions in awhile either, but I think the main role of GRE then was (1) weeding out really weak students, or (2) showing students (often foreign) from unknown places have at least a reasonable background.  I don't think this aspect would have changed.  So for students with good grades from UGA my guess is it'd only be helpful if some places they're considering applying to either require or recommend Math GRE.

@Kimball: Thanks for your reply.  My thought at the moment is also that these scores would be more helpful for applicants coming from places other than a nationally known large state university, namely (i) foreign countries and (ii) smaller regional institutions where it is hard to know how their very strong students compare to students elsewhere.

In the US there was never a "consensus" about the GRE in the sense of universities getting together and making a joint decision. What there is, though, is a legal "fairness" requirement that must be met. The GRE seemed at the time like a good way to help ensure that, but there is no requirement that the standard be met in that particular way. Each university is free to make its own rules within the law.

No idea about the general pattern, but at U of MN in math we do not currently look at GRE scores. This may change in the future, due to many faculty members' enthusiasm for single numbers that supposedly adequately reflect mathematical potential. The Dir Grad Studies for several years (Dick McGehee: he deserves credit for all his efforts!) and I had realized many years ago that the GRE really tests for lots of things that are not what what we  want to know about... and the pandemic aided us in explicitly disregarding the GRE. But, as I said, this may change... sigh...

There is no consensus.

@paul: Thanks.  That was my assessment of the situation so far.  I admit that this is not an ideal question for this site, because I really want to hear from several key people how things work at their institutions.  Still, I got something out of it already...

RE duplicates: there is this question, but that's a year old already, and neither of the answers to that provides an "on the ground" answer. So, I'm inclined to agree that this post could still be valuable.

@cag51 I think I'm inclined to agree. I'm both interested in this question, but also have some trepidation that it's phrased as a discussion. Pete's self-answer is reasonable in style, but the request in the question for anecdotes feels somewhat out of scope to me.

Pete: Perhaps you've already seen this, I was linked to it I think in a different question. Doesn't precisely answer your question, but maybe it's more data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hmdO7af3-lLvtJQO-szayG6blTvAYBQ1JcYXFZ_6apE/edit#gid=0

I spent about an hour looking into this question.  I looked at the mathematics PhD programs ranked numbers 21 through 61 on the US News and World Report List.  I found five that require at least one of these two GREs: Michigan State, Texas A&M, UC Davis, UC Irvine and UMass Amherst.
It was interesting that there was a diversity of language used among the others.
The most common verbiage I found was "no longer required" or "optional."  I found only one program that said that the scores would not be considered if sent.  Several institutions managed to convey to me (a former graduate admissions chair) a lot of ambivalence about the exam, as in the quote I put into the question.  Here is another interesting one:

Both the GRE general exam and the GRE math subject exam are optional. If you feel that your GRE math subject exam score contributes positively to your application, then we encourage you to submit it, and unofficial scores will be provisionally accepted.

Several other programs indicated that GRE scores would only be used to help applicants, not to hurt them, which -- I pause to give respect to a truly difficult situation -- upon scrutiny doesn't seem to make much sense.  (This is a highly competitive process.  If submitting something can help your application, then how can you ensure those who do not submit are not being hurt?)
I also saw language saying that these requirements were "waived for 2023" or "suspended in 2023," indicating that many institutions are openly unsure of what they will do in the longer run.
Taking all this into account, it is hard to make a clear, uniform recommendation to prospective students.  (Compare to five years ago, when I recommended that all prospective students take the GRE.  Without the GRE they would have been unable to apply to at least two thirds of the programs.) I do think that there are some good test-takers out there whose strong scores would help their applications, especially if they are coming from programs whose overall academic standard will not be known by admissions committees and/or for which the recommendations of the local faculty may carry less weight.  But it is hard for me to broadly recommendthis time-consuming, expensive exam that most schools say they won't hold against you if you don't take.

It's been interesting to see how quickly university stances on the GRE have changed as a result of COVID era policies. My university doesn't have a math major, but we have some incredibly bright and gifted students. I've suggested to them that they take the GRE to better position themselves by demonstrating that they have the requisite knowledge.

When I see language like "GRE scores would only be used to help applicants", I always understood it to mean that good GRE scores would be used to help applicants that submitted them, and be ignored otherwise (so applications with bad GRE scores == applications without any GRE scores at all) ... essentially meaning that submitting a score, good or not, won't hurt your application. Whether it would hurt somebody else's application, ah well, ...

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


text:
How I can efficiently use Google Scholar to find prior research on a topic?
For starting a new problem I generally need to look for work already published through Google Scholar. For example, recently I came across an equation, the Pochhammer-Chree equation. When I type this equation name in the Google Scholar tab, a large number of publications on this equations piles up. It is not possible to look for every single publication to check what type of work has already been done on this equation.
Let me elaborate a little more. Suppose I need to check if the Lie symmetry analysis on this equation has been carried out or not. Then I have certain options in advanced search, that to include the words symmetry or symmetry analysis in the title, abstract or in the whole article along with the word Pochhammer-Chree. Here of course the time range can also be given. Unfortunately, even by this type of search I can miss some of the article that have been already published on symmetry analysis of Pochhammer-Chree.
Is my way of search correct? If not, how should I search through the web by not missing a single article on the topic I am looking for?

