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What should you do when your professor disagrees with your research direction?
I am a graduate student working to get my master's degree, but my professor and I have differences in research directions. While his personality is very strong, I don't think he is capable enough in his chosen research direction.
On the other hand, I have already produced certain results in the research direction I am interested in. I have also completed a manuscript submission and am currently waiting for opinions. I was tortured every day by hesitating between the tasks he assigned me and my interests. what should I do?

Declaring a professor to be incapable in his own research is a bold claim.

Did you have a discussion about this with your professor? What did he say?

You haven't described that he "disagrees with your research direction," only that he has assigned you tasks you disagree with.

First of all, as a Master's student, your time in the program and with your advisor is limited. Therefore, if you're interested in conducting research and publishing it, it's clear to me that clashing with your advisor should be avoided. I also hope that you have never expressed these thoughts about your advisor's capabilities, either to him or to fellow students.
That being said, it's positive that you have results in the research direction you prefer. But you should find common ground with your advisor's interests and follow his research agenda, if for no other reason than political but also for your own benefit. After completing the requirements set by your advisor, you can then discuss publishing the results you have.


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What is the most practical way to assess the performance of electrical engineering students in the use of MATLAB?
I am teaching a Signal Processing Lab to undergrad students but I am very confused in regard to how I can evaluate and assess their performance.
I have discussed the matter with my colleagues and they gave me a few suggestions but I don't think that those suggestions are very effective

Every student should be asked a viva question
Every student should be given a task based on MATLAB

As far as suggestion number 1 is concerned, there are approximately 30 students in the class and I will have to repeat my viva questions since I cannot make 30 different questions from a single topic.
As far as suggestion number 2 is concerned, students copy codes from ChatGPT or from their friends. (We cannot ban their internet usage but even if we do, they still will be using it without informing us).
Please give practical/possible and feasible solutions where I don't have to spend extra time as I also have other classes and responsibilities.

It feels like there's a bit more to the story here -- in particular, it feels like someone is looking for a metric for the ABET process.  Your course might be a place where the students' facility with Matlab is assessed, which is fair, but unless you're actually teaching Matlab in your course, it doesn't feel fair to include that latter assessment in the actual course grade.

From a technical solution point of view, this might be beyond Academia scope!

2)Every student should be given a task based on MATLAB
... As far as suggestion number 2 is concerned,students copy code from gpt or from their friends.( We cannot ban their internet usage,if we ban they still will be using without informing us)

From a teaching and learning approach, a practical solution is leveraging assessment enabler like SEB: Safe Exam Browser.
You can run in a kiosks mode or integrate with your university's LMS. It should work seamlessly with BYOD.

For university teaching using Cisco Packet Tracer, see Adesemowo et al., for their teaching and learning approach

Adesemowo, A. K., Johannes, H., Goldstone, S., & Terblanche, K. (2016). The experience of introducing secure e-assessment in a South African university first-year foundational ICT networking course. Africa Education Review, 13(1), 67–86.

MATLAB will run within SEB, just like Adesemowo et al. had students perform their networking exercise in Packet Tracer within SEB. You can 'restrict' which MAT file gets loaded within SEB for assessment.
PS: I'm guessing, similar to Packet Tracer, for MATLAB, the MATLAB workspace 'assessment file' would've been created in Test Manager.

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text:
Do part-time post doc positions in computer science exist?
I am very close to finishing my Ph.D. in Computer Science and I am working full-time as a software engineer. In fact, I have been working full-time as a software engineer for the past 7 years.
I am currently working in FAANG and I am wondering if there are part-time post-doc positions available similar to what I have been doing in my Ph.D. (part-time at my own pace for the last 5 years). Or is that not an option for post-doc positions? I am in my early 30s and don't want to regret that I missed an opportunity.

It depends on the country; if the law for working hours allows and you get an offer you can do it; you can also do a postdoc in your company or another one, to get your answer come with more details, university, area, country, experiences,

What is your career goal, and in that context, what is the purpose of the postdoc position that you have in mind?

@henning to continue learning more in the field of computer science/compilers even though these may not be directly used in industry.

