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Am I betraying my professors if I leave a research group because of change of interest?
I am an undergraduate and have been doing some work that is part of a program being done by a research group of this department for around 6 months now.
However, I have developed new interests and I no longer like the project I’m working on now.
Will my professors be mad if I leave the group or are they used to these things ?

Do you plan to give some appropriate notice?

Welcome to the academia.SE!
The word "betrayal" is not good to use in a professional environment, certainly not in your current situation. You are just an undergrad, and it is very much understandable that interests change at that age. Your mind is keeping on looking for more interesting things to do. Perhaps, your current assignment was not good enough for the kind of work you wanted to do, or you would like to make a career in.
Now, you might be feeling a sense of guilt, thinking that I am leaving them midway. But, trust me, academia, and any other organization for that matter, is always like this. People get better things, and they move on. So don't be hard on yourself, and discuss this with your current mentor/group. A reasonable mentor will always understand this situation from your perspective.
If you have time before you jump on to the next project, you should complete the current assignment(s) or at least assist/train someone else to complete them. That would be a fair thing to do. But, again, if you really have no time for that and you don't have any official agreement for your current assignment, you should just leave. But, remember, don't burn the bridge.

Will my professors be mad if I leave the group (I was doing most of the work), or are they used to these things?

The rule of thumb is that hiring an undergraduate is much more for their benefit than for the supervisor's (professor's) benefit. In my mostly-computational field, it usually takes more time for me to mentor an intern (undergraduate) than it would take for me to do it myself. Even setting aside the intern's cost.
So no, I am not mad if an intern leaves. On the contrary, I am pleased: (1) the intern has learned something valuable, so I am proud of myself and happy for them. And (2) I don't need to worry about them going forward, which is less work for me (or I can hire a new intern, which lets me have an impact on an additional person's life).
Of course, your mileage may vary. Not all supervisors are as delightful as I am, and there are some fields (e.g., wet labs) where undergraduates do tedious but useful work, and replacing them is a hassle. But even in this case, you should do what you need to do; your supervisor will get over it.

It's pretty normal for undergrads to disappear from my former grad advisor's wet lab as well, and I think he would have the same perspective. I think a lot of them have a more glamorous view of what extracting and sequencing DNA involves. Nope, just endless hours of moving drops of liquid from one tube to another. But several that stuck it out eventually got funded grad projects in the lab.

People move on from positions and projects all the time - especially students. No-one is expecting you to dedicate you life to a lab. You're at a point in your career where you should be exploring your interests. So don't feel guilty that you find yourself drifting towards something different. No "betrayal" there.
That being said, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this. The wrong way - ghosting your professor to hop to a more interesting project. The right way - having an honest discussion ahead of time i.e., now, about how your interests are shifting and you would like to switch projects/labs.
You may find that your professor is fine with you leaving now. Or they may want you to stay on and see the project through (personally I think you should do this either way). Or they may want you to stay on just long enough to get another student set up.
The takeaway here is to be courteous and professional. As @Coder said, don't burn bridges.

Seeing the project through also depends on how long the project is, of course. If they’ve been part of it for six months and the project is scheduled to last another five years, that’s a completely different kettle of fish to a project that’s scheduled to end in another two months’ time.

Of course, I don't think anyone would expect an undergrad to stick with a project of that length even under the best circumstances.

As others said, it is perfectly normal for your interests to change. Plus, you are at an early career stage and have many different options to explore.
I agree with all the other comments above.
What you did not mention in your original question, is whether you ever discussed the expectations with your current supervisor. Did they take you on for a couple of months? For a year? With no end date? If there is some sort of agreement, then I would do my best to honor that. Sure, circumstances and interests may change - but in a professional relationship it is also important that you follow up on things you promised and that could in this case mean until X has been achieved on a project or any time frame that you discussed earlier.
Of course this is not set in stone, if you are slowly growing miserable then you need to discuss that and maybe leaving is better in that case, but don't just drop things because you think there's something better out there or because you don't like it anymore. Most jobs have aspects to them that we don't like and we usually have to do those parts as well.
In either case, go talk to your supervisor and be prepared so you know what you are and are not willing to do. Maybe they will be ok with you saying ideally I want to stop at the end of the month and maybe they will want you  to stay for a whole new academic year. If you know your own preferences and boundaries you should be able to negotiate a solution that works for both of you.

Look, I totally get it. You've been slaving away in this research group for months now, doing most of the heavy lifting. But now you're just not feeling it anymore. The project bores you. You've got new interests you're jazzed about. I mean, six whole months - that's a long time when you're an undergrad! Your attention span has limits.
But you've also got these professors who brought you into their elite little group in the first place. Will they freak if you walk away? Are you gonna burn bridges? Betray them after all they've done?
Here's the deal. Professors expect this stuff from undergrads. One day you're obsessed with nematode worms, the next it's black holes and dark matter. They get that your interests are evolving. You're not married to them or this project.
So have a straight talk with your lead prof. Explain it's been a great learning experience but you're moving in a different direction now. Offer to finish up any loose ends so you don't leave them hanging. Train any newbie who's replacing you. Make it a smooth, collaborative transition.
If you communicate openly and tie up loose ends, you're doing right by them. Don't feel bad chasing your new passions. It's all part of the journey. No professor worth their salt will take it personally or see it as a betrayal. Just be real about why you’re moving on and show gratitude for the opportunity. You can part on good terms.

Just leave
(he won't be mad. And even if, that should not be what you base your decision on)
I don't disagree with other answers. But I want to emphasize that there is only one way forward.
You're "just" an undergrad
Even grad students are still "at the bottom" of the chain. Especially undergrads.
This also adds that I can, personally, only recommend you to explore: the world is in front of you and live ahead, don't get stuck in habits and comfort, that happens early enough. So enjoy, try out, be curious and have the courage to change and break with things!
That has a name
It's called the bus factor and describes that people just leave. People change, live changes. They may find a partner and move. They have other interests, maybe they wanna be a tourguide in the Atacama desert or a cook. There are hundreds of reasons people come and go.
Academia is about "want", not "have to"
Nothing works in academia if you force someone to do research and be inventive. All of it runs because people want to think. So if someone doesn't want to do what they do, they're of no help. People know that.
Disclaimer
People can always get mad for any reason. You're not letting them cut the line? They're not getting the free upgrade as they got already once? You never know how people react. So a more general advice: base your decision on what's right and wrong, not on how people may react. Once you do that, you're controllable and people can be toxic AF (!)

No, I worked with 4 different people during my undergrad and ended up doing my PhD with none of them and still will catch up with them when I'm back at the Uni I did my undergrad. So either:

The worst case is that they are disappointed about losing a potential student, but they still will have the professional connection if you continue in academia and may work with you or your new group in the future.

They feel its a betrayal, in which case you have just escaped a bad supervisor.

In either case leaving the group is the better choice if you feel that you want to experience a different field of research.
Take your time to explore different fields and opportunities during undergrad and maybe you'll find the variety of knowledge you have useful in the future, and possibly knowing multiple groups/fields of research may help you to cross-fertilise between them or act to introduce these groups to each other.


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Applying to a PhD program during a one year Master’s
I’m an incoming student at a top 10 CS graduate program and I’m currently planning my PhD applications. I’m worried about the fact that when I submit my PhD applications (December) I will have spent at most three months at my current Master’s program. I will not have time to do significant research, it’s as if I’m applying straight out of undergrad. I also read that most successful applicants at top CS PhD programs with a master’s under their belt have already published (or at least submitted a paper) by the time they apply (source: Jeff Erikson on Quora). What should I do to bolster my chances?

In what country (countries) do you intend to apply for a doctorate?

USA mostly, and thanks for your detailed answer!

Certainly in the US, and probably other places, you should apply this year, starting soon.
In the US the process for doctoral admission is long with early deadlines almost everywhere. Meet those deadlines. Decisions won't be made until mid-winter or so, but you need to be in the system.
Also note, and this applies everywhere, you don't, in fact, have a MS "under your belt". You are just a beginning student. Even at the point decisions are made, unless you want a gap year, the MS won't be in hand.
Some places might let you update your application materials if good things happen prior to decision time.
Back to the US, most of the competition for a doctoral slot will be with people who have only a bachelors as that is very typical here. Even being in a good MS will be a plus.
Get in the game if you want to play.

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Are there any high level knowledge scanner websites for scientific research?
For instance, I'm imagining a website where you could type in a query, like

Does exposure to sun cause cancer?

And it would lead you to a page which had an either human curated or automatic overview of scientific research that is related to attempting to answer this question. Obviously, it's a uselessly general question without more qualifying specificity, but you get the idea.
I am interested in any kinds of websites that offer visual or otherwise condensed summaries / links to existing scientific research across all domains. With a focus on usability as a lay person.
Does anyone know of sites that might do similar things?  Thanks for your time!

