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Are UK PhD studentships provided by PI grants or by their departments?
I have been recently accepted a lecturer position in a UK-based institution (which is supposed to be started in a couple of months). I had a discussion with my current postdoc supervisor (in a North American university) about applying grants in the UK (as they had worked in that system for a decade.) They just noted something about (STEM-based) PhD studentships in the UK that I don't truly digest. He said when a PI applies for a grant (associated with, e.g., UKRI), they has to declare any desired postdoc fellows as potential personnel that need to be recruited. So, their salaries have to be a part of the resource statement of the grant. But the PI should not state any required resources to recruit PhD students. Instead, once the grant is approved, the PI has to deal with their department so that the department provides them some PhD studentship. Is it really the case in that PhD students in the UK are funded by their departments not their PI's grants?

The information from your advisor is mostly true.
Postdoc salary and other costs come from external funding. UKRI is one source. Other sources such as charity funding and EU funding also work this way (at time of writing!).
For PhD students, UKRI explicitly do not allow costs for PhD students. These instead are usually funded through department budgets. There is a block PhD training grant provided to each university to cover some funding in this case. This is typically quite limited.
Often funding for PhD students is negotiated with Head of Department (or other budget holder). This can be for example as part of a recruitment incentive or conditional to support other large grants.
UKRI provides most of its PhD funding through dedicated Centres for Doctoral Training. These are specialist institutes focussed on one area. If you are lucky to have one of these in your area at your institution, these can be a good source of high quality PhD students (although this can be quite competitive internally).
Charity funding and EU funding sometimes allow funding for PhD students.
The other route for funding PhD students is by them brining their own funding. I know of several students from Saudi Arabia and Mexico in our department who have brought this type of funding from their own governments.
In your case I would make contact with your new institution who will be able to give more specific advice on all these points.

Neither.
In general  you cannot fund students from normal research grants from UKRI (although there are some calls that are exempt from this rule).
Also, most departments don't fund students these days either (perhaps occasionally as part of a start up package, or a capacity building exercise in a new field).
The standard way for students to be funded (if they are funded), is through large grants specifically targeted at student education. At UKRI such calls are generally known as Doctoral Training Centres (DTC) or Programs (DTPs) or Collaborative Training Programs (CTPs). These grants will be judged not on the proposed research (no research is proposed at this stage), but the quantity of the training/education being offered and are usually collaborations between several universities that will fund 30 or so studentships a year. You will then have the oppotunity to apply to a DTP/C that your department is a part of. This is the stage at which the research you are proposing the student do will be assessed. You will probably be in competition with PIs from several universities. Students might apply directly to you, or to the program, and who makes the decisions about students varies from DTP to DTP.
The reasons for this are that in the UK, the people that make the decisions about such things regard students as students, not as researchers. While they do do research, they are their to get an education, not perform useful research. If the government wants research done (and done properly) it will pay for qualified researchers to be hired. If it wants to up-skill the workforce it will pay for education. These are two separate goals.
This is also partly connected to the fact that UK PhDs are only 4 years max (and are often only funded 3-3.5), but unlike Europe, where they also have time limited PhDs, students in the UK are not expected to have done a 2 year masters degree, so often have to go from zero to qualified researcher in a very short period of time.
Disclaimer: As I always point out on these threads, i'm not in favour of this system, just describing how it is, and the reasoning of those in charge.

That is kind of appalling.

@Buffy There is a logic to a system that funds studentships on the basis of the quality of the education they will receive, at least in theory. Whether it is good for students and science in general in practice is another question. It does avoid some of the worst problems with the US system (student having to fund themselves through TAing, supervisors hanging on to students for years after they are ready to graduate etc), but has its own problems. It would be more convincing in its aim to get research done by techs/professional researchers, if it were matched by lots of funding for those.

Actually, I've never considered the TA system in the US (which I participated in long ago) as a "problem". It was an opportunity, rather, giving me the chance to learn more about teaching. As an advanced TA, I taught sections of Calculus. Research alone would have given me an incomplete picture of academic life and left me unprepared for a career.

I guess its not the TAing, in pricinciple that is a problem, but the way it is implemented. Uncetainty over which and how many classes a TA will get, whether a vital income stream will even be available in the next year, etc. Plus the problems of the work load it imposes (i've known some TAs have teaching loads not dissimilar from profs, but with the added expectation that they are making progress in their bench work). Our students have opportunities to TA, but its generally not more than 2-3 hours a week for half a semester, with no prep work.


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Connecting with Case Studies Prior to Publication
I submitted an article for publication quite a while ago that was a “Discussion Article” for a performing arts/theatre journal. I previously worked as a Resident Dramaturg for a documentary theatre company, and I use my time as an employee at the company to provide an example of the ethical quandaries one confronts when trying to dramatize the lives of real characters who may or may not have been queer and who died 100 years ago.
I use an example of a show that has been in development at the company since 2017. I give proper credit in the article to the theatre company, the team, and the artistic director specifically. Now that the article has been chosen for publication, it was recommended that I share the article with the artistic director of the company to ensure I am presenting them accurately. The work I discuss in the article is technically still in development, but it has had 2 staged readings with ticketed audiences. In the article, I only share the research that I conducted, and even that research could be accessed by the general public (I was an independent researcher with no academic affiliation when I conducted the research, so I know this for a fact).
Is it unethical for me to share this company’s process in the making of this work? I have a meeting scheduled with the artistic director to discuss the article, and I expect given he would like a discussion that he likely doesn’t want anything published. Am I jumping to conclusions too much regarding this?

I think this is quite a tricky situation. Presumably your employer did not know you were using your employment as a research project. Might that violate your employment agreement? Research with human subjects often requires prior ethics approval - how much have your conversations with others influenced the work? Finally, by crediting the team and company you may falsely create the impression that they endorse the work - that seems to be the journal's most pressing concern. Overall it kind of sounds like you tried to sneak something through which doesn't give a good impression.

Your title says "connecting"; do you mean "contacting"?

Jumping to conclusions about what, exactly? His wants?

Is this related to academia?

This is a theatre company, so not an academic research project. All research was independent and didn’t go through ethics approvals as it’s not attached to an institution. I also did not have a contract of employment, as I started at the company as an intern and was given an official title in name only, even though I was the only person on the team performing my job role.

source: Stack Exchange

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sort: votes


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Should sources helping me understand concepts but not crucial to reconstruct my work be cited?
For example, to calculate a specific exponent E, I need to read book A on summation, book B on multiplication, book C on exponent. After that I can do E.

C is surely cited, but is it required A and B to be cited too? If not, should they be cited?
If both A and A' are excellent resources to understand what's summation is, is it fine to cite both of them?
C' is also about exponent, but C is the one actually makes me understand what the exponent is. Should C' be cited?

I would often add a bibliography section for those types of sources. Not only does it give credit where it's due, but it gives the reader sources to help them understand the concepts if needed.

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Why is Reddit not a reliable source of experts?
Some people say that you should take for granted for opinions on Reddit, because comparing it to academic journals is like comparing kindergarten to university. But I don't understand. Well, it's true that it is incomplete from a scientific point of view, but most active users in a specialized subreddit likely know what they are talking about. It also has the same peer review mechanism like Stack Exchange, and you can always visit users' profiles to evaluate their expertise. Saying a frequent redditor is not necessarily an expert is like saying top users in Academia Stack Exchange are not necessarily academics I think.
So if you can trust (to a certain degree) ideas from TED talks, Wikipedia, or Stack Exchange, then why should Reddit be an exception?
PS: I think the keyword specialized subreddit hasn't been implemented enough in the answers. Yes, all of the points are applicable in a generic subreddit, but I'm talking about subs that the fact one is in there means that they must have a certain level of knowledge, or else they can't never find out the sub. Any random person can create accounts, upvote, and write hilarious comments, but only those who actually have the knowledge can write serious ones and show the holes in my knowledge.

Related:
• Are TED presentations academically credible?
• Are there instances where citing Wikipedia is allowed?
• When should we ask questions on Reddit? (quite a misleading title in this context, but anyway)

Do not confuse review and peer review. Peer review is an evaluation by other, typically already-established experts in a field, while the alternative is open to anyone with an opinion, well-informed or not. Upvotes on Stackexchange and Reddit indicate that many people agree with you, but do not necessarily indicate that anyone who knows what they're talking about agrees with you.

I don't really understand what you are trying to ask here. Also "some people say" is quite vague. If, based on your post history, you are asking why posting your theory on reddit is not the same as publishing your theory in a peer-reviewed journal, then I don't understand what you are treating reddit as the exception. Posting on SE or creating a Wiki page is also not similar to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal.

For all you know, the self-identified "expert" on reddit is a three-headed monkey. For all you know, I am a three-headed monkey. (Plus, majority votes don't compensate for expert review. Or do you want your doctor to write your prescriptions based on an opinion-poll among those in the waiting room?)

I'm not sure you mean "take for granted"? Also, I have seen many incorrect things about my subfields upvoted highly.

@NuclearWang no, I just talk about people who comment. Anyone can make a funny comment to gain upvotes, but those who can show me holes in my knowledge or bring interesting perspectives are different.

