text:
Tradeoff between Consistency and Uniqueness in choosing publication Last Name
I am at the beginning of my career, but I already participated in several conferences and published 1 paper (and a reply) as the main author, and co-authored a revision with many other authors.
In total, I currently have 11 citations.
In my first publication, I used the last name (A) that is very common and which I don't identify with.
In the review, I started using another last name (B) which is less common but still not very unique.
I came now to the realization that I can use my mother's surname (C), which is very unique, pronounceable, and have other nice interesting features as beginning with the letter 'a'.
Currently, I am about to finish and defend my MSc dissertation and there are probably more publications coming along the way. Is it too late for me?
For reference, A yields > 4million results in google Scholar, B yields ~ 1million, and C have less than 100 entries.

related: changing last name before publishing and during the PhD

If your full name, or initials with last name is common in your field, there might be some inconvenience. But otherwise I doubt that uniqueness has much value. I share a full name with another prominent researcher but in an entirely different field. It is sort of funny when the search turns up both of us, but it is obvious that we are different people.
Consistency, on the other hand is very important, though at the very beginning, the earliest papers may not be so important to the overall career trajectory. But, by the time you finish a doctorate you should establish a name that you can live with throughout your career. Hopefully your earliest work won't be your best work over a long career and a few exceptions won't be an issue.
A personal web site (or one hosted by a university) can be useful in pointing to your work, even if done under different names initially.

For the record, it should be noted that some people publish under a pseudonym to maintain both uniqueness and consistency.


text:
Best Practices for Contacting a Potential Postdoc Supervisor When Planning to Accompany Spouse Abroad
My spouse will soon start an internship in the US, and we are exploring options for me to join her. The financial limitations of her stipend mean that I would need to secure employment to support our stay. Coincidentally, I am completing my PhD and considering a postdoc position that could align with this timeline. I believe I could significantly contribute to her supervisor's lab, given my relevant skills and experience.
I am contemplating a short-term (6-12 months) postdoc position with her supervisor, with the understanding that I might need to transition to remote work after the initial 6 months due to personal commitments back home. I have prior experience working remotely with positive outcomes and references. This plan is for the beginning of 2025, so there could be enough time to look for potential funding.
I seek advice on the best approach to propose this arrangement to the supervisor. Should the initial contact be made by me directly or through my spouse? Additionally, how common are such arrangements in academic settings, and what considerations should I be aware of to make my proposal as appealing and feasible as possible?

Asking is fine, but they may well not have funding.

If you are seeking a job, then you should be contacting the faculty and asking yourself.
In terms of how common such arrangements are, not exceedingly, and I can tell you from my perspective why I would be hesitant to hire someone under these circumstances.
6-12 months is short for a postdoc. The typical postdoc lifecycle is 2 years. In that cycle, the first 6 months is getting up to speed, then you get 12 months of good productivity, and the last 6 months are applying for jobs and going to interview. Onboarding you for 6 months just so you leave would be unfortunate, as would paying you to be remote shortly thereafter. One of the values of postdocs is having them around for day-to-day interaction with the younger lab members.
The only time I personally do short postdocs is when I am bridging a graduate student to their next job (whether my own, or someone I know from the department). Nonetheless, the faculty in question may have the funds to do so, so certainly go ahead and ask.
While you may only see $30-$60K of salary (depending on 6 or 12 month contract), that could burn up over $100,000 of funding when factoring in overhead, health insurance and all the other extras you never see from your end. This is all to say, hiring a postdoc is not a casual, low-cost endeavor, so proposing a short stay, or one where you suddenly go remote may not come off as a particularly appealing way to spend $100,000+.

I  might need to transition to remote work after the initial 6 months

I think you should abandon any idea of this part of your plan. It is very complex from a tax and administrative perspective to have employees in another country. Universities are not usually equipped for this, they are not multinational corporations, funding streams may explicitly disallow it, etc. An academic lab certainly cannot handle this on their own.
It has absolutely nothing to do with your personal remote work experience.

source: Stack Exchange

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text:
How to follow and contribute to a research discussion when less experienced?
I am a second year PhD student working in math.
I find that in most discussions with postdocs or even my own supervisor, the pace of the discussion is too fast. The other party invariably seems to think faster and go through to the next step before I have fully processed the current step. I usually have to take photos of the whiteboard, go back, work it through and then realize either that the argument is correct or that there was an error. At conferences or talks, the same is true - the pace of the discussion is too fast for me to meaningfully contribute. I mostly end up listening and this makes it difficult for me to find collaborations because the conversation is too one-sided. If there is no whiteboard and the discussion is over a meal, or when there are multiple people involved, it is that much harder!
While some of it is down to experience, I imagine that even experienced researchers working in fields that are new to them face this issue. How does one "informally" brainstorm with others in an effective manner in technical fields?

Not sure that this will work but you might produce an outline or an abridged version of the subject matter and request feedback on the accuracy of your takeaway.

I take it "second year PhD student" means you've got a bachelor degree?

Your experience is normal: A second year PhD student should not keep pace with postdocs nor advisors. They should learn. It seems like you're doing that.
In a meeting setting, try to understand when it is appropriate to slow the pace to improve your understanding. Don't interrupt when you can learn later; interrupt when you can't, either to learn during the meeting or to arrange a tutorial afterwards (likely with the most junior person, beside yourself). (Meetings are presumably to get work done, so too many interrupts will preclude that.)
In a seminar setting, ask the speaker after their talk, over lunch, or arrange a one-to-one later in the day. (External speakers are usually visiting someone and will have some free time during the day.)
At conferences, you have plenty of opportunities to ask speakers for more details.

I mostly end up listening and this makes it difficult for me to find collaborations because the conversation is too one-sided.

Having conversations will allow you to build bridges. (As a PhD student, I'd suggest focusing on relationships within your department, rather than the broader field. Bridges are useful for research visits, internships, subsequent positions, etc.)

If there is no whiteboard and the discussion is over a meal, or when
there are multiple people involved, it is that much harder!

Such discussions will become easier once your knowledge broadens. Sit-back and enjoy your meal. Ask questions one-to-one, e.g., after dinner, whilst walking a guest back to their hotel, or the following day.

Dear Downvoter, Is it a coincidence that each of my answers gets a downvote? ;-) Many thanks,

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text:
Is it necessary to have a variety of publishers in the list of my own publications?
I am a junior researcher and physician at a German university hospital. I am part of a funding program with regular workshops on grant applications, scientific writing, etc.
More recently, we discussed grant applications at the workshops. All of us had to hand in a sample application or an application we recently sent. When discussing my application, the course instructor / lecturer said the following things (translated from German):

Your application is good but very factual based. It is not very creative. A major point of concern is your top 10 publication list. The majority of your publications is from a single publisher - which could be interpreted as a lack of diversity.

Do you agree on this? I checked my top 10 list, which is a list of my own most relevant publications for the grant application, and it included: 3 publications in Springer, 2 in BMC and 5 in MDPI journals. Usually, my boss would decide where to submit. Should I be concerned? As we are in Germany, most publications in Springer and BMC are made open access free of charge for us by Project DEAL, and I simply do not have the money for some Elsevier / Taylor & Francis open access journals etc...

Is the "course instructor" also a researcher and physician or something else? What else if the latter?

She is a local assistant professor in Sociology and one of the 3 main instructors of that very mixed course. I am one of the few participants with a clinical medical background, the majority is from a basic science field.

I find it strange that the number of publishers is the concern and not the number of journal titles. For instance, a notebook binder of papers on a certain topic I randomly picked from my bookshelves has papers published in Amer. Math. Monthly, Acta Math. Hungarica, J. Symbolic Logic, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., Pacific J. Math., Real Analysis Exchange, J. London Math. Soc., Quaestiones Mathematicae, among others. I certainly know and recognize these journals, but the publishers . . . ? I can guess a few of them, and I know Amer. Math. Monthly recently changed publishers for example.

Just to clarify: Your top 10 list of publications is a list of own publications, right? Something in the style you would attach for example to a DFG proposal?

Dear Snijderfrey: exactly - this is my own list of publications ( a real one covering my achievements within the last 4 years). I used it for a DFG proposal - which was rejected in the end.

It may be that the concern was not so much that half the publications come from a particular publisher, but the specific publisher involved. There are some people who do not have a great opinion of MDPI journals - see the fourth paragraph of their wikipedia article.
I do not know enough about MDPI to be able to speculate as to the validity of such an opinion.

See also: Is MDPI a reputable Academic Publisher?

That was my first thought when reading the feedback you received ... the reviewer may be skeptical of MDPI journals but unwilling to specifically "name names" in the suggestion he or she gave you.