" don't want to regret that I missed an opportunity." which opportunity, exactly? People doing their postdoc full time are already struggling with advancing to further academic positions, so I would say that doing a postdoc as a 50%, or 30% is not helping any academic opportunity.
If, on the other hand, your "opportunity" are in terms of advancing research ... ask your company. Or ask your family/relative other what do they think if you spend your free time doing research.

I personally think a full-time job in software engineering is enough to keep one occupied.  Often, they expect more than 40 hours a week.  Of course, if you want to do research as a second job, that's up to you (if your company doesn't have rules against it).  To my way of thinking, it's very unwise, however.

Yes. I did two postdocs after my PhD, one in CS, the other in Biology. The CS postdoc was Part-Time. In my case, the research group needed help with a grant-funded project, but could not afford a full-time postdoc, so they offered me a part-time position. At the time I already had another job as an administrator at another institution in the same city, so it worked perfectly for both sides. I learned a lot, and they were very happy with my work.
I know of many other postocs who have worked part-time. The issue is that these positions are usually not advertised, but you find them through your own network. Someone needs short-term part-time help finishing up a project, e.g. help a group of grad students wrap up a project and write the papers. Another PI needs some technical assistance, e.g. writing code to automate a process, etc.
Remember that "postdoc" only means "job you get after the PhD", and that postdoc positions range from grant-funded mini-professorships with your own space, students, etc., to underpaid technician or teaching positions, with everything in between. So the answer to the question of "can I get a part-time postdoc" is yes. The answer to "can I get a worthwhile part-time postdoc" is maybe.

Depending on your field of study, there are research groups that would not mind incorporating a recent Ph.D. in their on-going work, but they would probably prefer to spend their grant monies on their own graduate students instead of someone they would only see occasionally. Your paid part-time post-doc while working a challenging job is not something that academia is set up for. My expectations would be that the post-doc quickly drops out of active research since the immediate goal of the Ph.D. is already achieved.
On a personal level, you need to decide what your goals are. If you want to be active in research, you need to either go into academia full-time or you need to find a paid job that allows you to do research. After all, your Ph.D. should have trained you to work in Research and Development.

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Is it ethically acceptable for university book stores to market homework help websites?
A university bookstore, which is operated by a well known bookseller, is selling subscriptions to a "homework help and textbook solutions" website.  The subscriptions appear beneath the university logo and the words "University Official Bookstore."  If you select a course, the required books appear.  Below that, it says "Optional" and the subscription is listed.
This seems to imply the subscription is endorsed by the instructor, very probably without the instructor's knowledge.
Is this marketing by the bookstore ethically acceptable?
This bookseller operates over 700 campus bookstores.
Update:  The bookseller has changed the page to read "Bookstore Recommended" which seems more appropriate.

Is the "homework help and textbook solutions" website run by the textbook publisher/author?  Or is it just some generic independent site that the bookstore lists as optional for every course?

"very probably without the instructor's knowledge": if the instructor is on the premises, wouldn't they have probably seen the ad at the bookstore?

At least one answer below seems to think this problem is just for one instructor, and possibly that singular instructor participated and approved the inclusion. Is this issue a thing that appears for just one instructor, a few, or every course listing on the site?

I think that this might also depend on what sort of "homework help" the website offers, as well. If it's selling answers to assignment questions, for instance, that would certainly be unethical, since it'd be encouraging students to plagiarize!

@MassimoOrtolano My expectation was that all book stores are websites in the year 2021.

Not necessarily, but even more so what makes you think that the instructor didn’t notice?

@MassimoOrtolano As an instructor, I haven't been to our campus bookstore in at least year and I have never had a need to do so for instructional purposes. I also never go to our bookstore website. Of course, I might be an anomaly.

Are you sure these aren't ads injected by a third party ad provider?

Is the bookstore "marketing," i.e. advertising the so-called homework help site, or are they selling the subscription?  That is, does the student pay the bookstore or some third party?

It'd be helpful if you could share a picture of this. And perhaps helpful to have a picture to show your instructor to ask them if they approve, or are even aware of it.

