text:
Results that are too good to be true - peer review
So, I'm reviewing a medical study (open-label trial) that compares the efficacy of different drug doses on a patient population (heart failure). The study is arguably of low-quality, compared to the landmark trials that established the benefit of this drug in this population: low sample size (~100 compared to 2000), short follow-up duration (~3 months compared to 16 months), open-label and without placebo.
The results the authors report are too good to be true - the study arm that can be directly compared with previous trials on this topic (same population, same drug dose) had a 4 times greater reduction in NT-proBNP (heart failure biomarker) than in the original study! And remember! Only in 3 months compared to 16!
Furthermore, during previous peer review, another reviewer suggested that it is a study limitation that no markers of functional capacity were available (6-minute walk test), and the authors just included it, seemingly out of thin air! (It wasn't previously mentioned in the methodology of the study).
Another indication that their data is falsified is that they report that all their measured variables were normally distributed - in my experience with similar variables, they are normally log-normal, not outright normal! (Although there is no proof that's always the case in literature).
The editor is seemingly hell-bent on publishing this paper, as it has undergone 4 rounds of review, and reviewers that reject it are being replaced one-by-one.
I know I can't reject this paper on the strong suspicion of foul play - what is the right way to tackle this?
EDIT: Thank you for your responses and comments. The authors ascribe the discrepancy to a different sample make-up, but it's (subjectively) too great to be simply due to the sample composition. As for anonymity, it didn't occur to me initially - I'll try to maintain enough ambiguity as to prevent a breach of blinding.

In case it gets published, you should raise your concern about the then-published paper on PubPeer.

Do the authors try to explain the discrepancy between their results and the older ones? If so, is their explanation reasonable? If not, shouldn't they?

Maybe share this with a senior colleague and see how/what they think/feel too...

Since you are (presumably) reviewing the paper anonymously, you should also anonymize your identity here.

"Furthermore, during previous peer review, another reviewer suggested that it is a study limitation that no markers of functional capacity were available (6-minute walk test), and the authors just included it, seemingly out of thin air! (It wasn't previously mentioned in the methodology of the study)." This just seems like poor writing, the other issues aside?

As it's been said many times on here, you do not reject or accept the paper, you only make a recommendation to the editor.

"reviewers that reject it are being replaced one-by-one." Are you sure that this is a reputable journal? Sounds to me like one of these "author-friendly" scam journals (MDPI, IEEE Access etc.)

You do not have to conclude that the data has been falsified to conclude that the data is unreliable and unconvincing.  "Falsified" data implies conscious intent which is something that you cannot determine from your position.  However, you can make a judgement as to whether the data seems good or not.  IN SHORT, JUDGE THE PAPER AND IT'S CONTENTS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

If you can see the authors' names, do some investigation into their financial ties. I once reviewed an intervention trial where the lead author did not disclose that they were the lead science officer for the company manufacturing the intervention, and a little sleuthing revealed that... which, along with a bunch of sketchy stuff in the manuscript itself, was enough to recommend rejection.

"Too good to be true" Do you mean this with respect to the conclusions of the paper, or with respect to the data?  In a sample of coin flips size 100, it is not entirely unlikely to get fewer than 40 heads, even if the coin is fair.  On this note, if you'd like to bolster your argument, you should take a CI from this n=2000 study, and compute the probability of getting a sample "far" from the range of the "better" study.  If the value for this new study is "far" from the other study in this sense, then you can support a claim that "one or the other of these studies is broken".

Thanks everyone for your input. I will not go into further detail as to the journal so as to maintain the anonymity of the peer review process. That said, rest assured that if it was a predatory-style minor journal I would not have given the matter that much thought.
@Him The paper has a number of troubling points - for one, the data is indeed very positive. Furthermore, the authors were able to procure data from diagnostic methods that were not mentioned in the methodology when asked for by previous reviewer. This is highly irregular for a prospective randomized study.

"Another indication that their data is falsified is that they report that all their measured variables were normally distributed" - are they? Did authors provided the raw data (open science) in supplementary materials, or just some plots?
Had been the study preregistered somewhere?
Mind that there is an alternative (to data falsification) explanantion of a marker "included of thin air": authors measured many parameters and published only the significant ones. HARKing and p-value fishing is still a scientific misconduct.

@abukaj In the Methods section, the authors state that all normally distributed variables are reported as mean+SD, while non-normally as median (IQR) - this is standard in medical literature. Even though the authors were specifically asked by previous reviewers to double check whether ALL parameters are normally distributed, they kept them the same.
As for the newly procured methods, this may be a plausible - although still unethical - explanation!

If authors provided neither raw data nor the criterion used to determine distribution normality, it may be just their arbitrary feeling... Is the reported mean less than sd or 2sd? For values that by definition are nonnegative that may be an indicator of a right skewed distribution, thus possibly log-normal. I have just run 1000 numerical simulations of sampling 100 log-normally distributed values. The maximal ratio of mean to sd was 1.33 (the minimal was 0.35).

"The editor is seemingly hell-bent on publishing this paper, as it has undergone 4 rounds of review, and reviewers that reject it are being replaced one-by-one." Replaced as in fired, or as in taken off this particular review?

@Acccumulation: Presumably they're being taken off the review, as reviewers are generally asked to volunteer to review a paper.  For example, if you were recognized as an authority on X, then an editor considering a paper on X might email you to ask you to review that paper.

In a comment on @Buffy’s answer, you wrote:

[…] my thinking is that it would be wrong to reject these researchers purely on the suspicion of falsified data - after all, I could be wrong.

There is a misconception here that is worth pointing out. The key thing to remember that it is fully the authors’ burden to convince you that the research is correct in order for you to recommend acceptance of their paper; it is not your burden to prove that some suspected flaw you are perceiving is real before you are allowed to recommend rejection. In other words, rejection should be the default decision for any research that doesn’t meet high standards of rigor and  address any reasonable criticism that might occur to a referee. So for example, if you thought there was a 25% probability the research results were unreliable and a 75% probability they were correct, then recommending rejection (or at least a revise and resubmit to allow the authors to fix the flaws you are pointing out) would be the correct decision, even though it would still be the case that “after all, you could be wrong”.
Following this logic, if the results really seem too good to be true, then it’s up to the authors to convince you that they aren’t too good to be true, by increasing their sample size, shoring up any methodological deficiencies you point out, and/or rebutting your critique about normal versus log-normal distributions. Consider giving them the chance to do so.
Being skeptical does not mean you are saying the results definitely aren’t correct, you are simply saying you’re unconvinced and that you don’t think the paper should be published until it can more rigorously defend the claims it is making. As @Buffy said, simply state your honest opinion — that is precisely your duty as a reviewer.

+1 The fact that this seems to be medical research makes the application of this logic really important.  There could be someone's life at the end of this chain.

@StephenG Though in this case, any competent medical decision would be through a meta analysis (formal or informal) that would consider previously published results as well, and weight them more heavily according to sample size and study design quality.

@BryanKrause Medical research (or practice) is not my field however you'll forgive my cynicism that (IMO) there are medical decisions made without the proper or even reasonable oversight, often driven by wishful thinking or management goals.  But I take your point.

+1 all research is like this. The authors failed to convince you they weren't making shit up. Reject.

@StephenG Oh of course, I just meant to indicate the stakes are a bit lower for OP's situation than they might be feeling. Still definitely good to raise any concerns and be cautious with suspicious results, but even if the paper gets through that isn't the final "check" before patient care.

Wouldn't increasing their sample size after the fact be p-hacking?

@BryanKrause: StephenG is right. Numerous if not the vast majority of doctors make medical decisions based on very little actual scientific evidence. They rely on medical or pharmaceutical companies to make the decisions for them. Those in turn make decisions influenced by money. For instance, one doctor who was the head cardiologist in an established public hospital did not know that MRI could give superior cardiological imaging with less risks than a CT scan, and said so himself when I asked for MRI instead of CT scan, and yet he baldly asserted his 'expertise' to have the final say.

@Persistence: If you increase greatly the sample size (and your new sample does not include the old one), you minimize the risk of (accidental) p-hacking. In the first place, the very notion of confidence intervals is that you must expect ≈ 5% of scientific studies that find significance in some claim at 95%-confidence level to be wrong even if they all are scrupulously honest and scientifically careful.

@Persistence I don’t do experimental work so I’m not sure. But, to add to user21820’s answer, I think whether it can be interpreted as p-hacking depends on how you report on your results. If you increase the sample size and report that as a new experiment separate from the first one (which is still reported as before), with a completely new data analysis, then you are basically reproducing the experiment - that’s good and not p-hacking. By contrast, if you just add more data points but mix them in with the old ones, and replace the original analysis with a new one, then yes, that’s p-hacking.

Very insightful - I chose answer because I found the way our duties as peer reviewers are described most helpful.