It is not totally clear to me what's the actual question here. In the title it seems like you are searching some specific article. The question body seems to indicate that you would only like to find any work that could be relevant. It may also be that you want to ask "How can I find out if something has already been treated?". Please clarify.

See How to do a literature search

@D.W. Is there a similar question on Academia.SE? That one is specific (with specific journals) to the cryptography field.

@J.Roibal, not that I know of.  Feel free to ask such a question here, if you'd like to see a similar answer here.  However, my answer there is not at all specific to cryptography.  The main elements remain the same in any other field -- I would make only extermely small changes for non-cryptographers ( remove recommendations to look at IACR or Crypto.SE; those are the only crypto-specific parts of my answer).

related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/30719/how-to-build-a-list-of-seminal-papers-in-a-field/30725#30725

Just to elaborate on what the other posters have mentioned: your first
job is to find at least one paper that is very relevant to the
specific topic that you are interested in, e.g. symmetry analysis of
Pochhammer-Chree equations.  Possibly just searching on Google Scholar
and browsing the results is your best option here.  The number of
citations that a specific paper has is an indication of whether that
paper was important/influential within your field (i.e., these are the
papers your reviewers will know about), so you should make sure to
study these papers in particular.  Once you have a good reference
paper, you can use Google Scholar to click on the blue 'Cited by ##'
hyperlink that is on the bottom left of every search result on
Scholar.  You can use this to find other relevant papers going forward
in time.  As you collect relevant papers, you can also look at their
references (and read the 'related work' sections of the paper) and
find other papers that you may have missed.
In most cases, it is impossible to 'not miss a single article' on the
topic that you are looking for, and I don't believe this is a useful
goal anyways.  Of course, in some fields, a result may be binary:
either you have proven/shown something or you have not, and once it's
done, there is no point doing it again.  But in most fields, if two
people independently pursue the same topic, they will approach it in
different ways, and confirming each other's findings in this way
provides a lot of value.  When your paper is reviewed, it is essential
that you demonstrate an intellectual heritage to your work - that you
care about prior work, and have used it to guide you, and you are
building on a tradition.  If you miss something, the reviewers will be
happy to point it out, and in my experience this is rarely the reason
a paper gets rejected.  And even if a paper is rejected for inadequate
understanding of prior work, this is an easy problem to fix for
resubmission elsewhere.
So in summary: you can only do your best.  The process outlined above
is the process used by most people these days.  If you follow this
approach, and put in the proper amount of effort, then if you miss
something anyways, I don't think anyone will hold it against you (and
most likely no one, including you, will ever know).

I think the key takeaway is that in research, it is far more likely that you will need to read many papers over weeks or months to get a feel for the state and texture of human knowledge in an area. It is very unlikely that one paper was written that answers your question specifically, even if you had the perfect search string, and fills in just the gaps you need filled. Expect to invest substantial time and intellectual effort.

It is true; there are too many papers out there to even read the abstracts of all of them. That is why many research papers contain phrases like "to the best of our knowledge", etc.
My approach to minimize the risk of missing out publications is as follows: I start with reading review papers. These will sum up the research up to a certain point and will show you what the seminal papers in the field are. Then I look up the latest papers that cite the reviews and/or the seminal papers. This approach works very well with Google Scholar.

IMO, the phrase "to the best of our knowledge" should be acronym-ify as "TTBOOK" for short.

Isn't it better to simply assume that the authors looked back in time "to the best of their abilities"? If someone wants to correct them, they can correct them directly.

@ooker - this acronym does not sound common at all to me so I do not see the need to change it in the post

@magnon2020 I just try to have some fun here...

One trick that I find useful, when researching an area that I'm relatively new to, is to sort by the number of citations. Among the top-cited papers from the search will often be the original paper that introduced a concept, and/or a useful review article. Both of those provide excellent starting points to follow citations forwards and backwards through time. If neither of those appear, then out of the top few papers, pick the one with the most relevant sounding title, and with any luck it will, at the very least, provide references within the text that will form a useful starting point.

The search feature on Google Scholar is a fantastic starting point to begin your research, but there are also other methods which can be used with Google to provide highly relevant results.
Once you have found a paper in your general topic and have determined to be of high-value (usually the first result in Google Scholar Search) you can then view which articles cite this article, and which articles are cited by this article. That is a fantastic way to develop an interconnected web following the same line of thought through time. You can learn who researched what when, and what advancements were made to that theory or reasoning and how long each development took.
For Example, when searching google scholar for "CRISPR Cas9" (A new methodology for genetic engineering) A number of results is displayed, and underneath each result, statistics are available. Under the first result, it says "Cited By 850", by clicking this link, you are able to see what recent publications on the topic are covering. These can also be sorted by citations, date published, authors, etc. This is one of the most effective methods for performing google scholar searches and finding relevant information.