@KevinFegan I think that would violate site rules against accusations.

@BobBrown I presume the payment goes to the well-known bookseller, but I'm not trying it to find out.

@shoover No, but the web design has lead me to believe it is a product of the bookstore.

@AnonymousPhysicist - accusations against who, the bookseller? I don't consider it an accusation to simply ask a question unless the question includes an accusation. But in any case, the picture could be redacted to to sanitize identifiable information.

It’s helpful to approach the question starting from the following general guiding principle:
It is not acceptable for a university bookstore to engage in misleading marketing practices of any sort.
If the way the subscription link is presented creates an appearance of endorsement by an instructor, and such endorsement was not given, then the marketing is misleading. If this was done intentionally, then that is unethical.
If the link suggests the service is endorsed by the university but not by the instructor (or is simply offered as an optional purchase without the implication of any endorsement), it seems hard to argue that it is unethical, or at least hard to argue it is more unethical than any other link to a product that anyone puts on their website. It’s mainly creating the appearance of an endorsement by a specific instructor who didn’t give their approval that would be problematic.
I cannot be sure from your description that I would agree with your assessment that the way the information is presented creates such a misleading impression. But I might, or perhaps I’d agree that it’s sufficiently ambiguous as to risk misleading at least some students.

What you have in bold at the top doesn't address the actual question - unless you make a lot of assumptions.

@Buffy that’s only the beginning of my answer. Your criticism doesn’t make sense to me, can you clarify what the problem is?

The question isn't about misleading marketing. I don't disagree with the answer as a whole, but that isn't where the question, or the emphasis, is. We don't, in particular, know if there is an "endorsement" by the university or the instructor. I suspect not, but don't know.

Ok. I’ll let my answer speak for itself.

Without more information, it is hard to make any ethical judgement. The instructor might have a say in what appears, for example.
But the more serious issue I see is that, if such things are published and available to some students, even just the ones that are more diligent in taking shortcuts than in learning, then it might actually be essential to make them publicly available to all. This "levels the playing field", so to speak, so that everyone has easy access to the same materials.
The instructor should, somehow, be made aware of such things so that the course can be designed in such a way that they don't interfere.
But, if they exist, and can be found, then they should be open to everyone. It is much more problematic if they exist but are only known to a few and unknown to the instructor.

And, knowing about this, the instructor can respond, perhaps in the syllabus. Anything from "This is a valuable/essential resource" to "You will be wasting your money with a subscription". The professor could also, perhaps, buy a subscription and make credentials open to the entire class. It would be a pretty cheap TA, I think.
And the faculty can, if necessary, respond as a whole, though I doubt that banning such a practice will make education better. It is the existence of these resources that have issues, not the fact that they are known to all.

I would, of course, prefer to be the sole source of hints to my students, so that I can give minimal hints (letting them have "insights") and also assure that a question/answer from/to any student is seen by all (if a question is asked by one, it is probably one others have as well). But I have no way to guarantee that. I did, for several years, run a mailing list for each course that had those desirable properties, making other things moot.

-1 It's pretty clear that there's an implied "for all/any" to the OP's question. ("If you select a course...") This is not about one course, it's a standard feature on the bookseller website. And there's no way all the instructors are signing off on this (in fact, possibly none would approve).

@DanielR.Collins, you are pretty strong in your assumptions. I'm also pretty sure that the professors, acting jointly, in the scenario you propose could get it stopped. But that doesn't make the "resource" disappear. Just makes the playing field more tilted.

This sounds worse than unethical, but depending. Required/Optional are official names for textbooks selected by the instructor. This may not be the current instructor, but it will be someone involved with the course. The bookstore does not get to just throw their own recommendations into the Optional list. Unilaterally adding something as Optional is in the same ballpark as listing Optional as Required, or just adding a book out of nowhere to Required. It's not underhanded -- it's simply lying.
But it's so bad that it's hard to imagine the bookstore doing it on their own initiative. I'd imagine the University has some relationship with that website and has authorized it. Most instructors are probably not amused, but no harm done since they know students never buy anything marked Optional until asking in class; and that all non-Freshmen know it's just an advertisement for the Homework Help site.