@user21820 I like to use a horrifying truth disguised as a joke to illustrate this.  There is a small branch of medicine called "Evidence-based medicine," which, by its very existence, implies that all other medicine is NOT evidence-based

@DanRomik - Aye, if you treat it as a new data set then sure, if you just increment your sample size until you see something significant then you've got an issue

Say to the editor what you say here. You can't prevent the publication, but you can be honest. Even if there is no foul play, if the results are anomalous then there are probably methodological problems, such as sample size.
You can recommend rejection. If the editor publishes anyway and takes you off the list of reviewers, you are probably better off. Tell it like you see it. The responsibility is with the editor.

I was writing an answer very similar to this, but you have beaten me to it. +1

This was my first thought too, but my thinking is that it would be wrong to reject these researchers purely on the suspicion of falsified data - after all, I could be wrong. On the other hand, if this is paper is published and is indeed falsified, it would hurt the medical community as it could be included in meta-analyses that are then skewed in a false direction...

@AnastasiosTsarouchas Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.

@AnastasiosTsarouchas If the way the results of the paper are presented makes you doubt their correctness that seems to be enough reason to reject. But the entire point of reviewing is sharing your honest evaluation, even (or especially) if you suspect dishonesty. The rest is up to the editor.

I agree with this answer, just commenting to add that a good way to communicate this to the editor is to make use of the "confidential comments to editor" field that the review forms usually provide.

@AnastasiosTsarouchas Metaanalyses that include reports from shitty original papers inherit their shittiness.

@Karl "We found 42 peer-reviewed original papers on this topic but 18 were rated as shitty so we do not include them in this meta-analysis."

@silvado made my day :D

@silvado The problem is that this is almost never the case - the main results of most meta-analyses in medicine include even studies with very high possibility of bias, and then (usually) include a sub-analysis of only low-risk-of-bias studies.

''The editor is seemingly hell-bent on publishing this paper, as it has undergone 4 rounds of review, and reviewers that reject it are being replaced one-by-one.''
That's not your problem.  Recommend rejection for the reasons which you give here, and then it's the decision of the editor if they still wish to publish it.
Edit: I should add, try to be tactful with your comments and don't outright accuse the authors of misconduct, at least not in such a blunt way.  Even if you suspect foul play, you could be wrong.

And you might decide to no make further reviews for this editor or this journal.

I'm extremely uncomfortable with this answer. It's precisely because of this kind of response (just give your recommendations and then it's not your problem) that we keep seeing this repeat again and again, and according to the asker even for just this one paper. If instead it was made publicly known which journal this is, then reviewers will stop getting duped by the journal! After all, it looks like the journal knows the paper is problematic but has ulterior motive (sponsored?) to publish it, and so is trying to find scapegoats (i.e. those reviewers who accept it)!

Sorry, I don't really understand your comment.  What do you mean by reviewers ''getting duped'' by the journal?  How does ''the journal'' know that a paper is problematic, it is only the editor that accepts or rejects.  It can be made public knowledge that the editor is doing stuff which is not moral or has some strange ulterior motive, academia is a small world.

''It can be made public knowledge that the editor is doing stuff which is not moral or has some strange ulterior motive, academia is a small world.''  Although this might be problematic as seems to breach the theoretical anonymity of being a reviewer.

You can indeed

reject this paper on the strong suspicion of foul play

Tell the editors what you suspect and why. You need not prove that what you suspect is true.
If the paper is published you can comment publicly on it in any way you like without violating reviewer anonymity. You might tell the editor that you may (or will) do that, in hopes that they will take your critique seriously.
Unfortunately, once published it may be cited forever even if debunked.
Andrew Gelman's blog has much to say on this subject.
He responded to email saying

Interesting.  One thing that I didn't see in the thread is that every
paper will get published somewhere, if the authors want to get it
published.  So getting it rejected at journal A is no big deal; it
will still appear in journal B.  Or maybe it could make a difference,
if journal A is an attention-getter such as Jama, but otherwise not.

I try to never attribute to malice that which may be explainable through other mechanisms, and I don't think you need to say "I don't believe the data is real" here, especially in context of the point Trunk made.
However, you are asserting that there is a well-established literature, using solid methodology showing findings quite different from what the current authors are finding.  This places an extremely high burden on the authors to convince the referees that their methodology (statistical and otherwise) is correct, and that they've done all appropriate controls.
There are always serendipitous findings.  Perhaps the authors have really found something substantial about the difference between biomarkers at 3 months vs longer term, and that would merit publication.
For me, the discussion section would be key here.  How have the authors tried to explain the difference between their findings and earlier studies??  Are there other controls that need to be done?  Do they need to extend their findings out to 16 months to demonstrate that the biomarkers return to where the published lit would predict?  Why haven't they done that??
As I said, the required level of rigor that should be used when the data doesn't match the expectations of the literature is very, very high.  I can't tell you how many times I've seen authors run to the community with surprising findings, rather than trying to hunt down the artifact or confounder that really explains their results, and this may be one such case.
If the authors failed to convince you that they've employed the level of rigor required to confirm a result that disagrees with a well established literature, I'd recommend that you recommend rejection solely on that basis.  I'd most certainly avoid saying "I think they just made up the data" unless you're very sure that this is the case.  That's a charge of academic misconduct, which is very different from saying "I think your science sucks".

This to me seems like the best answer. The suspicion of misconduct don't even matter. The paper isn't up to scientific standards, even if the authors had only the truth at heart. More needn't be said

Instead of reviewing the paper you can reject it, which seems that you should do, you could try publishing a note somewhere debunking the study, or at least indicating the issues it has. Scientific criticism and responses are not as 'in' today, but there are ways to at least leave a trace--the easiest one being ResearchGate.
Another issue here is that it seems the publisher seems to have wrong incentives, which is a generator of problems such as the one you described here.

Sorry but reviewers should never do that.

@Buffy Once the paper is published the reviewer can do that  without saying they were a reviewer.

One of the advantages of open peer review is that reviewer comments get published alongside the paper for everyone to see. Probably ideal for this sort of problem.

@EthanBolker, seems like it would upset the editor, though, with possible blowback to the reviewer.

@Buffy An option is to resign from being a reviewer if negative reviews are getting sidelined.

Why is this answer so heavily downvoted when other answers with a few upvotes also suggest that the OP can criticize the work publicly if it is published? @Buffy, why can't reviewers criticize a work publicly after it is published? There is no need for the OP to reveal they were a reviewer.

@WaterMolecule it's not an appropriate recommendation to do right now - the qualifier "after it is published" is quite important here, and this answer does not mention it.

@Peteris To be absolutely fair, right now is also not mentioned by OP.


text:
Is it a good idea for a part-time post-grad to start an Academic CV?
As someone who returned (part-time) to academic pursuit in a different area a number of years ago, in which time I have completed my BA and now am in my first year of a MLitt, I am wondering is it a good idea to start to compile an academic CV? I am unsure as to if their would be any benefit of it for me, as a part time student, and at what point I should start to compile it.
At the moment in my own head the advantages are;

It may be of use in applying for funding.
I may need it if I wish to go on to future study
It would be good for myself to keep track of what I have achieved.

I have read a number of question on the site about what to put in a CV and realise that at the moment mine would be pretty sparse, as I have no publications, but my advisor has mentioned about me presenting at a conference and I have just applied for my first funding.
In general is it a case of everyone should keep an academic CV or do you just compile and tailor one when and if it is needed?

I am wondering is it a good idea to start to compile an academic CV?

Start as you mean to continue: it is certainly a good time to start keeping track of all of your academic achievements in a structured way. Later down the line, this will prove invaluable as you will have a record of all your presentations (with dates, slides, venue, etc.), all your publications (with venue, full-text pre-prints, maybe a .bib item), all your reviewing activity, all your visits, and so forth.
Otherwise the cost of trying to recall all these details later might be prohibitive and you might forget things. At the moment, you may be able to remember everything you've done, but trust me when I say that what you were doing four years ago can become hazy.
You could keep your record as a CV in LaTeX format or a database or an Excel file or a HTML homepage. Even a journal notebook would be preferable to nothing. Keep one format canonical so that you don't have to synchronise multiple versions. And keep back-ups!
Of these options, I would recommend a homepage. It helps your impact to have a public personal homepage where you list all the pertinent details of your research (and to link to it where you can, short of spamming). Also consider getting a personal domain: hosting homepages on work spaces is convenient, but there's a chance you might lose that space (and the associated links/ranking) if/when you move institute. If you get a personal domain, some soft advice is to get a .org ... they're more trendy in academia (otherwise .edu, etc.).
In any case, whatever version you keep canonical, get in the habit of keeping it up-to-date in a consistent style. Mapping the records to a CV format for specific purposes further down the line then becomes trivial enough.