Your question is too vague. You already use search engines or specialized search engines like google scholar. So, what exactly do you want that is different?

Is it though? If you know of any sites that are in that ballpark, I'd like to know about them.

The obvious answer is google (or google scholar). That is literally what a search engine does, it shows you relevant documents based on your criteria. It seems like that's not exactly what you mean though. I don't think you will find curated content, only because how could someone curate content in real time for a dynamic search phrase?
There are programs that sort of do what you want. For instance UpToDate is a medical focused resource for clinicians that provides articles that summarizes topics and concisely presents the latest research and expert opinion. It doesn't generate these articles on the fly, and you are still just searching a database of content, but it is more curated than a general search engine. It is also very expensive and is really for medical doctors to use as a replacement for those old school desk references.
The final option is the worst (in my opinion) but is exactly what you want - Bing's AI powered search. It attempts to generate an explanation of whatever you want (being based on GPT3 or GPT4, I don't know which exactly) but unlike the base versions, tries to "cite" it's sources using search results from the regular Bing search algorithm. Presumably this is to circumvent the tendency for these AI's to basically make things up. So you might get more reliable results. I think it's only available on Edge (or through a phone app) and its basically just a reskinned ChatGPT. So I don't know how useful it would be for in depth research concepts. But it does sound like what you are looking for.

elicit has some of this functionality. it allows users to input a general research question and the program analyses papers that help answer the question, its quite new and theyre rolling out new features. ive used it as a supplementary resource and for that its quite helpful.
it provides some detailed results on each paper that it returns like a summary of the abstract, methods and key findings which is helpful too.

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How to publish results heavily influenced by a prior paper without being a plagiarizer?
When I was reading prior works for my master's thesis, I found a conference paper whose proposed architecture to solve the problem really caught my eye. So I decided to base my work around that architecture.
Of course over time I ended up changing a lot of details and even added a new block to the suggested block diagram in that paper, and completely changed the implementation of one of the blocks. Now my advisor has asked me to turn my master's thesis into a publishable paper.
Here's why I'm afraid, if you zoom out enough my architecture is 90% similar to what was suggested in that paper, and I would have to cite the original paper in order to not be a plagiarizer, but I think seeing a ton of repetitive [5]s will make the readers and the review team think that I basically have copied the paper. Since the difference is in the details, the shorter my paper would be, the more similar to the original work it would look like.
How can I deal with this situation? I want to publish my results without making it look like a copy of the work that heavily influenced me.

You avoid plagiarism with citation, indicating clearly what you used and how. Adapting work isn't an issue about plagiarism (assuming you cite properly), but it can be a copyright issue. But even there, using and adapting the work of others isn't a copyright issue. Republishing their work is.
But copyright is a serious issue. One of the rights of copyright holders (most jurisdictions) is the right to make (and control) derivative works. You need to explore that issue. To avoid the problem, contact the copyright holder with and ask for permission, describing what you have done.
If your work is a clear extension of theirs it is (probably) less of an issue. And a copyright holder has to care enough about it to want to file a lawsuit. They will care if your work lessens the value of the earlier work. I don't think that is likely, though, but IANAL.
At least, say how you adapted the work with enough detail to make it clear what your contribution is and what theirs is.

You avoid plagiarism by citation. This is a straightforward answer with no real wiggle room. I would not be too concerned with copyright, most academic papers are published under reasonably flexible licenses in terms of non-commercial use.
I am a little confused about why you feel you need to cite this paper so frequently - didn't you write an entire original thesis? I'm worried you are expecting to just reproduce this paper with some tweaks. This really isn't ideal and is likely not publishable regardless of citation (unless you intend to frame your work as a direct reproduction). That being said, citing an important paper 2 or 3 times is not a problem.
I think you avoid excessive similarity by writing your own paper. Your introduction/background, results, discussion, and conclusion should all be unique, even if your results support the original work. All you are really using is their architecture - it's totally normal to build off of others' work in this way. In fact if you write and frame the paper correctly, it would likely be sufficient to mention in the methods something to the tune of "the architecture was based on paper X with the following modifications...". I don't see what else would need to be cited, unless you copy everything from the paper in which case, your paper needs to be rewritten. This might be a concern if you followed their validation exactly and it was somehow non-standard i.e., unique to the source paper or if you found nothing new or interesting.

Publishing is often commercial use.

True but I've never heard of a publisher's license prohibiting citation (even excessive citation).

Citation is not the issue.  Publishers can't stop that, and it doesn't have much to do with their generosity concerning flexible licensing for non commercial use.  Commercial users essentially have the same rights in this area.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Another answer mentioned copyright issues, and for normal academic use there should not be a concern about that. Maybe I didn't express that clearly enough

It's normal that some work is strongly based on some other work, so just attribute honestly to the other paper what was done there. As long as you make clear what your own contribution is (assuming that there is some that is worthwhile) I don't see any problem. It may not be seen as original enough at a very high journal level, but if you don't aim too high, it should not be a problem.


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How do I go about correcting numbers in my accepted conference paper?
I have submitted a working paper to a conference. The working paper was accepted and I was asked to submit the final version.
During further data analysis I noticed a small error in my code (calculation of a variable), that affects path coefficients and model fit statistics. The incorrect values are only slightly off, so none of the results change.
Should I just change the values in the final submission or should I contact the editor beforehand?

Just make the necessary corrections. Only a major glitch calling the conclusions into question would warrant anything more. Small changes are pretty common in such things.


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Tutoring programs who accept teenagers
I am a 14-year-old college freshman at California State University Los Angeles. I want to get work experience so that my resume would look nice when I apply for jobs, and I think I would be a big shot at tutoring Mathematics. However, I haven't found reputable tutoring organizations that accept teens as tutors, like Next Level Tutors and Step Up Tutoring. I am not sure about Paper but currently, it has no job openings. Do you know any respected tutoring organizations that are online and accept tutors within my age range? If so, what are they?

If you wish to boost your CV by getting work experience, you may consider programs of paid summer internships at research institutions. One such program (for US citizens) is NREIP  There also is such a program at the JPL  Surely, there are more programs of the kind.


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How to in-text cite a paragraph in APA format
I have the following paragraph:

This incident was part of a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War. These two nations had different ideologies. The United States was a Capitalist country, where people had to compete for money if they are residents in it. This creates a gap between the net worths of people in the United States. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a Communist country, where people in it had to share their profits with everyone. Theoretically, this makes all people in a communist country have the same amount of money. Another difference between the two nations was that the United States was a democratic nation. The Soviet Union was authoritarian, although it claimed to be democratic.

which all comes from here. Is it possible to cite the entire paragraph using one in-text citation in APA format? I don't want to do this for each sentence, so I am looking for a more concise way.

I'm assuming this is for a school paper. You're probably best asking your professor and seeing what they want.
As far as I know, there is no maximum amount of information you can cite at once. If a block of factual information came from the same source, you could add a single citation. I believe APA states that it should be after the first sentence. I have also seen the citation at the end. That is how I have always done it when 2 or 3 sentences were based on one source. It is cumbersome to add a citation after every sentence. For example:

The sun is a yellow dwarf star with a circumference of 4,379,000km [1]. Temperatures on the surface range from 5,973°C to 15,000,000°C [1]. It is primarily composed of hydrogen gas that is fused into helium during nuclear reactions [1].

versus

The sun is a yellow dwarf star with a circumference of 4,379,000km [1]. Temperatures on the surface range from 5,973°C to 15,000,000°C. It is primarily composed of hydrogen gas that is fused into helium during nuclear reactions.

As long as the source of the information remains unchanged, the second example is acceptable and cleaner to read. Now there is a bit of a hitch here. If you are editorializing i.e., adding your own opinion between cited facts, or you are adding information from a second source, you must make it clear where each chunk of information comes from. For example:

The sun is a yellow dwarf star with a circumference of 4,379,000km [1]. Yellow dwarf stars are the most interesting type of star. And our sun is the perfect size. Temperatures on the surface range from 5,973°C to 15,000,000°C [1]. It is primarily composed of hydrogen gas that is fused into helium during nuclear reactions.