Frankly, the comment seems bizarre. But since it seems to be just advice on writing grants, without a supervisory component, you can safely ignore it.
You may have limited influence over where those papers were published, and possibly no control, given that your PI decides. It would be a mistake to write with the goal of maximizing the number of publishers cited rather than the appropriate papers no matter where they appear (if reputable).
The instructor may believe (wrongly IMO) that papers get prestige or validity from the journal they are published in, rather than the other way about. Journals have prestige because they publish high quality papers. If they publish junk, they lose prestige.
Had they criticized a particular journal for lack of quality, it would make some sense, but "more is better" seems, to repeat, bizarre.
I doubt that people evaluating a grant proposal have the "number of journals cited" as a measure of quality, though some journals are recognized to be low quality.

Edited to add that some MDPI journals are controversial as noted by other writers here, and MDPI itself has been criticized as a publisher.

I am pretty sure that OP's top 10 list of publications is a list of own publications. Is this also your understanding?

@Snijderfrey, maybe you are correct. Modifying a bit.

Your course instructor probably reiterates something she was taught herself by somebody else. In fact, I have heard the recommendation to avoid publishing too large a fraction of one's publications in the same journal before, uttered by different people. This recommendation was not focussed on the publisher, though, but on the journal. So yes, there is a chance that a proposal you write is assessed by somebody who concurs with your course instructor, and you may want to take this into account for future manuscript submissions.
The reasoning behind this was usually to avoid the impression that there is some personal connection to a specific journal or editor which improves the chances that a manuscript is accepted for publication there.

See also Is there a reason to spread your research into multiple journals instead of just one?


text:
Independent research in statistics
Is it possible to do independent reserach in statistics? If i do something what is the way to verify my work?

Yes, of course it is possible. The "way to verify" your work (whatever you mean exactly) is the same like for non-independent research.

If by "independent" you mean "not affiliated to a research institute", then: Yes, of course you can conduct research in statistics.
Here is a list of 74 scholarly works (as of Dec 2021) in the field of Statistics and Probability, Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, or Computational Mathematics published by at least one (co-)author whose affiliation was either independent scholar or independent researcher.
You can have your work "verified" by having it peer-reviewed. That is, submit your manuscript to any scholarly journal in the field of statistics. For instance, Web of Science offers a list of journals - just filter it by the category STATISTICS & PROBABILITY. Pick your journal and read the author guidelines carefully (and read other papers published in that journal) before you do submit your manuscript. Good luck.

Independent researchers might not have easy access to Web of Science.

@Snijderfrey, that's true, which is why I merely linked to its (publicly accessible, freely browsable) Master Journal List.


text:
Why would a post-graduate interviewer care about my knowledge regarding their school?
I was interviewed a few days ago for a master degree and the interviewer asked me questions about the degree and the school in general. Some questions were about the learning method they use, the number of people in the class, the internship rhythm, etc. I wasn't able to answer some questions like "do you know the name of our partner?".
We did a debriefing and he told me that he was frustrated that I didn't know some pieces of information. He said that other students went to the school open day (knowing I live 500km away) or called the school a few times (I saw all the information I needed on their website).
As I want to prepare my interview better next time, is this case common? And how does it affect an admission?
Side note: I'm in France.

It is pretty standard to be interviewed about a few details of the place you apply at. This is not specific to academia. If the information is easily and publicly available, like on the institute website, it makes sense to read and memorize it before the interview.

Actually, this seems very odd to me. We don't know the field, and we don't know if the university is unique in some way, but lots of things are assumed without issue by applicants in some fields; math, for example. The basic assumption is that it will be hard, but reasonable.

@Buffy It's in the IT field and the university isn't unique but approach some really interesting subject (in my opinion).

tl,dr: At a milder level this is a way of gauging your level of preparedness and interest in their specific school.  At an unreasonable level like this it is inept and presumptuous.

Assuming that this type of questions is rational, I think they are to identify students that have some existing connection to the school. In principle, it is a good idea to know where you are going to apply many months or even a few years in advance, do an internship there, take some short course, join a collaboration, and develop connections there. This is a general strategy that also works for joining a PhD program, applying for a job, etc.

If you apply for any position in any institution, you're expected to be prepared, i.e. to know about the basics of the institution and the position/program.
The examples you mentioned fit well into that scheme. Why would you want to apply for a program if you don't know key concepts like

the learning method they use,
typical class sizes,
the internship system applied?

The interviewer tries to assess

whether you understand the learning culture at that school,
whether you will be a good fit for the institution, someone who will graduate successfully with some probability.

A master's degree demands more than just being there on time and doing what some instructor tells you to do.
So, for the next application, I'd recommend that you try to answer the following questions ahead of time:

Is this institution/program a good fit for my expectations?
Am I a good fit for the institution's expectations?

This probably needs some research, but it will save you and the interviewer from wasted time and travel costs.
And if there are things you really can't find out on your own during this research phase, don't hesitate to ask, preferably before the interview, but it can also be done in the interview, showing your interest in the institution.

What if the student has no preference for the learning method/class size/internship system? If the applicant does not consider these things relevant for their school choice, then I don't understand why the institution insists that the student needs to know them.

The reason is simple: if there are many more appplicants than open spots, and some applicants had familarized themselves with the (possibly unique) school system while others have not, why wouldn't they prefer those? All other things held constant, obviously.

@LuckyPal You can also turn that reasoning around: if some applicants are very flexible students who would do well in many different systems while others have very specific requirements about class sizes and learning methods, then why wouldn't the institution prefer the more flexible ones?

I think this is more about checking if the student has some sort of an existing connection to the school (e.g. one of the parents works or studied there) than about seeing if the student understands the learning culture of the school and is a good fit in that or a similar sense.

@MarcPaul there is a difference between being flexible regarding the school system and being ignorant about it. Also, concluding that the other applicants who informed themselves about the system have "specific requirements" requires a lot of extrapolation from the information in the question.

"A master's degree demands more than just being there on time and doing what some instructor tells you to do." And knowing the class size in advance is definitely not one of those things. That has zero correlation with the chances of success.

@LuckyPal There is also a difference between being informed about the school system and having memorized the details of it. Concluding that the question asker hasn't considered whether the institution is a good fit, or that they are ignorant about it, because they don't know certain details of the program is also an extrapolation. In fact, the question states that "I saw all the information I needed on their website". Apparantly the question asker doesn't consider class size etc. an important factor for deciding whether to apply, and I don't understand why that should be held against them.

@Trunk It's like a job interview.  You are demonstrating that you aren't interested enough in the institution to research it before your interview.  When you go on a job interview, you should know something about your target company's products, industry, and methods.  This is just applying that principle to academia.  You are thinking of the process as a consumer of education ("I don't care about that feature of your school for my own purchasing decision") and they don't think of you as a consumer.

@Trunk I don't understand your point. If you consider PhD students to be (young) professionals, then why should you not expect them to behave like a professional when applying for their position? A professional carefully selects the organization (s)he applies for,(s)he does her research about that organization, so she knows she is interested before applying, and can argue why she is interested. The organization can, and should, ask about that during the application to find out if she is really a good match.

@Trunk you are making more assumptions about the information potentially available than I am comfortable with.

The answer by Ralf Kleberhoff is completely correct in my opinion. I would just like to add one aspect.
As was mentioned also in the comments, it is custom to do some research about the school/university/company/etc. you apply to. If an applicant is not prepared, it might be that the applicant simply does not know about this custom. When a high school student applies for a summer intern, I would be lenient. But among applicants for a graduate program, it may be fair to assume that it is actually more likely being a sign of a general attitude.
In this way, being unprepared for questions about the school is comparable to wearing joggers. So I can understand the frustration of the interviewer, even though you may actually belong to the other group of persons.

@Trunk The graduate school has to make the information available, but I'm not clear on why it would have to "go the extra mile." At graduate level students are expected to be able to do non-trivial research, after all.

Some questions were about the learning method they use, the number of people in the class, the internship rhythm, etc. I wasn't able to answer some questions like "do you know the name of our partner?".

A hypothesis that other answers have not explored is that the institution might consider that these are their strong points. In other words, they might take pride in being different in these regards and they might expect good candidates to apply because of these.
OP points out that they "saw all the information (they) needed on the institution's website". Assuming that the information was available somehow, it is a red flag from the interviewer's POV. I mean, if OP is not aware of all these good things they offer and no one else does, why is OP applying at all?
I'm not saying that this was the case, but for some niche institutions it might as well be. Also, I don't think that it's OP's fault. If this is really a niche institution with a very particular way of doing things and the alleged advantages did not seem important to OP, then maybe there simply wasn't good cultural fit and OP might be happier someplace else.


text:
Is it necessary to add editors in citation?
I am adopting the MLA citation style. If a book is written by a principal author with an editor, is it obligatory to add an editor of the book in citation?

Perhaps specify what kind of editor. Is s/he on the cover?