@AzorAhai are those incorrect thing upvoted in your specialized subreddit too? For example, I see that you study linguistics. Are those posts upvoted in r/linguistics too? Or incorrect posts/comments about neurosciences in r/neuro?

@henning you say that majority votes don't compensate for expert review, but what is in fact happening here is opposite. There is a difference between a prescription based on opinion-poll among those in the waiting room, and a prescription based on opinion-poll among other doctors

@Ooker some of "us" might be experts, some of us might not. How would you know. For reddit, my hunch would be 5% experts, 55% teenage nerds, 40% cranks. Or maybe not. The point is, nobody can tell, and that's just not nearly good enough to count as reliable in any way.

@henning We are passing each other point. My point is that you can evaluate the person by their past posts and knowledge presented to you. A sub with 95% nerds and cranks will make the experts bored and gather in another sub. In a sub that the very act of finding it out require a certain level of knowledge, I think it is reliable to tell

@Ooker I've never browsed r/neuro, so I can't speak to that one. r/linguistics is pretty good, in general. It has a strict mod policy, but that doesn't mean mods remove wrong posts right away, before someone may have seen them. r/languagelearning (I'm an acquisitionist) is a dumpster fire

@Ooker It seems like most of your arguments in the comments in favor of reddit is that you've found it a decent place to get some feedback at least from some of the users. I don't think anyone here would argue against that: any public performance has a chance to get you some useful feedback. Even people who have no idea what they are talking about can sometimes give great feedback if it gets you thinking in a different direction. That's completely separate for whether you can get something similar to peer review, however, or whether your reddit-popular theory might be "good" scientifically.

@BryanKrause Thanks. I have no problem with your skepticism about my theory, since I know I lack a lot of thing. It's just that I have never expected feedback on Reddit has the same credibility as blind peer review, yet many people claim that I have that expectation, and then accuse me for a line of thinking that I have never had. All I need is feedback, and whether it's from blind peer review or from Reddit is still valuable to me. I don't get why people keeps saying users in Reddit are cranks, while I see that there are many people can show me my holes of knowledge

@Ooker The problem is A) you are comparing it to peer review as if it's similar, which it isn't, and that throws up people's alerts. and B) you have at times justified the quality of what you have based on positive responses on reddit, and that also throws up alerts.

@Ooker In academic peer review (which you are calling blind peer review, but need not necessarily be blind), journal editors choose scientific experts in the field of study to review. That's the big difference. They are determined as experts because they have themselves published in the field (and passed peer review), and because they typically hold positions in institutions where their peers and seniors have deemed them qualified to hold such a position at that institution. It's not perfect, but it's miles past what Reddit or SE can offer.

@BryanKrause I see, thanks. It turns out that the important thing here is established experts in the field. My confusion with Reddit/SE system turns out to be that although the users can be experts, their expertise is just based from your own observations, and they are rarely in the exact field you need. That's why they can only say interesting at best. I get it now. For point B), what do you think about it?

Well, it's true that it is incomplete from a scientific point of view

Why did you write anything after this sentence?

This is probably a bit flippant. But seriously. It's "incomplete from a scientific point of view", according to your own words. Why do you need anything further to justify the fact that reddit is on a completely different level than academic journals? You are focusing too much on the identity of the writer, when you should have been focusing on the actual content. Science isn't about who wrote what; it's about the research. People can publish anonymously in top journals, if they are so inclined and the editors agree.
Not to mention that reddit (and this website) is a popularity contest. Any random person can create an account and upvote everything. Does writing a hilarious answer filled with private jokes make you a great scientist? No. Does it garner a lot of upvotes on reddit? Yes. Do you not see the conflict here? Calling this "peer review" is laughably naive. Reddit users don't go through the painful process of checking all the details of a comment before deciding to click on that arrow button.

So if you can trust (to a certain degree) ideas from TED talks, Wikipedia, or Stack Exchange, then why should Reddit be an exception?

Just like with TED talks, Wikipedia, StackExchange, and journal articles, you should use your own judgment when determining what to trust and not believe blindly anything that is told to you. It's also true that if something is presented in the form of a funny anecdote on an anonymous website, you should proceed with extreme caution. I don't even understand why it's up for discussion.
PS: I certainly hope that you don't trust blindly anything written by top users here. StackExchange "reputation" is simply a measure of how much time one has wasted on this website. People who have never done any kind of research or teaching have garnered thousands and thousands of points asking braindead questions and parroting well-known talking points without really understanding what they are talking about.

I think the keyword specialized subreddit hasn't been implemented enough in the answers. Yes, all of your points are applicable in a generic subreddit, but I'm talking about subs that the fact one is in there means that they must have a certain level of knowledge, or else they can't never find out the sub. Any random person can create accounts, upvote, and write hilarious comments, but only those who actually have the knowledge can write serious ones and show the holes in my knowledge. This very answer is an excellent example that content is much important than the origin of account

@Ooker finding a specialized subreddit requries a certain level of interest; not of knowledge. I subscribe to plenty of specialized subreddits (and, sure, probably know much more about their subjects than the average reddit user does - but the average reddit user is not the relevant point of comparison). I'm entirely unqualified to contribute to research on the vast majority of their subjects.

@Ooker and, fwiw, my experience with those where I am qualified is that the ratio of users who know what they're talking about might improve in comparison to larger subreddits, but even in small specialized subreddits there are enough readers who don't know what they're talking about that all but the very worst cranks often get upvoted.

@ChrisH I agree with you. My experience is that the people upvoting me don't have the necessary background to fully understand what I say. However, in their defense I see that some users seem to be knowledgeable in fields I don't know of, so I have some respect to them. When they say that my work is interesting, I think it has some grain of truth in their. I'm not sure if this is correct or not.

Activity is a poor metric of expertise. Great experts can be very shy, and a person with the biggest mouth can be over-confident about their knowledge and abilities. Personal factors are diverse and individuals on the internet are often unreliable.
What matters is whether there is a system in place to recognise, support and promote best practices. In academia, such system is called peer review.
Academic papers are verified by peer academic before they are published. TED talks are peer-reviewed before they are shown to the audience. Peers are responsible for the quality of peer review because the failure can be traced back to them, and because they deeply value the integrity of their field.
SE has a very good peer review system. There is no pre-moderation, but wrong or unhelpful answers tend to be voted down very quickly. For controversial topics, the system ensures that important opinions are heard, but not drown in the infinite stream of small less relevant comments.
Reddit has similar vote system, but it does not work similarly well. Perhaps, it is because the average smaller size of a comment is much smaller on Reddit and it encourages people to be more impulsive and less pedantic. Redditors often reward fun and humorous comments, but not necessarily helpful and detailed.

SE has a very good peer review system [citation needed]. Every dweeb can vote on an answer. Not every dweeb is invited to referee scientific research.

@henning Sure, but ultimately what matters is what fraction of the community are unhelpful or ill-informed. Surely, we all have met an unhelpful reviewer in our academic publishing at least once.

I agree with that, and probably the userbase at physics.se has more expertise than on some physics subreddit. That may change, however, without any formal credentials to restrict access.

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How to deal with too many interfering unnecessary questions from professors about my career plans?
In my department, there is a professor who is not my advisor who constantly asks me about my career plans and how is it going with my research, how far I went in my research, and what did I do in that conference and this presentation ..etc.
I am not comfortable sharing information unless it is necessary with anyone in the dept. even if this news is related to my career and I am very introverted too, he interferes too much in things that are non of his business and this is making me uncomfortable. I really want to put an end to it.
Questions are very direct and usually followed by unasked-for advice:
Like:
Did you publish your conference paper yet? followed by advice of the form: you should do ....
What schools are you applying for? what conference are you going to? followed by advice of the form: you should do ...
How should I declare my boundaries more clearly?
EDIT: I am almost sure that he has a romantic interest because he glances at me inappropriately and sometimes I catch him so he instantly looks away but, I did not want to mention that, it is not innocent mentoring or someone who is genuinely interested in helping me acing my discipline, he is extroverted and disagreeable, I am in a tough situation because usually women who hint or make the case that they are subjected to some sort of harassment are not taken seriously or being blamed for it and eventually alienated and no one will want to work with them so, if I have to take this route it has to be my last option. We meet in conferences, or while I am staying in the dept. late finishing some work he passes by for minutes. I will take a graduate course with him in the next semester so I will have to interact with him. I should also mention that my dept. is male-dominated and is small, so I am the only graduate female student there.

Is he trying to “hit” on you? Alternatively, does he do this with every student, male and female?

Sounds like a bit of a general workplace question. See How can I politely ask a coworker to stop giving his unsolicited opinion and quit asking personal questions?

Indeed, is it creepy attention, or genuine? If not creepy, having more people interested in your career can be a good thing.

@buffy No he does not do this with every student and I suspect also that he is interested in me so, I want to put an end to it. Also, I will have classes with him the next semester.

You might say something like: "Thanks for your interest in my work, but your questions make me feel uncomfortable." He might ask why, but your statement is enough.

OK, as it is unwanted (creepy) attention, being direct with him, and discussing with your advisor are first steps. Determining the paths for formal escalation might be good too. I'm sorry you are in this position.