Of course!
You are doing some great work now, right? You already have experiences, degree(s), awards, presentations, perhaps even publications. Create an academic CV now, and update at least every six months (I've been told I should update every quarter, but that usually doesn't happen.) As time goes on and you add new and better content, you will want to drop some of the items you now have.
I encourage students to create an academic CV as undergrads, because having an updated CV or resume is often necessary (or at least very handy) when applying for scholarships, conferences, or transfer institutions. Certainly it is not too early for you to begin your academic CV. Although you may not use it right now, you will find it a great advantage to have the framework in place when you need one, instead of having to begin from scratch. Also, you will be able to craft a stronger portrait of yourself as a scholar if the work is created over time. You will be able to refine and strengthen the original draft.

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text:
How to cite Kindle books/ebooks when no fixed page numbers are available?
I got the following info from the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide website in relation to citing Kindle books or ebooks.

If no fixed page numbers are available, you can include a section title or a chapter or other number.

I am wondering is there a preferred method of citing in this case?
I am history Mlitt student and have only recently started to use a kindle for research purposes. At the moment I use the loc (location) reference that is produced by the kindle in the notes text file you can download from it, that shows all your highlights/bookmarks, but I am confused as to the proper citation method as my supervisor queried if this was the standard way of citing a kindle. I have a copy of my history department style-sheet but it makes no reference to kindle editions.

In general, chapter is a more stable entity than page number (the later can, and most likely - will, change with every edition; a few times I was searching in a wrong place).

According to the APA blog, the location number is actually a bad idea because it has limited retrievability. The blog also mentions that since Kindle's third generation, e-books have started to have real page numbers, you may try looking into that.
Another post on apastyle.org suggests that for materials that are not paginated, consider citing chapter number or chapter heading plus paragraph numbers.

Thanks and yes, some of my newer e-books do indeed have page numbers. Older e-books are not so good at having page numbers.

So... the page numbers now even depend on the specific hardware I use to access an ebook. Wonderful, just wonderful.

@StephanKolassa Not only on the hardware. If you change the font size, the pages will be renumbered accordingly.

@RobertoBonvallet The Kindle page numbers don't depend on hardware or on font. They're done by mapping spots in the ebook to pages in a particular physical edition of the book; for books from Amazon, you can even see the ISBN number of the particular physical edition (so you know what edition of the printed book your page number corresponds to).

The reason for citing a page number is so the exact quote can be found in context. In an electronic book, one can just do a search and find the exact location faster than just looking for the page number in a traditional book, so I would say it is not necessary.
To provide a better idea of the context, you can cite the chapter and section.

As a reviewer, I would demand a specification of the precise place which you cite, some "search method" is simply not enough, no matter what.

If the paragraph is quoted, search in the electronic book is trivial. I would consider it enough. Note that citing the page number may vary between editions, so if you don't have the same one, the "exact place" may be mostly useless.

However, if you cite Remark 2 in §3.5.1, or just §3.5.1, it's fairly precise. Numbering of blocks should be consistent amongst all versions, xindle, print or a 105th version of print.

Yes, if the book provides that granularity, absolutely yes. I have only seen this in some mathematical books; but on the other hand I have never used technical history books.

I got a look at a copy of the Chicago manual at my college and the guidance in that is a lot clearer than it is on the web site where the whole manual is not available without a subscription.
The reason given for citing a electronic edition of a book is quite clear.

The majority of electronically published books offered for download
  from a library or bookseller will have a printed counterpart. Because
  of the potential for differences, however, authors must indicate that
  they have consulted a format other than print. This indication should
  be the last part of a full citation that follows the recommendations
  for citing printed books [...].

The manual further goes on to state that;

[...] electronic formats do not always carry stable page numbers (e.g., pagination may depend on text size), a factor that potentially limits their suitability as sources. In lieu of a page number, include an indication of chapter or section or other locator.

Further in the section it deals with unpaginated electronic sources in more detail.

For such unpaginated works, it may be appropriate in a note to include
  a chapter or paragraph number (if available), a section heading, or a
  descriptive phrase that follows the organizational divisions of the
  work. In citations of shorter electronic works presented as a single,
  searchable document, such locators may be unnecessary.

It seems form reading the manual that the following are the preferred methods of referencing;

Page number (where stable ones exist/some new kindle books match the
print edition)
Chapter or paragraph number
Section heading
descriptive phrase that follows the organizational divisions

If you want to cite in MLA; this blog recommends the following.

MLA 5.7.18 defines digital files as neither on the web or a published
  CD-ROM. MLA recommends citing a book on a digital device using the
  guidelines for citing a book but replacing the format type (Print)
  with the name of the digital file format, followed by the word "file.”
  For the “Digital file type” field on the form, enter a file format
  such as "EPUB file" (a non-proprietary file format used by Kobo, Nook,
  Sony and others).  If an e-Book reader uses a proprietary format
  (e.g., Kindle), you may use the name of the file type ("AZW file") or,
  if this is not visible to you, the name of the device ("Kindle file").
Example:
Slawenski, Kenneth. J.D. Salinger: A Life. New York: Random, 2011. N.
  pag. EPUB file.
If you are only citing a section or chapter:

To cite a chapter or section written by the author of the book, cite
  the book and use an in-text reference to identify the specific section
  you're quoting or paraphrasing.
If the introduction or preface is
  written by another contributor, fill in the section of the form called
  Chapter or Section to cite the author, section title and page numbers.

As far as I understand, Chicago frowns on Kindle. Depending on how rigorous the context (class paper, proposed article), I would look at the print book.

In what way is a Kindle book less valid than a paper book?

It's lack of page numbers.

As stated above newer kindle books do have page numbers plus as per link in my question the Chicago style sheet makes specific reference to Kindle editions of books. Have you any reference as to why kindle editions are frowned upon? There didn't seem to be an issue with my history department.

Do the page #s correspond to the print version? By "frowned upon," I mean "not preferred," but if your dept. is ok with it, then, as i mentioned, it doesn't matter.

@user2569 The page numbers do indeed correspond to a particular print edition of the book; for books from Amazon at least, you can actually get the ISBN number of the edition in question.

I have a new Kindle and I purchased two books from Amazon.  One I am able to see real page numbers, the other only location.
I was told for APA:
In text citation
For Paraphrase: (Atkins, 2014).
For Quotation:  (Atkins, 2014, Location No. xxx)
For Reference listing to use:
Daley, D. Ph.D., & Moss, H. Ph.D. (2002).  Dual Disorders:  Counseling Clients with Chemical Dependency and Mental Illness (3rd ed.)  [Kindle version].  Retrieved from Amazon.com

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text:
How would someone go about creating something like the Pew Research Center?
I live in India. I've found that analyzing any sociopolitical issue objectively is almost impossible given the lack of data. If I wanted to close this knowledge gap by starting something like the Pew Research Center, what would it take? I am currently a Statistics undergrad in my final year. Would I require a PhD?
Thanks in advance for the replies.

No, it wouldn't require a doctorate. What it would require, however, is a ton of money. Many people would need to be paid to manage the information.

If you wanted to create something like the Pew Research Center, you could just take a look at their history (that's their own, or you could check Wikipedia) and see how it was done in the first place (founded in 1990). The short version: a newspaper company wanted survey data to be able to report on, and so they created a center to do just that. It was then spun off into a charitable trust supported by various and sundry donation sources.
So if you wanted to take a lesson from their founding director, check out Andrew Kohut's history according to Pew or according to Wikipedia. Note that the Pew Research Center was a late-career project for him, and he served many smaller positions inbetween.
You could similarly check out the history of the Gallup organization (founded 1935), though a more recent example might be The Gapminder Foundation, founded by the late great Hans Rosling (he talks about his own personal life-long journey in this last book, Factfulness - a great book, IMHO).
In general, most organizations with this sort of large impact were founded by a combination of people with a business/financial interest (charitable or otherwise), as well as people with an expertise often driven by years of working directly in the field. Kohut did it serving years for survey/polling companies and had a graduate degree in sociology, Rosling did it after many years serving as a medical doctor and specialist in public health, etc.
A research-focused graduate degree would probably be hard to do without if you wanted to be a subject-matter specialist, while a graduate degree focused on professional preparation around business/fundraising/etc. would tend  to be most helpful if you are not already independently wealthy and highly connected and wanted to be involved on that side of it.
Another path, rather than starting from scratch, is to seek out organizations that are already operating in your country with a similar mission, or to look for organizations operating in other countries that already have or might be interested in expanding their operations to another country. Find what sort of positions they have, and then look to see what requirements they look for, so you could obtain direct experience without needing to start from scratch. If you wanted to start their own, chances are you would be competing with them directly or indirectly anyway, in terms of funding, public attention, etc. You should be able to find potential opportunities for volunteering, internships, etc., where you could be involved before you've finished your education, which would help you ensure this is what you want to do and give you a big leg up in getting started.