I've added a couple extra sentences that are not necessary derived from my imaginary source and so I have added another copy of the original citation, to indicate when we are getting back into factual territory.
This example is a bit awkward, but I think it illustrates that you want to clearly cite all material derived from the source and only material from the source.
I hope this helps! In your case, I would probably just add a single citation after the first sentence per APA guidelines


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Overwhelmed by scope of undergraduate research project - how to salvage a good result?
I'm currently in the final semester of my engineering bachelors degree.
Right now I'm working in a lab with the former supervisor of my bachelor thesis which I successfully defended in late march.
My advisor encouraged me to work towards turning it into a conference paper and for the last three months I have been doing that and achieved decent progress. we agreed that I will get to be first author while my advisor is second and another PhD student who also helps is third.
Now overall the work has been enjoyable but the problem is that the sheer amount of work still needed to complete the project feels to much for me to handle at this point.
The scope (which was mostly outlined by my advisor) is quite big and many tasks end up taking a lot longer than I (maybe naively) initially thought they would.
Furthermore while my co-authors obviously advise me and help me out with certain tasks that I can't do I am still the one who does probably 80% of the actual work including the writing (in my thesis I was also quite independent compared to other students according to my supervisor).
I am talking to my co-authors about this of course and trying to distribute the workload but ultimately they have their own projects that have a higher priority and neither of them are prepared to really take over whole subtasks in the foreseeable future.
I do not want to strain my relationship with them and they are both decent people and supportive mentors but at the same time I also feel like they are getting their co-authorships a little too 'cheap'. Then again this publication is much more useful for me than them so I don't have much I can do except ask nicely (I think).
All in all this means that even if I further increase my workload (which due to other commitments would become quite unhealthy for me) I am still looking at probably two months of work before we can submit a first draft. My advisor recently suggested me to push back the finish date and take more vacations now (he does care about me after all) but I'm also not entirely happy with that option. I'm starting my masters in late october and will have to take a regular courseload again then. Furthermore I want to get some tangible result sooner rather than later and at some point move on.
So the core problem is that the work is more than I can and want to do no matter if it is compressed into little time or stretched over a long time. I'm paid little and don't get credits for this so at some point the opportunity cost is just too high.
For the future I see the following options right now:

Get my co-authors more involved and finish the full project on time.
My favourite option but probably not realistic (due to the reasons above).
Reduce the scope of the project to the point that I can finish in a reasonable time.   The issue is that the hypothesis relies on testing a full system where removing some of its components compromises the usefulness of the results.
Having me finish off the project as research internship in my masters.
This would solve the lack of time problem in the coming semester as I will have to do a research internship anyways. However I originally wanted to explore a new topic and department in that internship instead of putting even more time into the current one.
Find another co-author to help me.
I would be totally open to collaborating with another person on this in exchange for co-authorship and in fact it might be quite enjoyable to work together. The big issue is though that the PhD students are all tied up in their own stuff while finding a fellow undergraduate who is motivated and competent might be impossible in the timespan of 1-2 months.
Leave the project (perhaps not immediately) and hope someone else finishes it.
I definitely do not want to do this but of course this still could happen at some point. Either I would have to completely write off the past few months or I could hope to still get some form of official recognition of all my work if someone ends up publishing something off of this eventually.

Right now I'm not sure what to do and I would appreciate some advice but also encouragement very much. I do realize that I'm ultimately responsible for the whole situation and that I should have probably figured out and clarified most of this sooner.
In hindsight I was quite naive going into the project and too excited by the idea of publishing to critically think through it properly.
Now, however, it is what it is and I want to make the best of the situation.
I would be especially interested in advice on how to turn the project into less of an all-or-nothing situation so that I'm not left without a tangible result if the publication fails for whatever reason.

There is a lot to work through here. What your feeling is pretty normal. A lot of inexperienced researchers, especially undergrads, tend to underestimate how much effort goes into taking a paper from conception to publication.
On top of that, research takes time and it can be basically impossible to gauge the time/effort required for a project. Even experienced researchers sometimes underestimate the time it takes to run experiments (or do whatever is required for the paper). And often collaboration means waiting on other people who are almost always busy with other things. So the fact that your project is taking longer than expected is not unusual and not really even a bad thing - it's just a part of doing research.
I think, if you want to see this through (which you should) you need to adjust your mindset a bit. Right off the bat, divorce yourself from the idea that this project has a set timeline. If things are going slow and taking longer than expected, that's okay. If you're feeling overwhelmed or like you are doing too much work, step back a bit and take a break - you can always pick back up again. If you need help, ask your advisor. And remember that you don't have to work on only one thing at a time.
Often times, the key to publishing is persistence. This paper does not need to be the focus of your life but you also don't need to drop it completely. If you want to work on other things during your masters, do that and work on this on the side. But keep plugging along. If it takes a little longer (and takes a back seat to new projects) that isn't really an issue as long as you don't give up completely.
So I think the best way forward is to keep working on this until it's done. Just do what you're doing but be flexible.
Your other options are a bit misguided I think.

Get my co-authors more involved and finish the full project on time.

Your co-authors sound like they are doing what they should be doing - supporting your paper. There is no reason you can't ask them to do more, but it doesn't sound like they are doing too little. Ultimately, if this is your project, it's up to you to push it through. Don't worry too much about the timeline. If this is what you want though, be honest and direct. Tell them that you want this paper done and you need help.

Reduce the scope of the project to the point that I can finish in a reasonable time.

I don't think that this makes sense. From what you say, there is no reason to reduce the scope. The fact that you want to be done with the paper sooner is not really enough on its own.

Find another co-author to help me.

This would not be unreasonable in certain situations. However, you are early enough in your education/career that you should finish your own projects - don't try to shovel this off on someone else.

Leave the project (perhaps not immediately) and hope someone else finishes it.

This accomplishes nothing. Honestly, when someone "abandons" a project, 90% of the time it never gets finished. And again, don't try to shovel off your project on someone else.
Like I said earlier, you need to adjust your mindset a bit. This is not an "all-or-nothing situation". What you're experiencing is the research process (for better or worse). If you want to finish this project, finish it. There is nothing wrong with moving on - it's your choice. But you don't have to.

Thanks for this thorough answer!
The reason for why I was so concerned with getting it done is that this was (initially) not supposed to last as long as it now will and I wanted to start my masters in the fall with a normal courseload.
However I think I have now found a way to integrate it into my studies by turning the remaining work into a research internship (which actually counts towards my masters degree unlike the current work). So if that works out I will have solved the problem quite nicely I think :)

I am talking to my co-authors about this of course and trying to distribute the workload but ultimately they have their own projects that have a higher priority ... I also feel like they are getting their co-authorships a little too 'cheap'.

I'm not in engineering, but this setup sounds appropriate, that is, being co-authors while doing less work than you. It doesn't seem like they are doing "too little," if they are supervising your project.
I think you are wise to try to wrap this up before starting classes again, so I would suggest you go with

Reduce the scope of the project to the point that I can finish in a reasonable time. The issue is that the hypothesis relies on testing a full system where removing some of its components compromises the usefulness of the results.

I don't know what the details mean, but your advisor should be able to advise you on what a still-useful project would be.


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Asking for academic reference
When it comes to asking for academic reference, let's say for a graduate application, must I wait until I'm done with my final exams or until the semester ends before I email my professor to write me a reference or am I able to ask them to write me one while the semester or finals have not yet ended?

You can ask at any time. The professor might want to wait until you finish to complete and send the letter, but you can ask earlier. They would then have a chance to think about what to say and to look out for things in your interactions that might affect the outcome.
If there are early deadlines, then let the professor know of them, of course. They will likely comply or let you know that they can't write a letter for you. Yes, Ask.


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Taking too long for a PhD: Practical implications later in academia?
I am a fourth year theoretical biology PhD student in a German university. My original funding source has now run out, but my supervisor (who has been quite supportive so far) is willing to fund me for longer, from a separate source. We both agree that if I spend some time there's a good chance that it would result in better quality publications/thesis.
My question is this: if I spend say, five/six years to finish PhD, what are the practical implications I should be aware of regarding staying in academia? E.g. would I face issues applying for postdoctoral positions/grants in EU or US (for eligibility or evaluation)? Is there any major reason to rush and wrap up quickly? Is there some problem I should be aware of and prepare for?

In the US, 4-6 years is pretty typical for a PhD.  My department (math, at a University of California) guaranteed funding for PhD students for 5 years, and was nearly always able to find funding for a 6th.  Probably around 1/3 of students stuck around for that 6th year (and one or two every year came back for a 7th).  COVID changed things (I'm told), but 6 years isn't really a big deal in math.  My father's PhD (cultural anthropology) took nearly 10 years (though he did take some time off to complete a JD); other people in his department took 7-8 years.

Ultimately, 5-6 year degrees are not unusual in the US (though, of course, there is a lot of variability from one department to another, and one institution to another; my impression is that lab sciences go faster, for example), and I can't believe that anyone is going to care all that much how long it took you to get a degree.  It certainly isn't something I am going to care about when I am on a hiring committee.