@Buffy I would not necessarily label it as sexual interest (although would not rule it out entirely, either, of course)… Rather, mansplaining sounds more like setting the boundaries of the question - in some cultures/generations being patronizing towards women is still considered "virtuous", after all.

Two thoughts: (1) you're an introvert, he's an extrovert and you're seeing the typical tension between the two types. (2) Academia is known to have individuals pretty intelligent in their own chosen fields, yet relatively socially awkward, in which case you might be seeing this person attempting to engage awkwardly, in the only way he knows how. All his questions seem to be related to your student career. If it were otherwise, now that would be different.

" I will take a graduate course with him in the next semester so I will have to interact with him" That should probably be emphasized more as it changes the situation completely. At least where I'm from, random professors in the same department would basically have no power over a PhD student, and are basically normal coworkers.

What have you tried? How do you respond to these unwanted interactions?

Short answers while expressing uncomfort using my body language, like looking away when talking ..etc He then gets offended and expresses that in the form of rude advice or indirect ways.

Maybe the question is "How to deal with a creep that may have some power over my career?". It is a truly fraught situation that, sadly, occurs too often in academia. It it may be one of the ways that women are chased out of some fields.
If this were a person you met at the 'five and dime' you would probably just tell them to get lost. But this is dangerous for a student interacting with a professor.
The first rule, is to make sure you are safe; both personally and professionally. One way to achieve this is not to act alone, but to seek allies who know the situation and who can act with you if needed. If there are other women in the department then talk to them about what experiences they have had and how they dealt with it. But make them aware, so that if it becomes necessary to escalate then you can do so as a group. Solidarity.
If there is a female administrator at the university, or an office for counseling students, make them aware that the person is making you uncomfortable, though you don't (yet) know how serious the situation is.
When possible, interact with the person only in groups. When possible, ignore them. When that doesn't work, say as little as you need to and move away. If you have to take more positive action, do so with your allies. A group is hard to ignore.
If it goes on, a diary of interactions might be valuable. In extreme situations, I'd remind you that your phone probably has a record feature.
They probably think their behavior is innocuous and it would be a shock to them to learn that it isn't. They might react badly. Try not to let that happen if you can do so within the "be safe"  parameters. But, first, make sure you have backup.
The advice in a comment by Jon Custer may be good, depending on your advisor. You need to make a judgement call about that.

I think this is epically bad advice.  This professor is providing mentoring.  A much more common form of gender discrimination is for faculty to deny mentoring to students who are not male.

Upvoted, with one caveat though: "In extreme situations, I'd remind you that your phone probably has a record feature." I suggest to be very careful with this. Depending on the legislation, recording other people without their consent can cause you serious trouble (even if this other person behaves like a complete jerk).

@JochenGlueck, yes, I agree. Only for extreme situations.

But what if everyone, these potential allies included, finds it completely innocuous? Better safe than sorry, sure, but consider how the other side would feel if trying to provide career advice and being hit with basically sexual harassment response...
Edit: source - personal interactions; no darker undertones involved and yet I felt very uneasy with the constant need for making excuses for not living up to expectations for the perfect student. Doesn't take a creep to stress the hell out of people lacking the capacity to excel academically here and then.

@Lodinn, in that case you would have important information to calm any fears. And I'm specifically not suggesting a sexual harassment charge. Rather trying to avoid it if it isn't necessary. Your peers may have important things to say, whatever they are.

That is fair enough, but would not approaching them with "ugh he is being really obnoxious pestering me about my research every week" be more fruitful than "I fear he might be hitting on me, what to do?"? As in, that essentially eliminates the risk of being alienated and cut off support on the basis of overreacting. Getting a response from peers like "maybe he just likes you... a lot" would indeed escalate the situation towards "that is what I am afraid of" and then getting the team together to fend those advances off. What I'm saying is get unbiased take from peers first; advice before act.

If a professor asks you an unwelcome question about your research or career plans:

Thanks very much for your enthusiasm for mentoring.  It's great to know I can come to you for advice when I need it.  Right now, I need to get back to my research.  Bye!

Giving career and research advice is a good thing for professors to do.

related to my career ... he interferes too much in things that are non of his business

I have to disagree with you.  Universities are judged based on the career success of their students.  As a student, your career is something all the faculty should be supporting when they can.  You can always decline the support.

"Giving career and research advice is a good thing for professors to do." WHEN ASKED

@EarlGrey I strongly disagree, because almost all students need career advice and almost none of them ever ask for it.

and on average, they get career advice of this depth:
https://xkcd.com/1827/
look at the current state of academic career: the only meaningful advice for the past 20 years would have been "be a male, cheat the publications metric, done". Any other advice is subjective take on specific points that would not have ever made a difference.

@EarlGrey  Well, that's not how I would do it.  I'd say to students:  Read the AIP careers data.  https://www.aip.org/statistics/physics-trends/starting-salaries-physics-bachelors-classes-2017-2018

Do you mean that a career is quantified by the median salary? I thought you could ask the random, stereotipical guy on the street to get such a profound advice.

Sorry, this seems tone deaf.

I would agree with @Buffy, but this sounds like an appropriate tone directed at someone who doesn't get the message.

You feel it is unacceptable, then so it is. But you have also the unbearable burden of him being in power position, at least until next semester.
You mention you have classes with him: that is already an issue to be discussed formally, even if he is not a creep, he is at least a mansplainer and you can mention to your advisor it is impossible for you to work with him (I interpret you have classes with him as TA).
Since you are introvert, and he is in a position of power, unfortunately I don't see any meaningful way for you to tell him "my advisor is taking good care of me, I do not need additional support, thanks" (where meaningful would be "get the f*** out of here").
Apart from the formal process, which is heavily country-dependent and it will take a long time, you still have a couple of indirect ways to try to shake him off from your daily life.
First: if he express his (unwanted) interest by constantly entering into your office, tell him you are waiting for a phone-call to discuss a proposal or keep your headphones and tell him you are following a video presentation or take your phone in hand and tell him you need to make a private call (please note: the more clumsy you look, the better, he may understand he is doing something wrong...).
If his attentions are expressed at the coffee corner, at the group meeting, etcetc, just stay close to the others (for example stay close to Mary, or to Benjamin, even if you barely know them) and deflect his questions ("did you publish your conference paper yet?" "oh no, it is a long way, Benjamin how long does it take you to publish a conference paper?").
You can try to ignore him, by replying "the same" and "it goes on" to any of his questions, or being proactive in constantly answering to his questions with other direct questions. If possible questions that implies he has to spend time and money. For example asking if he has an open position for a brilliant student from your former uni, asking him if he has any left over money to buy equipment for your group, asking him to cover the expenses of your master student (it does not matter if you have none, you can always say it is a master student you are planning to supervise).
Or play dumb and ask him if he knows the meaning of mansplainer. If he explains it to you, then you can close the discussion with "ahah, a bit like you! I have a phone call, now, sorry", if he doesn't you can tell him "I guess it is someone that is explaining to women what they should do, I have a phone call, now, sorry" and close the small talk with that.
You may look rude not answering to his questions, but given the conditions it is totally ok and you can just tell him "sorry, I am thinking of something else" and keeping on ignoring him.

I worry about any sort of confrontation. Even ironic confrontation. It is fine for a colleague to do it, but possibly not for a student without a lot of prior thought.

@Buffy I tend to agree, but here I am thinking of a PhD student that is already past his master, new PhD in the european sense, because from the OP description it "smells" to me as a very European set-up. I stress here that ignoring a person and replying "I am thinking of something else" and keeping on ignoring that person is no confrontation at all. Bad manners, if anything at all, but if the choice has to be between bad manners and own mental safety ...

You are recommending rude and dishonest behavior.

@AnonymousPhysicist if it makes you feel better, you can amend the "phone call" part.

Since you are introvert, and he is in a position of power, unfortunately I don't see any meaningful way for you to tell him "my advisor is taking good care of me, I do not need additional support, thanks" I'm an introvert too, but I would have no issue with saying just this if that's what needs to be said. Introvert doesn't mean socially anxious. Nobody is going to guess your boundaries, and nobody is going to establish them for you. This is a great learning opportunity.

@henning then please complete your maieutic role in teaching me how should I read read OP's statement "I am very introverted too" as relevant to the question.

@EarlGrey "learning opportunity" refers to setting one's boundary.


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What is the value of a summer project on cv of someone who wants to pursue graduate studies?
I got accepted in a summer research project in the US with a very famous professor in the field, however, it is so expensive for me.
I am not a US citizen but planning to pursue graduate studies there. I don't have publications yet and by the end of the project, the participants will have to write a paper. How valuable is that for graduate admission?

Do not work for free. That is exploitative and wrong on behalf of the employer.

@astronat, that depends on whether any benefit accrues to the professor. If it is just guided student research, there is no issue.


text:
what is the difference between a Research question and a research Hypothesis?
Is it a must in a research paper when you have four research questions, their must be four research hypotheses?

I should stop writing papers then, because I have no clue on what are research questions and hypotheses.