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text:
I am writing a briefing paper, and it only consists of facts and citations
I am writing a briefing paper, and it only consists of facts and citations. Literally every sentence is a quote or a link to another source.
The topic of the paper is pretty much covered and there are no problems with a structure of it (my supervisor told that). The problem is that it is too dry.
How do I add my own comments to it?
I struggle expressing my own thoughts and I do not have an experience with writing. I do not feel like I am qualified to comment on such topics, in some way I feel like adding my own point of view is not right, as everyone should make their own conclusions from the given information. Am I wrong?

Why are you writing the paper?

It's a briefing paper. Unless you are actually expert at the topic, you're not meant to be adding commentary, just summarising the important information and where it came from in case somebody wants to read more details.

Even if all that you are doing is summarizing pre-existing material, if you aren't writing in your own words, you are likely to produce terrible prose.
In summarization, you are necessarily making decisions about what to include and what to omit. You have reasons for making those decisions. That is your perspective on the material.
A good briefing can be quite exciting and compelling, even if it is filled to the brim with citations.  Too many quotations however, is likely to be a problem, because those quotations are taken from a different context and will not flow together to make a narrative.
If you are having trouble breaking away from these prior words, I might suggest the following radical technique: having first made you collection of material as you have described, open a fresh, blank, document, and starting writing without looking at any of the original material.  In this circumstance, your memory will be not good enough to continue using only the words of others, and you may be better able to start developing your own expression and perspective on the material.


text:
Can I scan data from a paper for my own research?
I am a PhD student working in mechanical properties of materials and will be finishing soon. My PhD is in numerical modelling, so I need experimental data (stress-strain curves) to validate my programs. And this is where the situation starts to tangle:

There is a set of data published by a group from another university that I would like to test in my model. This data comes from lab experiments and they also did some numerical modelling trying to replicate it.
Some data is published in a paper and some other is published in a PhD thesis.
The PhD thesis is not available online, but can be accessed publicly (physically) in the library of the other university.
I have asked for the raw data and a copy of the PhD thesis to the other group and the response I got was: we are not going to send it to you, and we prohibit you to use any of our data in your research.
I then learned that there is a bad relationship between our group and their group because of historical competition.

Furthermore:

I have scanned the data in the paper (I created a program to fit the curves in the image and get an analytical expression for it) and run my simulations.
I happen to have a copy of the thesis (a third person gave me a scanned copy), so I did the same.
In both cases my numerical results are significantly better than those from the other group, which is why we think that my research would have a high impact.
Since I scanned their data I can generate my own figures, so I guess image copyright is left out of the equation.
I will, of course, cite where the data comes from.

I believe in open science, so I would never do what they did. However, I get their point on not wanting me to have the data, since they did the experiments. What I believe is not ethical/appropriate is banning me from using any of their data sets.
Finally, we could prepare these experiments in our lab, but it will take a couple of years, resources and expertise (which I don't have), so this is not viable.
So my questions are:

What are the implications of publishing my comparison with their data?
Is it ethical, given that I have been denied the use of the data?
Would there be any additional problems if we decided to publish a paper or publish the thesis as a book?


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Is programming experience relevant in a pure Math graduate program?
Programming skills such as experience with Java, Python, C++ or work experience as a software developer can be indispensable for applied mathematicians. How useful is it to have such experiences as a pure Math graduate student where the focus tends to be on proofs and rigor rather than computation?

Define "useful" and "programming experience."

Two applications come to my mind, and these should be two of possibly many: 1- one may use programming languages to numerically calculate results of integrations, expansions, formulas, etc; 2- there are packages like Mathematica which do analytical expansions and calculations. So, my answer is, Yes! Programming is a good skill to have, these days.

I would look at this from a different perspective: programming requires a certain kind of logical, mathematical reasoning and thinking, so if you have programming experience then that should count as a point in your favour for a pure mathematics course, whether or not the course itself might involve any programming.

one thing i think everyone missed is, theorem provers (example of their usage for math) are (i hope) being used increasingly often - since it's nice to have a permanent, verifiable record that a certain theorem is true. (of course, i suspect this is far enough from convention that it won't be particularly common for a long while yet)

if in pure physics the answer is no, then probably for pure maths it's also no?

What is "pure" math to you?

Even when it seems contradictory at first, there exists a branch of mathematics called "Experimental mathematics", math is not purely deductive. Such that experimentation is performed by computers, using for example CAS systems. In fact, there is a journal for it.

The Mathematics Masters (not necessarily pure math) had a required computer course.  Not sure everything it covered, but it included IEEE number format, tolerances and accumulated rounding error and presumably a programming language.

I don't have the rep here to post an answer, but if I did it would be a form of my answer to the opposite question "Is mathematics necessary for learning to program?" which you can read at https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/137075/48582 ; a point I haven't seen yet in the answers here is that the skills you have developed from programming will help you considerably with learning Mathematics even with topics that have no visible link to programming.

In many parts of pure mathematics you use software to calculate examples that a while ago you could do only with pencil and paper. That's particularly true in combinatorics (my field) and number theory.
There is a tradeoff. Sometimes you learn from the slow process that forces you to see what happens at each step - like looking at a program with a debugger. But you get a lot more data in a lot less time, so are less likely to be misled by the law of small numbers.
I have taught an undergraduate course whose purpose was to expose students to the possibilities of calculation: python, symbolic manipulation (mathematica and sage), spreadsheets, LaTeX for writing mathematics.
You may not need programming skills to be admitted to graduate school, but any on your cv would be a plus. You might well have to learn some
when you start your researchl

Even limited programming skills make a huge difference when it comes to learning LaTeX, and LaTeX seems to be even more widely used in maths than physics

I once looked for certain paths in certain graphs with a computer and was then able to show their general existence after noticing patterns for small examples. However, even for those small examples, the graphs were not actually small (they were graphs of graph homomorphisms between small graphs), so I could not just have looked for the paths by hand. (A smarter person might of course have found a better proof, who knows.)

Beyond Mathematica/Maple and the like, there're tools such as PARI/GP for number theory and GAP for discrete algebra (group theory).

Not really an answer to what you asked, but: Look beyond grad school as well. Most math PhDs do not actually stay in academia but end up in industry in one way or another. Nearly every job mathematicians will eventually take on outside academic pure math research will benefit from having computer programming experience. So there may not be an advantage to knowing programming when you apply for grad school, but it will be useful to you in the future anyway.

"nearly every" ... True.  But current math Ph.D. students (and their advisors) often do not want to admit it.

@GEdgar Yes, but ignoring or denying the fact doesn't make it any less true :-)

+1, it's super important to hedge.  They don't like to admit it probably because the main point of a pure math education is to work in academia.  It's kinda like admitting a lot of what you are doing is not really going to be of value to you in the long run.  There are exceptions of course, but for many of the types of jobs people end up in there was probably a more useful field they could have enrolled in (eg if you end up as a programmer or developer more than likely cs would have been a more useful path [or stats/DS if they end up in prediction/modeling/database admins.])

Maybe, maybe not. Ignoring some of the more obvious expectations such as LaTeX, you might consider becoming familiar with Pari as well as Mathematica programming and Sage/Python. Apart from that the cognitive development that comes from learning both procedural and declarative programming can be fruitful in unexpected ways.

Computers are sometimes used to solve complex mathematical problems because it's impractical for humans to enumerate all the cases and combinations. Famously, the Four Color Theorem was proved using a computer.
There's a list of proofs that used computers in this Wikipedia article: Computer-assisted proof
And while the eventual proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was purely mathematical, computers were used by many researchers to confirm the conjecture for many cases.

Long-term usefulness aside - during your PhD, you might have to teach a class that is not pure math and may require you to know how to program...

Yes. For example, in my case Matlab programming was quite helpful for plotting figure. The latex language Tikz/PGF the is almost very essential in plotting figures, diagrams in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, number theory etc. The Language like PARI/GP and SAGE are very helpful in algebra and number theory.

Having a familiarity with programming languages is useful in pure math too. It is easy to observe some patterns by plotting a suitable graph.
For example in number theory,  if we are studying a particular type of prime number and we want to see how they are distributed, the first step I would do is to plot the counting function to get an intuition which can not be done by hand. If this function is not studied before it is unlikely that you will find an existing inbuilt function in standard programming languages. In this situation, if you are familiar with programming then you have an advantage.
Also, we can do various calculations using a computer which would be laborious to do manually.