Thanks for your comments @XanderHenderson . Other posts on SE suggest the same. But other people's CVs in my field suggest they typically finish in four years or so in Germany (although I'd agree that this is anecdotal, and not a proper survey) - which leads me to wonder where exactly do people face issues if they spend longer. I'd also appreciate it if someone shared a survey that I may have missed. Here's the only one I could find but it doesn't talk about implications later in an academic career.

Would your supervisor be willing to fund you as a post-doc instead ? Also: I would assume your supervisor knows, but it pays to double check the academic regulations at your university to see if there is an upper limit for the length of a PhD.

Assume that I don't have a problem with being a PhD student for next year or possibly a sixth year, not in terms of regulations or funding. My question is more about what problems would I face in academia if I spend that long (even if indirectly)


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Is It Appropriate to Provide a Professor's Assistant's Email in the Application System?
I'm currently in the process of applying to a graduate program and have a question regarding the submission of recommendation letters.
I have a professor who has agreed to provide a recommendation letter for me. However, due to his busy schedule, much of their correspondence, including matters related to recommendations, is often managed by his lab administrative assistant.
My question is: In the application, is it acceptable to provide the details (name, position. etc.) of the professor as the recommender but use the assistant's email address (uni email, ofc) for correspondence? This arrangement is with the understanding that the recommendation letter is authored by the professor, but the assistant handles the submission.
How might an admissions committee react to this arrangement? Is there a chance it could be viewed unfavorably?

Is this what the professor has told you to do? Usually a PA would have access to the professor's email account, precisely so that this kind of thing is not necessary.

I would assume that the admissions committee may well not even see what email address you entered into the system, only the resulting recommendation letter, no matter which email address it was sent in from. Probably best to just ask the recommending professor, or their assistant as to what they usually do if you don't want to bother the professor.

@avid I wasn't told how to do it and I don't think that the PA has access to the email.


text:
Can I put a paper from a non-indexed conference to Google Scholar?
I have a paper published in the proceedings of a student conference that is not indexed. Is it possible to add it to my Google Scholar profile? Can I submit it to Arxiv and then add to the Scholar profile?
I'm fairly new to the field and don't know all the details.

Question 1: Yes, you may go to your profile, press to the "+" icon, and provide the bibliographic data of your contribution.
[![Plus icon and Add article manually menu item>] 1]1
Question 2: Yes, you could submit the paper to arxiv.org. Papers, which are included in arxiv.org are indexed in Google Scholar. Make sure that the copyrights of the proceedings of the student conference do not prevent publication via arxiv.org. Further, be aware that there is a kind of approval process in arxiv.org, i.e., not every submitted paper finnally gets published in arxiv.org.

As far as I understand, if it's the first publication, you don't have that "+" icon because going to "my profile" makes you choose an article from the search only

@ElonMuskofBadIdeas Yes, this might be true if there is no entry in the profile yet.


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What is the correct tense to use in a literature review?
I am currently writing my bachelor thesis and have to do a small literature review for it. Unfortunately, I don't know which tense I should use.
Do you write ?

Hager et. al (2020) show/indicate .....
Hager et. al (2020) showed/indicated....
Hager et. al (2020) have shown/indicated ....

I am quite confused about what tense to use.

Welcome to Academia SE! There are many questions that generally answer the question, "What tense should I use in a paper?" These usually include pointers on what tense to use in the literature review section of a paper, e.g., https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3608/in-what-tense-present-past-should-papers-be-written/96178.

I don't think there are any general standards. It depends on your field and, potentially, your adviser's preferences. I tend to prefer the active tense (since I think that any sentence that mentions a work kind of presents said work), but pick whatever you like as long as you are consistent about it.
(My field is maths/computer science; other domains might have common standards)

What if their is a clear chronological gap in the literature -- early authors claimed that, while current authors claim that...? That is being consistent about a change in thinking. (Probably not what is happening in the OP's case, but worth considering.)

Generally speaking any are acceptable. If you focus on the authors then "did show" or "have shown" feels about right. But if you take the citation to mean the paper itself, then the present tense is fine since the paper still exists and does still show...
However, advisors can be a bit picky on some such things, so it would be good to ask whether they think it makes a difference.
In a few rare circumstances, future might even work if a paper hasn't yet appeared, as in one of your own. But, as Gnosophilon says, consistency is probably a good choice.
In almost all cases people will understand you no matter how you write it. But there are exceptions, such as when some things need to be put in historical context, perhaps with older results being replace by new research. That doesn't seem to be your concern here, though.

My preference would be option 2, the simple past. There is IMO a good reason to prefer it. Quite often it is natural to say something like "Hager et al. showed [statement]. Subsequently, Smith et al. showed [stronger statement]." This (or anything else that indicates the papers were written at different past times) doesn't really work with either of the other options.

The already-given advice to ask your advisor is good general advice for academia. It doesn't always work; some advisors are less helpful than they should be. But if they will be grading your work, they can be the most reliable about how they want it to look.
Another piece of general writing advice is to look for already-published examples in your field. A lot of papers have a section that is a small literature review - how do they do it? This is nice because you can learn more than just what tense to use.


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Second opinion requested in third round of review
I recently submitted my first paper to a well-known journal in the field. After about 1.5 months, the first decision was a major revision which I completed promptly and re-submitted (the decision was by a single reviewer, and of course, the editor).
After about another month the same reviewer asked for a moderate revision (also commenting that the main issue of the major revision had been satisfactorily cleared). I again acted on it quickly and re-submitted.
This new version was sent back to the same reviewer again, who, after two days, remarked to the assistant editor that they might want to get a second opinion and so the AE is looking for another reviewer.
Since it is my first attempt at publication, I'm not sure if I should be worried about it being a sign of the original reviewer realizing the work is unsuitable for the journal and wishing to get another opinion for that reason, or if there's still a good chance of eventual publication. Any similar experiences or opinions on this matter would help.

You may have worries, but they may be misplaced. It is the editor's job to decide on suitability, not the reviewer's, though they can make recommendations. Reviewers are responsible for evaluating correctness and originality (novelty).
A more likely situation is that the reviewer suddenly had doubts about the correctness of the paper itself as might be the case in a technical field such as math. The more information that is revealed in the recent edits might cause rethinking of some issue(s).
Yes, you are at risk of rejection, but that is always the case until the editor accepts the paper.
You are free to ask the editor what the concerns might be, though you may not get much of an answer. And it is in your interest that there is a thorough review. It is what it is.

Thank you for your answer. As you said, the reviewer had doubts about the correctness in the first round, hence the major revision request. The reviewer seemed satisfied with the correctness, however, in their comments after the second review

I'd take the news at face value: now that the paper has gone through several revisions, the reviewer is unsure about the paper's suitability for that journal. It would have been better if they had predicted that from the beginning, for example, sending you a note along the lines of "after some revisions, this paper might be better suited for another journal", but they didn't. I'd take it as a good sign that they are not rejecting the paper outright. I've never had this happen to me when submitting papers, but it has happened to me as a reviewer, that of being unsure of a paper's suitability after several rounds of revisions. It's a human enterprise.


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Acceptance criteria for top conference
I am a PhD student at a University that isn't top rated in my field, and have only published once before and wasn't even cited.  I want to submit what I believe is a really great paper to the top conference in my field.  Will my paper be judged only on its merits?  Or will my lack of credentials prevent reviewers taking it as seriously as someone with a high h-index at a prestigious University?

What does your advisor think of the paper?

As a reviewer I'm meant to review the paper and not the author's name. If they wanted to accept papers based on the author's h-index, they wouldn't need to ask reviewers.

There is unfortunately evidence that researchers from the top universities get the benefit of doubt more often than everyone else (https://www.protocol.com/workplace/how-i-decided-edward-lee). However, in my experience with CS conferences, all papers are still evaluated on their merits and are taken seriously (unless they are very bad - but then they are rejected reliably). But if your contribution is unclear, your proofs are not 100% convincing, or the like, some reviewers may subconsciously give a slightly better rating to papers from authors they know. So you just have to write good papers!

Beyond reviewer bias, there are also more legitimate reasons why publishing top-conference papers might be easier for PhD students in certain universities: Being exposed to a culture of people who regularly publish in top conferences is likely to impact the way that you think and talk about research, and increase the potential to come up with top-conference papers yourself. Not that it cannot be done otherwise, it's just way more "heavy lifting" on your part.

I don't know your field, but in mine (CS) the paper will get a fair reading and accepted or not on its merits.
There is a lot of competition, of course, and a limited number of slots for presentation so nothing is automatic. But my experience is one of acceptance and a desire to push the boundaries of knowledge and practice, not to assume that everything good comes from Harvard.
And use the time at the conference to build yourself a circle of contacts who can eventually become collaborators.
There are lots of great people working at universities that don't have  great names. Don't be intimidated.

