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Why are there so many papers written in bad English?
I am pretty sure that anyone who has spent some time reading academic papers have come across quite a few "lemons" among them, with bad grammar, strange word choices and incoherent sentences. Such papers are always a chore to read, even if the topic is interesting and the research is good, and I have found myself throwing away papers just because they are so awful to read.
The strange thing is that these papers have been peer reviewed and are published in reputable journals. But still they are often near unreadable because of bad language. Why is this the case? Why isn't bad language picked up and corrected when peer review is done? I understand that a lot of these academics don't have English as their first language, but publishing a paper that reads like it was translated from Chinese to English with Google Translate and a thesaurus is not a good way to publish your research.

I don't think there's a black and white here. As a reviewer, I tend to go easy on non-native English authors and try to give a list of typos and sentences to rephrase. If the technical content is good and the paper is readable, I can certainly forgive even frequent minor typos. What really p*sses me off, however, is when I have to review papers with poor English written with co-authors that are clearly native English speakers (i.e., "free-riders" that couldn't be bothered to improve the writing of their own paper). Grr.

I found this gem in another answer: "the language of science is bad English"
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/14921/how-to-improve-my-english-from-academic-papers/14923#14923

On the most recent paper I reviewed, the review form had a checkbox for "needs English language corrections".  I think English language corrections should be done by English language professionals, not by other scientists.  There are plenty of companies that can correct academic English.

Peers doing peer review may not also be editors/proofreaders/language experts. Poorly written published papers have probably not had editing done to them as part of the publication process.

I'm sure it depends a lot on the publication. There are many less-than-reputable academic publications that exist just so researchers can be "published."

@badroit : the last paper I reviewed had the same issue (native English speaking co-authors who should've caught the problems) ... but it also didn't cite any of the co-authors' papers on related projects, so I told the editor that I suspected the co-authors were likely listed without their knowledge.

U R seriuz? U R rejektin mai paipur "I can curez kansa" becuz U no like the way 1 ritez? I am humble sorri 4 waistin mai live learnin buyoloji insted uv praktisin mai ritinz 4 U. Urz A. N. Ortha. PS U can find morg on googlemapz. ---
If you want to ask why journals don't spend more time helping authors to polish their papers, that's a valid and interesting question. But, as it is, it sounds a lot like you're ungratefully criticizing authors for not being very good at writing or, even worse, for daring to learn your language instead of making you learn Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portugue

I tend to go easy on non-native English authors — Me too, if they're students.  But I tend to be fairly harsh with tenured authors.  After a while, not being a native speaker isn't a sufficient excuse; lots of non-native English speakers write beautiful English.

I think English language corrections should be done by English language professionals, — Oh come on.  Seriously?

Why does everyone here assume that it's the reviewers' job to correct English mistakes? We should blame the journals and their "added value" here.

Also, keep in mind that not all reviewers are native English speakers.

Related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15824/is-there-such-a-thing-called-native-speaker-bias-when-publishing?rq=1

This question seems like hyperbole. Most papers I read in top journals have very functional language, and a few have inspiring (literally - they have inspired my own writing), elegant prose. Can you give some examples of these supposed prestigious publications with bad English?

I like V. Rossetto's answer (+1), but I think the level of cynicism it contains is more appropriate as an answer for why bad papers are published (to which I would add that there is now a glut of mediocre venues looking for content ... everyone wants to be editor or co-organiser of something; and I would also add that, unfortunately, authoring and peer-review is still done by humans).
But as for badly written ... I feel a little balance is needed. In particular, I feel it's important to caution against a common hyper-sensitivity to language problems in publications.
The phrase "badly-written" is subjective. Sure, the readability of the paper is an important aspect of the quality of the paper, and there is some minimum level of language quality that is a prerequisite, but that level can be artificially high for some academics.
The majority of research is published in English by non-native speakers. Many papers are primarily authored by students in their 20's/30's who might be quite new to English and to writing scientific works. Even certain native English speakers will struggle to structure a paper in such a way that it reads well (sometimes because they are still of the belief that things have to be complicated and difficult before they can be published, so they write in a complicated and difficult way).
As an example of hypersensitivity, I am a native English speaker and for a journal paper I was primary author of, I once had a reviewer complain that the paper was poorly written. His/her main complaint was that we were confusing the semantics of "that" vs. "which" in the paper, saying that mixing the two up is not up to the formal standard of English required for journals. Eventually I did actually manage to stop laughing, but as I picked myself up from the floor, I realised I'd have to "correct" it for the revision. Three hours of Ctrl+F'ing "that/which" in a 40 page journal paper (and even worse, fixing the resulting bad boxes and widows again) wiped the smile off my face.
I also find that students new to reviewing, particularly non-native speakers, tend to expect a very high standard of writing. For example, I assigned a workshop review to a student once that wanted to reject the paper, primarily due to having "several typos". These would take 5 minutes to fix and didn't affect the paper at all. I asked the student if he had had any problem reading the paper? He said he hadn't. Did he learn something from the paper? Well yes, X, Y and Z. Why is he rejecting the paper? Necessary has two 's's.
Yes, the quality of writing often sucks in published works, but I don't believe that a paper should be automatically rejected just because it could be labelled as "badly written".
The goal is to communicate ideas with good science/maths, not to give an exposition of English grammar and phrasing. The original versions of many important publications were almost indecipherable in their writing. Even if an idea is written in such a way that you have to spend a few more hours to understand it, the idea itself might influence you and many other people in a positive way for many years.
Yes such influential papers are rare, but there are many shades of grey in between black and white.
And think of all the raw brain-power we will be missing out on if we perpetuate a culture that implicitly discourages non-English speakers from publishing!

In any case, for journals, I would tend to blame poor copy-editing and typesetting from the publishers. Most journals employ professional technical writers whose job is to avoid this situation. (I don't envy them their job, but still.)

I agree that my answer was cynical, yours is quite empathic for the non-native English speakers. +1 for this more optimistic viewpoint.

This is a very important addendum to V.Rossetto's answer, because, frankly, we don't WANT to reject papers just because of problems of presentation and writing.

Your answer contains a significant typo. ;-)

You tease! I did find another typo though. :)

@xLeitix. What do you mean by "Because we don't want" ? That "we" want to consider only scientific content ? that "we" want the editors to do it, it's their part of the job ? that "we" as scientists have other things to do ? I my opinion, not discouraging bad presentation is actually offering those who know about "good" presentation real opportunities for getting grants and positions even if their scientific work is not as good as the one of "bad" presenters. When examining applications, this remark comes to my mind quite regularly.

I might also note that an alternative, people only publishing in their native tongue with only the finest grammar and word choice, would be vastly worse for us native English speakers than having to wade through some less than poetic prose. Native English speakers are exceedingly lucky in coming to the table with a skill nearing mastery level, in a language that by total happen-stance turned out to the lingua franca of academics. Papers could all still have to be written in Latin, or...French. Please don't make me learn Russian because word choice miss sometimes!

"Three hours of Ctrl-Fing"? Find a nearby CS student and get them to use emacs on it!

Actually for this task I guess Emacs takes more keystrokes that a normal third-millennium editor with the usual shortcuts.

@sweeneyrod I got the impression it might be Word. But even MS Word would have shortcut for search and replace, surely?

Is someone claiming there's an editor whose search-and-replace can automatically replace only instances where "that" is incorrect?  (In fact, I believe that WordPro and Word grammar check are almost there, but not simple find-replace)

I'm grateful to the editor who explained to me the difference between "that" and "which", which none of  my high-school and college English teachers had taught us. (I still make mistakes, but at least I know "in principle" what I should write.)

To add something not contained in any of the existing answers: in some fields, language errors are more prone to create important misunderstanding in the mind of the reader.  For instance, in mathematics, even seemingly minor grammatical changes to the statement of a theorem will often drastically change its meaning.  My (purely anecdotal) sense is that in such fields, badly written papers rarely get through peer review at reputable journals.  But I'm sure someone will disagree, since these terms are subjective.
Of course, plenty of badly written mathematical papers get through peer-review in disreputable journals.  The result can be complete gibberish.  For example, see this entertaining abstract.
Finally, I respect badroit's answer, but I still get annoyed when I'm asked to spend hours reviewing a paper and I find that the authors didn't even take a minute to run spell-check.  That's rude, to say the least.

I agree on spellchecking. In defense of authors, I've learned to spellcheck LaTeX (without spellchecking the commands) using a terminal or Emacs, but that seems not entirely trivial.

Might be worth noting that the abstract you linked is by SCIRP, which was on Beall's list when it was discontinued.

@Blaisorblade, Most authors nowayas use GuI-based text editors for LaTeX, and most of them have good spell-checks (but, grammar-check is not really there unfortunately).