“Worse than unethical”, really? It’s just a link to optional material for a course on a bookstore website, let’s keep things in perspective here...

@DanRomik I don't love "worse" there, but unethical is sleazy but not breaking any rule; whereas this would be both sleazy AND breaking a rule, making it worse. I'm open to a better way of expressing that.

what rule is being broken?

It seems that if they are really homework helps (designed based on the instructor or the course homework) and it is without the consent of instructor, or without the aim of the students' knowledge improvement (consciously), it seems unethical.
But in other cases, even sometimes the book writers write the solution or a guidebook for their book exercises. Although, normally they are not used as homework questions, or in case they are, just some of them are used to warm up or giving insight to students (after their try to solve the problems).
Besides, not always all students take all the points of a class. Their knowledge and mind level is different and they take advantage based on their levels. Sometimes it is ok if the students learn the solution of some specific questions after reading one example. Although they are not at the same level as the ones who solve the problems by itself, they are not at the level of the students who don't learn even after that. The first group lay in the top students of the class and the later lay in the middle ones. (But the instructor should be aware while gives the marks, although the advantages of learning is beyond the marks)


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Improve my relationship with this professor?
When applying to graduate school, I didn't asked for a letter of recommendation from a professor who offered one.
Now I have a course with him and he seems to avoid me. How I can fix my relationship with him?

Are you sure he is avoiding you?

@Allure I am sure he doesn't like me much. What can I do to improve this please?

What exactly "avoid" means in your situation? Is there any specific event or occasion?
To me, building a relationship with someone is hard especially when It comes to professional life (e.g. academia). It takes lots of effort and time. Did you spend time with him like asking questions in his class, talk to him, or even disagree (debate) with him on a certain topic? I don't talk about the relationship outside of the classroom.
I think this is just your bias about what that professor think or feel about you and you care too much about that. Most of the time people don't care much about other people unless there is common voice or opposition about something between them.
So, if you want to have a better relationship with that professor, my suggestions could be something like (based on my experience):

Actively discuss when you're in his class.
Email him asking about some of your ideas.
Buy him a cup of coffee :)

I'm not sure if this helps but hope you feel better.

I'm dubious about the last suggestion. Maybe it would be ok if you are in the middle of a conversation and you want to continue it at starbucks (and he seems invested in the discussion), but don't just show up with coffee out of the blue.

@nengel: you're correct, just need to be more sensitive when doing that. Thanks for your comments :D


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Publish unethical research or get kicked out
PhD student in bioinformatics. I was given the control data for some old experiments and asked to turn it into a paper in 1 semester. I've worked with the Top Student in the lab on this. Mid-October, he decided we would focus on X. Some of the data supports X. Some of it supports Y or Z. We talked about redoing the analysis or changing the approach to get better results, but Top Student said we wouldn't have time. Just focus on X. Make all the figures and text about X and ignore the rest.
I've been doing the writing. I am trying to find this middle ground where I am not omitting or hiding what I find meaningful while still focusing on X. I've gone through 4 drafts and have been told each time it is garbage, think about it more, but no specific constructive feedback. I'm not allowed to talk to anyone outside of the lab about it. I think this is cherry-picking data and unethical, so it is really hard to give it 100%. I don't want my name on the paper.
I was told that I am not allowed to change advisors. I continue in this lab or I will be kicked out. I have 3 years to go. Also, I have to finish this manuscript by the end of the semester or I'm kicked out. I don't have rich family to fall back on and I don't know what I would do if I were kicked out.
My friends say just stay. Just do what the advisor says, do what the Top Student says, document every conversation, and just graduate. But I don't want this on my CV. I don't want this unethical work hanging over my head for the rest of my life. I think life is not black or white. There must be a middle ground I'm not seeing. What is your advice?

How does another student have such power?

"We talked about redoing the analysis or changing the approach to get better results" Crafting the analysis to get "better" results is likely just as bad of a path as reporting partial results.

Why are they threatening to kick you out? Have there been other issues before this that have caused them to mistrust your judgment?

Did you talk to your advisor about these issues? What do they say?