Thanks!  I completely understand competition and limited slots and legitimately hope a better paper would get accepted over mine.  I just don't want to apply if my paper will be thrown out before anyone even reads the abstract.

First, in my field, some top conferences have a double blind reviewing process.  Second, the large number of competent researchers and limited positions at top 100 institutions mean many of these researchers are now located beyond the top 100 universities.  Third, it is easier than before to access information and become a competent researcher.  For these reasons, a high quality paper with a good idea can come from almost anywhere.
Having said that, the key problem with lower rank institutions is that they may not have the people or/and resources to carry out high quality research.  I have reviewed many papers from these institutions, and many authors simply do not have the processes to carry out high quality research nor know what is high quality research.
Whether your paper has a chance will very much depend on your supervisor(s).  Does he/she have a high track record of publishing high quality work? If not, even if your idea is great, it may lack many key ingredients expected by your community.  This means it is not the 'brand' of your institution that matters, but the quality of your work.

As I said, I am confident I have a good idea and high quality paper - my concern is no will read it when they see who I am and where I am from.

It depends solely on the conference. In machine learning conferences, papers are typically reviewed in a double-blind fashion. While the existence of a preprint might pose an unfavourable advantage for 'big names,' your paper will still be reviewed based on its merits, and no one will take your previous publication record into account, at least not in a negative fashion.
Good luck with your submission!


text:
Censorship by Collaboration?
Suppose I am the primary author of an article advocating a controversial view along with several coauthors, and my coauthors not only change their mind but want to stop my article from being published altogether. It seems wrong to remove their name if they contributed, but worse to make them sign on to something they disagree with.  Is it okay for me to tell them I am publishing anyway and give them the choice between two options - either remove their name or keep it?  Or do they have a right to prevent me from ever publishing ideas because they contributed?

We've seen this situation many times here, though usually the co-authors are merely non-responsive rather than combative. Though this one is very similar / possible duplicate: If an author declines authorship, may her co-authors publish without her?.

Could you add what field you are in? In a lot of fields the idea of an article 'advocating a view' seems strange, so someone more familiar with your field may be able to give better advice.

For various reasons, sometimes some co-authors want to remove their names from a publication. Ideally, their intellectual contributions should also be removed (especially if they "want to stop the article from being published altogether").

It seems wrong to remove their name if they contributed, but worse to make them sign on to something they disagree with.

You have no power to make them sign on, and it's unethical to remove their name without removing their intellectual contribution.

Is it okay for me to tell them I am publishing anyway and give them the choice between two options - either remove their name or keep it?

Neither. The third option is to rewrite the paper so that it has only your contributions.

Or do they have a right to prevent me from ever publishing ideas because they contributed?

They can't stop you from publishing your own ideas. Hence the need to rewrite the paper.

If the ideas presented are the results of interactive collaboration (as opposed to a sum of contributions), it might be difficult to even agree on who was the author of which part.

As the other answer says, "you can divide contributions between content (concept and ideas) and form (writing)."  Removing their writing is easy.  If I had an idea and discussed it with them, they contributed even if it was my idea and they didn't write anything.

Short answer:

Write your own article representing your own ideas, trying to abstract away what you feel was contributed only by your former co-authors, and acknowledge what is left of their contributions in the acknowledgment section at the end of the article.
Send your draft to your former co-authors, asking if they agree with your depiction of their contribution or if they want to make alternative suggestions.
You are the author of the article you write, you decide if taking into account their suggestions or not.

Longer Answer:
Simplifying a bit, you can divide contributions between content (concept and ideas) and form (writing). Both can be difficult to attribute to a single person, but the strategy to cope with this differ:

if you are not clear about who wrote a given paragraph, delete it and rewrite it entirely as your own work to avoid the most subtle risk of plagiarism.
if you are not clear about who contributed a given concept which you wish to still present, do present it (in your own words), but acknowledge in the acknowledgment section at the end of your article the persons with whom you discussed the concept, in statements such as "the author thanks XXX for interesting discussions which lead to the concept of YYY" or even "the author thanks XXX for suggesting the concept of YYY".


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Prerequisites for sfu computer science undergraduate
I graduated in 2022 and have not started post secondary yet. I wanted to apply for the computer science program at SFU but I was wondering how strict the prerequisites I need are. I have all the grade 11 needed courses but for grade 12 I have English 12, social Justice 12, and pre calculus 12. I’m planning on taking physics 12 and law 12 to reach the requirements but in pre calculus 12 I received a 57%. Should I look into retaking that course or do I still have a good chance of getting in if all my other courses are above a 70%.

Hi Ghazal, this isn't a good site to ask questions specific to you personal circumstances

Sorry, this is not the right site for your question.  Undergraduate admissions are off topic in general, and we don't handle questions about the rules of specific institutions.  You should contact the SFU admissions office with this question.

I have contacted sfu but due to their high volume of inquiries it could take up to 2 weeks to get an email back. I just wanted to see if anyone that is currently in the program has any input!

@GhazalMahdavian It's clear what you want; the problem is that you're not asking in an appropriate place, because undergraduate admissions is off-topic here.


text:
France M2 admission
I have just finished my bachelor’s degree in maths (180 ECTS). I am currently starting my master’s degree in Data Science at the University of Luxembourg. In my first year I will accumulate 60+ ECTS.
I wanted to ask whether I would be able to apply for the M2 in IASD at PSL (a data science related M2), given I have acquired the 60 ECTS of my first year. Of course it would still depend on other factors, I would just like to know whether a transfer would be possible/feasible?
Thanks in advance!

Entering directly in the middle of a diploma path is usually called an admission passerelle in France
It is extremely dependent on the institution's policy (most of the time at this level, those will be open, but existing students will be prioritized)
You can usually easily find this information on the institution's website
For example, at Dauphine University (the PSL component) the rules for M2 are at this link

Who can apply?

Students who have completed a BAC+4 degree (a four-year degree worth 240 ECTS) or equivalent at Dauphine or another university or institution of higher education in one of the following disciplines: computer science, applied mathematics with a focus on computer science and algorithmic thinking
Students in their last year of engineering school (or holding an engineering degree related to the program’s main areas of study)


text:
Software implementation / quantitative research for MSc thesis did not go well
I've been working on my MSc thesis in creative AI, and chose to research a novel form of game AI, with three seperate strands/use-cases, all of which are novel.
I achieved straight A's in this course, so I'm disappointed I've not been able to achieve everything I hoped for the thesis. In hindsight, this was too far out of scope for a three month thesis period, but here I am.
It's due in just over a month (Oct 2) and I've started writing, because I'm not sure what else to do. There are no extensions available. My supervisor has been on holiday the entire time, as well as my course leaders etc, hence why I'm asking here for advice!
I successfully designed the systems and flows, created the work environment (I had to implement the paper it is based on, which had not yet released its code), and made a rudimentary implementation for one use-case which I'm currently testing. It works but it's not a great implementation - my programming skills are not such that I can fully execute the entire flow, solo, in such a short timeframe.
Is there a way that I can present my design frameworks (which are thoroughly researched and definitely can work, I just ran out of time to write the code) as finished research alongside the part I've finished and tested? I'm comfortable switching from a purely technical focus to a design/HCI one if that would help, and it is permissable as this is a creative computing course.

It's not really reasonable to expect someone to write a thesis with absolutely no support. You can ask some questions here, but it won't be sufficient to replace actual supervision. Will your supervisor be available soon so you can get some assistance?

It's dangerous to give advice when I don't know what the requirements are and I don't know what you're really doing. You should really be having this discussion with your instructor -- hard to believe they just gave you a big project and then disappeared for three months. Still, from what you've told me...
It seems like it's time to rescope. It does not matter if you formally committed to the big project already; scope often changes in research. It's much better to proactively narrow your scope and do a good job on the small problem, than to keep working on the big problem and fail to deliver.

Created the work environment (I had to implement the paper it is based on, which had not yet released its code), and made a rudimentary implementation for one use-case which I'm currently testing

This doesn't sound so bad. You identified an interesting paper, implemented it, changed it substantially so that it would solve a different problem, and tested / evaluated the results. Not bad at all.
Better yet, you still have a month (a third of the time!) left. Personally, I would ditch the rest of it and just dig in here. Either improve the implementation so you get better results (especially if your code will be reviewed), or think about other interesting things you can do with the existing codebase.

Is there a way that I can present my design frameworks (which are thoroughly researched and definitely can work, I just ran out of time to write the code)

Maybe? Saying "I have this idea, but no real proof it will work" is not really convincing. I would certainly avoid calling it "finished research." On the other hand, if you have already put a lot of effort into this design, there probably is a way you can include this work. For example, you could motivate the actual work by saying it is a proof-of-concept for your more creative idea. Or in the "future work" section, you could describe the big project as a natural next step in the small project's evolution.