Badly written papers can still serve the interests of

the editors and the authors, if it concerns a hot topic (or considered as such), the article will potentially be cited by others even if they do not read it at all;
the editors, if they have difficulties to find enough good papers to fill the next issue. They need to show their employers they are working;
the referees, if they are cited in the references;
the scientific editors, if they have conflicting interests (like being at the same time head of a university's department);
the list does not stop here (please edit).

These are no scientific reasons, but they are dictated by the "numbers" and these numbers play a significant role for researchers applying to a position, a grant or a promotion.
It can also be that the authors made a really good discovery, want to publish to avoid being spotted, but prefer to keep their "advance". So they publish intentionally in a way that is difficult to read. This reason is rare in my opinion, but I've heard of a case. In this situation, maybe it is a deal between the editor and the author.

I would add that "Badly written papers can still serve the interests of" ... the journal and science itself, if the scientific content is better than the writing.

@xLeitix. Good point (+1). Feel free to edit the answer if you wish.

If only we could edit the published papers ...

@SamB lost count on how many times I thought that. WikiDemia.

"want to publish to avoid being spotted", fully agreed, especially in the cases of patents!

It's simply about saving money. Until the 1990s, publishers of academic books and journals employed copy editors to put text into readable form. This, not least, was because the typesetter had to input text by hand, character by character, into the machine. Typesetters, although as capable as anyone else of making unintended errors, had high professional standards, and would find it painful to deliberately embody obvious errors into their work. Since typesetters had to read the material, it was necessary at least to correct errors that would make their life hard. Moreover, the publisher, commissioning editor, copy editor, and typesetter had a shared culture of seeking high quality for the customer who ultimately provided their living: the intended reader.
With the advent of computerization, the expensive copy editor and typesetter could be cut out. The author is instructed to follow the style file, and the editorial job is now principally to check that this has been done---at least well enough for the output to appear at a glance to conform in style to the publisher's standards. Driving this compression, in the same period, were four other strong trends: the expansion of higher education; the increasing specialization of academic works; the establishment of English as the principal medium of publication for authors who are not native speakers of that language; and the measurement of academics' worth by the quantity of their published output. These trends all put pressure on publishers to produce a great multiplicity of titles. With money available to buy books constrained by general economic growth, and with libraries not having the highest priority in university spending, this profusion of titles could only be printed, at affordable prices for the end user, by sacrificing quality to cut costs.
Of course, this is an oversimplified description of what has happened diversely in hundreds of publishing houses over the past 25 years or so. It applies particularly to titles with a low print run (say 500 copies), where the costs of copy-editing and typesetting are hard to recover from sales, and not so much to more popular books and journals.

Good answer, but I doubt the saved money meant lower prices. Without copyediting (and with only free peer review) we have journals run for next to nothing.

A reviewer who receives a submission which he/she has sent back a few times on grounds of serious problems with the scientific content or superficial presentation might just be happy at least those have been corrected and not bother also correcting typos and odd choices of words.
One more thing: a lot of reviewers aren't native speakers themselves (me, for example) and don't pick up on all the errors or have a hard time formulating what's wrong with a given word or phrase.

+1, but it is not the responsibility of the reviewer to provide a detailed list of typos. Remarking on the quality of writing is important, but to provide a detailed typo list is (or at least should be) considered by all involved purely as a bonus. So don't sweat it.

A few years ago, I was asked to work with folk from a specific sub-discipline of our field.  I'm not a scientist, but had been doing IT support in the general discipline for 6 years at that point.
They all spoke English well, and the majority were native English speakers -- yet their documentation had all of the same problems that you describe.  So I wrote up notes about problems that I saw.
... and they rejected every comment I gave them.
The problem was that they had developed their own jargon, and what I had assumed they were talking about wasn't actually it.
The problems don't seem bad when you talk about it ... they had a 'prime key' which is somewhat related to a 'primary key', but not quite.  And the 'dataset name' isn't the name of the table where the data's being stored (the 'data series name', but a serialized string for a given query.  These are just subtle enough that you make assumptions when reading that they've obviously made a mistake, attempt to correct when reading it, and the whole thing just makes no sense by the time you're done.
...
I've heard people joke that jargon is a way for communities to keep out people who haven't yet given enough time to the community ... and I understand that sometimes different communities have slightly incompatible definitions ... but you really need some sort of a warning for certain cases.
When I was in grad school, we had a textbook that spent a full chapter defining what they meant by information.  I thought it was horrible.  I even told the author that when I met him at a conference  (he told me some of my comments would've been more useful, but they had gone to press on the 2nd edtion just weeks before).  But I've since come to understand why he had to do it -- as painful as that chapter was to read, it would've been even worse to try to read the whole book without a shared understanding of 'information'.
update : I said they didn't seem so bad on the surface, and until you actually run into these cases you probably won't appreciate just what a problem is can be.  Although spelling wasn't originally called out by the question, here are a few situations where jargon can look like the problems mentioned so far:

Spelling : Some communities will use foreign words or the British spelling of words rather than an Americanized spelling to convey slightly different meaning.  eg, archaelogy's provenience to distinguish between provenance as used by archives and museums.
Grammar : Some communities may consider the same term to be singular or plural; eg, 'data' is considered by the scientific community to be the plural of 'datum', while the computer science community considers it to be an abbreviation of 'dataset', a collective noun and therefore singular.
Odd word choices : Some communities, especially in the legal field, will assign specific meaning to words or phrases.  eg, Bill Clinton's insistence that he did not have 'sexual relations' with Monica Lewinsky.  In some cases, the specific meaning differs between communities (eg, an earth science, a 'data product' is composed of multiple 'datasets' (individual files; the relationship is reversed in solar physics).  Issues also arise with metaphor in informal speach, such as the American 'kick the bucket' or the British 'Bob's your uncle'.
Incoherent sentences : When combined, the above issues seem make statements seem incoherent because we think we understand the message based on our incorrect assumption that we understood each of the words within the statement.  It can be almost painful to read / listen to / etc.  If as an American, you've never seen early episodes of Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef, you'll realize that American and British cooking terms are different enough to cause significant confusion

Even with all of those issues, I don't want to say that the above problems never appear in published papers.  I peer-reviewed a paper last year that had many of the issues, and told the editor that I suspected the co-authors (American and British) had never read the paper; they didn't accept the poor spelling and grammar as evidence, but they did accept when I pointed out the co-authors' papers that hadn't been cited.

Problem with jargon is especially true when the papers are among the pioneers published, and they really must invent some words to describe something still not very affirmative, or still much fluid in understanding.

In my opinion, this answer has nothing to do with the question.

Using strange jargon is something different then using wrong spelling and grammar everywhere.

@PaŭloEbermann the point Joe is making is that it looked like spelling and grammar problems, but was really jargon.

@PaŭloEbermann : I was focusing on the 'bad grammar, strange word choices and incoherent sentences ' from the original question.  Although it didn't mention spelling, I know of cases where jargon might look like spelling issues; in archaelogy, they make a distinction between 'provenance' (chain of custody) and 'provenience' (where the item was found).  To someone who doesn't know they're two different (but related) terms, it looks like a spelling mistake.   In other cases, the jargon is a word used as a different part of speech (eg, verbing of nouns) which looks like a grammar error.

@DavidKetcheson : I've added more details and examples to attempt to explain how this can be mistaken for the problem.

If you don't know the field's jargon, you don't stand much chance of understanding the paper anyway.  If you do know the jargon, you won't mistake it for poor writing.

Unfortunately, you don't have to write a pioneer paper to invent your own jargon. I have seen this done way too often.

Because the authors' English is poor, the reviewers feel their job is to figure out the science and not the English, and the copyeditor does not understand the manuscript enough to make changes.
Try writing a paper in a language you know but are not at native level with, and you'll quickly see how difficult it is.
Then try fixing the English in the manuscript you're reading. I'm sure you'll think it can be done, but it takes a lot of effort. As a reviewer, your time is precious, so you might feel that it's not worth it and you should concentrate on the science not the English. If there are a few errors, you could fix those because it's relatively easy, but if there are a lot that will involve rewriting, then you might think no.
Then try fixing the English in a manuscript you do not understand. You can find examples of these in published papers. Pick a technical field you don't know well and take a random paper. For example, here's something I found on when I did this search:

Since we saw that in the case of rigid susy, the algebra closes even on-shell on the dynamical boson (the scalar in that case), but it doesn’t on the fermion, we now require closure on the graviton, even on-shell (without the S), hoping it will work in the same way.

This sentence reads pretty convoluted, suggesting that something should change. But if you don't understand it, can you be sure it's actually convoluted? Maybe it makes perfect sense to an expert. Furthermore, how would you change it? The only option is to make some kind of "best guess" and then ask the author, but 1) this is very time-consuming since it involves communication with the authors; if there are pages of such issues then the authors will take a long time to respond to, and 2) remember the authors' English aren't very good either.
Then add in the fact that the readership of the average academic paper is miserable and some people will conclude that it's not a problem worth fixing.