In the social sciences, the answer is no. Descriptive questions that seek such information such as the mean, median, etc. do not have hypotheses because there is normally no a priori guess as to the value of such a parameter.  For example, if you want to determine what the average salary of a professor is, there is no need to develop a hypotheses but simply to calculate the answer.
For comparison question and relationship question you can develop hypotheses. For example, if we compare the average salary of men and women professors we can develop a hypothesis that there is no difference (null hypothesis) or that there is a difference in the salaries (alternative). In this example, we have a categorical independent variable (gender) and a continuous dependent variable (salary)
For relationships questions, we may look at salary by years of experience. Again, we can say no relationship, which is a null hypothesis and or there is a relationship which is the alternative hypothesis. In this example, both variables are continuous.
The simplest difference between research questions and hypotheses is that research questions end with a question mark or they are interrogative. Hypotheses, on the other hand, end with a period and are indicative statements.

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


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Is it OK to ask your supervisor for a recommendation for attending an academic event if the PhD just started?
I just began my PhD this week.
There is a very important event that will take place next month and there are some stipends for attending PhD students, but the deadline to apply for such stipends is in one week.
As usual, it is required that the supervisor writes a short "support letter" to the program chair.
The thing is that I just started my PhD something like five days ago, and this is my first time working with my supervisor. I have experience with the topics that will be covered in the event and I consider it is important for me to attend.

With this in mind, should I ask my supervisor for a letter?

I was thinking in asking him for his opinion rather than the letter, would this be better?
Thanks in advance!

I think you should ask your supervisor "do you think it would be a good idea for me to go to this?" rather than more directly asking "can you write a support letter for attending this?". If he responds enthusiastically, then ask for the letter.

Thanks for you answer @Thomas, that makes sense to me. I think I will approach him like you propose, saying additionally why I think it would be a good idea. Thanks again! if you write this as an answer I will be happy to accept it.

@Thomas - Could you move that to an answer?

Rather than just ask for the support letter, it may be a good step to simply ask if your supervisor thinks that the event is appropriate for you to participate in, given your knowledge of the topic and ability to prepare for the event (if applicable, I'm not sure if the event is something you would have to prepare for, like a conference). Your supervisor may be happy that you are demonstrating such enthusiasm and effort early in your program of study!
Since the deadline is short, I would offer to draft the letter for him. This will help with the timing, plus it will help since you have not worked together very long. This will ease the burden of the task, which he will also appreciate. Good luck!

Thank you so much for your answer! I think I will approach him this way. The thing of letting him know I can write the letter for him is a great idea. Thanks!

Glad to help! I wrote a blog post on drafting our own reference letters. I don't know if it would be helpful, but just in case: http://www.academiccareerclinic.com/single-post/2017/01/31/The-Art-of-Writing-Your-Own-Reference-Letter


text:
Will Google Scholar update the title of existing papers?
I have published a journal paper with IEEE; however, I noticed that both the journal paper and its conference version have the exact same title, which may cause confusion. I contacted IEEE to request a slight modification to the journal paper title, and it has since been successfully updated on IEEE Xplore. This happened in May 2024.
However, Google Scholar has not yet reflected this update. I have reached out to Google Scholar support regarding this issue but have not received a response so far. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or advice on how to resolve this.

sorry, what google is doing is unfortunately a mystery.

Even the time to initial indexing of a paper is quite variable.

You can edit the paper name on Google Scholar. I've edited other information before when they refused to get the correct information or preferred to show the pre-release version information, not the conference one.
Clicking on the paper opens the paper information. Afterwards, click on edit in the top left corner.

Thank you for the suggestions. A few months ago, I attempted to manually correct the journal paper title in my Google Scholar profile. However, the updated journal paper still does not appear correctly linked to my profile—it only shows with a '*' symbol above it.
Additionally, after making this adjustment, the conference paper in my profile no longer links to any papers. I would appreciate any further advice on how to resolve these issues and ensure both papers are correctly linked in my Google Scholar profile.

@CharlieNie, I would assume you have to unmerge the journal and conference papers and change the name of the conference paper. Then, it will keep them separate and with the correct citation count. Usually, the * symbol means GS is adding up the citation count from two references. If that is the case, you should see the two entries and select the one you want to unmerge when clicking on edit.


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For IEEE papers with Part 1 and Part 2 do I need to submit both parts at the same time?
Sometimes in IEEE magazines I see Part 1 in one issue and Part 2 in the next issue.
How does this work when writing and submitting? Do I need to submit both parts at the same time or does IEEE decide to split it? Can there be more than a one issue delay between Part 1 and Part 2?
As part of my PhD requirements, I have to write two papers, one with a review of the latest papers in the field and another with my contributions. Many Part 1 and Part 2 papers are organised like that.
My two papers cannot be published at the same time and unless the first part is published, University will not consider approving my contributions.

Why can you not submit them as two completely separate papers? Then you don't have to worry about this issue. You can still link them by a similar sounding title, e.g. "Topic X: recent developments" for the review and "Topic X: a novel method to improve sensor characteristics" for your contribution.

Ask the editor how you should proceed.

The way you phrased your post is a bit misleading, I think.  There are two possible answers.
Answer-1
It seems that your supervisor/university requires you to first publish a literature review/survey followed by one or more contributions.  This is quite the norm in engineering and computer science.   In practice, in their first year, students conduct and write a literature review/survey, and identify a number of research questions.  They then submit the survey for review. At the same time, they start work on their first contribution or research question.   By the time they complete the first contribution, the survey paper may have received feedback.  Students then revise the survey paper, and finalize their first contribution.  At this point, they have two papers in review.   They then start on the second contribution, and the cycle repeats.
Answer-2
There are papers whereby authors break up a huge paper into two parts.  The first part deals with theory.  The second part deals with the application of said theory.  For these papers, both parts are submitted simultaneously.
An example from IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing:

Parallel and Distributed Methods for Constrained Nonconvex
Optimization—Part I: Theory.

Parallel and Distributed Methods for Constrained Nonconvex
Optimization-Part II: Applications in Communications and Machine
Learning

You need to see what your predecessors did. I am concerned for you based on your question because I do not know any IEEE transactions or even conferences that accepts review / survey papers. There is the ACM Surveys, but the authors there are often very well known people who write about their research field of the last decade. The IEEE magazines are aimed at practitioners for their readership and the literature review of a typical Ph. D. topic would be usually too specialized.
Also, any IEEE transaction will usually want to have a "related work" section in all papers, so splitting it up like you are supposed to do is really difficult.
I am in Computer Science and my answer might be too discipline dependent. But, to repeat myself, I am afraid that your university is making your life really complicated. Your predecessors must have found a way around a restriction that might make sense in Philosophy or Theology, but not in Engineering or the Sciences. Find out what they did and follow their example.

'I do not know of any IEEE transactions..' -- this is incorrect.  Many IEEE Trans. accept surveys.   There is also the IEEE communications surveys & tutorials.


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Submission not visible anymore after 4 months with the journal
I submitted a paper to a journal and after four months, the status changed to "decision in progress". After 2 days, I cannot see my submission  anymore. I am co-author.  What happend?

I beleive you should ask the corresponding author(one who submitted the paper) rather than asking the people on Academia

Are you sure it didn't move to the "decision" tab?


text:
Can a paper be rejected for not using western blot?
I'm going to be brief with this post. We have submitted a paper to journal x. We had two reviewers. Both had comments which we addressed in our response letter. Reviewer 1 endorsed the paper. However, reviewer 2 rejected it cause we did not use western blot to confirm the protein level of gene x. Is this normal? This same reviewer wanted us to repeat the whole experiment using a method they suggested. Morevover, this method, if applied, deviates from the goal of our work and is not suitable at all.
Finally, I should mention that our work focuses gene expression
Manipulation and possible  mechanisms involved.
I appreciate any feedback shedding lights on reviewers requesting additional work or differentvmethods that are not important to the work.

Not everyone here will know what "western blot" is. Is it fair to say that you did some work with one method, but your reviewer prefers a different method? Would most people in the field agree that one of the methods is superior?

You should get advice from a person who has read your paper.

Your paper can be rejected if any of the reviewers are able to convince the editor that your paper is deficient in some way. That can include things that are in the paper that are done wrong, and things that are not in the paper that make the results questionable or open to other interpretations not fully explored.
If a reviewer requests experiments that do not fit the goals of the paper, and you are not willing or not able to do the experiments, it's up to you to make the best case for it in your response to the reviewers (which is also for the editor) while also being polite and respectful of their concerns. Even if their proposed solution does not seem to make sense to you, you can propose alternative methods/explanations to reassure them. If the protein level of gene X is important in your study, and you haven't shown that the level is consistent between conditions or whatever it is that the reviewer is hoping to verify, it seems you have to do something about it.
After that, the editor decides. The paper can be rejected for any reason they see fit; that's their job, after all.

A referee can recommend rejection for a number of random reasons.  The point is that the editor has judged the argument to be reasonable and have merit, whether you yourself judge the argument to be reasonable and have merit.
You can reply to the editor arguing that the argument of the referee are not important, but it seems to me the editor has shown their hand already.  Thus, it would appear that you are out of luck with that journal.

What about the question tells you what the editor thinks?

@AnonymousPhysicist the editor did accept the referee report, else it would not have been communicated to the authors, or at least the editor would have commented to the authors.