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Is it true that people willingly provide their articles that were published in journals?
I live in a third world country. I barely make ends meet so I cannot afford to go to college. However my passion for academics never died so I kept self learning with online materials. However beyond a certain level, free material is not sufficient and is hard to find so I end up relying on sci-hub and other websites. But sometimes the latest articles are not available even there so I have to search for hours in my spare time.
While sacrificing my sleep time and searching I found [a twitter post by Dr. Holly Witteman] that reads as follows:

That $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors.
If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so.

This post gave me hope that I could finally get my hands on articles that I was interested in. I found emails of four writers, politely asking them for a copy of their article. However I didn't get a single reply. I tried other email services because I thought my email might be blocked by spam filters. But that didn't change anything. Eight months later I have yet to hear back. Is the practice of freely giving out papers limited to the area Dr. Holly Witteman majors in? Is this not common at all and the doctor is a generous outlier? Is it that professors are so busy that they don't respond to random people's emails?
Also why do people write for journals in the first place if they really don't make a single penny out of their work and contribute to filling the pockets of greedy publishers and more paywalls? Is publicity so important that it is worth giving up all financial incentives?

(a) to have a career in science, you need funding. (b) to attract funding, you need to be perceived as an excellent researcher in the respective field. (c) to be perceived as an excellent researcher, you need to publish in the "top journals" and have a high citation count. (d) many top journals are not open access, and do not share income with the authors. (e) at the same time, citation counts tend to be higher for freely available articles. (f) point e makes putting papers on personal web pages or providing them on request attractive.

...oh, and attracting funding is useful for getting or keeping an academic job. The salaries of that job over time are probably at least an order of magnitude higher than any author payments that the authors may be able to collect over time...not mentioning that these, if they actually existed, may belong to the employer of the researcher at the time of writing.

I am sorry that you are having trouble getting a response. It is in fact perfectly normal to ask researchers to share their work. You are not breaking any kind of academic norm by doing so, and it is reasonable to expect an answer. It's difficult to speculate why you are not successful. I suspect overeager spam filters may be the main culprit. If not, are you emails short and to the point? You should not need more than 4 or 5 sentences to state your request. Do they have an informative subject line? Are you sending them to one person rather than emailing 5 co-authors at the same time?

I have gotten these types of requests before. If it's from an educational domain, I take the 20-30 seconds it takes to fulfill the request. However, if it's from some random domain, I have always assumed it's some sort of scam / spam effort (IE, if I respond, I'm going to get 500 more emails inviting me to a "conference"). I personally would be more likely to respond if you very succinctly convince me that you can't access the paper, that you are truly interested in the work, and that you won't send 5 more emails if I comply. Best of luck.

Try sending your article request via ResearchGate. Some like me will oblige you on ResearchGate rather than responding to an 'unknown' email.

Actually, I would not answer your request as I would think that you are collecting papers for sci-hub or similar. The situation would be different if I knew you somehow, either having seen you at a conference, or having read your paper. And more, most of the authors gladly share their papers if there is a hope that they will be cited.

Before emailing the author to ask for a copy, check the author's web site to see if a copy is already available there.

@GEdgar there's a FireFox extension called UnPayWall (quite likely Chrome as well) that looks for legitimate accessible copies.  Of course it doesn't know about all institutional repositories but it's a good start

Some journals may ask the author(s) to transfer the copyright, rather than just allow them to publish the article. In that case, the author(s) may not have the right to share the article. And in other cases, authors may wonder if they have the right to do it or not and be too busy to check.

I just started an #ICanHazPDF room in the chat (https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/148199/icanhazpdf) . Share the DOI of the paper there and magic may (and may not) happen.

The last paragraph is a separate question and should be asked as such, although I'm pretty sure it's a duplicate.

Also a possibly relevant question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/165634/84370

In my field everything new is also uploaded to arxiv. Perhaps there is something similar in your field?

@semmyk-research: … and others will not, since they cannot distinguish honest requests on ResearchGate from its automatic spam or they spam-filter ResearchGate e-mails altogether.

When there are multiple authors, proceedings and several journals in my field ask as part of the submission that one co-author be designated as the "corresponding author". E-mails to the other co-authors would be regarded as spam or phishing attempts.

Yes, people do send other people free copies of their articles that are published. Authors make nothing on published papers, as the post you reference states. Often authors have a specific agreement with the journal that says they retain the rights to share individual copies of their work with people; other times they just share them, it's unlikely a journal will come after them for breach of contract unless they're very blatant about it, like posting the articles for public download rather than emailing copies to individuals.
However, that doesn't mean sending a free copy is free to the sender: it does take them time and energy to respond to an email, to dig up a copy of the PDF (remember that they may be reading email on a phone or other device), etc. The time investment may increase for older papers, and over time even papers that you've written yourself (maybe especially papers you've written yourself?) get to be stale and boring. You might also get better responses from a student who published the work than a professor who supervised it. Professors in particular get a lot of email. It's very easy to intend to respond to a request and then to forget about it, or to simply triage and pay attention only to the most pressing matters.
I think academics are much more likely to respond when interest is coming from someone they know or are otherwise eager to share their work with (e.g., another academic), and when the work is new. Unfortunately, your position doesn't really fit well with that mold, so you may struggle to get attention. I don't think there's much of a solution to this, being more pestering will just get you labeled as a pest. You might have better luck outside the busy and vacation times of year: summer, beginning and end of semester, key holidays, are all times when it's harder to get responses from academic emails. You might also format your email in a way that makes it easy to respond to and increases confidence that it's worth someone's time:

Keep it very short and to the point.

Identify the paper clearly, with a full citation, and make your request clear (like "can you email me a PDF of..."). If you're emailing Dr. King, "King et al 2023" might describe several papers.

Explain very briefly why the paper is important to you/convey in as short a phrase as possible that you're familiar with the field (short meaning less than a full sentence, ideally). "I'm studying Underwater Basketweaving and am not able to access full text of your paper on delicate weave morphology..." Try to sound like a human, if you copy-paste the title or something from the abstract here, you'll look like a bot.

I'm surprised you're having such trouble with the latest articles! For newer articles, the trend in publishing is tending towards open-access rather than subscription models, so it's more likely you'll find newer articles than older. Another trend in publishing is towards preprints like arXiv: these may be identical to the published article, or may be slightly different but are still suitable for your purposes. Many academics also just post .pdfs of their paywalled articles on their own personal websites, whether or not they are technically allowed to do so. Look for all these alternatives before you make a request.

Once upon a time this is what those reprints were for. You'd get a nice postcard in the mail in a semi-standard format requesting a copy of one of your papers, and you'd send it to them. In the mid-80's I spent a summer at IBM Research with someone who used the declining number or reprint requests and the countries they still came from to map out the spread of copy machines around the world vs year. No, that was not their primary research goal...

@JonCuster I've still received paper reprint copies from a journal as recently as... oh, 2014-ish maybe? Has definitely become more of a curiosity.

Yup, and they now just sit in a file. Some folks routinely had to order extra reprints because they knew they would get >100 requests for most papers.

Maybe sending a physical postcard would actually work. Surely will get the necessary attention.

@BryanKrause the last journal I published in offered paper reprints - but they wanted to charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and they didn't offer a handful of prints, you had to buy quite a few.

Why include more than the first sentence in this answer?  The first sentence is the answer.  The rest is redundant.  It's almost like ChatGPT.

@AnonymousPhysicist Well, OP has been asking and not getting papers. So, it seems like they need a bit more explanation. I did expand the answer a bit in response to some helpful comments.

This is only a supplement to the nice answer of Bryan Krause who has answered all but the financial questions you ask at the end.
People publish without pay because it enhances their career and earns them advancement through the academic ranks. That comes with increased salary and also, in many cases, opportunities for grant funding for the research that leads to those papers. The benefits may not be financial, but they are definitely a benefit to a career.
Moreover, it isn't that publishers are necessarily "greedy", though some disreputable ones are. There are costs associated with publishing. Most especially for print journals, but also for online publishing in maintaining web sites and their infrastructure, with a promise of "perpetual" availability. That cost must come from somewhere since governments don't, in general, give much support to it. And, like any business, investors have a fair claim on profit, as long as it isn't exorbitant. It might seem exorbitant from someone from your location, I realize, but the costs are real.

"Moreover, it isn't that publishers are necessarily "greedy", though some disreputable ones are. There are costs associated with publishing." Sure, but are they really that high? Sci-Hub, for example, has to maintain a similar web site and infrastructure, but is funded entirely by donations. Further, Sci-Hub claims "The running of Sci-Hub website costs a few thousand dollars per month."