Practical programming experience is very useful for any high-educated worker that spends most of their time behind a computer, and for a PhD-student in particular. Why?
Automation
As a PhD student, you will increasing likely be working with software systems in order to do basic tasks such as writing, literature search, interacting with students, having meetings, administration, grading homework. Some of this systems have a well designed UX (user experience) and allow you to tell the computer what to do at the speed of either your thoughts or your typing.
However, many of these systems can be rather painful. Often these are simple things, such as dragging the cursor all over the screen rather than pressing a key, or waiting 10 seconds on a page to load that could have been loaded while you were doing something useful. These are minor things, but when you have to do them ~200 times on a day, these annoyances add up. So, what to do?
Do it yourself
You could ask someone else to solve this issue, such as the developers of the software. However, this is a task more difficult for them than it is for you (assuming you have the practical programming experience): they need to change it (if they agree to change it at all!) and make it work for all users, you only need to make it work for yourselves.
This may sound a lot of work, but it's not bad at all, time-wise. It's a time investment that has paid of for me within a week, whenever I improved some frequent painful processes. And while the time gained may be peanuts, the main purpose is to remove annoyances, which allow more enjoyable and more focused work.
It's not particularly difficult, either, if you have some practical programming experience and know what tools are out there. A web-app drives you crazy? Write a user-script with Greasemonkey/Violentmonkey/Tampermonkey. Some simple DOM-manipulation often works, I personally use  MDN as a reference. An application can use more keyboard shortcuts? AutoHotkey can help.

Well, in addition to other good points raised, in these days if a math/tech-oriented person is clueless about talking to computers in any serious way, they're just a babe-in-the-woods. Almost immediately incompetent in various sorts of not-strictly-math ways.
As many of us have noticed, "computers" are a big deal, as is the internet. Not all of that is relevant to "doing mathematics", but quite a bit is. I use Perl to rearrange text/TeX files, Python for basic computations, Sage for subtler computations and graphs... even if none of those computations or graphs enter in any public-facing paper I write.
Also, many notions from Computer Science, such as "scope of a variable-name", are quite valuable in understanding mathematical writing (and in writing more clearly). And in teaching more clearly, and understanding that most undergrads do not have the same sense of "scope of a variable" that mathematically trained people do.
One last thing: I myself would not want to be making choices based on weakness, rather than on interest and preferences. If one shuts oneself out from understanding how computers seriously work, ... well, maybe you'll be an "end-user". No reason to solicit that.

how useful are they when applying to pure a Math program?

Having to contend with (La)TeX to typeset your publications already means you'll be doing a bit of programming; and if you're even the least bit finicky, creative or perfectionistic, it will be more than a bit.
... you might think this answer is tongue-in-cheek, but many a grad student has TeX battle scars they could tell you about :-(
Want another example? Well, will you have a personal website? That often benefits from being able to program. Is there any chance you might want to demo some of the abstract concepts you work on for a wider audience? That would require programming. Will you be using abstract/symbolic math software packages? Another case programming comes into your life. Hell, if I could, I would reprogram my alma mater's math department building elevator, the logic of which I couldn't figure out.
So, programming is (nearly) everywhere, for pure mathematicians as well.
(Also, what @EthanBolker and @WolfgangBangerth said.)

Obviously having a skill is better than not having that skill. As far as direct applicability to a PhD in pure mathematics, Python and possibly C++ might be useful for certain kinds of computational work (such as generating examples or testing hypotheses) mentioned by other commenters here. But this is usually done using packages tailored more specifically for mathematics such as Magma or Sage.
If what you're really asking is whether experience as a Python or C++ programmer is going to boost your application, the answer is probably not, unless the advisor you're planning to work with wants someone who can do that (e.g., if they don't want to do coding themselves).

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


text:
What physics background is necessary for pursuing a PhD in Mathematical Physics?
If I wanted to do research related to the topology and geometry of space or their applications in quantum mechanics or general relativity, would it be possible to do that from a Mathematician’s POV without the upper level undergad physics typically required?

Check the website of the program you're interested in. Here's an example.

Basic preparation should include courses in advanced calculus, linear algebra, modern algebra, complex variables, classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, modern physics, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Knowledge of the following fields is desirable: real analysis, differential equations, probability, topology, differential geometry, and functional analysis.

This makes it sound like you should be OK, but my judgement is not useful; you need to convince the admissions committee.

For

topology and geometry of space or their applications in quantum mechanics or general relativity

one needs to have a good understanding of tensor algebra, typically used in General Relativity (GR) courses. So if you want to study different topologies of space-time and its implications on GR, then you need to be able to perform matrix and tensor algebra elegantly :)
Research on this can be done from two perspectives - (a) mathematically, identifying the space-time behaviour e.g. conformal field theory, and (b) with a somewhat more physical approach, but that can be in so many different ways that it is peculiar to each project. There is always a non-zero overlap between these two approaches in this research area.
Also, since each programme is unique, they usually will mention the specific courses/skills required to have been taken before they accept the candidates into the project. If that is not mentioned, asking it in the PhD interview is recommended.
Hope this helps.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but genuinely curious: when you say that there is a "non-zero overlap", is it merely a pleonasm (because overlap itself should indicate that it's non-zero) or is there some obscure field of mathematics/physics that has this weird cases that trained your mind to be specifically say when there is a non-zero overlap, in order to differentiate from those weird cases?

That's a nice comment @cinico, I think what I want to highlight here is the significant overlap between mathematics and physics, often hard to differentiate which is which and depends on perspective, compared to some other fields of physics where there is substantial use of mathematics but can't be classified as pure mathematics research.


text:
Should I talk about courses I plan to take before starting graduate school in my CV or statement of purpose?
I am applying for graduate schools in Math and I was wondering if it is okay to talk about what courses I plan on taking this Fall and next Spring before the beginning of Fall 2022. Should I talk about this in my CV or SOP?

Maybe mention which direction you see youself. But, no one cares which courses exactly you want to take. There's more interesting stuff to talk about. Your vision, interests, cool stories, projects, achievements, etc. You're too low level imo.

Are you in the US?  If so, I would imagine that applications aren't due until well into the fall semester, so the fall courses should show up as "in progress" on a transcript.

This is not something for the CV, which lists your past accomplishments of various kinds.
It is more the stuff for the SoP, but it might be a bit too detailed - especially listing specific courses. But you should at least talk about which major subfield(s) you are most interested in. In my case it was both Analysis and Topology. But it was a bit more specific: Real Analysis and Classical Topology. (Note that this was long ago).
And don't forget, in the SoP, to also write about longer term plans. Making it a bit general gives you options, but not so general that you seem to lack direction.
But, since you mean courses you will take before you actually start the degree program, then you could name a course or two in support of the goals you list. "To support my goal of studying Topology in the future, I'm taking a course, now, before, the program begins." (Hopefully you can phrase that better.) But the bulk of the SoP should be about your plans for what you will focus on in grad school and what you intend to do with the resulting degree.
If a course has been completed, then it might be appropriate to list in the CV. Make the CV about the past and the SoP about the future.
And note that this will count for little, since it is still unknown how you will do in those courses. It shows some dedication to your studies and seriousness of purpose, but that is all.


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Do outside-funded graduate students normally have TA or grading responsibilities in the US?
Assuming a student has full funding from an outside source. Do the TA and grading responsibilities become optional?

Some departments require a period as a TA because it is seen as providing experience in teaching that is generally required for many jobs.

My national university sends students with a full scholarship and stipend to study in the US. Therefore students do not require any funding that most students typically require from the schools they apply to.

@JonCuster Really?  Where?  I don't know any math departments in the US that mandate (as opposed to strongly encourage) this.

@Kimball - many moons ago in an engineering department they had everyone be a TA. Just part of the program, everyone did it in the first few years, no big deal. And, yes, even those with external funding (including the IBM fellows getting their IBM salary).

@JonCuster, I assume such "requirements" come with the usual perks; tuition forgiveness and a stipend. Otherwise it is indentured servitude. Even scheduling it arbitrarily seems very wrong.

@Buffy - of course. All PhD students were funded, internally through TA or RA, or external (again, we had a few industry fellows -paid by their company to get a PhD - or by various industry fellowships). But doing a turn as a TA was part of the gig.

@Kimball My non-math dept does.

@AzorAhai-him- + Jon Custer Hmm... maybe it's more common in non-math departments then?  That said, in math departments there are relatively few people who get full external funding, and maybe there are such requirements but I've never heard about them.

@Kimball That actually surprises me, as I would have thought more math departments would have been focused on preparing PhD students to work in departments that might teach a lot of classes for the university.

"Normally," no. But you should never make any assumptions and always get a written statement of your obligations to the department. Some math departments require some teaching as a part of the program, but how much varies a lot. It might also be the case that if you don't have instructional duties, then you don't get office space.

My neuroscience PhD had a TA requirement as well, regardless of outside funding, but just for a minimum of one semester. Most students in that program are primarily funded by RAships, so a TA requirement was both to benefit the department, in that there was otherwise not a natural source of TAs, and to benefit the students, to ensure that everyone would have at least a semester of teaching experience on their resume by the time they graduated.

Only giving TAs office space is lame, what? I haven't heard of that.

@AzorAhai-him- Yup, even for doctoral students. Some places are really strapped for space.

@AzorAhai-him- I do not have any handy references, but I am pretty sure there are office-less tenured professors.  Office space is a finite resource.