I do not believe that an editor would choose not to send a report to authors.  I think editors would only very rarely criticize a referee.

@AnonymousPhysicist we believe differently.   In this case, it is clear the editor choose to give approximately equal weight to both reports and therefore de facto endorsed the objections of referee 2. It is always the prerogative of an editor to seek a third opinion if they are confronted with a split decision from two referees, and in this case the editor chose not to do this.  Although not stated explicitly by the OP, the outcome appears to be that acceptance depends on satisfying referee 2, an outcome that any competent editor would recognize.

@AnonymousPhysicist an editor would indeed rarely criticize a referee, at least through correspondence with authors or other referees in the process.  Better for the editor to see another referee and provide a third perspective, and overrule referee 2 if a third party agreed with referee 1.  But of course in this case the editor chose NOT to do this.


text:
Can i publish a book chapter independently?
My question is can I publish a book chapter independently? I have completed my PhD and currently I am not enrolled anywhere, in this case can I publish it without approval of guide or institution?

Is a book chapter published on its own still a chapter?

You are not bound by any permissions. The Ph.D. thesis is your work and you have the copy-right. You might want to consider involving your Ph.D. advisor, because publishing papers even when based on Ph.D. thesis chapters is not trivial, but you have no obligation. In some disciplines (like mine / CS) it is customary to have the super-visor as a co-author, but this is not a requirement.

There are cases where the university owns the thesis copyright, see https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/37796/17254


text:
Best practices to manage the workflow with your thesis committee (Ph.D.)?
I am doing my Ph.D. in the Social Sciences and I am reflecting on how to optimize the workflow with my thesis committee (three advisors) in the implementation of feedback on chapters or papers. I understand this is a matter of negotiating between us. However, it would be useful for me to hear your experiences and how you perceive the pros and cons you see of each approach.
For example, if I write a draft, I could:

Send the draft to the first advisor, receive and implement their feedback, then send the edited draft to the second advisor, and so on. I imagine this would slow down the process considerably and would require many more rounds of editing.
Send the draft to the first advisor, receive their feedback, then send the draft with the first advisor’s comments to the second advisor (if the first advisor agrees), and so on with the third. This would allow each committee member to have an idea of the other members’ feedback and possibly react to it directly (agreeing, disagreeing, building on it).
Send the draft individually, at the same time, to the three committee members. I have heard of people doing that and then sending them an overview of everyone’s comments, and the way they intend to implement them, as if they were peer reviewers. This would allow me to send out the draft to the three advisors at the same time.

How did you manage this during your Ph.D., and which were the pros and cons of your approach?

Are the three advisors in the same department at the same institution?

No, two of them are in the same institution but in different departments, whereas one is in a different institution altogether. They do not interact in their day-to-day life.

I think approach 3 is the only viable one -- that is, always sending your work to all three advisors at the same time -- and a regular schedule might help ("I'll send you some thesis work on the first Monday of every month, and if you give me some feedback I hope to incorporate it within a month or two").
With any of the other approaches, you risk any one advisor becoming the bottleneck on your writing process. Your advisors will be very busy people and they will often delay giving you feedback (unfortunately). By soliciting their advice in parallel, you should have at least one opinion to work on at any one time.
Don't worry about second-order "What does Advisor X think about Advisor Y's opinion?" questions. Your thesis is your thesis and it is ultimately your responsibility to produce the original knowledge it will contain. Your advisors' opinions of each other are their responsibilities, not yours.
(Indeed, in the unlikely and unfortunate event that they become hostile to each other over your thesis, that will be a further argument for asking them all "in parallel" for their feedback. If you are always working on Advisor X's feedback and then sending the results to Advisor Y, but they disagree, you are setting yourself up for repeated unpleasant interactions. Soliciting and receiving their feedback in parallel means you should be free to work on either, both, or neither comment, as you choose.)

Very helpful answer, thanks a lot!

May I suggest option (4), which is really a variation of option (3):

Use an online tool to write your drafts (Overleaf if you are using Latex, something like Sharepoint or Office 365 if you are using MS Word), and give all your advisors access. This way, people will always read the current version, and every decent tool like this has the option for multiple people to comment, and for everybody to see each other's comments in realtime. Note that you still need to inform your supervisors when you specifically want feedback and on what, even when everybody has access to your draft you should not assume that they are just constantly monitoring your writing.

Options 1 and 2 slow you down too much, and option 3 is honestly kind of obnoxious for your supervisors (knowing that they are likely spending time on feedback that two other people are also giving).

Going a bit beyond the actual scope of the question, with three supervisors in different places you really should think and discuss a lot more about your supervision process and the different roles of your three advisors, to the extent that this question may become redundant altogether. Since I am not in the social sciences I cannot say what typical supervision roles would be, but you and your team should be in agreement whose job it is to provide day-to-day coaching on writing, who watches the "big picture", who scrutinises your method, etc. etc. The danger with a large, disjoint supervision team and no explicit discussion of roles is that everybody assumes the other people are supervising you anyway, and that they can lean back.

I also have another option...
I work in the sciences with large teams, sending each version of a paper around all authors is generally infeasible, especially when working with new researchers who will need a lot of feedback and revisions to get the writing to a good standard.
So for each section there should be a single person who gives feedback on the early drafts.  Only once this person is satisified that the paper is ok, do we send it round the other authors for feedback and/or approval. This cuts down the amount of work for everyone considerably.
For some students it's the same first person for all their chapters/papers, for others we split the work amongst the supervisory team, with each person taking the sections they have the strongest affinity for.


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How do you frame hypothesis where independent variable is categorical and dependent variable is continuous in social science?
A question on academic writing in social science research.
How do you frame hypothesis where independent variable is categorical and dependent variable is continuous?
In my specific case, i am interested to research if robo-analyst (Some sort of AI/automatic analyst) investment recommendations is profitable. The independent construct is 'analyst types' and the dependent variable is 'recommendation performance'.
Currently what i have is the following:
Do Robo-Analyst analyst type relate positively to recommendation performance ?
But i am not sure if it is correct.
Thanks !

I’m voting to close this question because I think it's a question about statistics not academia, which belongs here: https://stats.stackexchange.com/

There is a difference between a research question and a hypothesis.You need both. What you proposed is a question, as there is a question mark at the end. What I miss here is the reference: Compared to who are the robo-analyst better? Compared to all humans, compared professional humans?
A hypothesis is a possible answer to (a part of) the research question. You base it on your theory. If the theory you presented is true, then the answer should be ... It is a statement, not a question. At the end of your project you can say that that statement is supported or not supported by your research. If it is, then that is counted as evidence supporting the underlying theory, and if it is not, then that is counted as evidence against the underlying theory.

Thank you Maarten. Yes, the reference is versus human analyst. Actually i wanted to test 2 hypothesis, (1) Whether the robo-analyst performance is positive stand-alone  (2) Whether the robo-analyst is better than human.
I think i know how to frame hypothesis part 2. i am stuck how to frame part 1 as a hypothesis statement. If you could enlighten me, i will be highly appreciative. thanks !

I think the problem you have is that 1) is too general. If you refine the term "positive" with something more specific like "make a profit", or something more appropriate for your exact research problem, then it would become easier.


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Should a "good" Ph.D. student still get some strong supervision?
I am getting closer to the end of Ph.D. studies and in some months I expect to stop the research to seriously work on the thesis. My supervisor has two other students working on slightly different fields than mine. He is involved in many projects and loves to help other people.
I think he trust me deeply, sometimes he tells me about his issues with his other students/people he is following and when I have chance to attend their seminars I understand that they require much more supervision than I do.
We keep talking, off course, but in the last months he welcomed every my initiative without critics. I prepared three conference papers and he basically only corrected few typos, while other people gave me more constructive comments (together with compliments) that boosted the quality of the papers. Getting closer to my defense I would expect a bit "stronger" supervision, maybe some suggestions on how to polish my work. Overall, I am still a student, not an independent researcher. I am worried that at a certain point he may examine my work with more attention, spotting some bad holes and that this may happen too late to properly fill them.
This doubt is stressing me quite much and I think that is also starting to have some negative impact on my productivity. Should I somehow address this issue to him?

So many people ask variations of this same question. You have doubts and would like the engage your adviser for more/closer attention. You seem to indicate a good working relationship with this adviser. Yet you hesitate. Set up a time and talk to her. You've enough stress as it is. Don't let 'should I or not' add to it. She is there in order to advise you. Let her fulfill her de facto purpose.

You seem to have a very good relationship with your supervisor. Have you tried bringing this up with him?

The fact that you are running your draft papers past people capable of making constructive comments, and that you are using those comments to boost the quality of the papers, tends to support your supervisor's trust in your ability and judgement.

Some advisors have a style of viewing supervision the same way ER doctors look at treatment. The key word is triage. Where there's a need to make things okay, he/she will be there. My advisor had the same viewpoint as he was very busy with other work and saw our meetings more as a checking-in as a friend than supervision.  I thought that when all the other students graduated, he'd give me the same amount of time as they got, but that was untrue. He continued with the same amount.
I asked him about this at the end, and he just said there weren't many crises (there was exactly one, in which he met me within 8 hours to make a game plan with me). Rest assured that your advisor probably is allowing you to create your own research programme and become independent earlier than usually scheduled. This will help your letter from him. From having more of a mentoring friend instead of being strongly supervised, I had an easy transition to postdoc, which is basically how your advisor is treating you now. In my fourth year, I felt almost abandoned. A year into my postdoc, I see that my advisor was the best advisor I could have asked for.
Seems like you're doing great as an independent researcher and your advisor will give you his input if needed but is curious what you'll come up with on your own. A loose leash is a good thing if you're self-motivated.