Arguably, most authors are paid to publish their papers - as part of whatever salary they receive from their university/institute. One might then ask why the university is willing to give the fruits of its employees' labour away for free - but perhaps that's easier to understand as being aligned with a general mission to educate and inform the public, as well as being good 'advertising' to attract new investment.

@Vaelus Journals have things like software developers (for things like the peer-review software, API tools, etc), IT staff, copy-editors, typesetters, customer support staff, marketing staff, managers to manage those things, HR staff, etc. Plus the cost for commercial work space. Just directly hiring a copyeditor for one of my articles would probably run $100-200. My understanding is that Sci-hub is run just by a single person trying to provide file access, which is just a small part of what journals do.

@Vaelus Also, keep in mind that a lot of researchers are at major universities and have pretty good access and rarely if ever need to use Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub's costs might look a lot higher if those people lost access and had to start relying on Sci-Hub

@Vaelus SciHub is just a database, not a journal. It scrapes already published articles from other sources and hosts them in one place. Simply hosting the finished article sidesteps the vast majority of the work that goes into scientific publishing.

There are costs associated with publishing yes: the order of magnitude is between $200 and $1000 per article (depends on field, size of journal, rejection rate and so on). The big publishers charge more than that, either to the authors (APC) or the readers (library contracts). Elsevier (sorry I mean "RELX") has profit margins between 20% and 40% depending on the year, way above the average private company.

@KFK The big publishers charge more than that because a great deal of manuscripts are waived (i.e. free). You should be able to see that yourself - if each article costs between $200 and $1000 and the APCs are $3000, then the profit margin would not be between 20% and 40%. RELX operates more than just publishing, they also run Scopus, EMBASE, etc. They've not had profit margins of 40% for the last 10 years (and their most recent profit margin is <20%). And there are several hundred companies with net margins > 20%, e.g. Apple and Yum Brands. How much do you really know of publishing?

@Allure They've not had profit margins of 40% for the last 10 years According to this Guardian article they have had such margins in 2019. According to RELX’s 2022 financial statement, it was about 25%.

Also, the comparison with Apple is specious. Apple is a private company selling to private buyers in a competitive market. If they do well, that’s legally and morally good (unless you reject the basic principles of capitalism, but let’s not go there). Elsevier, SAGE etc. operate in a practical-monopoly market (you cannot look at only the Springer literature to keep up-to-date in your field) flooded with public funds. It is entirely legal, sure - but they are still parasitic rent-seekers.

@KFK you can always check their annual report, which is surely more reliable than Guardian. https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2019-annual-report.pdf

@KFK you consider Elsevier and SAGE to be in a "monopoly market" and not competitors to each other? I'd like to see your logic to that. Also, tons of companies make money from public funds. I don't see an issue.

If I don’t like Apple smartphones, I can buy a Samsung smartphone, and I can still call/text/etc. Apple smartphones. If a university librarian doesn’t like Elsevier, and decides not to subscribe to Elsevier journals, then either the researchers will use Sci-Hub or they will miss on a lot of relevant literature; either is unacceptable to university heads. (In that respect, the move towards open-access with APC i.e. author-pays rather than subscription i.e. reader-pays does reintroduce competition.)

As to "public funds": I don’t care that Apple makes a lot of profit, because if I don’t have to buy their products. I do care that my tax money goes towards Elsevier’s profits via university library budgets. If it was the result of Elsevier selling a good product in a competitive market, it would be fine, but that is not the case.

On Researchgate, a networking platform for academics that some do not particularly like but that I personally find useful (see other questions here on this site for more info on that), there is a feature for each added article where you can ask the researchers who put an article up there for a copy of it. They receive a notification (on researchgate) that someone asked for their research and can then easily send the PDF of the article (that they have perviously uploaded to research gate) to the asker. Sharing research is less tedious this way, but requires the person(s) you ask for their research to be logged in there every once in a while at least.
I have both received requests for my papers there and asked others for theirs and in my experience the success rate of receiving papers is quite substantial (I would say about 50%), so I would suggest to try this route. Often, you will not receive the final print version but a less well formatted draft version of papers, as this is less of an issue with copyright, but the content will be the same.

Unfortunately ResearchGate sends so much email that it's hard to regard it as anything but spam.

@BryanKrause You can opt out of all email notifications in your settings. I hardly receive any email from them.

I was about to answer OP, directing to ResearchGate, and I saw @Sursula answer. Yes, opting out of email notifications reduces, almost eliminate, receiving unwarranted emails from RG; at least for me.

I'm told that Researchgate has a profile for me, even though I've never made an account there. E.g., I've had someone message me there for a paper (which I have no way of receiving), be disappointed, and at a later date track down my school email to tell me that. So be aware if using that channel.

Yeah, they scrape author names, then send emails to co-authors of the paper if they're already on the platform asking to "Confirm you authored XYZ with ABC" to build up their network. Plus they search for any paper that matches your name and email it to you saying "Did you author XYZ". My name isn't overly common but I get many of these so it is a bit spammy

I doubt you will get much from Researchgate since everybody's blocked them by now.

@Sursula I don't really like the idea of being bullied into making an account so I can disable the spam I didn't ask for.

I like ResearchGate (as an independent academically-minded person who doesn't have easy access to paywalled sites) for the PDFs that are already there and available.  I don't like their spam "did you author this article?" because my last name - uncommon (though not unique) in English-speaking areas is apparently a common last name in Turkey.  No, I did not ever nor will I ever co-author an article in Turkish.

The very brief answer to this part of the question...

Also why do people write for journals in the first place if they really don't make a single penny out of their work and contribute to filling the pockets of greedy publishers and more paywalls? Is publicity so important that it is worth giving up all financial incentives?

... is: It's required for promotion in academia.
Traditionally, the fundamental job description of a professor in the west is to make new research discoveries and publicize them. Teaching classes is/was considered a secondary, almost accidental part of the job.
The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2021 wrote this:

The most common model, and the one that guides both of our careers as assistant professors, is 40/40/20 — that is, 40 percent research, 40 percent teaching, and 20 percent service.

Note the leading "research" component requires publication somewhere widely recognized. The publishers are arguably taking advantage of this need to publish with their copyright and paywall regimes. Recently many predatory publishers have risen, looking to scam academics who have this occupational need to publish.
Over time (speaking USA here), as college funding has shifted proportionally from the state to students paying tuition out-of-pocket, the emphasis and proportion of time professors spend on teaching has followed the same trend (resulting in the current 40/40/20 expectation).

I live in a third world country. I barely make ends meet so I cannot afford to go to college. However my passion for academics never died so I kept self learning with online materials.

Many academics, upon hearing this, would be more than willing to send you everything they've ever written and (if they're as junior as I am) answer questions over email. I was lucky enough to have a student from Nigeria reach out to me on Twitter and ask me a lot of interesting questions about my research and future directions for their research.

This post gave me hope that I could finally get my hands on articles that I was interested in. I found emails of four writers, politely asking them for a copy of their article. However I didn't get a single reply.

There's two reasons for this: academic emails, and other life comitments. Many students are on academic emails which expire once their Ph.D. is done (or shortly after) so they can't be reached at that email. Another is that people are busy and there's no direct reason to do this besides a small amount of self promotion and making the world a better place, which is hard to justify against paying the bills and handling responsibilities. I would try to find an updated email for the authors and ping them again, sometimes they just don't respond when they see it the first time but showing continued interest will have them more likely to respond. Obviously, be reasonable and wait a week or two between emails.

Also why do people write for journals in the first place if they really don't make a single penny out of their work and contribute to filling the pockets of greedy publishers and more paywalls? Is publicity so important that it is worth giving up all financial incentives?

You have to understand that many people who have the means to pursue a Ph.D. at a research university have the means to pursue something for reasons outside of money and fame. For example, at my university many people turned down jobs that would put them in the top 5% of U.S. earners to achieve personal goals as a Ph.D. student, such as furthering their research understanding or contributing to a higher scientific cause.

If you send it to multiple co-authors in one email, each one will think another will reply. If you send it to each of them separately, if multiple of them reply, you're wasting their time.
If you're sure you can't find it anywhere else, send an email to one email address at a time, waiting a few days in between each attempt. If one of them replies with the article you want, reply to everyone else you've already emailed to tell them you got it, so they don't duplicate their effort.

Some researchers put very similar (same major results described) paper somewhere where it is not difficult to find. Try just putting authors and title into Google search box.
If they have done so, they may be reluctant to respond to E-mail asking for that copy, because they think that if you need it, you should find it.
Also, write a single precise sentence why do you need the copy but otherwise do not ask for other help in the same letter and avoid contacting the same professors repeatedly. The problem is, too many people try playing on emotions so researchers tend to overreact, closing E-mail as soon as they recognize.