In my discipline, the reason is because most reviewers and editors are non-native speakers.  Hence, they know that their English is poor and no longer comment on it.

Then try fixing the English in a manuscript you do not understand. --- This was essentially my problem a few years ago, as described in comments to this 5 May 2019 answer of yours: "... virtually every paper that was offered up was in computer science, and the two or three I selected, I felt that I didn't know enough about the field to intelligently make any but the most trivial editing changes ..."

I can name seven reasons off hand (listed, roughly speaking, in the reverse order of the "validity of excuse" they offer)
1) The stuff is so complicated that there is no way to explain everything
without writing a three volume treatise.
2) The author is pretty much "dyslexic" or incapable of expressing himself
clearly for some other reason (it is amazing how many first rate mathematicians
are like that at least occasionally)
3) The language in which the paper is written is not the mother tongue of the author.
4) This is the first paper of an inexperienced author (a student, say).
5) Someone is in a hurry to set up his priority.
6) Neither the author, nor the referee care much about style, and the editors are
too busy with other stuff to take a close look.
7) The journal is happy to get at least something that doesn't look like an outright garbage.
and, surely, there are many more.

The role of a reviewer is clear: Review the scientific quality of the paper, no the language one, as long as the language is "bearable". The problem is on the other side.
Too much is published. Journals are missing good Language Editors, but as well good Copy Editors and good Typesetters. If they have these people and they are good, they have to deal with too much work to do it well.

In 2012, Priem and Hemminger proposed the decoupled journal, in which these services are a 'bolt-on' rather than part of the journal.

In addition to what has been listed by others, in particular,

no need to spend money on copy-editors
no need to spend time on proof-reading

there are many scientists who couldn't care less about grammar and style, even in their own language.
I am thinking of the cliche engineer who hated language subjects in school and absolutely doesn't care about comma conventions or subtleties in word choice. They don't even care in their own language. If their own language is not English, they will care even less.
Apart from language, the same is true with bad formatting. Whether it's Microsoft Word or Latex or anything else, most scientists just want to get out the information and don't bother about stylistic issues that they don't even know exist.


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Why don't most academic conferences make their budget publicly available?
I wonder why most academic conferences don't make their budget publicly available.
Making budgets publicly available could help explain high conference fees (which attendees often complain about), help other conference organizers, receive feedback to be able to improve, improve transparency towards the taxpayers since they fund most of academic research, explicitly mention what the private sponsors are and to what extent they are involved (e.g. to detect conflict of interests), etc.

Why would they?

@FranckDernoncourt: If the goal of that explanation of registration fees is finding items that could be saved, even the arguably questionable parts of the registration fees that are publicly visible (yes, gala dinners are nice, and when they are indicated as compulsory upon registration, conference attendees are often likely to get reimbursed by their employers, but that doesn't mean they are really needed at the level they often have) do not seem to really interest anyone now.

Asking too many questions like this is a good way to get invited / volunteered to join the organizing committee for a conference, at which point you will learn far more about these issues than you ever wanted to know.

People who organize conferences are already helping other conference organizers by the mere act of organizing. E.g., I recently co-organized a conference with around 50 attendees. Someday soon, one of them will organize a conference, and will have my event as a small (positive, or maybe negative) role model. I think it's a matter of efficient allocation of resources. I spend my time in the way I think helps the world best. That doesn't include releasing a budget, which to me seems pointless. My time and energy are better spent working on a paper, or even answering questions on Academia.SE.

@NateEldredge I can easily go next door and ask a bunch of conference organizers, but I'm trying to bring the information to some public place. It's sad to see the number of downvotes.

The downvotes are telling you that lack of financial information about conference organization is not a pressing problem for academia and that working on changing this is not a good use of anyone's time. I don't see why that should make you sad. Instead, you should be happy to hear that the world has one less problem than you thought it did. :-)

P.S. I didn't downvote the question...

I also don't understand the down votes. The question is ok, it has an answer between "because nobody cares" and "because it's not anyone else's business".

@CapeCode it's a concept called transparency

All conferences I have attended actually disclosed their budget during the business meeting. I guess this is field-dependant.

I don't think there's any universal policy behind this.  One reason is lack of interest: in many cases I'd bet nobody involved has thought much about the issue, the world isn't clamoring for the budget, and publicly releasing it would take at least a little work.  Inertia is a common reason for not doing things.
Another reason is to avoid arguments.  The main thing people would do with a publicly available budget is criticize it.  Some criticisms would be based on ignorance of the options and constraints, while others would amount to saying "more should be spent on my favorite things, and less on the things I don't care about" (which is not so useful if there's no consensus as to which aspects are more valuable).  E.g., is money for snacks essential or wasteful?  What if they are overpriced hotel snacks, but there's no other option without moving to a venue that is worse overall?  What about a reception with alcohol?  Basically, imagine repeating every discussion the organizers had about the budget, but with an unmanageably large group arguing, and with random trolls from the internet chiming in.
In general, I would assume it's not an attempt to preserve secrets or disguise unpopular spending.  If the conference is funded by a grant, then the funding agency saw a budget.  If it's funded by registration fees, then participants at least know how large those fees are and can compare them with other conferences.

I foresee vast wars at medical conferences between the people who are and are not claiming CME.

"there's no consensus as to which aspects are more valuable" - Indeed. A particularly nasty discussion would be between those students that are on low travel budgets or even self-funded and those from "rich" labs that see conferences as nice paid vacations :)

I think the last sentence is a good point.  Conference participants are in some sense purchasing a product.  In general, you don't see sellers providing a cost accounting to justify the prices they ask.  They charge what they think the market will bear, and consumers decide if that price makes the product worth buying for them, considering their other options.  Consumers really don't care how the producer sets a price, nor how the price relates to the costs.

Furthermore, for many conferences I've been associated with, the budget walks a very fine line - you have venue-required minimums to get the number of rooms you think you need.  If you get fewer attendees, you lose money (which normally is not possible to allow), if you get more attendees than expected you 'make' money, but that usually gets plowed back into the next iteration of the conference.  Indeed, the OP should actually help plan a conference.

@NateEldredge At the same time, since quite some funding come from taxpayers, the latter may want to look at how their money is used.

@FranckDernoncourt: In that case I would group the funding agency as a producer, not a consumer.  As mentioned, the funding agency will have had some oversight over the budget, and the budget may be available to taxpayers via freedom-of-information laws.  If you really want to see some conference budgets, you could go that route.

@NateEldredge: I think "In general, you don't see sellers providing a cost accounting to justify the prices they ask." is spot-on, but I wholeheartedly disagree with "Consumers really don't care how the producer sets a price, nor how the price relates to the costs." The mere fact that for most products, sellers can convince their customers that the production costs make up most of the price doesn't mean customers aren't very interested in the actual production costs as soon as they suspect they are being fooled into paying much more than what the product actually costs.

There are two basic reasons that I know of:
First, we have better things to do with our time than putting together a detailed financial report along with necessary explanations.
Second, the information is not useful to anyone except a potential conference organizer, and the variation across institutions in terms of what one has to pay for is considerable.
For example, some universities charge for room usage, and some don't; some require you to use official catering facilities, and some don't. Sometimes you can get a student assistant for free, and sometimes you have to pay. Costs vary according to venue so much that a having someone else's budget is useless. What might be useful for a neophyte organizer is a summary of things that they might not think of (such as huge catering charges for coffee breaks; administrative fees for processing credit card payments; ludicrous room rental charges; surprise, you have to pay extra to get projectors in those rooms).

Concise and comprehensive answer +1.

I can't answer directly the titular question, but, having served in the organizing committee of a couple of conferences, I can try to explain the high conference fees.
Let's take as example a medium-sized 5-day conference with about 500 participants. The main expense is the venue: a quality venue with a capacity of 500 participants, with several rooms for parallel sessions, can cost around (200-250) k€ for five days, probably more for high-quality venues in several countries (e.g. large 5-star hotels in the US). This makes already (400-600) € per participant.
Then, you have to serve lunches and coffee breaks. This, depending on the service, can cost around (20-30) €/day. For five days, this adds another (100-150) € to the conference fees.
Then there are the conference gadgets and the proceedings. These are not too expensive if the proceedings are edited voluntarily by the organizers -- let's consider around 50 €/participants for both the gadgets and the proceedings.
Now, what about inviting a few speakers? Paying the travel, lodging and conference expenses of, say, five speakers can cost around 20 k€, which divided among 500 participants, adds another 40 €/participant.
Finally, there is the support for young researchers, and this can add another 50 €/participant.
So, we are already in the (700-900) € range. But, wait, am I missing something? Sure, how could I forget? Of course, you might need to pay some extra-personnel, depending on how many services you need to outsource (conference secretariat, side events, etc.). These can quickly add another bunch of euros for participants. And if you also want to the social dinner, add another bunch.
You see that we have quickly arrived to conference fees in the (800-1000) € range.