You most definitely still need strong supervision, it is just that the type of supervision that you need is shifting.  From what you have written, it sounds like you are following a very typical trajectory for a strong graduate student.
Early on, you needed help at a technical level, in order to building basic research skills.  Now, however, you need coaching on how to make the transition from student to independent researcher.  Learning self-assessment as a researcher and having a reasonable degree of confidence in your self-assessment (not too high or too low) are important skills to develop in the range from late graduate school through postdoc and early PI years.
You speak about worrying that your advisor will spot bad holes in your work.  Where do you think they might be?  If you reflect carefully, I am certain that you will find that your feelings are not uniform across your work, but that there are some parts that you are more confident or less confident about.  This judgement is something that is important for you to build skill and confidence in, and will also help you to ask for help in a more focused and effective manner (e.g., "Can you check my narrative in Section 3" or "I'm a little worried about this part of this proof").
This is something that is totally reasonable for you to ask for help with from your advisor.  To do this, I would recommend that you shift from asking for a general "review all of this work" to instead asking for a second opinion on your judgement of which things are reasonable to worry about and which are under control.  It's also entirely reasonable to get feedback from other mentors and peers, not just now but throughout your career: more perspectives are often better, especially as you are preparing to leave the nest and fly on your own.

Excellent answer. I have found this in my own development as a researcher. In the beginning, my supervisors were telling me what I needed help with, but now I know what I need help with, so I ask them to focus on specific areas. Also, even if you know you're doing OK in a particular area, you can still ask for help. For example, my writing skills are solid, and I've learned the basics of academic writing. But writing is especially important to me; I'm always trying to improve. My supervisors know this, and spend more time reviewing my papers than they otherwise would feel the need to do.


text:
Researchers nowadays communicate via screens, not papers. LaTeX is not the right tool to write for screens. Why is it still the go-to for writing?
Web format is interactive, easily to read on the phone, and the editors are as WYSIWYG like Word, but as customizable as LaTeX. Learning HTML/JS is much more useful than learning LaTeX. (Searching HTML/JS in Google yields 1080 M results, while LaTeX yields 780 M results.) You can archive, version and index a webpage like any PDF file. If one wants to have everything in one file, then webpages can do that. In fact that's what PDF does: compress multiple files into one file. If the medium is computer screens, then I only see it has advantages over using PDF.
I know that we still need to use paper as the medium here and there (we call papers as papers, not files), but isn't that only in that case that we should learn typesetting system? If the author doesn't care what medium the intended audience will read on, then why not using web format, as I think it is more popular these days? If the readers only need to read it in papers for some reasons (like it's better for their brains to read and write with pen and paper) and actually doesn't care about beautiful styling, then the print command is enough for that.
Or is it just that the new medium needs more time to widely adopted? In that case can we expect that more journals will accept web format submission in the future? Or if not, then what makes us expect that the intended audience will read the papers on paper?

Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion may be removed.

It's not clear to me why this question is so heavily downvoted. If you disagree with OP's sentiment, then write or upvote an answer explaining why. I think the question itself is reasonable and within the scope of this message board.

I think your primary assumption, that LaTeX compiled to PDF is unsuitable for screens, is just wrong.
Instead of asking why authors should not use web format if they don't care what medium content is read in, ask yourself if authors really should not care what medium content is read in. In my opinion, both as an author and reader, they should!
Remember that papers do not just exist to contain results but also to present them. In this regard, for example, it makes quite a difference if the key comparison of two plots is presented side-by-side, top-bottom, single-page... or arbitrarily strewn throughout prose. There are many visual parts in a paper - even formula heavy ones - and their readability and impact depends on the layout.
In that regard, being inflexible and unresponsive is not a deficiency for papers, it is a feature. Raw web content is notorious for having looks somewhere between beautiful and unreadable depending on the device. Making proper responsive cross-platform pages is a time-consuming art in its own right. Heck, reading improperly responsive, improperly cross-platform content is time consuming!
Avoiding that effort by simply enforcing a well-defined layout for everyone is an efficient and effective solution.

At the end of the day, people writing documents from source will be using a typesetting markup language. Regardless whether they are using "web technology", many scientists will need something like LaTeX anyway. There's KaTeX, there's MathJax, there's whatever MS Office uses and they all look like LaTeX. Even if you use HTML/JS, or Markdown, or Jupyter, you will still use something very much like LaTeX.
For many scientists, learning LaTeX isn't some huge extra effort. It's something they have to do anyway.

"For most scientists, learning LaTeX [is] something they have to do anyway." Citation needed. There are other sciences besides physics and computer science. You said "At the end of the day, people will be using a typesetting markup language" but then you talk about math typesetting. Those are different things, and even fewer scientists typeset equations.

@AzorAhai-him- True, I've made the statement on scope less general. FWIW, I would claim that many typesetting systems are conceptually similar (in the sense of "you learn programming, not language X") but indeed outside of equations this quickly becomes more abstract than concrete.

Ok, but by "people will be using a typesetting markup language" do you mean "... to typeset equations"? Most people I know write their papers in Google Docs or Word without touching a "typesetting markup language"

As a scientist with equations in almost every paper I've written, I have yet to use anything other than a WYSIWYG document creation program. Usually msword, and there usually with whatever equation tool is bundled with it.  I would put forward the hypothesis that THAT and NO learned markup language is the default and dominant condition.  I also expect any publisher to have a web format and PDF format display of my papers, without me doing my own markup. 99% of the time this expectation has been correct in the past 20 years. I mean, they need to use those fees for something.

I agree that being forced is also a feature. That's basically what WYSIWYG or type system does. Beside size, position or font, there are also browser engine and language version to consider. Different browser engines can result in different layouts and renderings. And if HTML/JS has a new version, then you have to update the browser engine if you want new syntax be supported. Whereas if TeX has a new version, you don't have to update your PDF reader.

Nevertheless, I think theoretically we can have a standardized engine, and in your document you can specify what elements you want to be laid out and rendered exactly as you wish (I'll coin the term What-You-See-Is-What-I-See), and what elements the readers (and their browsers) can freely decide to display (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Decide). It's possible that there is one already. Do you think it also satisfies this need?

@Ooker There is a widespread What-you-see-is-what-I-see standard. It is called PDF.

@TimRias I know. It's just that HTML is also widespread and I think theoretically can be made WYSIWIS as well.

@Ooker Theoretically maybe, but after decades of people trying, I think it is safe to conclude that is a pipe dream.

@TimRias can you elaborate on why is that?

Several major commercial publishers (e.g., Springer, Elsevier) do publish both PDF and HTML versions of articles, so the end format is either.

I know that we still need to use paper as the medium here and there (we call papers as papers, not files), but isn't that only in that case that we should learn typesetting system?

The need to learn typesetting programs such as LaTeX is field specific.
Furthermore, the need to learn LaTeX can be circumvented by learning markdown-based languages like R Markdown or Quarto.
Both of these can be compiled to many outputs such as HTML, ePub, PDF, and MS Office formats.

If the author doesn't care what medium the intended audience will read on, then why not using web format, as I think it is more popular these days?

I would challenge this assumption.
Popular among who?
Web developers? Data scientists? Academics? The general public?
Most non-academics I know use Word and even most academics in my field use Word to write documents.

Or is it just that the new medium needs more time to widely adopted? In that case can we expect that more journals will accept web format submission in the future? Or if not, then what makes us expected that the intended audience will read the papers on papers?

I encourage you to push your envelope and expand your horizon.
Specifically, explore how other people publish who do not follow the traditional methods.
Tools like Quarto allow people to write in one language and compile to many other languages.
Examples include

R for Data Science that is both an author hosted website and a Book from O'Reilly Press
Python for Data Analysis that is both an author hosted website and a Book from O'Reilly Press
Modern Dive that is both an author hosted website and book from CRC Press
Many other book coauthored by Hadley Wickham that are listed on his website
The Quarto GitHub repo for journal articles
The rticles package for R Markdown

For your last question:

Why aren't more papers written in web format?

How do you know how papers are written?
You only see the output from the journal.
Most people I know and work with use MS Word.
This is neither a web format nor a typesetting program.
Personally, I try to use Quarto.
Most mathy people I know use LaTeX.

I understand why people prefers a low learning curve, WYSIWYG program like Word. But when the project is complex and they have to pick a programming language to learn, then assuming the effort to learn is the same, then why not choosing a more popular, more interactive, and intended for screens? I haven't looked closely at Quarto, but at the face of it I would put it in the same basket with webpage. Jupyter is the same: interactive and intended for screens, not papers. (I agree using "webpage" limits my options)

Quarto is a Markdown-based language that can go to HTML or PDF simply by changing one line of code for most files. Also, Quarto can use Jupyter Notebooks as input files.