There are a lot of kinds of editors, but it would be very unusual if any of them contributed to the actual intellectual content of a work. In that sense, no, it isn't necessary to cite them so some would put the name of the editor, say in parentheses, with the citation: "...(edited by x.y)".
Some editors handle the publication process, some give advice on writing style, some might even rearrange things, but few would contribute to the actual ideas. There might be rare exceptions.
There is, however, another kind of editor. Some books are little more than a compendium of the work of several authors. In this case and "editor" will have done the creative work, such as it is, of collecting those papers into a single volume. Then, if you need to cite the volume itself, cite the "editor" who created it. But the papers themselves don't need the editor's name attached.

In my field the book and the editor end in the references list not the contributing authors of the chapters/sections. Usually investing time on writing a handbook chapter does not bring much citations.

I've seen books where only the editors are displayed on the cover even e.g. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-37569-9

Many books don't have editors (unless they are employees of the publisher). But some do, and it is possible you should add their name to the citation. For example if the book is a collection of papers by [famous author], then the editor is important, since they chose which papers to collect. Similarly the editor of a review volume is also important even if they didn't contribute any articles to the volume.
If the name of the editor appears on the front cover, I would default to 'yes'.


text:
Journal Paper Review (Computer Science) taking so long? How to proceed?
I submitted a journal paper to Springer's SN Computer Science Journal.
Below is the time line

18th Nov, 2021 --> Manuscript Submitted
15th Feb, 2022 --> Editor Decision (Major Revision)
1st March, 2022--> Revised Manuscript submitted

Since then it shows "under review".
I have contacted the corresponding contact person several times and the editor as well. Either I do not get reply and if I receive a reply, it is always the same stating "under review and as soon as a decision is made, you will be notified and I have requested the editor to expedite the process". It has been more than a year since that revision had been submitted but I have not heard about the decision. Any leads what I shall do?
I am reluctant to withdraw it from here and submit elsewhere due to then again starting the long waiting time cycle.

Do any of the questions under the "Related" tab to the right answer your question? Especially https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/178056/should-i-withdraw-my-paper-because-review-is-taking-too-long and https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/66219/what-should-i-do-as-my-submitted-paper-is-still-under-review-after-1-year ?

I would love to hear an update. Gradually I am so fed up with the review process. Personally it only takes me 2 weeks to send them my reviews but then when it's me as author, it takes forever.

Given that you have no leverage to speed up the review, your only choices are to wait or to withdraw. You note, properly, that withdrawing is only likely to extend the time to publication.
Some things take time because of their nature or because of the difficulty of finding good reviewers.
I suggest patience. What you have heard from the editorial department is probably all you will or can hear until review is complete.
Hopefully you have other things to be working on.


text:
Under Review immediately, what does it mean?
I submitted a paper to a journal. Initially, it showed "New Submission", and changed to "Under Review" after an hour or so. This is not what I have usually observed. I would usually expect something like "Editor Assigned" kind of a thing. What does it mean?

Does this answer your question? What does the typical workflow of a journal look like?

Yes, a duplicate, but likely it means that the editor decided to send it out for review and started the process. Don't read too much in to it, other than that it isn't an immediate desk reject.


text:
Separating citation and text inside parentheses
In the following examples, should the citation be separated by ; or ,?

Simplistically, the goal of the investor is to maximise return (subject to risk constraints; XYZ, 2011).

or

Simplistically, the goal of the investor is to maximise return (subject to risk constraints, XYZ, 2011).

Not an answer to the question, but very often you can avoid putting expressions inside parentheses altogether, which I would usually prefer.

Stylistic issues such as this are subject to local culture. Find out how people do this in the place you hope to publish. There may be an official style guide. Or you must check past documents published there.

Thanks both for your comments. I think the second suggestion of the accepted answer is what I'm trying to say.

In that form, without reading the cited document, I cannot clearly understand if the citation refers to the parenthetical part, to the main one or both.
I'd thus rephrase the sentence, depending on the goal of the citation. If the citation refers to the main part, I'd write

Simplistically, the goal of the investor is to maximise return (XYZ, 2011), subject to risk constraints.

If the citation refers to both parts, I'd write

Simplistically, taking into account risk constraints, the goal of the investor is to maximise return (XYZ, 2011).

If the citation refers to the parenthetical part, I'd write

Simplistically, the goal of the investor is to maximise return (subject to risk constraints, see XYZ, 2011).

or

Simplistically, the goal of the investor is to maximise return, subject to risk constraints (XYZ, 2011).

Thanks. I think your second suggestion is the most accurate. I noticed that even your third suggestion doesn't have a ;, so maybe it's not common practice to use semicolons.


text:
Is it a problem if I add my journal paper manually in Google Scholar?
Today, my paper was published and it got a DOI number. However, it does not appear in Google Scholar.
After searching the web for the answer, I found that it takes a long time for the paper to show up in Google Scholar. For this reason, I want to ask you: if I add the paper manually to Google Scholar, will that be a problem in the future?

Does this answer your question? How long does it usually take for published articles to show up on Google Scholar?

It does not take that long for a paper to appear on Google scholar.

Can you manually add papers?


text:
Font used in scientific articles diagrams/graphs
I'm very careful with visual appearance of what I write, and I want to know if there is some convention with the font used in the graphs or diagrams of an article. Normally the articles are written with the defoult LaTex font,

LaTex font, Tex

But in the other hand there are a lot of articles in internet that for the graphics use the default font of python matplotlib, that I  have seen a lot in sites as SciPost for example,

Python font sans-serif

Wich one do you think is better or more appropiate for an article?, or if exist some convention that tells the graphics should be in the same font that the article.
What you do in your articles?

The "TeX font" is called Computer Modern.

I will cite from a contribution by Jillian M. Buriak (see reference below):

Sans serif fonts are ideal for graphics because they have a cleaner appearance, enabling your reader to quickly read the text unimpeded as they work through your data. Many people have a strong aversion to Times font in graphics, particularly in chemical structures (e.g., ChemDraw images), and thus a standard Arial or Helvetica font will avoid such an effect.

This is pretty much in line with what I think is aesthetic, but surely it is partly a matter of personal preference. And, as usual, when preparing graphics for publication in a journal, consult the corresponding author guidelines. Often, journals have specific requirements for formatting.

Reference:
Jillian M. Buriak, "Which Font Looks Best in a Figure?", Chem. Mater. 2016, 28, 3, 689–690. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b00306

The best font for scientific diagrams and graphs is the same font or fonts that are used in the main text of the paper itself. This consistency is particularly important for mathematics, where the way how each symbol appears may significantly impact what this particular symbol means.
The way to achieve is for example to embed graphs as pdf+LaTeX or TikZ in your main TeX-based document. Alternatively, you may need to set up your graph-drawing software with the fonts used in the style file of your target journal, which may not be easy to find and also may be subject to change.

The way to achieve is for example to embed graphs as pdf+LaTeX or TikZ in your main TeX-based document. – This needs an restriction like: “if the journal accepts this”. Even in the TeX-friendly field of physics, most journals don’t accept embedded TeX files as graphics.

@Wrzlprmft From my experience, the chance to have it accepted is higher if you never ask.

True, but so is the chance to waste your time. Also, IIRC, at least some journals explicitly disallow this.

I do not disagree, but generally I think the more we push for the right things, the more chances journals are to accommodate it. And embedded graphics (like TikZ) is clearly a right thing compared to external pdf or even jpg.

For the most part the choice of font is a matter of taste (on which I am mostly neutral).
There is one exception: When possible mathematical symbols should appear in the same font as they appear in the main text. For mathematical symbols, different typesetting is often used to convey different meanings. Consequently, even when your text does not ascribe a different meaning to x in a serif font vs x in a sans-serif font, having a different symbol appear in your graphics can lead to unnecessary confusion among your readers.
(This effect is amplified for the typesetting of non-latin characters.)


text:
Is the review process at MDPI fair to reviewers?
I was asked to review for an MDPI journal and realized while requesting to extend the deadline for my review that the editor at MDPI intended to send review requests to several reviewers, to gather enough reviews to make a decision on the basis of the first 2-3 he received. This means that the journal might have requested a review that they would not have needed. I am wondering if this is how MDPI normally conducts reviews as it would be disrespectful of the work of reviewers.
It appears that others might have had similar experiences (see here and here).
Can you tell me if you had similar experiences so that we can better understand how MDPI normally conducts its reviews, and if it is respectful of the work of reviewers?

Are you asking a question about MDPI, or about the general idea of inviting multiple reviewers but making a decision based on only the first several received?

It may be better to separate the issue of "Is it common at MDPI (but not really elsewhere) to request more reports than needed" and "is this practise unethical".

Journals may well proceed without receiving all requested reviews - how long are they supposed to wait if somebody does not reply?

If it's the latter question per @Arno, then it's answered here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/79495/is-it-ethical-for-a-journal-to-cancel-an-accepted-review-request-when-they-have The description in that question also sounds very much like MDPI. Still, it would imply they are cancelling because the deadline has passed, not because they have received enough reviews to make a decision.