Exactly. And every single one of these line items could be discussed, and seriously so. The entire budget is already discussed in great depth by the conference organizers. The very last thing they want is another six months of discussions of the exact same topics after the conference, if they publish the budget.

What this answer does not explain is the huge price differences between conferences across fields. In math, I never saw a conference fee this high, for example.

This. Even the cost of the snack service is often shocking if you haven't been involved in this sort of thing before. And "space for parallel sessions" is a killer: most of us can think of a facility where we could find one big room for merely a lot of money, but if you need two big ones and three medium sized one? No choice but to go with the built to purpose venues, and they know what the traffic will bear.

+1 This answer is great, but it misses one crucial component. At least in my discipline (CS), good conferences have sponsors (Oracle, Google, MS), that cover part of those expenses.

@Alexandros: yes, also in my field (other, less wealthy, sponsors, though), but frequently you have to decide the fees before having completed the list of sponsors. Later on, I will edit the answer to take into account your comment and that of Boris Bukh.

It makes me sad that "quality venue" or "five-star hotel" is even a serious item on this list. (Also, didn't you miss "pay some publisher a large sum for proceedings"?)

@Raphael as a rule of thumb, in most cities the top-range venues will be the only ones that have large enough facilities for a major conference. If you have 50 people, then you have all kinds of options from budget to luxury; but for large events it may well be impossible to find any facilities that aren't run by some five-star hotel chain.

My experience is that the conference budget is typically presented and discussed in the business meeting (which is of course open to all conference participants). So there is no mystery about the registration fees: all participants see precisely where the money goes.
Moreover, conference organisers are usually very happy to share conference budgets with anyone who is e.g. organising the same conference in the future.

Do you mean "open to all conference attendees", instead of organisers?

@Mangara: Yes, of course.

Game Theory Answer v.0.1
Suppose that two rival groups, the Mathematician's Guild Of Firenze ("a") and the Firenze Guild of Mathematicians ("b") both get granted some money and use of a building to hold a conference on game theory mathematics.  Each wants to attract Da Vinci to their conference and each wants to ruin the other, as this town is too small to have enough funding for two rival guilds doing much the same mathematics as one another.
Now if (a) publish their budget in full then (b) can calculate how much money they need to borrow to decorate the conference hall with paintings by Michaelangelo, provide lavish conference food, and any other comparable nonsense thought likely to make their conference more popular and ruin the other lot.  Alternatively, (b) can publish their budget with enough exaggerations in it to provoke (a) to outspend the published budget with borrowed money and ruin themselves.
Personaly, I prefer the approach taken by Da Vinci, which was to lock himself in his room, write everything backwards just in case, and stay away from the likes of a and b.

Funny, but not really an answer. Reality is much more complex, as anybody involved in organizing a conference can attest.

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text:
Data exchange between academic institutions
Is there any publicly available statistics on the amount of exchange of data that transit through Internet between academic institutions? (e.g. X TB yearly from institution A to institution B)

Including or excluding cat movies? (SCNR. I wonder how such a study could even be set up, with everyone using DropBox and similar services for large data sets. I'd therefore not trust such statistics overmuch.)

@StephanKolassa including cat movies. Yes, I don't expect data transiting via 3rd party applications to be easily countable: just focusing on direct connections (i.e. what network admins could see).

You should look at statistics from the different research networks that exist. For instance, the european GEANT network claims to transfer over 1000 Terabytes per day (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%89ANT . The US has the Internet2 backbone which is mainly for academic institutions and I expect they are moving even more than 1000 Terabytes per day.

In France, the network RENATER, which connect many universities, publish some statistics showing the live load of links:
(the French phrase "charge des liens" in the legend means link load)
Paris area:

Metropolitan France:

Brazil has similar resources for the RNP: http://www.rnp.br/servicos/conectividade/trafego

This seems to be like Internet2 in the US. But I suspect that most data transfer happens over the public Internet, not over these research/educational networks.

(Also, since these research/educational networks are widely used for experimenting with networks, they tend to carry a lot of "fake" data, which may or may not be useful to you in the context of this question.)

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text:
What is the easiest way to check for plagiarism in student essay papers?
I've had to grade quite a few essay papers in the classes I've taught, and I've suspected some may have plagiarized but I never really pursued check on them because it would be too time consuming to check their sources and pursue any/all possible sources where they may have copied from.
What's the easiest way to check for plagiarism?  Is there a search engine tool that one could use to upload a paper and check for it?  I doubt it, but other than that, I don't know of any other way to check for it than to put in more effort than I have time for.

easiest way...google some sentences

I've always wondered what happens if I take the definition of an uncommon concept out of my dissertation and make a new Wikipedia page out of it. Does that mean that my thesis will automatically get flagged as plagiarized in future?

Ironically?   Your students are looking at an easy way out of their work ... too!   I mean, they at least search for their ill-gotten works - you didn't search for this or talk to colleagues, presumably.   Or tell us what age, subject, institution size ...   Despite all that, you got a good answer, why haven't you accepted it?

From my experience of peer reviewing my friends who are ESOL, it is painfully obvious when they just copied and paste. And then Google pulls up whatever source they used.

There are plenty of tools out there. The best 'seems' to be TurnItIn. It's costly so if the school won't pay for it, you might not be interested. My school does not so I found other options.
Here is a tool called WCopyFind that is very good at finding plagiarism when one student copies from another but it will not find something online. After collecting papers for several semesters it has been catching more and more and most students take the same easy way out.
There are other options if you search for online plagiarism checking but they are not as robust as this tool above...however to really see the benefits, you need to maintain a library of old papers to compare against. What I like about it (besides being FOSS) is that it is highly configurable (consider a match 6 words in a row, or consider a match 9 words in a row where 70% of the words match). It all runs local (since there's no internet search) so it's quite fast.

It's worth noting that TurnItIn also offer their services to students who can use it to iteratively hide their plagarism. This makes me extremely dubious about their reliability.

In my department/university we have access to some systems for checking for plagiarism but most of us end up using Google, believe it or not. The reasons are that the plagiarism systems (we have access to) seem to work on a limited subset of work and that Google is extremely easy to use. My suspicion is that the existing systems may be tailored to specific subjects and may be excellent within these. So I would simply say, test your suspected essay by inserting sentences or even larger (key) parts of paragraphs into Google and see what comes out.

You can also do it yourself using google. Pick a single idiosyncratic phrase from the manuscript and search for it in quotes. It is amazing how often you will find search results have that same phrase followed by and preceded by the same words as in the paper. If so, you have found plagiarism. I once found a term paper substantially ripped off from a MS thesis (from a small schol in Australia) using this technique.

Some of the plagiarism tools do not seem to be effective against bilingual students who plagiarize and then translate the works with machine translation. It only takes 1 minute to catch:

Select and copy a random sentence from the paper containing some rare words.
Paste this sentence into an on-line translation tool, set to translate from English to the student's L1.
Copy this output and search for it in your favorite search English.
If the search preview finds a sentence word-for-word match, copy that address.
Translate the whole address from that student's L1 to English and compare that with their paper.

Since most students who plagiarize are also lazy, many do not seem to bother with editing the translation, so I've caught many students who submitted papers in this fashion where the output from the Web translation service was identical to the output they gave me.

If your school uses blackboard, d2L, or something of the sort...plagiarism  detection (if that's what we can call it) is built into the system.  For blackboard, the program is called safeassign.  Students submit their papers through safeassign (I'm convinced that just telling them about this program cuts down on plagiarism), and then the program gives you a report (ie 23% plagiarized).  A couple of great things about the program:  it gives you the source where the student lifted the information and keeps a running database of papers so that students cannot use each others assignments.  It makes the process totally objective, and you won't have to worry....the program does all the work.  Good luck!

It's worth remembering that the report is only useful if you check what it is saying. For example, I just had a whole page flagged up - the cover sheet.

Recently, I had to check several texts for plagiarism, and I used a free plagiarism checking tool (you can google for one, there are a few that are returned). You just copy and paste text there and if it is copied from any published source the tool will detect it and provide you with the link to the source. That's how you can actually check the accuracy of references as well. Though the tools are not designed for academic purposes, it works well for checking any kind of papers.

Please note that some "free plagiarism checkers" will turn around and sell the papers that are submitted to them to other students.  Be careful with their use.
I find TurnItIn to be well worth the cost.  Even though students can check their own papers through the system, this is a GOOD thing because it teaches students what is plagiarized and what is not.  If the student has to make adjustments to ensure that they aren't plagiarizing, isn't that what we want them to do?