Also, I would challenge this view "then why not choosing a more popular, more interactive, and intended for screens?". Popular among who? academics or the general population?

So is it valid to put Quarto in the same basket with webpage? As for the latter, I don't think that matters, because I think the answer is both: popular among academics and general population. And even there is a set of people that it's not popular, then the popular point is not as important as the points about interactive and intended for screens

Yes. Look at the home page: Quarto does both interactive websites as well as print formats https://quarto.org/ one quote notes Publish collections of documents as a blog or full website. Create books and manuscripts in both print formats (PDF and MS Word) and online formats (HTML and ePub). Another quotes notes Engage readers by adding interactive data exploration to your documents using Jupyter Widgets, htmlwidgets for R, Observable JS, and Shiny.

"and they have to pick a programming language to learn" Who does, for what?

@AzorAhai-him- who has complex documents that using Word is inefficient? And they do this for the job of writing them?

@Ooker writing things like theses, dissertations, books, and the like can be hard with Word. Historically, it would crash with large files. Depending upon the equations and cross referencing, Word also does not work well, although Word now includes LaTeX equations. Lastly, the legal field often still uses Word Perfect (see this review of the software https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/corel-wordperfect-office).  The review also lists cause where the author uses Word Perfect rather than Word.

@Ooker I'm sorry, I don't understand either of your sentences.

@AzorAhai-him- I mean people who has complex documents that using Word is inefficient has to pick a programming language to learn

@Ooker Yet, most people do just fine with Word.

@AzorAhai-him- I know. They are not in my scope

@Ooker But they are, you said "researchers" ... not "researchers who use LaTeX."

@AzorAhai-him- yes, I should have been more specific on the scope

There are a few reasons that a publisher might consider and that would make HTML a worse choice than print or pdf.
One is that it is difficult in html to specify pages and citations often rely on pages. Is a page a screen? Does a page take many screens?
Another is the publisher gives up a lot of control over presentation to the browser that presents, and interprets, the html. Browsers might insert ads, for example. The publisher wants full control, rather than deferring to decisions of another entity, such as the browser creator or a web service provider.
Printing pdf to paper is usually more predictable than printing html pages.
Many browsers will support useful presentation of pdf, of course, and still preserve publisher interests.

HTML representations are often quite messy with all sorts of ancillary files and folders (see what you get when you save a journal paper in HTML view from the journal website). A PDF is packaged up nicely to be one file in a consistent format.

@JonCuster One thing I like about Quarto documents are that the HTML files can be compiled to be self-contained.

@JonCuster you can simply compress it into one file. In fact that's what PDF does

PDF has now been around for 30+ years, an open format for 15. It likely will be around in another 30 or more given the widespread adoption across many areas. Almost anything can make PDFs (at worst through a ‘printer’ driver). It isn’t going away. It just works.

it is difficult in html to specify pages and citations often rely on pages. – In HTML you can anchor a heading, and hover the information for citation. Is a page a screen? Does a page take many screens? – Well, you can set it however you like. This very web page take multiple screens, for example. Browsers might insert ads – The same argument can be applied to PDF as well. PDF readers might insert ads (lots of them!).

The publisher wants full control, rather than deferring to decisions of another entity, such as the browser creator or a web service provider. – You can send them the source code, be it webpage or LaTeX, and they can control the content and style as their wish.

Printing pdf to paper is usually more predictable than printing html pages. – My counter-argument is the second paragraph in the question: except that the intended audience is expected to read on well-designed papers, then there is no strong motivation to use LaTeX. The authors can use whatever technology that is convenient for them, and I argue that webpage is usually more convenient. Many browsers will support useful presentation of pdf, of course, and still preserve publisher interests. – Good point. You can read a pdf in a web browser, but you can't read a webpage in a PDF reader.

One of the main reasons that TeX (and its off shoots) are so popular in math heavy subjects like physics of mathematics, is that provides a robust, flexible way of reliably typesetting mathematical equations. So far this is the easiest (least inconvenient?) to use of various alternatives that have been introduced.
This is so much so that even in the web domain TeX is the go to tool for typesetting equations on the web. See an equation on Stack Exchange? It has been typeset using TeX. See a complicated equation on Wikipedia? It has been typeset in TeX. Same throughout the internet. And while integration of TeX equations in web formats using things like mathjax works, the typesetting can be a bit janky, especially when used inline. Consequently, when writing equation heavy texts, it makes sense to native write in a TeX derivative (only insane people still write in native TeX).

If your contention is that HTML is easier to write by hand than LaTeX, then I suggest that that is just not true. HTML was perhaps meant to, but in practice is not reasonably created by hand. It is definitely much harder to read than LaTeX sources, principally because of the lack of enclosing braces, using the <tag> ... </tag> style that is much more distracting to the eye.
One could perhaps, though to a lesser degree, level the same criticism on LaTeX. In the end, both should today be written with WYSIWYG editor, at which point the debate becomes pointless: If you're writing either in a WYSIWYG editor, what it outputs at the end no longer matters.
What is relevant, however, is that formulas are written in the fundamentally same way: MathJAX uses a syntax pretty similar to what LaTeX uses.

It seems that I mistake the syntax (LaTeX) and the engine (TeX) (see What is the difference between TeX and LaTeX?). I have no problem with using the LaTeX syntax. MathJax seems to be the best of both worlds: it converts the LaTeX syntax to HTML/JS

I think the answer is simply that LaTeX has a large network effect, and the benefit of interactiveness and responsiveness is small, making it still the dominant recommendation on writing complicate documents. Only when the interactiveness or responsiveness of the medium is necessary to convey the message that the authors have to use a non-LaTeX tool.
Food for thoughts:

The Network Effects Manual: 16 Different Network Effects (and counting)
What advantage does *TeX provide over modern tools like HTML+CSS+js?
Why books donʼt work
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

There are latex tools which allow responsiveness, see e.g. https://hint.userweb.mwn.de/hint/format.html


text:
Should diacritics be kept when citing a paper written in an abundant diacritics Latin-based script language?
Diacritics, or tone marks (as what they're called in my language), are symbols added to letters to change their sound. For example, diacritics for the letter a in my language can be ă, â, à, á, ả, ã, ạ, ắ, ẳ, etc.
What should I do with papers written in such language when citing them in an English context?
For example, the APA Style guide says:

Book/article titles and names written in Latin-based scripts (French, Spanish, German, etc.) can be cited with only minor adjustments.

My language (Vietnamese) uses Latin script, so logically, I should preserve the diacritics. However, I think the guideline is only aware of Western languages, which may not have so many diacritics. If I follow the guideline, the title of my work may be cited like this:

So sánh năng lượng liên kết tĩnh điện giữa các thể đột biến của protease HIV-1 khi liên kết với thuốc lopinavir (Compare the Electrostatic Energy between Mutants of HIV-1 Protease when binding to lopinavir)

Is there any problem if I keep the diacritics? I think the title will only be copy-pasted, so there is no big problem if I cite it like that. It may be hard for foreign readers to read, but I think they wouldn't care at all; there is a translation of it in the bracket anyway. A common practice is to "transliterate" it to a non-diacritic version, which can be typed in any unsupported keyboard, and that is readable to the native speakers. However, it will make a lot of adjustments, and regarding to the guideline, this should only be used for non-Latin scripts.
I choose the APA style because it is the first thing come up in my mind. I think other styles will recommend the same. Some other styles suggest that I just need to provide the translation, but that is the easy case.

Which typesetting system do you use? Word? InDesign? LaTeX/XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX? If it's LaTeX and friends, do you use BibTeX or biblatex to manage the process of generating the citation call-outs and formatted bibliographic entries?

I use Word/Scribus and LaTeX. I use Zotero to manage citations.

I have modified the title to include "Vietnamese" explicitly. Feel free to revert the edit if you disagree, but I think that in this case being specific helps the reader to understand better the situation, since few other languages have the same amount of diacritics.

@FedericoPoloni I'm not sure if it's really needed. My old title already had many diacritics in there. Why do you think it will make a difference?

I think it's easier to understand what you mean with the title in its current form, but that's just my personal judgment and I could well be wrong. Many Europeans will think French or a Slavic language when they read "many diacritics", but Vietnamese has truly many more, and as far as I know it is the only language with that many (and Latin script); so it is in a rather unique position. Also, it is a more explicit keyword that may appear in a search.

@FedericoPoloni well, how about other comparative adjectives, like excessive, abundant, plentiful? I know that it's pretty exceptional for a Latin script language that has, well, excessive diacritics, but I don't want the question to be too focused. Even someone trying to cite papers in other language can learn something here.

@NajibIdrissi lol, I didn't check the dictionary first. Perhaps abundant?

Nowadays, every sufficiently recent typesetting system is able to deal with diacritics. When submitting to journals, the real problem are the publishers' typesetters, who are -- at least in my experience -- frequently careless in copying letters with diacritics.
So, my advice is: keep the diacritics, as the style guides and common sense suggest, but check carefully the proofs received from the publisher.

will this advice work for names too?