What's the model for "being kicked out"? Is it failure of course, or is this "top student" a Fellow that is your supervisor? What is the hierarchy under which you have to work?

No one can force you to put your name on a paper published in a reputable journal. Most journals now ask each author to sign a letter attesting to their participation. You also have the option of asking the editor to remove your name up to publication and another option of asking the editor for a correction in authorship after publication, that is removing your name even after publication. I don't see your situation as unethical, just unpleasant and undesirable. Discuss your ethical concerns with others. Ask to discuss the written papers in the presence of a third person, eg, a supervisor.

@cag51 I accidentally made enemies of important people in the department. I thought that I needed to follow the handbook and terms of my admissions. That was incorrect. In the words of the associate dean, "My word is law." The associate dean broke the terms of the handbook to deny me funding. The current advisor decided to help a student in need and took a chance by giving me funding directly from his lab. It is the associate dean who says I finish with this advisor or I am kicked out.

@BryanKrause I see that perspective. I'm a junior in this, but it in this lab, you use an algorithm to cluster the data. Inevitably this is not clean, so then the data is manually annotated (based on known physical properties, we think this item should be in cluster 2, not cluster 1). After this is done, you start exploring the dataset more. One of the clusters clearly represents multiple physical phenomena and should have been split from the start, but our advisor said we were taking too long, so stop clustering and just see what you get. Our results would be more meaningful if we'd split it.

@CaptainEmacs I would be removed from the program per the decision of the associate dean. I made another comment. The university and departmental handbooks do not matter in this department. The associate dean has decided I succeed in this lab or I'm removed from the PhD program. Others have also asked about mastering. I would need 2 more semesters to master out. Without funding, that would be as expensive as pursuing a degree at another institution.

@ChristianHennig My advisor says that the only thing that matters is results. We must have a manuscript by the end of the semester or we have failed, and I will be removed from his lab. He doesn't care what the manuscript says, but my writing is "garbage" and the Top Student's writing is the gold standard. As the Top Student says we're writing about X, we're writing about X. The advisor has decided we are publishing in a journal for research in X.

@my_ancient_house I'd be careful with any results using that sequence of approaches where your answers depend entirely on how you manually label data.

@BryanKrause I agree, but that is what this lab does. There has been a recent shift to a new research niche, and the first paper in that niche was recently published. The advisor says that the algorithm can't account for all biological variation, and if we are transparent about the manual adjustments, then it's fine. As the lab's paper was published, it seems the field agrees. It bothers me though.

"If we are transparent about the manual adjustments, then it's fine" - this is an important statement. Basically, if a imperfect strategy is used, but honestly and transparently reported, it is maybe not brilliant and high-class work, but acceptable research and up to the reviewers/editors to decide whether it should be published. Is there anything outright fraudulent in the model or is it just perfectionism on your side that is the problem (not that I do not sympathise with perfectionism, but you are in a politically ticklish situation)?

@CaptainEmacs My issue is with the presentation of the research. "We set out to explore X at time points a and b" vs "We wished to explore the changes at time points a and b, discovering X" vs "...discovering X, Y, and Z." I think the last is the best course and the second is acceptable. My labmate is pushing for the first, and I find that dishonest. I don't think my advisor cares if we do the first or the second, but my labmate is the golden child, so if he wants the first, I suspect the advisor will support the first.

@my_ancient_house Yes, that's an issue. Maybe formulate more neutrally? These people seem to know how to publish, but maybe it can be toned down to not be so explicit as to how decision were made - after all, it is not so important?

Are X, Y, and Z mutually exclusive? There's a big difference between "We ran experiments that support X" and not mentioning experiments that suggested that Y and Z are also true, vs not mentioning experiments that suggested that Y or Z might be true instead of X. The former is just limiting your scope; the latter is unethical.

@Ray That was really helpful. Thank you. This is a data discovery project. Compare control group at time point a and control group otherwise identical except it is at time point b. The project was initially "see what you find." The top student is saying X is publishable and similar to what we did previously, so let's just talk about X. He wants to frame it as, "We set out to explore X, so we examined the data at time points a and b." My issues are 1. We found X, Y, and Z. I find not reporting on Y and Z to be unethical, but the more I talk to people, the more it seems that is what people do.