While it is now several decades past and details may have changed, I was a student in a Tier 1 US research university math department with multiple years of (so-called, see below) "full" external funding.
The tone of your questions suggests you would prefer not to have TA or grading responsibilities with such funding. There is, of course, good reason for this if those responsibilities are extensive or onerous. However, in mathematics in particular, even the most successful researchers end up doing some teaching during their careers, and training/experience as a grad student to do this is helpful. So I would strive to negotiate a reduction in teaching/service time, but not try to skip it altogether.
As a formal point, while this may have changed, in my time many private research universities nominally charged quite significant Ph.D. program tuition, which they "waived" (i.e., it was a fiction on paper only) for all recipients of internal or external funding, which was ultimately everyone in the program. Therefore, technically, the department may well insist on some labor from you as a condition of the "tuition waiver" part of your "support". Or you could theoretically find that your external funding doesn't go as far as intended...this is why I put "full" in quotes at the top of the answer.

It’s not that I prefer not to have these responsibilities, but that I would like the option to reduce them if I needed like you said. I have seen some high ranked programs where the tuition was waived for all accepted students. I wonder how that affects the admission of someone who would not need any funding since not requiring any funds usually increases the likelihood of being accepted.

It entirely depends on the department, but most likely no. In the US, students can be funded on an internal or external fellowship (like you've described), on a research assistantship (i.e. on a specific grant), or as a TA.
However, I say most likely no because it is possible the department will require some time as a TA as teaching experience before graduation.

I think the teaching experience would be quite valuable as a graduate student. My concern was if I was taking some particularly difficult courses and wanted some more time that semester.

@Delta_Epsilon The timing of the TAship would be entirely up to your department. If it's mandated, I would guess that they would schedule it for a different semester than when people usually take difficult classes.


text:
Is it appropriate to provide my recommenders with a spreadsheet to keep track of applications?
Is sending a shared spreadsheet with the university names, deadlines, and a box to check when completed be something beneficial or appreciated by my recommenders? I thought maybe it would be nice for them to have all the info there and also get to see if they forgot about a particular application.

At the least it shows you are on the ball with your applications.

Better than sending it in a possibly proprietary Excel format, send it in an Open Document Spreadsheet format.

@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket The vast majority of academics are much more familiar with Excel or Google Sheets than ODF. Not everyone is a computer nerd.

@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket Excel spreadsheets conform to ISO 29500 (https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html).  That's not very proprietary.

@Flydog57 Do you happen to know if it's always been like that?  I stopped using Excel years ago because people on various platforms reported challenges opening the files if they didn't have Excel.  I recall incompatibility of files between different versions of Excel as well.  IIRC, at some version, Excel started to offer the option of saving files in a more standard format, but IIRC (sorry for the IIRC again... it's been years) many versions don't offer that functionality.

Microsoft began the switch to the OpenXML formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc) in the late 2000s. By Office 2010 (IIRC), it was complete. I think it was the next version before it was completely compliant with the ISO spec. The format is a ZIP file of a folder tree full of XML files (really) - the Open Packaging Convention (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Packaging_Conventions). Adopting the standard was a big nasty fight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML. The standard is very complex, but the API is pretty simple. I've written both Excel and Word file (simple) generators

Oh, if you see other familiar file formats suffixed with an X (in their file type), they may use the same packaging. There's good tooling (at least in Windows) for generating and parsing those XIP+XML files

This is exactly what I did when I applied to grad school. One of my recommenders asked me to create such a sheet, and I shared similar lists with the other recommenders, after checking if they would prefer to have them.
It is a good idea, but ask first, particularly if you want them to check a box after submitting each letter. It might otherwise look a bit presumptuous and as if you were telling them how to organize their work.

It's helpful to get a concise list of the schools a student is applying to and the dates, but putting it into the email request is enough for me.  TBH, if the list of schools you're applying to is so long it takes a spreadsheet to keep track of all them, the spreadsheet isn't really a solution to the actual problem.
I'm always delighted to write the first couple of letters for a student because I'm always so happy they're going on to graduate school.  I think that's a great choice for most students who did well as undergrads.  Once I've written the first LOR for a former student, it's pretty quick to revise it for the next school.  But once I've done 3 or 4 letters for the same student, the thrill definitely begins to wear off.
Possibly more helpful than the spreadsheet are the basics:  copies of your transcript, CV or resume, any essays you expect to submit with your applications, and suggestions for anything you hope they might emphasize in their letter.  Completely optional, a photo can also be helpful for reminding them who you are.  (It's also helpful to plan ahead and cultivate future references by participating in class and hanging out in their office hours so they get to know you well enough they don't need to be reminded who you are.)
Also, here in the US, if your reference knows you as a student, pretty much everything they know about you is confidential under FERPA unless you explicitly grant them permission to discuss your academic career and performance.

Please excuse my ignorance, but wouldn’t you have practically the same letter for all the universities? Or do you customize them for each one?

Yes, but I try to make my LORs look like I put some thought and effort into them, which takes thought and effort.  I do them on university letterhead with a formal inside address (which I probably have to Google) and references to the name of the program I need to change for each letter.  Counting time to create the PDF and upload it, each additional letter probably takes me 15 mins or so.  One time, I had a student I'd never met but had been in my section of an intro class with 1200 students who wanted a dozen LORs.  He did well, so I wrote them but I thought that was a lot to ask.

@NicoleHamilton Would it be possible to minimize the customization effort on your side by having the student collect the address and program information for you and put it into some, well, spreadsheet? ;-)

@lighthousekeeper  Yes, that would help.

@lighthousekeeper But could also go in, say, a table...in the body of the e-mail.

I see no harm in asking, but since it's unlikely you are the only person they are writing letters for, they may already have their own system and decline to use yours (or forget).

Personally, if I were writing multiple recommendation letters for a student, I would find that extremely helpful.  It also shows that you are systematic and well-organised, which is something I would note (to your benefit) in my recommendation.


text:
Leaving a Computer Science Ph.D. program for Google after getting a M.S
This age old question has probably been asked, but there are always new considerations and specifics. Also I want to hear from people who have quit the program themselves, namely the biggest question of all: Do you regret it? and, did you ever feel that it hurt you later in your industry life? (assuming you have a Masters)
I have a fellowship and I'm in a prestigious program, but I am truly suffering in it. My advisor puts us (the students) against each other to compete and there are tons of politics. Of course industry is not without politics, but I have had experiences there and it was not this bad.
My current options are to switch advisors and start the research portion from scratch or accept a nice offer from Google for a very interesting team that is similar to my line of research. In the short term, I know I will enjoy being in a company. I'm a bit older (32) and I've worked in companies before. I also have friends there and I miss working in a collaborative team. I'm afraid however, in the long term certain positions or opportunities will be closed off for me. And of course a general feel of feel failure.

If you want to give industry a try, take a leave of absence -- don't burn your bridges!

I was in similar situation long time ago (the only difference is that Google did not exist back then). I think it's very unlikely you'll come back to Academia once you leave for industry. My advice is to figure out what and where your mind and your heart are before you make the decision.  What do you truly want to do (in your heart)? What do you think you should do (in your mind)? To answer your question: Do you regret it? Yes, I do. Please see this answer.


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Can I use my university email address for job applications?
I just started a postdoc position in England, but I have a personal problem with the place. I want to apply for another postdoc position in other cities.
Am I officially allowed to use the university email to contact other professors for finding possible postdoc position? Because, it is not an official use related to my job, but personal.
I wish to use my university email, as it can attract more attention, as I am already working in England. Many Indians send email to professors, and they do not read them carefully.

Whatever the answer to this is, be aware that (1) a university email address can expire soon after you leave, so you might miss followup replies about vacancies appearing in a few years, and (2) if you have a personal problem with your higherups, you might not want them to be able to read your future plans.

@darijgrinberg That seems like a slightly excessive level of paranoia.  While I agree you shouldn't put anything in an email you want to really make sure will never want to be public (as they say, the "e" stands for "evidence."), presumably, the only person likely to care if the OP leaves is his/her PI, who shouldn't have access to his/her email.

Check with your alumni association to see if they offer an email (or email-forwarding) service. My @alum.schoolname.edu forwarding account is promised to be good "forever"; when I move to a new ISP I just log in and change where it forwards to. Good compromise. I'm officially not worrying about security on that link. What the school gets out of it, of course, is knowing how to contact me for donations.

My personal policy is that I use I use my uni e-mail for all professional communication (except for the very informal part, perhaps). Looking for a post-doc position sounds like a professional reason, and I agree that it should make people treat you more seriously than they would if you had used some random gmail account. I seriously doubt anything (formal or otherwise) would forbid me from doing what you are considering.

Voting to close because the answer to "Am I officially allowed to use the university email to [do something]?" depends entirely on the regulations laid down by the university that employs you.

I, personally, wouldn't use anything else.  This might depend a little on the culture of your field (see Should I use my university's letterhead for a cover letter for a job application? for a similar discussion), but exactly as you say, using your professional email address might well cause someone to give your email an extra second of attention.