What would be unethical about it, as long as it is known to reviewers?

https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4879/reopening-this-question-on-mdpi

My experience with MDPI has been that their review process is inconsistent.  It may vary from journal to journal.  It is a marginal publisher, similar to Elsevier.

There seems to be a trend confusing the word unethical with annoying, aggravating, unfortunate, could-be-better, etc.

@A rural reader I've taken to edit out the word "ethical" in such questions, replacing it by "(im)proper", "(in)appropriate", "(un)fair, "(dis)respectful" etc.

@henning. No need for euphemism here. We can certainly talk of problematic ethics (or "professional ethics" if you prefer) when it comes to publishers making profits from the work of reviewers and wasting their time on top of it.

@Buffy. Interesting question, which I think show that we're talking about professional ethics here. Please see my comment to your answer below.

@AnonymousPhysicist Thanks. I've read this post and it is not directly related to my question. I get your point about inconsistent procedures. This would be a simple answer to the question.

@Allure Thank you, I didn't know of this question and it is similar to mine. I'm asking specifically about instances where an editor let you start working on a review and then tells you that your work is not needed anymore.

@outis "It depends on the journal" or "It depends on the editor" is not an answer to the question.  It is a reason to close the question.

@outis this isn't specific to your question, but as another commenter said, the term is used in an overly very broad sense on this site in general.

The question was closed but I can't find the answer to the question it was associated with. Wouldn't it be better to associate it with the question suggested by @Allure? : https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/79495/is-it-ethical-for-a-journal-to-cancel-an-accepted-review-request-when-they-have

I'm voting to reopen because this question has a different focus than the alleged duplicate, and OP's question is not answered there

Clarification question: When did you ask for the deadline extension? Before or after agreeing to review the paper?

This question is still unclear to me, and might possibly have been answered in the other of the linked questions. I'd vote to close, but my one vote might be enough to close it.

See also: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/12380/19607

@lighthousekeeper : before

@Allure can you tell me what is unclear? It is similar to the question linked by Kimball (academia.stackexchange.com/q/12380/19607) but asked about MDPI in particular. It also assumes that asking for reviews to more reviewers than necessary is professionally unethical, which appears to have confused or annoyed people.

@outis because the question is effectively two questions in one (c.f. Arno's comment), and it is unclear which one you are asking.

@Allure I see what you mean. You may have read the last paragraph of my question too literally. I think many comments and all responses to my question show that a common reading of my question is to assume that I am not asking but affirming that the practice I describe is unethical.

@outis if you are affirming that the practice you describe is unethical, then it ceases to be a question and therefore is not within the scope of StackExchange.

I'm going to vote to close as a duplicate. If you are asking specifically about MDPI, then it's still a duplicate, but of the other question (about whether MDPI is predatory).

@Allure Yes, the question is not whether the practice I describe is unethical or not but whether other people have witnessed it as well. Moreover, I did not ask whether MDPI as a whole is predatory or not. I would say that a journal using an unethical review system is not necessarily "predatory" (I understand by this term OA journals that do not actually conduct reviews). One might wonder whether MDPI as a whole has a parasitic business model but this would be a different (i.e. broader) issue than the one I raised.

I had my own experiences with MDPI both as a reviewer an as a special issue editor. I'd say they don't do anything I'd call "unethical", but they definitely follow a kind of business-like approach to the whole process, trying to observe the rulebook and the deadlines.
As a reviewer, you get an invitation along with other reviewers. If you respond too late, the link simply expires. I am not sure what happens if several people respond quickly, but probably it rarely happens in practice: it often takes longer than planned to get enough reviewers, and if there is no response within a reasonable time, another candidate will be invited.
As an editor, you can leave the work to inviting reviwers to the MDPI staff or do it yourself. In either case, they notify you when all the promised reviews are received (or the deadline has passed), and you can see them all in the editor interface. So I really doubt that any review that was actually written won't be shown there.
I'd say that MDPI has an extensive ever-growing list of "special issues", which are edited by guest editors (like me). It's an editor's job to decide what to do upon receiving reviews, so the authors' experience depend a lot on editor's attitude. For example, seeing a poorly written review, an editor might ask for another review or simply look at the final verdict (accept / reject) without much attention to review content.
From a purely user interface perspective, the editor doesn't really have any incentive to prefer some reviews and ignore others. There is a box with a short summary of all reviews (like "Reviewer 1: acccept; Reviewer 2: major revision; Reviewer 3: reject"), so I doubt any reviews are lost at this stage.
Naturally, if the deadline has passed and we only have two reviews out of three requested, the editor might decide to make a decision without waiting the for the third review (especially if two people have already proposed rejection, there is little merit in delaying the decision), or to invite another reviewer rather than waiting for a reply.

In the comments, you give an important clarification: You asked for a deadline extension before agreeing to review the paper. Hence, in this case, there are no fairness- or ethics-related implications, because you did not spend any actual work on reviewing the paper.
It's fair for a journal to invite more reviewers than they need, because rejections to such invitations are very common. If they get more positive responses than expected, they can just dis-invite the unneeded reviewers without doing any damage (unnecessary work done). The same happened to me recently upon a review invitation from a top journal in my area.
A related, but different case would be if they actually had more reviewers review the paper than needed, and moved on to a decision before all reviews are in and before the agreed deadline has passed. This would indeed be disrespectful of the reviewers' work and could be seen as somewhat unethical. But I don't see any evidence that MDPI does this.

The situation I described is the one you mention in your third paragraph.

@outis Now I'm confused. In the comments, you said that you asked for the deadline extension before accepting the review request. Does this mean that you started the review before you accepted the review request?

Here's the sequence of events. I went to the review form, filled it and added a note saying I would need  a 1 month extension (there was no way of asking this extension on the form). I received an email thanking me for accepting to review the paper that made no mention of my note. I then immediately emailed the assistant editor telling him about my request. Responded that it was ok but that if enough review reports were collected before I sent mine, they would let me know."

@outis Thanks for clarifying! Now I understand how the process looked liked from your side. The situation is still not fully clear to me, because I don't understand if the response from MDPI is a special response to your request for a later deadline, or describes a general practice of soliciting more reviews than required. If it's the former, one could argue that it's still fair, because they communicated it to you, and you are free to withdraw from the review. In any case, the fact that they initially ignored your request leaves a sour aftertaste.

Thanks for asking. Yes, unfair might not be the right word after all. I would rather say that the question the editor asked (in essence: “may I ask you to work for me for free and perhaps also in vain?”) is indicative of low ethical standards, to put it mildly. I would expect other to have had similar experiences, hence my question.

I don't find anything unethical in the practice as long as no deception occurs. If it is a policy of the journal or otherwise communicated to reviewers then they have no obligation to opt-in to the review, or even to working with the journal in question.
I doubt that any reviewer has a guarantee that their view of a paper will have any particular influence on an editor. An editor needs evidence about the quality of a paper and reviewers supply their views. But those views can be ignored, and often are when reviewers differ.
You might be upset if an editor seems to waste your time and effort by not taking your view into account, but there is no contract to do so.
Long term, it might not be in a journal's best interest to send out more requests than needed, especially when it angers reviewers, but that isn't an ethical issue. They are trying to avoid the problem of late reviews delaying publication of good papers.
But if you feel your time and effort is being wasted, don't participate.

I've answered only the topline question as applied to ignoring reviews and make no statement about whether the publisher is ethical in general or not.

Have you ever published with or reviewed for MDPI?

by ignoring the content of my question, you missed the point. My question is not about editors ignoring the opinion of some reviewers (I'm happy they do this!) but about editors letting you start a review and then telling you they won't need it. Do scholars in your discipline normally submit manuscripts to multiple journal at the same time? It would be unethical to do it in mine, and for good reasons (more requests for reviews). We will get (or already have) similar problems if editors start to ask 10+ reviewers for every manuscript.

I don't understand how multiple submissions is relevant here. And no, I know of no discipline in which that is acceptable. Would you rather they let you continue and then ignore what you send them? Or would you rather be told early that you can drop it? I'll assume that when they asked you at the start that they weren't planning to ask you to drop it later. No deception was specifically mentioned. Are you looking for answers here or trying to get confirmation of a hoped-for result?

Maybe a better way to phrase it would be: would you rather they make a decision without your input and don't tell you leaving you still working on the review, or let you know that the decision has been made already (or that they have sufficient feedback on the paper)?

Sorry but I think we're talking over each other's heads. My question concerns a situation where an editor is obviously asking for more reviews than necessary. That's what I find unethical (unfair or whatever). I also think it will remain unethical even if the editor tells reviewers that he/she might be wasting their time.

No, sorry, you are interpreting your own irritation as an ethical lapse on the part of someone else. It may not be optimal for the journal, but it does you no harm. You are a player here, not a victim. You have agency. I'm starting to think your "question" is a disused rant. That isn't the purpose of this site. And yes, for the record, I've studied ethics.