@Ooker: Yes: I collaborated with authors whose names contain diacritical marks (e.g. ù, ò or ä) and papers were published with the proper marks. Also affiliations in my language can have diacritics (università for university). However, we had to correct the marks many times (typically the accent was in the wrong direction, e.g. é instead of è). It is worth noticing that many journals (e.g. those from IEEE) now support the publication of author names in the authors' native language (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, etc.) alongside their English versions.

And places too? For example most people only know Vietnam, not Việt Nam, or Ho Chi Minh City, not Hồ Chí Minh City. And what if I write a paper about pho, our traditional food? Should I use pho as everybody knows or use phở as its correct form? I think that once the word is known by many people, it starts losing its correct form regardless of modern typesetting. The word becomes an English word, and as long as we are writing in English context, we should use it as an English word.

But the title of a non-English paper does not become English in any way.

@Ooker: With place names, things might change to some extent, as there are sometimes English (w.l.o.g.) translations of those place names. Likewise, some food or other local items are translated (e.g. one would write "spring rolls" in an English text rather than "春卷"), and sometimes, that "translation" is merely an anglicized version of the original word. Whether to use the anglicized version or the original spelling depends mainly on whether the anglicized version is sufficiently wide-spread and well-known as a "native" English word, rather than swiftly made up by the author to avoid accents.

@Ooker: Without claiming that Wikipedia is authoritative in any way here, check out some page titles that IMHO reflect well how some place names have commonly anglicized "English" forms, whereas others (usually less well-known/smaller places) have no "native" English name and thus retain their original spelling - the article on Ho Chi Minh City is indeed titled without diacritics, whereas the article on Sečovlje does not remove the caron from the c.

@RemcoGerlich I know. The initial problem has been solved. I just want to broaden the topic. If I write my name in my CV with full diacritics, but the city and country I live in is not, because they are anglicized, then the readers will query why.

@O.R.Mapper nice explanation. Should we use Wikipedia to know which name is anglicized? And about non-Latin script languages like Chinese, after romanizing the word, there are still diacritics. Should we keep them or not?

@Ooker: The answer might be found in submission guidelines (though more often than not, no such details are covered in my experience), otherwise this is heading toward a new question of its own. Generally, WP may serve as a rough guideline, and as there isn't always a clear-cut answer in this topic, anyway, no absolute precision or reliability can or should be expected. Nonetheless, checking other sources, such as dictionaries, is a good idea.

@Ooker: for what it's worth, I'm starting to see "Viet Nam" as an anglicisation more than I ever used to. So not only is the answer to your broader question, "it depends", but the things it depends on also vary somewhat over time :-) Probably Việt Nam is becoming more recognisable/acceptable to English-speakers over time, but right now it's rare-to-nonexistent in English text. I would expect it's almost universally comprehensible, at least.

@SteveJessop as a Vietnamese, I hardly see that Việt Nam is becoming popular. And I think it is best for the word to be Vietnam, so that it will get agree with Vietnamese


text:
MSc. Eng. thesis - Failed experiment - How to put it in the thesis?
I'm currently writing a thesis. I'm simulating a problem using CFD model. The model has been validated by using it to investigate similar problem with known results. The model vs. experimental results are showing good consistency.
As for my problem, I've modeled it and I've got the results.
I've spent few weeks designing, building and testing the experimental equipment but I've concluded the experimental equipment must be rebuilt using different components and I don't have time.
So, where in the paper do I report the failed experiment and how do I put it in words that it failed?
Here is the main structure of my paper.
1: Introduction
2: Literature Review
3: Method.
3:1 Model observation
3:2 Experimental observation
4: Results and discussion
4:1 Model validation
4:2 Problem Results (Here I was going to compare model vs. experiment)
4:3 Discussion
5: Conclusion and future work.

Did you get results that differ from the model, or can you not get any results at all?

I couldn't get any sensible results. The equipment is vibrating allot which have direct effect on the sensors and data acquisition. The equipment is partially controlled by motors which doesn't seem to have enough torque and the motor is changing position when load is applied. As for the force sensor I was allocated, it's just unfavorable for this kind of measurements (Weak tolerance for momentum which is unavoidable in this case).

If you have not already done so, still have access to the experimental setup, and have time, try to quantify as much as possible. How much torque does the motor supply? How much is needed? Vibration amplitude and frequency?

You need a slight mental twist. Your experiment was not a failure. The purpose of an experiment is to ask the real world a question, and unexpected answers from the real world are at least as interesting as ones you expected.
The question you asked the real world was "Does this experimental set-up work for Problem X?". The short answer to the question, based on your experiments, is "No". Of course, you will go into a lot more detail in your thesis.
The early sections of your thesis will be much the same as they would have been if you had got the results you expected.
In 4:2, you describe your tests of your experimental set-up. To the extent that you got results at all, you do compare them to the model.
In 4:3 you discuss what you learned from building and testing your experimental equipment. If you are getting different results from model and experiment, you need to discuss why the model is more reliable than the experiment. One learns more from unexpected results than from expected ones, so this section will be richer and more interesting than it would have been if you had got the results you expected.
Your question contains the outline for "Conclusion and future work", easily identified through the keyword "concluded":

I've concluded the experimental equipment must be rebuilt using
  different components

The conclusion is that the equipment you built is not suitable for your problem. The future work is to rebuild it using different components. Again, you need to go into a lot more detail. What aspects of your set-up were unsuitable? Why do you think particular changes might improve it?


text:
When receiving an answer to a question do you respond with thank you?
When I don't understand something in a lecture or think I found a mistake I send professors emails, if it is not possible for me to ask the question after class. Do you send a thank you email after receiving the answer?
I don't know if this is relevant at all, but I study at a German university.

I apply the manners I was taught by my parents - so do many of my students, they send a short email saying thank you...

Honestly, I prefer not to get such mails. And I seldom send them to people I know unless there is some other content also. If I'm helpful to someone I assume they are thankful. If it wasn't helpful, we continue the conversation.

I like the "thank you" as it confirms 1) they received it and (probably) read it, 2) they can add that it now works for them.

In terms of etiquette, yes. A simple "Thank you sir/mam" helps acknowledge their response. The alternative is to say the thank you to them when you meet them the next day.
Reason: Unacknowledged conversations tend to leave a doubt in anybody's mind about whether the response was useful to the recipient or not. Certain people tend not to reply to an email if they were offended or if an email didn't help them. So in the same way we were taught it is good manners to say "thank you", it helps to do the same via an email.

Thanks for the answer. I thought some email that contained no information would be seen as rude. Now I get it:)


text:
Is it worth doing a 'Pipe Leak Detection' PhD (industrywise)?
I have been offered a PhD opportunity in a UK university and the topic is 'Pipe Leak Detection (using acoustic waves)'.
My question is, is it worth doing a PhD in this area considering the industrial opportunities available for such area of expertise?
** the research is co-funded by the UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR), but I am not sure (at the moment) about the possibility of joining them after the PhD.
Could someone with relevent expertise or someone working in the field advice me or drop some comments. I really appreciate it, thanks in advance for all.

One hint: think about other applications of the work. If you know a lot about how waves move in fluids, for example, then you can also look for interesting research jobs in sonar and oceanography, among other fields. That's a big hammer that can hit many nails. But if you are just a glorified technician on leaky pipes, then you're really taking a big gamble that you'll be able to get a whole career working on exactly that same problem. In other words, a very specialized hammer that can only hit one nail. Sometimes this is an OK gamble, but other times no.

I think it sounds awesome.  Huge connection to industry, society.  Both directly with the method and then tangentially with pipes in general (water, oil, gas, sewage).  The basic things you do in acoustics, mechanics, fluid flow will be good training also.
And then the integrative learnings from putting a "fancy" technique onto a basic problem.  And this is whether it "works" or not (in terms of physical results or economic feasibility).  For you, it's all upside in the learning and the connections.
Jump on that thing.  Like yesterday!

Reads a lot like snark. Should it be flagged?

I actually mean it.  I know that sounds crazy to a pure academic.  But getting involved with something contrarian can be HUGE upside.  Instead of doing string theory, do something on Raman spectroscopy of fouled catalysts in a refinery.  you will still use/learn all kinds of physics.  And get both direct and indirect connections to industry, other scientific topics.  The scary thing...I'm not sarcastic.  I actually LIKE applied stuff, not just try to lie about it to get grants!

There's probably even learnings applicable to systems we're not even thinking of (medicine, blood vessels, refineries, etc.).  Think of how "grubby" time domain reflectometry sounds but how much application it has had, both directly and tangentially.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometry  And connections to deeper topics like spectral analysis.

OTOH, an extremely esoteric field can lead quite quickly to a professional dead end. Studying esoterica in the odd moments is a bit safer.

If you have a curious streak, you can find connections.  Maybe if you're a weaker student, it ends up being a dead end.  Because you lack the ability to extend the practical to the theoretical or move from physics to engineering. I am probably unconsciously biased because I think of people who can make those jumps...versus just moving down the straight path of number theory or whatever.  Actually...screw it...even for a weak student, there is benefit to being in this sort of applied area (the direct industry connect).  I MEAN IT when I say JUMP ON IT.

thanks all for your comments and really appreciate all the efforts, I am leaned towards YES now :), but sadly now the question is ON-HOLD :(