There are two aspects to your question: can you to use your uni email and should you use your uni email.
The first is relatively simple to check with the HR, or the equivalent/corresponding, office of the university. At my university the rules is that you are not explicitly prohibited from using the uni mail for personal matters, however since it's a state university and university mail is technically an official public document, anyone (random average Joe) can actually demand to see your entire mail record (It should be added that the person needs to motivate it, but for example a journalist it's not a problem at all).
In other words, you are not explicitly prohibited to use your mail for personal reasons but you cannot keep it personal.
The second aspect is whether you should use that address. That's more difficult to answer as there are several different variables there. If you apply for a job in the industry it might be a good idea not to use an email that will expire, like a university mail. The reasoning is that if they contact you two years later for your dream job, the mail will be lost in the ether abyss and your misfortune will be someone else's lucky day. But I can understand the reasoning behind your motivation as well, it might be useful to show that you are already within the system.
either way, good luck!

OP has written quite clearly that he wants to look for other postdoc positions, not an industry job.

I have a hard time accepting that anyone can demand a whole copy of your university mail and --barring extraordinary circumstances- that they will actually provide your whole mailbox without your authorization. Country and references, please.

@Angel Ahem.  Admittedly, something like this is really unlikely to happen to a lowly postdoc, but it does happen.

@Ángel it has happened and stirred quite a big mess in Sweden. If I remember correctly, it was about a physics professor from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. It's been a while since I read the debate, so forgive me but I can't find it right now

@tomasz sure, the question body says another postdoc application, however the question title says job application. My answer was for the benefit of wider audience, i.e. why it might not be a good idea to use university mail for a job application. Frankly I am not sure what you think you gained by pointing out that the OP states that the s/he is considering to apply for another postdoc.

@posdef: I'm not trying to gain anything, just pointing out that the comment does not seem (directly) relevant to what OP is asking about.


text:
I am part of a “study team” that authored a paper. How do I list in in my CV?
I was a member of a study team that produced a couple of research papers.
The authors of the paper are, for example:

Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, John Smith and The ABC Study Investigators

In the acknowledgements, it reads:

The ABC Study team consists of members from Harvard University (James Bond, Thomas Harper, David Price, and Jason Jolly)

(Suppose that my name is David Price.)
Can I list such papers in the publication list of my CV?
If not, how can I show that I participated in these research papers?
In PubMed, my name was listed as one of 'collaborators.'

You could mention this in the section where you talk about previous research activity, but if you are not on the author list it would be misleading to include it in your list of publications.

That is an interesting question, I wasn't aware of this practice (i.e. listing a "study team" as authors).

Partially relevant? http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3260/who-all-are-considered-authors-of-papers-written-on-behalf-of-a-research-group

There is a good reason why in some journals, all members of the team have to be listed as authors, along with the team name; IMHO that's a good policy. This is different for books though, where teams or fictional characters are being used as authors; however, the book has its own editors and each chapter is authored by someone specific in the team.

Consortium authors are authors as well, just much less "important" authors than the main authors.  The situation is in fact quite similar to being in the middle of a large author list (e.g., one of my papers where I am 12th out of 32 authors).
As such, you should list the paper in a way that is clear, transparent, and easy for a reader to understand its stated authorship.  Put the paper in your CV with the authors just as they appear in the standard citation, then add a note at the end of that citation that says you were part of the consortium authors.  Following your example:

Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, John Smith and The ABC Study Investigators, "Totally Awesome Science," Journal of Irreproducible Results, 12(6), pp. 406-453, 2012.
  (Member of ABC Study Investigators)

You can switch to the citation style that allows this easily. I'll list two standard papers and a paper written in a team:

Study of DEF. Journal of DE 15(5):1388-1391, 2013.
Note on XYZ (with J. Doe). Journal of XY 51(3):820-840, 2014.
Note on KLM (with J. Soe and Team ABC, as a member of Team ABC). Journal of KL 8(1):1-15, 2015.

This is clear, you're not lying to anybody nor hiding any substantial information, yet the presentation of the publications is easy to read: (1) paper title; (2) authors; (3) journal specification.

This does not convey who is first author on "Note On XYZ", which in my field is critical information.

What style is this?


text:
What is a good way to proofread for a journal article?
What is a good way to proofread a journal article before you submit it? I would like to do more than just spellcheck.

Welcome to Academia SE. Can you please give us more details about the situation, e.g., are you proofreading your own article, an article you are familiar with or an article that is completely new to you? Are you a native speaker of the article’s language or not? What kind of errors are you hunting: Spelling, grammar, content?

I think this is a good question: I usually still find stupid mistakes after hundreds of spellcheck passes. I'd love to see some tips. But we need a little bit more information: what's going wrong at the moment? What kind of answers are you expecting?

@mrb I've expanded your question slightly based on the comment you wrote; please feel free to revert if you disagree with my edit.

@jakebeal It's not my question :) I agree with the edits, though.

@Peter Whoops --- reading too fast; fixed the comment.

I don't think this is really about academia at all, and asking for "the best way" is soliciting opinions. As it happens, a similar question has already been asked and answered on Writers.SE

c.f. Boat Programming

@EnergyNumbers I disagree, because 1) there are special challenges in scientific writing, and 2) even if parts have been answered elsewhere, that doesn't mean it's a bad question here.  SE does not attempt to close "duplicates" across different communities.

Proofreading is really hard.  The best way to proofread is to ask a friend to do it, who is less familiar with the material and therefore will be more likely to spot inconsistencies and errors---especially the bigger gaps in logic and tangles in presentation that are so difficult for an author to see.  You're simply too familiar with the technical material, and will inherently read it non-linearly, where a new reader will not.
For doing it yourself, I recommend printing out a copy of the material on physical paper and reading it out loud to yourself.  Reading out load has two big advantages:

It slows you down a lot, thereby forcing you to pay attention to every word.  Ordinarily, most of us actually read at a whole-phrase or whole-sentence level, which lets us hallucinate in things that are not there.
Reading out loud engages your language system through two different channels, thereby increasing the salience of any error and making it more likely for you to notice it.

You don't have to print it out---reading it out loud on a screen can work too---but I like printing it out because that also lets me take the paper into a different context with less distractions for doing the proofing as well.


text:
Why does Google Scholar combine my journal paper with its arXiv version only in my profile?
I authored a journal paper, of which I've also uploaded a version to arXiv. The title and the content of the two versions are same, only the layout is different. In my Google Scholar Citations profile the two versions are "merged" as one paper. But when I perform a search for the paper, or with my name, Google Scholar shows the two versions separately, with separate citation counts (8 for the journal, 2 for the arXiv manuscript).
However, if one looks at my Google Scholar Citations profile, they see only one paper (containing the arXiv manuscript as one version), and with citation count 10. Obviously, this is what I'd want to be seen whenever someone searches for the paper -- the combined citation count, and the possibility to download the arXiv version pdf for free. How can I make Google Scholar present the paper in a search in the same way as it presents it in my profile?

GS? Goldman Sachs? Geological Society? Columbia's school of General Studies? And what is it that leads you to believe that you'd have the ability to change it?

It is rather unlikely somebody here can answer your question. You'd have to ask Google Scholar.

I have an answer to offer: You need to keep two things clearly distinct: Google Scholar (GS) general search results, and your personal GS profile. The GS search results indexes articles that Google finds on the Web, and lists the number of citations for each article. If two articles are found separately, GS search results will always list them separately. In contrast, your profile is just what you would like people to see. Google graciously lets you customize how people see things in your profile, but this doesn't change the reality on the Web that there are two different articles out there.

I don't have voting rights, but I think the question is interesting enough to enough readers that it should be allowed. There is quite a community here on Academia SE that is very interested in the ins and outs of Google Scholar, and I don't know of any better place on the Web to get answers to questions like this one. To respond to "You'd have to ask Google Scholar", I don't think they would be very responsive if the answer isn't already on an FAQ.


text:
Is it reasonable to ask for access to an advisor/supervisor during summer time?
At the end of a recent lengthy meeting with my supervisor, in preparation for my end of year GRC (Graduate Research Committee) meeting, I asked about if I would be able to contact them during the summer holiday period in relation to my research.
Background is that I am a History Masters research student and as I'm completing it part-time I'll be doing as much work during the summer months (maybe even more as one of my major visits to archives is during this period) as during the academic year.
My supervisor was open to me emailing him during the summer and submitting any written work I may have completed. As it was we were finishing the meeting we did not elaborate on exact details. In my own case this will suffice as I am working on my project on my own with my supervisor.
While I just asked if I could keep in contact with my supervisor and that's probably the best thing to do in most cases, I am interested is it reasonable to request that you can have access to an advisor/supervisor during summer time (either by email or face to face)?

I'm not entirely clear on what the specific question is. In particular, I don't understand "While I just asked if I asked if I could keep in contact with my supervisor and that's probably the best thing to do in most cases, I am interested was this a reasonable request?" Are you asking whether it would be reasonable to ask for face-to-face contact during summer, over and beyond email?