And, again, sorry to be harsh, but if you've already formed an opinion and come here only willing to listen to confirmation of that, then you are, not to coin a phrase, wasting out time. If your own bias makes you refuse to listen to an alternate view, then you're not in the right place. People here genuinely try to be helpful. FWIW, I would have answered the same if MDPI had not been mentioned at all. Also, I disagree with the reason for closing this. I'd had preferred you get alternate answers.

No problem. You are right in that the reason I asked was to see if there would be more examples suggesting that my hypothesis is correct. If I had been given the chance to see whether there are more examples or not, I might have concluded that it's not. But nobody can convince me of that by exposing their hypothesis concerning my mental state. From what I see, we simply disagree: you think it's fair for an editor to ask for multiple reviewers and form an opinion with the first few reviews that come in, I think it isn't.


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Did anyone produce updates on existing published papers later on?
Did anyone produce updates on existing published papers later on?
Or is it always that when it's submitted, then "that's the way it is"?

what are you trying to achieve?

@aaaaasaysreinstateMonica I've thought that having updated journals might allow "results users" to dig into results of some paper earlier on, while the other standards of the paper might still take longer to complete. Thus one could push a "results, but unfinished quality check" paper for "early adopters" while continuing to hone the more aesthetic parts of the paper afterwards. After all, errors such as those related to grammar etc. are quite minor compared to withholding results, because the grammar etc. is not flawless.

@mavavilj What you've described is a typical use case for preprint servers.

@jakebeal Well, preprints omit peer review too, his proposal seems to be more like "arxiv + peer review now, make it look nice later". So, you can trust these results, it just doesn't look polished yet. I am unaware of anything systematically filling that niche; but I don't think this niche is relevant when the peer review will take a while anyway (and it could even delay the process if images or wording is hard to understand). Also, once you publish you tend to not really bother with all the improvements you could have made to that paper - you focus on your next one that improves results too.

@ZizyArcher What you're describing is called a "postprint", and they are already made available by some journals, e.g., as a category of "just accepted manuscripts". These are manuscripts that have gone through peer review, but not yet gone through the copyediting and formatting process.

Actual updates are unlikely. Subsequent work is frequent and valued. The problem is that an "update" assuming content is changed and not just form, could make citations made in the interim invalid.
Some publishers will publish notes or errata on papers found to be flawed.
Books get "corrected" editions published, but it isn't a general practice for papers. Even for online publication, changing the text makes some subsequent work (quoting) obsolete. It requires work that leads to as many problems as it solves, even for typos.

Note, however, that the paper published is almost never the same as the paper submitted. It goes through a review and editing process that can result in quite a lot of changes. But once published it is pretty much cast.

I find it odd that actual updates are not done, because the internet and computers specifically allow this. Compared to when it had to be printed and each print cost a lot.

@mavavilj Optimistically, the published version is still the version of record, and freezing that keeps us honest, allows others to build on the work, and means citing a paper for a specific point won't be invalidated by that point changing.  Pessimistically, online publishing is paper publishing without the printing, and we're bound by old habits.  Preprint servers attempt to fill the gap between these views

@mavavilj It's not that it's technically unfeasible, it's that making post-publication edits difficult adds robustness to literature: the authors must be very sure before they publish; if I cite a paper, everybody who follows the cite reads the same paper; I can be sure the version I'm reading is the version that passed peer-review. If there is an actual error in a publication, a correction or retraction can be published, but this is unusual and generally doesn't look good.

@Cai Why cannot publications behave like updates to code? Someone pushes an update -> people using that project will get informed that there have been changes. They don't need to update, but at least there's a mark that "future revisions differ". This does not invalidate current projects, because when they used those references, they did draw usefulness from them. I.e. existing publications retain their functionality in some sense.

@mavavilj Yes, that could work technically. But it still has the issue that (a) revisions would need to be peer-reviewed to the same standard as the original publication, and that (b) over time the overall findings of the paper could change substantially, meaning that other citing publications could have the rug pulled out from under them, so to speak. Furthermore if edits are easy, it incentivises sloppy work as "first to press" becomes more important than "initially correct". I think this would worsen the quality of the literature in general. It's a social issue rather than a technical one.

@Cai But that would then depend on, whether this quality is important. There's plenty of badly commented code for example and it's just because it's not considered worthwhile. So why can't people allow for "less polished" publications, but that get the main results across.

@mavavilj Then I guess the answer to the question comes down to: conventionally academics consider the quality of research to be important. And part of that quality means that when you read a paper, you have some trust that the authors have honestly presented the best version of the work in an effort to contribute to collective knowledge, and that through peer review it has been vetted by qualified experts. Part of this trust comes from the fact that edits can't be made. Not that there's nothing to gain by making every publication a living document, but it wouldn't be a strict improvement.

@Cai I'm also perhaps arguing from the fact that "real-world phenomena" are rarely clear cut. Thus in some domains it's expectable that most publications will not be "exact" in their given "percentages" or "accuracies" or that sorts. They're "strikes" about the whole. Thus some deviation can well be tolerated, since the phenomena are not exact. That's, there's room for deviation in linguistic exactness, while e.g. codes and amounts etc. are the important thing. Whether someone e.g. describes schizophrenia like this or that is a nuance. While essential info is what distinguishes it.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

While @Buffy's answer holds true in most cases, it is worth noting that a number of disciplines have a system of two-stage publications that are explicitly designed around publication of an updated version.
For example, in many computer science fields, papers accepted in a conference are encouraged to later send an extended version to a journal. Both enter the scientific record, and the journal version is intended to be a more authoritative and final version, citing and superseding the original, and typically with at least 30% more material than was in the original.
I have seen this beginning to appear in some other fields as well, e.g., with extended abstracts in a conference being invited to publish a full paper in a journal.

In large areas of physics and mathematics, we are reading papers on arXiv and paying little attention to their published versions. (Assuming there is a published version, which is not always the case.) When there is a correction or improvement to be made post-publication, it is often done on arXiv only, as this is much easier than sending an erratum to the journal, which nobody would notice anyway.
Example: an arXiv preprint and the published version. In this case the title and format differ. And the preprint has corrections post-publication.
Example: this article has 9 versions on arXiv including 4 prior to publication in a journal, and 5 after publication. Between the first version post-publication (v5) and the last version (v9), 4 years have passed, and the article has grown from 36 to 55 pages.

Agreed this is an important point, though worth mentioning that usage/views of this vary between and within fields.  In the fields I know (logic, pure maths), minor revisions like your first example are common (especially for errata), but extensive post-publication revisions like your second linked example are rare, and frowned upon by at least some people since they make clear + consistent citation much harder.

@PLL: Good point. As far as I know, extensive post-publication revisions are rare in any field, and reserved to some types of articles. After all, the average research paper is quickly superseded or forgotten, and not worth revising. But the original question was about "anyone", not "most authors".

There's a journal series that does exactly this - the Living Reviews series published by Springer. An example is Living Reviews in Relativity. From their description:

Living Reviews is unique in maintaining a suite of high-quality reviews, which are kept up-to-date by the authors. This is the meaning of the word "living" in the journal's title.

So one can expect articles published in Living Reviews in Relativity to be up-to-date. Most other papers, however, will not have been updated and so can be old or even completely superseded by later data.

These are reviews, of course, not the published papers themselves.

@Buffy: Really? If I’m understanding right, this series publishes review articles in the sense of full-length articles surveying research topics, not just reviews in the sense of short reviews of articles.

@PLL, they are not the original research, so their stability/finality is much less of an issue.


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How do I respond to an email from a potential PhD supervisor who was positive but short?
I recently contacted a potential PhD supervisor expressing my interest in working with him. I attached all application materials (personal statement, CV, etc), as he requested on his website. I received a prompt reply that he is accepting graduate students for the upcoming semester and to let him know if I have any questions. How should I follow up with him, and what sort of questions are appropriate to ask at this stage? I submitted my formal application to the program soon after receiving his reply.

It sounds like you've made it past the "scanning my email to discard junk" phase, which is a great first step. Perhaps a more direct approach this time asking something to the effect of: "given our similar research interests, would you be interested in being my advisor?"

Not all PhD supervisors can be tall.

Just to check: does the graduate department's website suggest contacting supervisors? i.e. is your application going to be evaluated by the department, or by the individual supervisor? In a department where students are only admitted to one PI's group, you need to talk with them most of all, but in departments where students get admitted at the department level, PIs may be less interested in talking with you until after you're already admitted.

Ask for a phone/skype call to discuss research interests, and to see if the two of you would be a good fit.

Hi Prof X., Would you be available for a phone/skype call next week to discuss research projects and to see if I would be a good fit to be your advisee? Thank you!

@KTK - I like Austin's idea.  Have you looked at some of this person's papers, and maybe a description of his current research interests?  Use this reading to prepare some conversation-starter questions for your phone conference.