Learning what minimal changes they need to make to hide plagiarism is undoubtedly a skill that will be useful outside academia, yes. These days, of course, they can simply ask an AI to rewrite it.

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text:
Choosing which version of an article to cite
I sometimes find an article published in several conferences.

If similar material is published in different conference proceedings,
  how do I choose which one to cite?

Can you give a real-world example?  I realize you might have to put some care into choosing the example if you want to preserve anonymity, but it would be much easier to answer the question if we could see the sort of situation you are facing.

Publishing similar material at different conferences is usually forbidden. Perhaps you mean publishing a short-version at a conference and publishing a longer-version in a journal. Or maybe you mean publishing papers with a common underlying theory.

@user2768 that is a rule in CS, where conferences are the main way of transmitting information. In other fields it is very common to repeat content in conferences.

Normally you should cite the most recent version, which is probably also the most prestigious venue (normally republication is done while ideas are working their way up the prestige ladder).  It's possible that only the earlier version contains the material you want to cite though, but unless that's substantially longer than a later version, then I would assume that means the author(s) have recanted that part, and you should probably mention that in your article e.g. "Bryson (1986) claims fish can fly (p. 253), though note later work does not reiterate this claim (Bryson 1991; Bryson 1993)."

I have a paper that I had to cut in length by a factor of two, and I often recommend looking at the tech report/working paper version of the journal publication as it contains more interesting results.

It's a little unusual to have the same or even similar material published in different venues. First of all, you didn't say whether your area uses conferences as primary publication venues or not - I'm assuming it does, otherwise why even cite a conference publication.
In that case, what exactly are you citing in the article ? If it's a specific result (empirical, theoretical etc), then probably the oldest venue where it appears is the first occurrence of that result, and should be cited. If you're citing background material or motivation, then either the first paper that discusses the relevant motivation, or maybe a survey article ?
At any rate, the key is to understand exactly what you're citing the article for, and find the oldest occurrence of that concept.

I don't think this is unusual at all.  Many people put drafts online e.g. arxiv, or "publish" in workshops before conferences, and conferences before journals.  Also, material may appear in papers before or after it appears in a dissertation.  Looking for the most archival version of a paper is a skill I always teach my research students.

Yes that's true. I was just a little surprised by the "difference conference proceedings" which I interpreted as "multiple conferences" as opposed to "workshop, conference, arxiv" which as you point out is quite normal.

You should have two goals in mind when choosing what to cite:

Give credit, by citing the first person to discover the result, in the form in which it was originally found
Helping the reader interested in looking the result up and learn it in more depth.

Either one of them can be more important than the other, depending on the type of your paper and of the context of the specific citation.
The two goals are often conflicting; for instance, #1 might tell you to use an obscure conference proceeding with a clumsy first version of the result, and #2 might suggest to use a clear exposition in a book by another author instead. You might want to go for a tradeoff instead and cite a newer paper by the first author with a better version of the result.
In any case, if your choice is backed up by either of these two rationales, or by a suitably weighted linear combination of them, then in my opinion no one can blame you.

On a number of occasions, I found myself knowing the author personally pretty closely, and would ask them which version they want me to cite. On other occasions, I would cite whichever source I read first, and just stick to that. People should not be cited five times for one idea; it is little of my business to untangle their political games of publishing the same stuff in different journals (a very common thing in the social sciences I mingle with), and I would do whatever works for me, not for them.

Cite all versions! I find this practice useful, because it gives me all the information that the author has. Ideally, you should explain the distinctions between different versions too.

This is not always a realistic option when you are under a strong page limit (and references are counted in the page limit).

@a3nm, individual citations can be condensed and/or merged, i.e., a single citation can include all versions.


text:
Contribution of gifts and hospital services to university revenue
This question is based on the pie-charts shown in this link, such as this one for the University of Michigan.

In most of these charts, around 5% of the revenue comes from gifts. What are these exactly?
How do hospitals and clinical services play such a critical role for the revenue?

I think those edits to focus the question are a great improvement.

Gifts are donations, typically from former students but they could come from anyone.  That's just how higher education works in the US, and the tradition of making these donations is a big factor in how some US universities have become very wealthy (some of the donations are spent each year, but many are added to the endowment).  The donations qualify for a tax deduction, so there's an element of government subsidy as well.
Hospitals and clinical services can loom large because university teaching hospitals are huge and medical services are very expensive.  (You can have thousands of employees, some of them very well paid, and elaborate equipment.)  However, this is really not relevant.  The medical revenue is typically paying for the hospital activities and medical education, but not used to subsidize the rest of the university.  Many universities do not have hospitals or medical schools.

+1 - One has to realize that medical schools and teaching hospitals are often massive healthcare systems.


text:
Is the end of April too late to find placement in Ph.D programs in the U.S.?
I am wondering if it would be worth emailing departments that I haven't applied to this year, asking if they'd be willing to take a look at my application material. Any advice, or should I just wait till next year?
I applied to too few places this year, because I couldn't afford all the application fees. I'm saving up now but I feel bad that I don't have anything planned for next year, and I really want to begin my higher education since I feel strongly about it.

Closely related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1531/is-the-middle-of-may-very-late-for-graduate-admissions-in-the-same-year

Yep, but this one was asked first.

For the most part, yes, it is too late to be considered for graduate admissions at most programs for this coming fall, as most schools have already made their decisions as to who they will admit.
That said, if you are an exceptionally qualified candidate, and unusual circumstances have taken place, it may be possible to be considered by specific programs. However, there has to be some really strange events taking place. (For instance, one school I know had a banquet during their one prospective students' weekend, and accidentally food poisoned everybody—and ended up with 20% of their expected yield of students. They probably would have loved additional late applicants!)
But, basically, you'd need a department that had a major shortfall of accepted students compared to their research needs, and you'd need to be a candidate that would be strong enough to accept in the regular admissions cycle.

accidentally food poisoned everybody — Ouch!

@JeffE: Yep. Emergency-room visits and warm, fuzzy feelings about a graduate program do not mix.

We usually take our prospectives skiiing, and one year someone had some serious problems getting down the slopes. We've had to filter the skiing option to people who aren't rank beginners :)

The short answer is yes it is too late. The long answer is that usually only top programs have only one round of admission and other schools actually have also a spring round of admissions so you could trying going for that. This is not common but I found a few schools that do that, and some of them are actually decent schools. But I would say 85% don't accept late applications.
How about getting a lab tech position at your current school and get more experience/pubs under your belt?


text:
Can I submit my application before fall semester grades are released?
I'm applying to grad schools, and my fall semester grades will be out before the deadline. I know my GPA is going to fall, so I'm thinking of submitting my applications without those grades. Is it acceptable to submit my application when the grades aren't out yet, even though they will be out before the deadline for the application or when the deadlines are in January, that means they expect to see the grades for the Fall semester? (They'll be out in a few days actually.)

You certainly can do so—many students must, given that the deadline at many schools is before the fall semester is complete.
However, note that any school that accepts you will want to see your finished transcript before allowing you to enroll. Significant plummets in grade (going from an A average to a C average in your final year, for instance) will raise eyebrows, and potentially cause some schools to withdraw offers.

Thanks very much for the answer.
Could submitting the transcript without this semester's grades hurt my application? (Given that they probably know that I could submit my application a bit later with the grades.)
I'd still probably have no grade worse than a B+ (my grades will most probably be A-, A+, B+). The reason I want to avoid submitting with the new grades is that my outstanding GPA will become just a good GPA. I was wondering if in this situation not submitting my new grades could hurt my application more than it helps it.


text:
How can I highlight particular authors of an "in preparation" manuscript on my CV?
What's the right format for in-prep publication on CV? I saw on another post that the format should be something like
[My name], & Author, ([year]). [Title of article].
But the problem is that the paper has a few dozen co-authors and my name will come somewhere closer to the end of the list. Also, there are two incredibly well-known scholars that are co-authors of the paper, so I prefer to somehow include their names! :-D  But is there any way I can turn the format below into something acceptable?
[first author], ..., [my name], ..., [Prof. 1], ..., [Prof. 2] ..., ([year]). [Title of article].

The paper is in a sense "sequel" to a highly-cited previous paper published in Nature, so there is a chance this will be accepted by Nature too. Is there any way I could mention that? (It's not technically exactly "sequel" to that work, so using that word would be somewhat misleading and wrong.)

Perhaps better to include in research statement. The statement would allow you set the context you want.