@StephanKolassa Thanks for input, I have tried to edit question to clarify. I was thinking about any type of contact when writing the question but I presume there is a different level of commitment needed for face to face time.

Professor, like many kind of employees, should have no summer holiday. Unless he is officially on leave or travelling for conference , I see no reason to stop contact with him.

@bingung wow, that is hard. In some countries even PhD students are entitled to more than one month of paid vacations!

@bingung: See Peter Jansson's answer. In many cases, professors are not actually employed by the university during the summer.

What is GRC? ....

@adam.r Graduate Research Committee

Oh really? I don't know and this may vary in country. For my case, all professors just work as usual except most of them do not have regular classes.

@bingung working and being employed are two different things. Many academics work on some sort of research even when they are not technically employed (i.e., getting paid for it).

Supervisors are employees just like everyone else. They have duties (to supervise you), and they have vacations and business trips. Both vacations and business trips (conferences, field trips, probably archive work in your line) will be more common during summer. Specifically for academia, many people will use summer to spend more time working from home while they don't have to give lectures, but they may designate certain days when they are in the office, specifically to meet with everyone on a single day.
That said, I see no reason whatsoever why email contact should decrease during summer, of course except for known vacation or trip periods, where everyone can agree that emails may take a little longer to be answered.
Face-to-face contact is also important, but given that many people will spend more time at home, there is a case to be made that you may not meet quite as frequently with your advisor during summer, even after accounting for vacations/trips.
Nevertheless, I see no reason why a request for email contact and (possibly somewhat less frequent) face-to-face meetings should be unreasonable. It would of course be optimal to work out a schedule before summer, taking vacations etc. into account. "I'll check in every day with a short email, and I understand if you reply later to email questions. Could we set up at least some face-to-face meetings, perhaps not every week as during the semester, but every other week, except for the week you are at a conference?"
After all, your supervisor will be just as interested in hearing from you and knowing that you don't spend all of summer at the beach...

Good point about conferences etc. during the summer. In my own case I am volunteering for a couple of days at a conference where my supervisor is one of the organisers. Probably be chatting to him at that but didn't put it in question as it would not be a formal project meeting.

Your supervisor will likely have a chock full calendar during that conference, meeting with many people he only sees at conferences. Don't expect him to have a lot of time for chatting with you. And don't take this personally; after all, you two can meet all year long.

Good points; we have only have a very general chat about what they want me to do at the conference. Might only be there to make the tea/coffee :-). He hopes we make some introductions with some of the speakers relevant to my field though.

Sometimes it's a little more complicated than your first paragraph.  At US universities, faculty appointments are often for 9 months.  At research universities, faculty often have grants to pay for summer appointments as well.  But if that's not the case, your supervisor may actually not be an employee during the summer.  (However, there's a good chance that, out of professionalism, he will meet with you anyway.)

The question is perhaps not whether to contact or not. You can send mails as much as you want and you may expect variations in the timing of a response. What, IS important is to communicate and organize work so that you optimize the time. There is no point in arranging your own work so that you definitely would need help when you simply cannot get it.
As for what you can expect, some of the answer lies in the employment conditions which will vary between universities and certainly between countries. In some cases university employees are not salaried during summer. In cases they cover this by applying for research money. It is clear that the focus will then be on other things. In other cases payment also cover summer and instead vacation is planned for some of that time. So, you need to know what the system is like in your part of Academia and expectations made up based on that.
In the end, I see it mostly as a communication issue. To just expect without actually finding out is not a good strategy.

+1 for importance of communication. As far as I know in Ireland salaries are year round.

At many American universities, we only receive 9 months of salary. We either cover the summer 3 months from our grants or we ask the university to divide the 9 months of salary over 12 calendar months.

It is our job to be available to our students!
I'll be gone for half the summer, and the half I'm in town I will be working from home. My students shouldn't expect to just look for me in my office and find me, but I will be very receptive to coming in and meeting as long as I am in town, and corresponding by e-mail otherwise. I suspect this scenario is reasonably typical.
"Expect" is a little bit of a dangerous word; I advise you to replace it with "ask for". Take the initiative in requesting meetings, asking questions, and the like. Don't overdo it --- but other people aren't shy about asking for your advisor's attention, I urge you not to be either :) Good luck!

It's reasonable to email him and stay in contact that way. You're still working/researching and you need support from him.
What would not be reasonable is to expect immediate (ie, within 24 hours) replies.
If throughout the summer, he responds fairly quickly, and you feel that meeting in person would be beneficial to you, then ask.
However, keep in mind that he is probably planning on doing his own research during the summer as well and also is likely not getting paid to advise you during the summer. That doesn't mean you can't send him questions. It just means that the frequency of your emails should probably decrease during the summer.
I would also suggest that at some point during the summer (maybe after your trip to the archives) that you rest and relax. If you keep up a continual level of work and stress, sometimes one can't see a perspective on the work or the work becomes less interesting. I'm not recommending not studying, just make sure that you take care of yourself. Limiting how much you email your supervisor will likely also help with this.


text:
I rejected a PhD offer but now would like to accept it again
I accepted a PhD offer but next I had to reject it due to family reasons that I explained to my supervisors and they understood.
A couple of weeks later I have overcome these family hitches and the position is still open as I can see from the site, and of course I would like to join again but I am afraid for the response of supervisors.
What should I do about this?

Are those "family hitches" something that is likely to happen again during the PhD, and make you quit? (the advisor is likely to wonder about exactly that)

Be honest with your supervisor and let them know of the entire situation. Since you had to reject the position they might have given your seat to someone else. Let them know that you understand if they already gave your seat away, but that you would like the position if it’s still available. Also if possible make sure that you won’t have to cancel before contacting them again.

Contact the supervisor now, explain your situation and hope for the best. The worst that can happen is that your position has been given to someone else (so be prepared for this). The more you wait the less likely it is that your PhD offer will be renewed.

Just ask. Some supervisors might be a bit puzzled but would be unlikely to object strongly. If you are admitted then you can explain to anyone who asks what your situation is, assuming it isn't so private as to make that improper.
However, it is possible, if unlikely, that you aren't the top-rated candidate anymore, so act fast in case they are still looking. They may have other offers out, actually. But ask and do it quickly and politely, explaining as best you can.


text:
How to do research without being a star researcher?
After my PhD and postdoc in computer science I got a permanent position in a company's research lab. This is my first time to work without a supervisor nor colleagues (other members have there own, not related projects), and it is very difficult: I realize my previous successful projects were due to my advisor and colleagues, not me.
It's not the imposter syndrome: I'm not a star; I'm very slow and stupid; I've contributed mostly to the implementation/experiments to my few papers; I've been told I should give up, I don't have any chance in the academic world, I miss important crucial points and I spend too much time in implementation details.
While sometimes I think I have interesting ideas to pursue, I do not have enough knowledge to put them in practice and other brilliant researchers are quicker to publish a better solution than what I would have done (this happened a few times). So I end up watching youtube videos or playing games because what's the point, everything I do will be bad. Unfortunately brilliant researchers don't have time nor incentive to help.
Are there other researchers in the same situation? How do you build up confidence and get back to work?
PS: I'm in Asia.

You may be comparing yourself against seasoned colleagues.  I can solve a problem in 5 mins that takes a student 3 months.   So start somewhere. As the saying goes: 'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step'.

Similar if not duplicate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/87668/how-do-you-come-to-terms-with-the-fact-that-you-might-never-be-among-the-best-in

"I do not have enough knowledge to put my ideas in practice" Your PhD and post-doc are proof that you possess relevant skills for putting ideas into practice. So what's the actual problem here? Don't you have any ideas that are aligned with your skills? Then maybe focus more on idea-generation in that area.

Relevant advice from Terry Tao

I guess your problem is not the absence of ability but an absence of self-confidence. Try to read some books on how to get that going, so you're not fixing the wrong problem. Read 'Self-Reliance' by Emerson.
I am assuming you joined this company for a reason and that you like your job. They hired you because they liked you and your profile. You just can't figure out 'how to do the job'. A good start is to discuss with your senior the short-term and long-term goals of your company. Clarify your tasks. "Do research" is not a clear task. You can even ask them if they are ok with you collaborating with others (e.g., your old team).
Other researchers will have the incentive to help if they feel they will get something out of it. Figure out your strengths: make a table of what you can do best and reach out to collaborators, telling them "how they will benefit" and not "how you will benefit". Also, read the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to get a general idea.
As for the 'others are too quick' thought, I think two research articles are hardly ever the same. Maybe the idea is the same, but you applied it to a different problem? Maybe the details of the problem were different? Perhaps you used a different algorithm? You have to look for these details that make your research stand out. This is a matter of presentation.
Not all shiny things are stars ;)
Good luck and good going!

Thank you for your comment and the book references.
Indeed the current job is something like my dream job and I want to stay there.