As suggested by @Austin Henley, take a personal approach (phone/Skype is best). PIs want people who are passionate and who fit well. Plus, a bit of ego stroking never hurts. The candidate who takes initiative to call/Skype demonstrates interest and initiative, and a little bit of ego-stroking that can pay dividends. At that point, you become a person, not a piece of paper.

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


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How helpful is a Latin honors designation (cum laude, magna cum laude) for admission to PhD programs?
I have the option of graduating from my university (U.S.) a semester early, and if I do so, I would receive the lowest honors designation of cum laude. However, if I do not graduate early, I will be able to receive the highest honors designation of summa cum laude. How important is this designation for graduate school admissions, and is there a major difference between these two? My GPA would remain unchanged, the only difference is completion of other honors program requirements.

The honor designations carry essentially no weight. The additional honor program requirements, however, could carry substantial weight. If for example, one of the extra requirements was an independent research project, this would be very valuable for graduate school admissions. If the requirement was the completion of a university breadth requirement (e.g., basket weaving), then it has no extra value for admissions.

Unless, of course, the graduate program is in advanced basket weaving. Such as, a Masters in underwater basket weaving . And a Ph.D. in basket weaving in non-Newtonian fluids. But I digress ;-)

I probably would take a course in Basket Weaving in Non-Newtonian Fluids, if such a thing were offered ;)

The honors program requirement is completion of an honors thesis. In my case, I would complete the same research project, but would not have it accepted as a thesis. See my question about this http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81035/importance-of-undergraduate-honors-thesis-vs-research-published-in-undergraduat

In mathematics, in the U.S., the honors degree per se doesn't matter much, but the fuller coursework (which does mostly reflect what people have learned...) is a big plus. That is, graduating early, if it means "stopping studying mathematics", is not at all a plus, but represents a misunderstanding of the enterprise. Of course, graduating early but/and continuing to study, perhaps even more energetically/aggressively, is positive... if one does not mistakenly disengage from faculty who can be good letter-writers.

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


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If I get an article published in a journal as an undergrad, but the research is low-quality, can it hurt my chances for admission to a PhD?
I'm an undergraduate psychology major with an opportunity to publish in a peer-reviewed journal as a second author. However, the research is fairly low-quality (it was previously submitted to a journal and rejected with very critical reviews). Would having this research published with my name on help or hurt my chances of getting into a PhD program?

A low-impact publication will not, in itself, have that much impact on your chances of getting into graduate school.  Graduate admission committees will pay a lot more attention to your letters or recommendation.  In terms of graduate admissions, the most important impact of having done research is that it should involve you working closely with more senior academics, who will them be in a position to give you strong graduate school recommendations.
Whether the research you do as a undergraduate gets published or not, what is key is that your research supervisor (and possibly other senior people you may have worked with) will know you well enough to write you a strong recommendation.  If your research was done under the supervision of a prominent, respected researcher, that person's letter will count for more.  On the other hand, if your supervisor has a poor reputation (being known for shoddy or crackpot work, for example), their evaluation of your potential will be weighted less strongly by the people reading your application file.  If the low quality of your publication is a consequence of having worked with a rather poor senior researcher, that is something of a cause for concern, although the best course of action is still probably to get the strongest letter you can from your supervisor, even so.


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Is it ethical to use a textbook required for a class that was easily found online?
I am taking an online class that requires a textbook to be purchased. I have found the book through my first simple search using the Google search engine. The website where I found the book seems to be foreign and not related to the original authors. Is it ethical for me to use the free version that I have easily found online and not purchase the book?
Edit: I think there is a valid distinction between resources found on controversial websites like SciHub and the Google search engine. Furthermore, my intentions were to purchase the book before I stumbled upon it in the first few search results.

Does it matter? I have probably 1k books downloaded, I also have probably 30 textbooks I have purchased.

Does this answer your question? Is supporting Sci-Hub illegal/unacademic?

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/145010/what-is-the-academic-argument-against-sci-hub

@AnonymousPhysicist Although the threads you have linked are asking related questions, I believe mine to be different. I did not go out of my way to pirate the book; instead, I simply found it as I was attempting to purchase the book online. I think there is a distinction between resources found through websites such as SciHub and the Google search engine.

Where are you and what do you know of local copyright laws?

"I think there is a distinction between resources found through websites such as SciHub and the Google search engine."  With respect to your use of a book, the law does not make that distinction.

Are you using Google Books? https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-authors-after-google-books-wins-its-fair-use-case-again-49363#:~:text=The%20Google%20Books%20decision%20is,classroom%20use)%2C%20scholarship%2C%20or

If you're asking whether this will be seen as ethical by a university administration, the answer is no. The law probably lines up with the ethics that fall into the professional norms of the university admin.
However.
The money that the public pays for textbooks does not flow into the pockets of the people that generated or summarized that knowledge, so the system is far from fair.
I had a professor who actually told us to download his book illegally if we could get it, and when we pointed out he was the author, he said he made negligible returns on the sale.
Which gets us to the professional norms of your field. Some fields are big supporters of free access to knowledge. In these fields, the arxiv and scihub are popular. Downloading anything illegally if it's academic knowledge would generally be accepted as ethical within the professional norms of those fields.
Personally, I believe academic knowledge should be much freer than it is, and everyone should have access to the work we do. I'm not studying physics because I want to get rich. I study this because it's beautiful and it's important, and because these are fundamental questions for humanity, and answers should be shared with humanity. We all benefit from living in a society that's informed about itself and the world around it.

The answer is not a definitive "no", but culture-dependent. While it's probably a "no" in the US and part of Europe, in e.g. Latin America or many parts of Asia the university administration simply wouldn't care at all; when resources are scarce, buying prohibitively expensive textbooks isn't a priority for students and even for many professors.

@B.Núñez good point! My experience is in North America and Europe.

Rather than asking if it is ethical, I recommend that you be open and honest and listen to your conscience. You can help yourself to clarify your conscience by consulting with the people who are directly concerned with this question. So, in this case, I recommend that you email the authors of the textbook and the publisher of the textbook and then ask them how they feel about you downloading their book instead of purchasing it (you could probably find their contact information by searching online). If they reply that they have no problem with that, then your conscience should be perfectly clear to download the book without paying for it. But if they reply that they are not happy about that, then you should do what your conscience tells you, even if that means paying for a book that most other students are downloading at no charge. Your conscience is priceless and is worth much more than the cost of a textbook.

I totally agree with your sentiment. I am a big believer in doing the right thing. I actually ended up borrowing an old version of the book from my university library.


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Should I email a corrected version of my essay to graduate admissions?
I realized the writing sample I'd submitted for my grad school application (US grad school) had a small mistake that messed up the formatting of the first page. I'd written the authors' contributions in the footnote of the first page, and because of a small formatting problem, half of it had gone to the footnote on the second page and that half includs important information on authors' contribution. (And since it's a writing sample with multiple authors, authors' contribution should be crucial for the admission committee I guess.)
I've already submitted my application and can't make any changes, but there is still couple of days left till the deadline. Should I send the corrected version to the admissions, explain there was a formatting problem, and ask them to replace the old one with the correct one, or would that do more harm than good?

To the person who down-voted: It's usually considered good manners to at least leave some kind of indication why.

To the actual question: Are you sure it's an error? I have seen some books do this. Not usually, true, and not very often. But if the footnote is referenced close to the bottom of the page it can mean that to keep the footnote all on one page would leave a big white space at the bottom of the page.  Usually that shows that the author has gone overboard on the content of the footnote, which should probably be integrated into the the text or moved to an end note.

You can send it. It probably isn't necessary. It probably won't be considered. But it won't hurt. Just include a note of apology for the bad formatting.
But an error like that should have no effect on your application.


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Maximizing Output
What are your methods in maximizing research output? I, a junior researcher without teaching duties at the moment, have been trying to work more and more hours, pushing leisure closer and closer to zero. However, I have the impression that further increases in working hours lead to a considerable decrease in productivity, to an extent that more working hours even decrease the overall quantity of produced research.
There is a general discussion on productivity, but I would like to collect methods that proved to be the most suitable for researchers. Do you adjust your nutrition? Do you engage in a specific type of physical exercise? Do you use specific scheduling techniques? How do you keep yourself from procrastinating? Do you stick to fixed time slots for leisure? How many working hours per week do, according to your experience, maximize output? Feel free to come up with further questions.

Wow, don't turn yourself into a paper generating machine.  Having said that, you can try searching the net for 'how to be a prolific writer'; e.g., https://prolifiko.com/how-to-be-a-prolific-academic-the-writing-strategy-of-superstar-scholar-adam-grant/.  There are other ways, like improving your networking skills and participating in many projects.  You should really focus on what interests you, and work within your capacity.  What person-X can do may not be suitable for you.

I recommend high doses of doing nothing.

Hmmm. Maximizing. Wrong idea, I think. Optimizing might be appropriate.