On formatting.
You should list publications/drafts as they would appear in a bibliography. The reader will assume that you (co-)authored every document listed. (Personally, I would assume your honesty and I would never think to check that you truly are the author.) The reader is interested in the titles of your publications/drafts and the venues at which you published. I'd suggest using italics for titles, so that they stand out, and for published works, I'd suggest that the venue follows immediately after the title, since it can then be found easily, e.g., Cynthia S. Cooper, Willie E. Wright & Sun He (2017) Mathematics: Criticizing Nervous Essentialism and Xenon. In ALB'17: 17th ALpha Bravo conference, pp317-495, publisher.
On name-dropping. You can name-drop in the body of your CV. But, I'm unsure whether name-dropping should be encouraged. I think it would be better to say what you've done. You could perhaps achieve both, e.g., in collaboration with [name-drop], I extended their earlier results (Nature'XX) to A, B, and C.

What do you mean by "the main body"? All CVs I have seen are completely separated into sections listing specific things, and I would find any form of free-form prose odd to include.

(I've replaced main body with body. Your publication list presumably appears at the end, outside the 1-2 page body.) I mean you can name-drop in the section where you describe that particular collaboration. E.g., Jan'16 -- present \t XYZ Corporation, Country \n ... In collaboration with [name-drop], I extended their earlier results (Nature'XX) to A, B, and C.

There's not really an elegant way to include some names that are scattered throughout.
If you cite it as Bigdeal, J. et al. then it's implied that your in that list somewhere, but you can't really pick and choose just to highlight the fancy people scattered through the authorship list.

The first author is not one of those reputable professors though. Any way I could somehow write something that at least implies one of those professors is a co-author? like "a project of [prof. 1] lab" or something?

@nra Not really. You could potentially reach into two or three authors before you hit et al. But I'd be skeptical about any other improvisation from standard citation practice. People are already a little skeptical of in prep in a CV as a concept.

You could list that you've worked with reputable professors in the main body of your CV.


text:
How to tell my advisor I stopped sending him weekly reports on my results because he was not answering my emails?
I have been working on my PhD from home for several months now because my mom is sick, which was fine with my supervisor up until a few weeks ago. Before starting to work from home (in a different country than my supervisor is), we agreed that we would communicate every two weeks and that I would send reports about my progress.
As I did so over the last months, I would rarely receive a response from my supervisor, who is a big name in our domain and is very, very busy.
After a few unanswered emails, I had the impression that I should just contact him in urgent cases, so I stopped contacting him every two weeks.
Now he is asking me to come back to work at the office because he thinks that I have not been communicating enough in the last weeks.
I am aware that I should not have supposed that he only wanted urgent information and thus I should have continued sending him my weekly reports, but how can I tell him that it is because I never got any answer from his side?
My wish is to find a good equilibrium in our communication style so that I can continue working from home!

Just tell him, honestly and nicely. Easy.

"Sorry for what happened. I stopped sending reports because I never got a reply. I promise that I will keep you updated in future. But it would feel better if you could send me a reply, even if it's only a note that you received my report. Can we meet and discuss how to continue since I would like to continue staying with my mom who is still sick?"

@Mark: That should be an answer, not a comment!

Mark's suggestion is good but soften it a bit: (1) instead of "never got a reply" say something like "I misinterpreted your silence to mean my emails were unwelcome.  Was the way I was reporting during 9/x to 10/y working well?  I can go back to doing that." (2) This is important: suggest a phone call or Skype once a month.  To prevent small problems from snowballing.

Yeah, "misinterpreted your silence" is way better, maybe even "misinterpreted your responses" in case there was one response every now or then? Something like "I misinterpreted what you wanted, and tried to only prioritize urgent information."

What you said in this question seems very reasonable, and I'd hope that an advisor would understand. The other thing you can do would be to include summaries of what you were doing in the weeks you missed, so it's clear you were still working, even if you didn't write the email!

Yes, it would have been better for the advisor to send an acknowledgement email each time a report is received, and even better to give indications of whether the progress is OK or give the student regular 'pep talk' emails to keep the student motivated.
While I can imagine a student getting a bit peeved with the lack of reply from adviser, that is an unfortunate rationalization to use to stop their updates to the adviser.
Frankly, the reason to send the regular updates to the adviser is to prove that regular and sustainable progress is being made despite the special accommodation. If the adviser had any unvoiced concerns about agreeing to the arrangement, this likely caused all of those concerns (rational and irrational) to have blown up.
One of those concerns is likely that a typical student needs more feedback than the advisor can give remotely, and that the student might stop working without it. (or might decide they don't need to keep the advisor updated as in this case :-)  ).
(this following wording is based on @Mark comment with a few tweaks.)
"Sorry for what happened. I have been continuing to work and the progress is good. I have attached the (X) reports from each the X weeks that I did not send them. It was my mistake to stop sending these updates regularly. Can we meet to discuss the work that I've completed so far and your advice whether there are areas that are weak? I'd also like to discuss how best I might continue this special accommodation in which I continue my work while staying with my mom who is still sick.  My expectation is that I would need to request this special accommodation would be XXXX more weeks(month)."
My answer is not answering the question (how to tell advisor I stopped updating because he didn't reply to me) but I assumed that the real question was: how do I fix this so that I can continue the arrangement I had? In the face-to-face (or skype) discussion in renegotiating the accommodation is when one can figure out whether there is a regular feedback schedule that works for both parties.

I would say that, like others, you should tell him honestly.
Something to the effect of:

"My apologies for the lack of communication in the past few weeks. I was under the false impression that you only desired my reports in urgent cases, as there were several that you did not reply to. It was my mistake to make that supposition without explicitly asking you. In the future, I very much would like to continue working from home but I also would like to find the best way for both of us to communicate. We can certainly continue a report every two weeks but, in that case, it would be very helpful to me if you would be able to offer me a little bit of feedback for the report. I understand how busy your schedule is but I would truly appreciate it. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks,
[Your name]"

Thank you !! This was of great help, I chose Carol's answer because it made me realize that my supervisor probably thought I wasn't working the time I wasn't sending reports, but your suggestion is very helpful and i will use a combination of both answers!

What a tough situation.  I'd say be direct, but I might be inclined to print a hard-copy of the unanswered email chain just to have some first-hand evidence.  This kind of situation is never fun to deal with.  Good luck!


text:
How to write a scholarship press release?
I recently won a scholarship related to my career focus. I was chosen as a winner in part because of a recommendation from a former professor. She is now asking me to draft a press release about winning the scholarship. I am hesitant because I do not want to appear press-hungry, but I would like to allow a write-up to be used as a means of increasing the visibility of the college and this professor. I do not want the focus to be on myself and my accomplishments. How should I handle this?

First, look at previous press releases from your institution and department. This may give you ideas.
But use the press release as an opportunity to speak to the public about things you deserve to be publicized. You're right, it doesn't have to be about you, but getting the fellowship is the award that gives you an opportunity to speak up about things you care. Press releases often contain quotes. In this case these could be quotes of other people talking about your involvement in a program you helped launch, or a quote of yourself praising whatever it is you want to praise.
In short: use that opportunity to promote something you believe in, in addition to pro outing yourself!

"[The scholarship] gives you an opportunity to speak up about things you care." I will use this opportunity...Thank you!

I do not want the focus to be on myself and my accomplishments.

While many of us (hopefully) have a modicum of modesty, there will be many times in your career where it is in your best interest to triumph your accomplishments, and this is one of them. In this case, it is a no-brainer: your former professor asked you explicitly to write the press release, and you should do it. Your university home page or newspaper probably has a news section that demonstrates the type of press release you're talking about (e.g., a short story with a picture and a description of the research and/or accomplishments).
The press release will be primarily about you (if you are the only winner at your school), but you should also include a paragraph about the scholarship itself and about the college and how it relates to the scholarship (e.g., "The X Scholarship has been awarded at Y College for the past 10 years, and was funded through the generous donation of so-and-so, who graduated from the college in 1954...).  If it fits in, you can mention your professor's relationship to the scholarship and your involvement (how did she know to recommend you? Was it her impetus or yours?).
If you're concerned about how to write the press-release, I would reach out to someone with journalism experience, whether it is someone who works for the school paper, or the news-section of the school website.

+1.  Another good resource would probably be your college's public relations office.


text:
Should I post publications in preparation (or just submitted) on my CV?
If I have works that are almost submitted to journals, or are in journal review, is it appropriate to include these on my CV?

if they are under review, then simply write under review after citing them without mentioning the journal or proceeding. I've seen many do that. But I know someone who mention in some of his papers ideas and cite them as under review but I am sure that they have never been even considered for publication. I dont know if this is ethical or not though.

FWIW - this is for a post-doctoral application to a facility in the US.

'almost submitted' = 'in preparation' Use that specific term. They will know what you mean. Like others said, just be prepared to provide a draft if asked to do so.

I will usually list things that are on the arxiv. They can be viewed as tech reports, so I don't see the harm in doing so.
Where it gets tricky is if (for example) you submit to a double blind conference. In such a case adding the paper to your CV might be viewed as a breach of the process.
But in general my view is that if you have the paper posted on your web page (and you should!) or on the arxiv, then it's perfectly fine to list it.