@vjj8919 During an online course I did a few years back, Mike Brown taught us how to use Google Scholar (not just Google), which can help you find papers. Try this search:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=life+as+we+know+it+friston
Notice that there is a link "all 17 versions": click on it, and it will take you to a number of sites where you can find the paper. With luck some of them will not be paywalled.
Some browsers (e.g. Firefox) allow you to install a Google Scholar toolbar. If you have that you can just select the title of a paper (from another browser tab), and get Scholar to find the paper from you. I've found it very good, but YMMV.
I realize this is sketchy: let me know if you run into difficulties.
Also, many authors post preprints to Arxiv. Your "Holly Witteman" doesn't seem to be their. I think it depends on the field: physicists and AI folk use it a lot.

One possible reason why you haven't heard back, is that some or all of the authors' email accounts aren't active any more. In modern academia, depending on the field, there's quite some coming and going in terms of personnel.
Hence, the university email of the authors of the paper might be a dead end, since they might have moved on.


text:
Thesis corrections didn't save
I have been a bit "haunted" by something that happened to me in graduate school. After submitting my MA thesis my advisor and the second reader corrected lots of typographical errors. I incorporated my advisor's corrections with no problem. However, there was a big problem when I tried to incorporate the second reader's corrections. I did the corrections and pushed the save button on my computer. However, unbeknownst to me the corrections did not save for reasons that I have never understood. Some days later my advisor called me into his office and mentioned that he had found lots of errors in the thesis. He checked the copy of the thesis that he had given me for correction and found that those corrections had, indeed, been made. Then he wondered out loud why the second reader hadn't "caught" the mistakes. But he never asked for the second reader's copy of the thesis. I went home checked the second reader's copy of the thesis and saw, to my horror, that the corrections had not saved. I stayed quiet and nothing came of this. I got my degree, but I have always wondered what could have happened if my advisor had discovered that the second reader's corrections had not been incorporated into my thesis. Under these circumstances could the thesis have been rejected?

I can't imagine rejecting a thesis because of unsaved corrections. The appropriate "penalty" would be that you have to make those corrections again and make sure they get saved (which I hope you did anyway).

Thanks for responding.

It's done. You got your degree, and nobody got bent out of shape over the issue. It is time to move on and use your emotional and intellectual energy on things that can shape your future, rather than dwelling on the past!

This doesn't answer the question, rather it says "you shouldn't have asked it". In my view this is rather the job of a comment than of an answer, if anything.

A valid answer solves the actual problem of the asker although unbeknownst to him/her. It did. Thumbs up!

I suggest making a corrected copy of your thesis publicly available, e.g. on your own webpage.  You can mention that your copy corrects certain typographical errors in the original thesis. That way any interested reader can find their way to the best version of your thesis.
Errors creeping in through some kind of version control failure are extremely common. When we notice this, we correct it -- what else can we do?  Also errors in theses are extremely common.  Good for you that the errors you are talking about are typographical.  I am a mathematician, and not long after I graduated I learned that one of the main results in my thesis is just false.  (I mention this on my webpage and instruct people not to cite results of my thesis directly but rather use published sources.)  Over the years a few other real errors were
pointed out to me. Nevertheless I have had a successful academic career for the last 20 years. The parts of my thesis that got published were only published after much more thought and work on my part; they don't include any of the errors I or anyone else has ever found in my thesis.  I think my story is pretty typical.
Once you fix what can be conveniently fixed, I really hope you can move on.  I can virtually guarantee that no one else is still thinking about the typos in your master's thesis.

Thank you so much for these thoughtful and sensitive remarks. I am most grateful.


text:
Data request from former job
I recently transitioned from a research institution where I worked for four years as a postdoctoral researcher on two major projects. One of these projects has been published, and the other is currently being prepared for submission.
I have received a request from a postdoc who has taken over my previous role on secondary research, asking for manuscripts and raw figures (in Illustrator format) that I worked on. I'm concerned about how much data I should share, particularly because I want to maintain my authorship rights and ensure that any future negotiations about authorship are not compromised.
To give you a bit more context, the culture at my previous institution was extremely hierarchical and not very supportive. During my tenure, I encountered numerous issues with authorship on research projects. Initially, I was involved in a primary research project and was promised first authorship. However, the PIs frequently changed their stance on authorship rankings. I eventually stepped away from this project to focus on a second project, where I developed novel experimental methods and setups for ephys. The primary project was initially submitted for publication and rejected, with me being listed as the eighth author. The PIs then requested me to apply the newly established methods to add impactful data for the first project, once again promising me the first author position. Despite my significant contributions and fulfilling their additional requests, I was relegated to third author. I later learned that the postdoc who secured the first author position had insisted on not sharing this status and had advocated for her favored student to be the second author. I discovered this demotion through conversations with other colleagues. After hearing this, I confronted the PIs, which resulted in a big argument where they even threatened to strip my authorship from another research project.
This experience made it impossible for me to stay, and I started looking for another postdoc position. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t give me a recommendation letter and even spoke poorly of me to the PI who contacted them for a reference. I managed to secure another position thanks to the support of my former graduate school mentors.
Given these experiences, I am now quite cautious about sharing data, fearing potential misuse or further conflicts. Currently, the team at my former institution has requested access to manuscripts, figures (and raw data in future I guess), presumably to continue the work without my involvement, predicted from the way they say in the email. I am uncertain about the appropriateness of sharing these resources. Given the background, I worry about the implications for my rights and the recognition of my contributions.
How much should I realistically share without compromising my rights and previous contributions? If anyone has navigated a similar situation or has insights on protecting one’s academic work and authorship rights, your advice would be immensely valuable.
Thank you for your guidance.

Has the previous work been published with you as an author? Is there a public record of you as a contributor, say at arXiv?

I'm having a hard time understanding why you're considering it at all based on the context you've provided. Are those materials part of a project your previous employers contributed to and which you intend to publish with them? If they are all things only you worked on, they are yours. If they contain other people's contributions, it sounds to me like you should refuse, cut your losses, and move on to other projects if at all possible.

Yes one of the two research that I was involved in is publicated currently, and I am a little bit afraid of shairing the exact information.
As I worked the project from the funding of the institute, they can say that supported the second research. I would like to publicate it with them, but I know that once I share the raw data source they will be able to easily throw me away. So for me, the best scenario will be wisely responding to them so they have to keep working with me. I am wondering sharing how and to which point will make it possible.

Holding data hostage is poor form, and depending on the source of funding for the work (not just your salary, but the facilities and resources used) and the specific rules of your country/region/university could be illegal. So you could also be in the wrong in this situation. It sounds very much like you could be. You can abstain from sharing your interpretation (and other creative derivation), but data which you were paid to collect while there is another.
Your only appropriate recourse is to release the data obtained at that institution as it does not belong to you. If your contribution rises to the level of authorship, when published, you should be included. If you are not included then you can raise ethics complaints.
However, your current approach of doing something unethical and potentially illegal to prevent your former colleagues from doing something else that is also unethical is not very smart. You are both wrong for slightly different reasons.

If anything, if I had a colleague behaving as suspiciously as OP I'd probably want to redo the whole thing from scratch anyways and cut them out that way, not to punish them for not sharing the data but because I would be too suspicious of fraud for it to have any value to me at all.

@BryanKrause I had to do a similar thing with a grad student in my early days. They left (very unhappy about things mostly stemming from personal life issues which spilled into poor interactions with other students in the department), and while they had sent me the data interpretation, they did not release the raw data, and their lab book did not correlate properly to the instrument files. So a new student had to repeat all of the work anyway, which led to slightly different/better data. I still gave authorship to the former grad student, but I would have been within my rights to refuse.

Yeah, to clarify my comment, if they'd earned authorship anyways then they're an author, period. But it's quite possible that by not contributing data or analysis to the project they'd no longer qualify if that was to be their main contribution and they've ceased to participate.

Thank you for the comment. I understand your point, and I also determined to share the data. But what I am worried about is how should I behave towards people who are expected to behave in unethical way, without compromising my own ethical and legal obligations. This concern arises from past experiences where my contributions were undervalued and my authorship rights were compromised. As I have done at least 70% of the work and created the figures for the paper, I just want to ensure that my rights are properly recognized.

@postdoc0115 Unfortunately you cannot withhold things preemptively based on any assumption that the receiving party will act unethically (or unfavorably towards you). You have to follow the process and seek correction after an impropriety has occurred, and not behave as if one is about to occur (even if likely). What you can do is seek to work with people whose operational standards align with yours, and if you find yourself in certain situations, you may have to just move on. Sometimes that means cutting your losses and focusing on positive momentum going forward.