Related questions: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4864/are-any-of-these-questions-about-working-hours-duplicates

There is a saying in industry that one should work smarter, not necessarily more.  Write out your high level goals for the next 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, etc., then set out a detailed roadmap on what needs to happen and when, to get there.  Then execute on those milestones.  Don't read every paper you come across, read those that further you along your path.  Give yourself deadlines to start/finish manuscripts. Hold yourself accountable.  Sometimes that overwhelming feeling of not getting enough done is simply a lack of clarity on what needs to be done.


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Popularity of Editorial Express
Why do many journals and conference organizers use Editorial Express and the related Conference Maker (https://www.editorialexpress.com/)? The tools look like a relic from the 90s. And at least the manuscript submission tool contains a few bugs.
Is it a competitive pricing, an integration with related software, or potential disruptions associated with migrating to alternative platforms?
This question is not meant as a critique or an attack on the Editorial Express brand. I am just surprised whenever I use that tool.

Maybe a lot of editors and academics are "relics from the 90's". I know I am. Maybe it works.

@Buffy - I'm not quite sure what decade I'm a relic from, but it predates the 90's...

I suspect the answer is that it is not actually popular.

It is very commonly used in economics.

It seems that 77 journals use Editorial Express. Given that there are tens of thousands of scholarly journals, it does not seem to be immensely popular.
Anyway, one Editorial justifies the adoption of Editorial Express. It might answer parts of your question:

We have decided to use Editorial Express, developed by Professor John Rust at the University of Maryland. This software is very cost effective, and allows for much flexibility in how it is used. The software will send automatic reminders to reviewers, automatically save contact information provided by authors and reviewers, save all correspondence and manuscripts, and has many reporting functions. Editorial Express is Web-based, which allows the editors to use the software at any time, in any place. Ideally, this Web-based solution will allow us to coordinate the duties of John Mallinckrodt and myself, and might provide for some significant financial savings.

To examine the argument about cost-effectiveness further: The standard price of Editorial Express is $2000 per year, but can even be lower due to its "lowest price guarantee"-scheme. In comparison, one of its competitors, Manuscript Manager, has a graded pricing that may cost up to $8500 per year. Another one, ScholasticaHQ, offers a "peer review system" that costs $250 per year in addition to $10 per submitted manuscript (thus, if you have 200 submissions per year, it adds up to $2250).


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Quitting master degree MBA
I am planning to quit my master degree ( I have completed 14 of 20 months) because I dont feel it will be helpful in my career, I also dont like to do a final Business model plan (which is huge around 180 pages) to get the degree (it must have financial evaluation and more stuff that are not related to my carreer, I studied Informatic engineer by the way).
I am struggling with continuing it, I already have my Engineer degree, I know the world it is more competitive but it doesnt mean that every employee must have a master degree in order to suceed.
I dont regret the time invested, I prefer studying and get a specialization program in my career field rather than a degree in something I wont work and invest more money and time just because "I must finish what I started" and then dont take advantage of it.
Tell me your opinions please

There is no question here and soliciting opinions is also not on topic.

What is your specific uncertainty here?  What is it that you want to know?  If you are just here to unburden yourself to the internet... this is not the place for that.

Even if an MBA is of no benefit to you and not relevant to a job you're seeking, finishing it is always going to look better on your resume/CV than not finishing it.

MBA are helpful only because of the network you build during your final assignment.
The intrinsic value of a completed MBA is close to 0.
However, in the late stage of your career, people would expect you to have an MBA, to offer you higher managment role in complex, large corporate environments.
Where do you want to be in 20 years? the indivdual consultant paid 50-500$ per hour, or the high order manager in a big company?


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Politicians and other students caught in plagiarism?
This is something I don't understand: how come many degrees have been revoked due to plagiarism after approval if Turnitin and many other software against plagiarism exist?
For example, there was a case in my country where a politician got his degree revoked when it was found that he copied from other student's thesis, the thesis of that student was in her college repository, how come anti plagiarism software didn't detect the fraud before approval?

You say "many degrees have been revoked". I doubt that is true, actually. A few. The case you cite is at least partly due to the prominence of the politician. Had it been an ordinary, hence invisible, person, I doubt that anyone would have checked and if they did and found the same thing, would probably let it go as "not worth the hassle". I think the case in question was pretty blatant and the person was flaunting his degree as evidence of greatness. Yes?

Anti plagiarism software is a recent invention; actually  software is a recent invention; heck, writing your thesis on anything other than a typewriter is a recent invention.

Software like turnitin also is pretty useless for mathematics too.

What does this question have to do with politicians?  I think nothing.

Actually, it is not just politicians. The media only report on politicians, though. I work with the VroniPlag Wiki academic group, there are over 200 published documentations of plagiarism, and many of these degrees have been revoked: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/%C3%9Cbersicht (sorry, in German, but you get the gist).
As others have noted, Turnitin and other systems are just a tool, not a litmus test for plagiarism. They can only find what their algorithms can find in the database they have been able to populate. There are very many false positives and even more false negatives. The reports are very difficult to interpret, to boot.
For your particular question, I know from my work testing plagiarism detection systems that very many repositories of dissertations are not indexed by the software. One reason is that they are very difficult to traverse (and each has a different structure). There only tend to be the dissertations stored in the databases that have previously been checked. So in your case, if the student's thesis A was not checked, it was not in the database when B was potentially checked. But if a human reader sees that the topic is the same and then compare's thesis A with thesis B, they can quickly see and document the overlap. And of course, not all theses are checked, for various reasons, not all of which are academic in nature.
If you want to know more about the work that goes into documenting plagiarism in (oldish) theses, I blogged about that ages ago:  https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-find-plagiarism-in-dissertations.html (in English).

Turnitin and other tools are mainly (exclusively) Internet based plagiarism tools. They check if a submitted piece of work contains passages that match those found elsewhere on the Internet or previously submitted to the tool.
There are many sources that are  not on the internet and created before such tools and technology existed. Any plagiarism from those would not be detected by things like TurnitIn.
In particular the historical (i.e. before 21st century) thesis archives of most university libraries have not yet been digitised and made Internet browsable. If someone just copied one and handed it in as theirs, then the only protection from plagiarism is the knowledge and experience of the examination panel (who would be expected to be familiar with prior works).
A further reason might be that not all institutions require the submission of a thesis in machine readable form. You can only use Turnitin on document files like word or PDF. You cannot (easily) use such tools for physical paper copies of a thesis. Some universities might still take submission as a bound book making detection mechanically difficult. Further, they might just not subscribe to TurnItIn et.al. as they might be too expensive and rely on the old human element instead.
This is why, when such blatant copying is later discovered a degree might be revoked.

But I saw news that the original files are documents already in the web. How come plagiarism wasnt detected there on time?

@CarlosVarasTello If you are asking about a particular case you should have given more details, then someone could answer about that case in particular. There are many reasons why this might be so .

@CarlosVarasTello Answer updated to explain.

Services like Turnitin weren't available twenty years ago, even though theses from that era are often available online.  Now that services like this exist, some people have taken to checking old these for plagiarism.

@BrianBorchers, and, I'd guess that they are finding parallel work that only looks like plagiarism but isn't, since back in the old days it was harder to find parallel work as it took longer to disseminate. Some dissertations wouldn't appear in the scientific literature for a few years after degrees were awarded.

Turnitin is not a fire and forget tool, it requires significant human effort to go through the results and separate serious plagiarism from sloppiness from outright false positives. Doing it retroactively is even harder because you have to carefully check who copied who.
Also turnitin only looks for straight text copying, it doesn't look for the (IMO more serious) stealing of ideas.
And of course it's not omnipresent either, lots of stuff (even stuff that is online) isn't in their database.
For normal students noone cares enough to do the work of trudging through old thesis looking for plagarism, famous politicians and other people who lots of people have a grudge against are another matter.

It is a controversial question (especially, if it refers to politicians). The issue of academic misconduct is an everlasting problem. A lot of famous people and thought leaders (including Martin Luther King) plagiarised and used other people’s ideas in their papers. Previously it was:

hard to detect plagiarism, as there were no such innovative technologies and software;
the requirements were not so strict towards the authenticity of the papers.
With the lapse of time plagiarism detection software was developed. Nowadays, no software can detect any type of cheating and has access to all the repositories available. It is just impossible as there is no common international repository for all academic institutions. Each university has its database and access to it is not granted to any third-parties.
The leading academic plagiarism checkers like Turnitin, Unicheck, have access to many private databases, improve their algorithms all the time and deploy new innovative products (authorship verification by Unicheck, or iThenticate by Turnitin). Still, the cheating methods are also ‘improved’ and changed every day. To combat academic dishonesty on time, the mixture of actions has to be applied where plagiarism software is only one of them.


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Why data falsification / fabrication is found after degree is awarded?
I saw on the internet that many degrees are revoked due to data falsification, but the question here is: how come colleges cant identify data falsification or manipulation before the degree is awarded? Do colleges have to wait for another person to report the misconduct and waste time and money?