Okay, it seems I have to play devil's advocate again… because my position on this is different from Charles' answer.
My CV lists my scientific production separated between peer-reviewed articles, non-peer reviewed articles (I have none, but it could happen), invited conferences, oral conferences. As such, I would definitely not put a non-published paper among the “publications”, especially not among the peer-reviewed ones. In my field, it is rare to publish (in the sense of “make publicly available”) a manuscript before it is accepted (chemists don't use arXiV much, because most journals prohibit it), so I find it weird to list unpublished material in a CV.
So, because you didn't tell us your field, I would say beware:

if your manuscript is unpublished, it's not a publication, don't list it as such
if it's published (arXiV or your website or other) while in review, clearly mark it as such (and don't list it as peer-reviewed)

I would say that the “under work” manuscripts do not add much information anyway. The topic they cover is surely already covered by your research statement (or list of research interests), so why would a hirer care about whether you are writing this paper or that paper?

"why would a hirer care about whether you are writing this paper or that paper?" There's a difference between a research statement saying you're interested in something and actually producing work. Beyond that, for postdocs and the like, work currently in the pipeline may represent a fair amount of their overall productivity.

I have a Publications section on my CV with Peer Reviewed Publications, Submitted for Publication, Conference Publications and Presentations, Invited Lectures and Seminars, and Reports.
For the manuscripts that have been submitted for publication I just put the authors, title, and I put (submitted) as the year.
I see people include the journal they submitted to, but I don't think that's appropriate since it unjustifiably uses the reputation of the journal to bolster your reputation. Anyone can submit anything to Nature or Science.
I also recently had a PhD applicant say they had submitted a manuscript to relatively good journal. I asked for a copy and the article was in no way suitable for the journal they submitted to.
I never put in-prep on my CV, since it's practically meaningless.

Another thing to think about is the rules of funding agencies and other people to whom you might submit these CV's. In German and EU funding applications, only accepted papers can be listed as part of an author's "publications" list. Work that is in review, no matter how far along the review process, cannot be listed until an acceptance notification has been given.
However, it's also not clear what stage of your career you're in. If you're applying, for instance, for a post-doctoral position, then it would probably make some sense to mention manuscripts under review. Normally, in such cases, the CV isn't going to a committee—usually it's just the advisor himself.


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Eagle Scout rank on CV?
Q:  Should I keep Eagle Scout (the highest rank attainable in the Boy Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America) on my CV?
I do not think that this is an appropriate item to include on a CV.  However, CV is loosely translated as ''the course of my life'', and this is an achievement that takes a lot of perseverance, and something that is earned and not just given away.  It requires a significant amount of time and volunteer work to complete a project that gives back to your community and also shows leadership and management skills which, you don't normally acquire until a little further in your academic career, but shows the ability to do so.
Is this award detrimental to include? looked down upon by hiring committees? not even given a second glance?
I have not found a satisfactory answer for this.
If it is kept on the CV, where should it go, i.e. award or outreach (both I think would be appropriate items, and it may be that if deficient in one or the other, one could move it around).

I was a missionary for a decade and typically include it. If nothing else, it shows I've travelled the globe and expanded my world view.

@JonathanLandrum That feels very different, in that if you didn't put it, you would be the opening the question of "what the hell were you doing for that decade?" (I'm assuming you didn't have another job).  Leaving off Eagle Scout doesn't leave a gap in the same way.

@BenWebster that is a valid point.

Not in academia, but... Rule of thumb in industry is that a resume should be kept down to a page. I don't quite go that far, but it should certainly be focused primarily on the position you're interviewing for. If you've got more recent and relevant experience to cite, "Eagle Scout" is just a character footnote -- and I think I'd be more interested in whether you were still actively volunteering. (I also have some personal issues with the BSA over the "three G's". I don't think I'd hold that against an individual scout, but I'm not sure I'd automatically count scouting as a plus either.)

@keshlam In academia, a CV can easily top 20 pages

I've heard a few times that non-academic achievements might bring a bit more attention (either as showing determination, or - as providing a starting point for an informal discussion; given someone in the committee know what does it mean and is emotionally engaged).

BTW: How old where you when you got it, and how old are you now?

(Personally, I'd probably be more likely to look favorably on a résumé w/ "Eagle Scout" on it... but that's me)

I wouldn't include it.  I doubt it makes much of a difference, but you yourself say it's not an appropriate item. I agree.
To expand a little bit, let me say this: the things you should put on your CV are those that directly connect to the job you want to have.  Something like a job you had in an unrelated field is worthwhile in that it shows you were employed and not a hobo, but most other things that aren't really directly part of your career (jobs, education, publications, info about teaching, conference presentations, grants, etc.) is just a distraction, and will make it look like you are padding.  I think high school achievements are especially bad in that they focus things too much in the past.  Nothing on my CV goes earlier than my junior year of college (and probably I should cut that; nobody cares where I studied abroad).
Of course, it's good to have lots of things to list on your CV, but you also want to keep the average high.  There are only a few things on there that are really important, and you don't want to distract people from what they are.
It would be great to discuss your experience as an Eagle Scout in a personal conversation, say if you have an informal dinner or drinks during an interview, but I just don't think the CV is the place for it.
EDIT: A point which a deleted answer raised also occurs to me: one reason to avoid putting extraneous things on your CV is that you can't control what associations people reading it might have.  For example, the Boy Scouts of America have stirred up a lot of controversy with their stances on homosexuality, and for many people that maybe be the first thing that pops to mind.  It's unfair to connect one scout to that, but people aren't logical.  They read "Eagle Scout," they think homophobia, and they have a negative reaction to your application that they weren't even conscious of.
I recently read an application for graduate school by a student who listed on their CV membership in some political groups with which I vehemently disagree.  I don't think that should affect my judgement of their file (luckily, I'm not on the committee, so I didn't have to try to make a judgement), but I honestly did not want to know about that aspect of their lives.  I'm sure they thought it showed something about leadership, but to me it looked like very poor judgement.

I agree, but as a compromise I don't think there would be much harm in mentioning it in a very short section called "miscellaneous" at the end of the CV.  That would avoid emphasizing it or putting it in the same category with academic awards or outreach.  It's still safest to leave it out, but including it like that is better than mixing it in with the core parts of the CV.

I agree that it's preferable, but having an miscellaneous section on your CV is also a terrible idea.  If something doesn't fit in a category you recognize as professional, that's a screaming red flag that you should leave it out.

I especially like how you said "high school achievements are bad in that they focus things too much in the past." I suppose one exception to that rule would be if the candidate was still in his mid-20's. In that case, there's probably not a whole lot to put in the CV, and Eagle Scout might demonstrate character traits such as perseverence and diligence. However, the closer someone gets toward 30 – and certainly as one gets well past age 30 – the greater the chance the inclusion might come across as resting on past laurels, and look bad overall.

I mean eagle scout is a way higher honor than what most people are comparing it to like say high school valedictorian for example.

eagle scout is a way higher honor than ... high school valedictorian for example. — [citation needed]

Well you are right JeffE my comment is completely subjective, of course there are about an order of magnitude fewer ESs compared to VDs but not so many people scout in the first place while nearly everyone attends HS, so I withdraw my last comment. However, I would argue that valedictorian would raise more red flags because it looks like you are hiding more recent academic failures to include academic awards from HS, while ES doesn't really have anything comparable that one might receive later in their career, although many would consider it irrelevant.

@MMH - Validictorian means you complete all your homework and score well on tests, especially as compared to your peers. It's an academic achievement. Eagle Scout means that you have earned a lot of merit badges and helped the community in some way. Both are impressive accomplishments, both represent long-term achievements, and, in my experience, both tend to be bestowed on people who really seem have their act together. Still, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, and I wouldn't want to be stuck with the duty of determining which of the two is more impressive.

I think my personal politics place me among a group of academics who are more skeptical of BSoA. Even so, I think that being an Eagle Scout is more likely to suggest that the person has shown leadership and engaged in community service than  that the person will support BSoA's historically anti-gay policies. In this particular case, it's unlikely to hurt.

@BenjaminMakoHill I agree for the most part, but people are not logical; in fact they're surprisingly free associative.  So, I'm not suggesting people are likely to read "Eagle Scout" and think "Well, he must be a homophobe," but rather that they'll read it, some part of their mind will go to homophobia, and for reasons they don't even articulate to themselves, they get a negative feeling.  Less information is often better, in that people tend judge, say, whether you'll be a good grad student by how consistent a picture they draw in their mind of it.

Thus, any piece of "off" information will be much more destructive than a good piece of information would be constructive.  So maybe Eagle Scout isn't the best example, but I think generally this is a good reason to leave stuff that isn't directly related out.