Sometimes data falsification is identified before a degree is awarded. Are you asking why it isn't always detected then?

yes, my question is why isn't it always detected?

"many degrees are revoked due to data falsification" - can you provide some context or citation for that statement? How do you define "many"?

@bryan krause search on google

There are two things to consider, in my mind, when thinking about your question.
The first is the possibility for sampling bias. If someone is caught falsifying data prior to their degree being awarded, they are likely expelled - and it's unlikely for the work to ever see the light of day. These detections are largely "silent", while the flashier ones that involve clawing back degrees, retracting papers, etc. are likely over-represented.
The other issue is to consider how data fabrication is detected. On a crude level, it's a function of both time and the number of people looking at the work. Inherently there's more time post-graduation than pre-graduation. There's also a larger number of people looking at it, especially if the work is being published. So if the detection of any given fraudulent work has a fairly low probability per person interacting with the work, it's entirely reasonable that the majority of these cases would arise after a degree is awarded.

In some fields only a few people see the work before the degree is awarded and they may miss things since nobody knows everything. After the degree is awarded, and especially when publications result at that point, lots of people get to look and they may notice anomalies.
I suspect it is less of a problem in fields in which there is a lot of publication of data and results prior to publication and also less in fields (mathematics) that don't usually depend on things that can be easily falsified.
Sadly, some practitioners seem to believe that they can only succeed with "positive" results and so, when they get the opposite, try to fudge the data. This may be difficult to detect without a lot of eyes.

however, data falsification is mostly detected in medicine, chemistry and psychology.  Isn't it supposed to be a better review because of the field before publication?

@CarlosVarasTello There is a lot of trust in science, mostly resting on the very severe career consequences if that trust is violated. Peer review asks whether the results are presented appropriately given the data. If the data themselves are fabricated, it may not be knowable unless the results cannot be reproduced. Some statistical methods can be used to estimate when data are not likely produced by natural means, but their utility depends on how clever the fabrication is.


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friends or competition for work
I am in doubt if I should share new academic opportunities, studies, etc with college's friends, because they will may be my future competition for a job and they may get the job thanks to the help I gave to them. What do you guys think about this. Am I being selfish?

Of course, they might give you help as well. That is partly what friends are for...

They are friends!!! Of course you should! Friendship should always be higher valued than money, jobs,... If they are real friends, you might be both happy for the other if they get an opportunity or job.

Good karma has a higher long-term value than nearly anything else in life. That includes monetary value.

Yes - it's not only good practice to share new information about career opportunities or research findings with your friends, but that's one way to build a healthy network of collaborators and a healthy community. Even if there's a chance that a friend gets a job you were hoping for, ideally they remain your friend and you can learn from their experience second-hand.
It's also good practice to share new discoveries with people who aren't explicitly your friends, both from the perspective of open science and because, well, you're probably not going to apply for every job you see or write every paper you can conceive.


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Go for undergrad or graduate degree in CS?
I am a cybersecurity professional well employed. I am almost 50 year old so since my employer would pay a graduate or undergrad degree I thought about going back to school to enhance computer science skills and apply more software development in my career.
My background:
18 years experience in various roles in network engineering & cyber security.
BSEE, MBA
Multiple computer certifications
Intermediate level in programming (Python, C)
Question is, I am not sure I can be admitted into a masters in computer science if I am not working mostly in programming.
Would an undergrad degree be suitable or just take certification training/bootcamps in programming?

Note that there are professional masters programs that are almost completely separate from the main academic undergrad-graduate track. These are more to assist with your career, rather than doing research, however. They'd be more like a certification but much more involved typically.

The CS grad program at my university wouldn't exist if we only accepted people with a BS in CS. Your experience in network engineering and cybersecurity would put you light years ahead of the other grad students in those classes.

Actually, the CS undergraduate degree isn't just about programming. True that our students learn programming first so that they can build some interesting things in later courses, but there is a lot more to it. Perhaps you have this skill, certainly you have some of it with your background. But algorithms, and data structures are important as is computability theory and information theory.
You already have an undergrad degree and a masters. If you are in the US, an additional undergraduate degree would probably waste a lot of your time. But you might need to fill in a few things.
I suggest that you go visit someplace that has good graduate programs and talk with a faculty member or admissions councilor to see where you might fit in and what things you might want to do before you start formally. Some places will have flexible programs in which you can pick up the missed requirements formally.
Every place will have different requirements for a Masters. In some you will probably be a pretty close fit already. In others, not so much. But only a specific institution can tell you for sure how you stand and give you an estimate of your probable success. Visit in person so that you can get a feel for the place and they can ask you meaningful questions about background and intentions.

If you want to formalize your software development skills and move up in your career, an undergrad degree in CS may be your best option. A graduate degree (without first getting an undergrad degree) would likely be a bad fit. Note that most graduate programs in the U.S. would require an undergraduate degree. Graduate degrees will also be more research oriented and would care very little about your industry experience. I would not look to a graduate degree as your first move. (Although, maybe after doing a bachelor's degree you will want to pursue a master's degree!)
If you are just looking to obtain more software skills in order to broaden your abilities in your current role, certification training/bootcamps in programming would be a faster path to doing so.

This is about two things:
One, what you want, ie think about what the courses offer in terms of the programming skills you want - which will give you the tools?
Two, are there any entry criteria imposed by the institutions you are looking at?
Not being mean, I was a mature student and the academic entry requirements were "adjusted" with "professional experience", based on an interview with a professor...
So, work out what each course offers compared to what you are looking for and, most of all, ENJOY IT !!
You could, easily, end up doing both... depending how you want to start.


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Will it to be tough to catch up if I missed 3 classes of 3 courses?
I lost my.passport before leaving for masters in the USA. I'm doing an engineering management degree and I will miss the first 3 classes of the 3 courses Ive enrolled in.
How tough will it be to catch up or is it risky to pursue this as I've visa and university requirements that mandate a GPA above 3.0.

We can not answer your question because we do not know the courses, this is why there are so many close votes. Nonetheless Nate Eldredge gave a good answer and maybe you can re-phrase your question to fit the answer.

Three classes could be three hours worth of material (not a huge deal) or nine (a bit more of a deal).

It depends greatly on the courses.  In some cases it might be easy, in others it might be very difficult.
Contact your professors immediately, let them know the situation, and ask what you should do.  They might:

send you notes
suggest material for you to study on your own
offer extra help when you get back
suggest that you drop the course


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All positions require multiple code development and machine learning proficiency. How do I address the knowledge gap? I am worried about my future
My mechanical engineering PhD is very applied. I used Abaqus software to model additive manufacturing process. I wrote two trivial user subroutines (VUHARD) to implement material models in Fortran and published 4 publications in Surface engineering journals. An example paper is this paper. I am defending next month and I am worried.
However, now I am searching for postdoc positions and the posts require proficient knowledge in C++, Fortran, Python, code development in Finite element analysis, development of machine learning algorithms, molecular dynamics simulations, phase field simulations among others.
I am seriously under qualified. I have not done extensive code development, neither I have knowledge of machine learning algorithms.
I feel I wasted my PhD. I should have done it on a different topic. Computational materials science is too hard for me and I should have gone with experimental projects.
Is it the end of the road for me? Can I address the knowledge gap after PhD? Due to lockdowns and covid restrictions, I am planning to join my PhD supervisor at the moment as an interim postdoc. The contract would end next September. I am seriously worried about my future. Please advise.

You're not as bad off as the pure math PhD, waste of 5 years for most!

None of the missing skills you mention strike me as "seriously underqualified". Those are tools that you can learn reasonably quickly. You can learn C++ and Python, and you can learn machine learning algorithms and try them out. This will not take you longer than a couple of months. The important thing is that you are an expert in your field: that is what requires years of study.

the posts require proficient knowledge in C++, Fortran, Python, code development in Finite element analysis, development of machine learning algorithms, molecular dynamics simulations, phase field simulations among others.

How many candidates do you think that will be experts in the postdoc topic and also experts in all those other things, in the sense of having year-long experience with all of them? Probably none.

I have not done extensive code development.

I do not know what you call "extensive code development", but I suspect that what you have in mind is not what most academics have ever done. Academics write code for themselves, to quickly try out approaches to a problem. Many (most?) of them do not write tidy, modular libraries that can easily be understood and maintained.
Also, not everyone is an expert in machine learning. Many researchers try it out as a tool, and for that you do not need so much time. I have seen many students in my department finish their PhDs and get hired for jobs that involve machine learning, even though some of them had never touched machine learning before. For a postdoc position it will be even easier, as the real bottleneck is "being an expert in the research topic", not "being able to code a neural network".
So I suspect you will be just fine. You can familiarize yourself with C++, Python and/or machine learning to increase your chances if that appears often in position descriptions. But I do not think you are "seriously underqualified".