To me, as someone who isn't an eagle scout, it seems inappropriate. But I will tell you this, every person who I personally know in academia who also happens to be an eagle scout has for some reason left it on their CV (there may be some selection bias here, but in each of these cases I didn't find the fact out by reading their CV, so probably it's not that big - sample size of 2 though is very small - 1 postdoc - 1 grad student on the job market for postdocs - note no professors). Anyways, based on this fact, I surmise that other eagle scouts will see it as a positive. So if there is an eagle scout on the hiring committee it may very well be a net positive! Now the probability there is an eagle scout on the hiring committee is very low (as you point being an eagle scout is an amazing accomplishment and very few scouts ever get it). I'd leave it out based on my initial reaction, which I think is the reaction most people would have. I see why you might not want to leave it out though. This line shows a lot of qualities that may be important in academia but most people would find it irrelevant even though it is an amazing accomplishment.
However, if you "organized" a massive charity event that is at least loosely related to academia as part of your eagle scout badge, you probably should list it, but not necessarily just putting eagle scout down. You might "sneak" it in by saying "organized ... as a part of winning my eagle scout badge" or something like that, and stick it in the service section. But if you do include it, at least make an attempt to make it sound relevant.

+1 for "if there is an Eagle Scout in the comittee". Not only that; if there's someone still active or emotionally bonded to the scouts (and there are many such people), they will see it as a positive.

Eagle Scout is nowhere near as impressive as "U.S. National Figure Skating Champion 1995."  There are almost 60 thousand Eagle scouts a year and two figure skating champions.

To be fair there are 6 U.S. figure skating champions at the highest level of competition, but your point is well taken. I never said they were equal, just that they are both amazing accomplishments. Far more people attempt scouting than figure skating, but I certainly agree "U.S. National Figure Skating Champion 1995" is a more impressive accomplishment.

I downvoted this.  First, I think this answer is a bit misleading about the actual statistics about Eagle Scouts: as Noah points out, there are about 58K per year, and 7% of the current membership of BSA are Eagle Scouts.  Comparing this to US National Figure Skating Champions is losing four orders magnitude: I find your "equation" to be innumerate.

@PeteL.Clark I 100% conceded Noah's point. The statement was never an "equation", the words "something like" were meant to modify equate. Equate was clearly being used colloquially but also incorrectly, I agree.

I wouldn't put high school achievements on a professional CV unless it's at the level of a medal on international science olympiad or a top 10 Intel talent search finish.  I don't think Eagle scout is quite at this level.  That said, it probably won't make a big difference either way, unless your CV has enough questionable things that it looks padded (which is bad).

I have a "Non-academic activities" section at the end of my CV that mentions that I'm a semi-decent long distance runner and that I used to moonlight for an amateur comedy troupe. But then, I do this because I can afford to do so: we are talking here about two bullet points that come after about 150 separate items including publications, talks, grants, teaching, advising... so it's obvious that I'm not including this to make my CV look longer than it actually is. If your CV is substantially shorter than this, you might want to think twice about including this kind of section. If you do include it, please please please do not write anything banal or mundane there. I once read a postdoc application to my department that included the line "Hobbies: watching movies". The CV in question wasn't great anyways, but this line was the metaphorical nail in the coffin.

Thanks.  My CV is long as is, and I have plenty in all sections.  I only made the remark on where to put it if one or the other 'looked short' in comparison, but the general question remains if 'non-academic' section belongs on an 'academic' CV.  Thanks for the answer.

If you have a longer and more comprehensive CV, I would keep it. It's an achievement and it tells people who know a little about the Boy Scouts that you've learned a few things about leadership and engaged in significant community service.
That said, I would put in way at the end with other trivia and less important tidbits. An an extra, it might end up being a slightly positive thing for some readers. For those of that don't care, make it very clear that you don't place this among your most important achievements as a scholar.

It depends on:
- whether you have other volunteer experiences
* If your last volunteer experience was only in Boy Scout, then I wonder why you didn't get involved in other things in undergrad/grad. If you are listing a bunch of experiences, it probably doesn't hurt to include it.
- whether this experience is related to what you are applying for
* If you see this being relevant to an education or outreach aspect for the position you are applying for, then perhaps it is a good idea.
If you list this as part of your career achievements, I might think that you are a bit desperate (as if you don't have anything else to write about and just want to pack your CV). Not to say that this is not important, but for an academic position it is not directly relevant; if you want to include it, it should go into "miscellaneous" or "volunteer experiences."

It depends on the position you are applying for. I would not include it in an application for a professorship, but for a post-doc I would keep it in under "misc" or "additional information". If there is a structured application form and they are asking for it, then include it.


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How to find credible sources for a general reference?
I am currently writing a paper in which I have many topics to describe. It would not be productive to read and cite papers or even books on the topics because I just have to describe them very briefly as an introduction to some follow up topics.
For "private" use I would just use the corresponding Wikipedia articles but that is considered bad practice in academic papers.
So do you have any tips how to get credible definitions of and/or short introductions into (in my case computer science) topics without searching through dozens of papers/books for some useful/credible parts?

You did check sources besides Wikipedia, right? You are not looking for things to cite blindly?

What I am looking for are resources that are as easily accessable and extensive as wikipedia but considered credible. For Example: If you want to present some tools in your paper which you used for static code analysis you want to give the reader a short introduction into what static code analysis is. But you don´t want to spend the whole day looking for that information so Wikipedia would be perfect.

There's a reason why Wikipedia is not considered a citeable reference for research articles; any similar collection would share the same fate. Peer reviewed articles and textbooks are the answer, as others have noted. Yes, you have to look into them. Yes, that's work. It's also the way it is, and probably has to be.

Most schools have access to a fairly extensive electronic library full of articles.  I have also used http://scholar.google.com/ to find sources acceptable for academic papers.

It would not be productive to read and cite papers or even books on the topics because... — [citation needed]

I tend to use books for this sort of thing. For example, if I need a definition of "data mining", I do a Google Books search for that term. A book about "data mining" is going to define the term in the introduction or first chapter, so it will usually be in the pages that are part of the free preview.
Another option is to look at the citations used in the Wikipedia article itself, and then look up those articles. Wikipedia tends to be pretty good at citing the key article(s) for a particular subject.
Also, it's helpful to know a few online cite-worthy dictionaries that you can search for common definitions. For example, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is useful for philosophical terms.
There's also Scholarpedia, which is a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia. It's not as extensive as Wikipedia. However, in my field at least, the articles tend to be written by well-known names.

+1 for Wiki citations.  I often check those when trying to learn something new.

To @Kimball +1 for Wiki too.  Wikipedia is often a fantastic source of general information.  You can use the cited sources to expand your understanding of the topic.  I would warn that the Wikipedia pages are crowd sourced and I've found a citation to a source which wouldn't qualify as peer-reviewed, thus probably not acceptable by academic institutions.

Consider:

textbooks on a given subject,
review (rather than research) articles on a given subject,
key papers (e.g. the one where a given subject was introduced for the first time).

Good places to start:

http://scholar.google.com/ and look for general and (typically) highly cited books or papers,
the references sections on Wikipedia.

I agree with the idea of referencing books. You may not want to buy a book for each topic.
I suggest using libraries. Most people writing papers have access to a university or other reference library. Many will let you go in and read books there, even if you are not affiliated with the university.

I read abstracts of journal articles I can find on JSTOR.
Abstracts generally serve as concise summaries of entire papers. They're also written by the author(s) of the article, so you know the emphasis will be on the core of the topic, not on side-note information.

You need not discard a Wikipedia definition if it is one that you like.  Print sources can be equally sketchy as anyone can print books (cf. "Fart Proudly", by Ben Franklin). It sounds like you merely want correctness, not sources of definitions anyway.
As long as the definition is fairly accurate, just cite it as you would a print source, but (like with all internet resources) give the date and time along with your citation, since the Internet can change out from under you.
In any case, it's not really academics who have a problem with Wikipedia, it's the publishers and ever since the printing press, they've spent a good while curating influence on the minds of the Establishment.  But obviously, with the Internet, it all needs re-addressed.

The credibility of Wikipedia is not the subject of this question; you might want to move this answer to this question, where that is the subject of the question.

Note: A democratic form of reputation ranking and a unified data store where academics can pull information off of the internet to store a source as they found it, is a project I'm currently working on to make the right solution in the Internet Age. (see also hypothes.is)

@ff524:  The OP makes the claim that it is "bad practice" and I'm disputing that view, but will edit to make it more clear.

Actually, the OP claims that citing Wikipedia for definitions is considered bad practice by academics, not necessarily that it is objectively bad practice. If you have evidence that it is not generally considered bad practice by academics, that could be more relevant :)

In any case, it's not really academics who have a problem with Wikipedia — [citation needed] :-)

@JeffE:  ha, you are right to nudge me a little on that, but I happen to be a little more studied than most on the derangements of the Establishment, so could only reference myself.