@Ray continuing. My second issue is the way it is framed. If we frame it, "We explored the data at time points a and b and found X," that's ok. I don't like that we are not fully reporting the full results, but that seems a cultural difference. But I find it unethical to imply we were looking for X and found X, as that's not what we did.

@my_ancient_house: It depends on what exactly are X,Y,Z. It is not unethical in itself to omit discoveries. However, if mentioning Y,Z would cast doubt on the assertion of X or the importance of X, then that becomes unethical. For example, if you had found that green jelly beans correlate with acne with 95% confidence but also that jelly beans of all other colours don't, then you would be unethical in omitting the results for non-green jelly beans. So what you have said so far is insufficient to conclude on its ethicality.

@my_ancient_house Yeah, don't make it seem like you were testing a hypothesis when you were doing an exploratory study, but if you describe it as an exploratory study, say you found X, and then maybe mention Y and Z as things you'll check in future work (the impression I got is that there exists more work to be done on those and that you're not reporting the partial results, right?), I think you'd be fine, although I can't say with certainty without knowing what X, Y, and Z actually are. The key question to ask: if you listed everything, would it change how readers interpret the X results?

Some people suggested talking to your advisor. If you believe that he/she does not know about this issue, then of course that is one option to consider. But more likely than not he/she is supporting or at least condoning this bad behaviour towards you, in which case you should consider getting out of a PhD but perhaps converting to a master's program if possible.
It would be ethical to lie about your reason to quit/convert so as to avoid unnecessary trouble with the people who have higher power than you (e.g. "My family needs financial help so I need to start working much earlier than I planned."). The point is that your moral responsibility is towards moral people, not people who are actively trying to harm you, so there is nothing wrong in telling them harmless lies to get the best for yourself.
I want to also assure you that you are not alone in feeling this way when others try to make you do unethical work. You are justified in giving high priority to your mental well-being, specifically to not having unethical work attributed to you. This is your personal choice, and nobody else has the right to reject or disrespect that choice. Naturally, taking fully ethical paths may not be easy, but "just do what [others] say" is definitely not the way to go if you want to remain ethical. Note that (as per my suggestion above) you can be purely ethical (in my opinion) while doing certain things that others might criticize you for (e.g. lying about reasons for your actions), but think about it, is it worse to do that or to force others to publish manipulated data?

There are a couple of ways of thinking about research. The first is deductive. You have a theory, you create a hypothesis, you test it. The second is inductive. You have a general research question and you have some data. You explore the data to see what it tells us about the research question. These are different ways of thinking about research. The first is more common in certain pure science fields, I am guessing biology would be included here. The second is more common in more qualitative fields, but I think a lot of data scientists are trained in this way of working as well. I have seen undergrad courses where the assignment is “Here is some data, tell me something interesting.”
I think what you are likely facing is a conflict between these two ways of doing science. In the first paradigm, what you are proposing is not accepted. If the hypothesis you were going to test is X, you test X. You don’t test Y and Z and then go back and make a hypothesis to support your findings. That is considered problematic. You should instead publish your results on X, acknowledging that Y or Z are not tested and may be alternative explanations. Then you work on testing Y and Z, probably with new data.

I appreciate this perspective. I am trying to view this as an issue with my perspective that can be addressed as a way to allow me to continue. Let's say you are given a dataset to explore, and it reveals major results X, Y, and Z.   1. Is it ethical to publish a paper that says, "We set out to explore X, therefore we collected this data and found X?" (This is my labmate's approach.   2. In your view, is it publishable to write, "We wished to explore this dataset (+reasons, context in literature) and found X, Y, and Z." (My advisor says this is unacceptable. Pick 1 thing to talk about.)


text:
Can I get into a career that specialises in mathematics writing?
Ever since I learned about math writing in LaTeX, I have really enjoyed it.
Over the summer before my freshman year of college, I spent hours rewriting a few papers I had written in google docs (yes with the horrible math integration) in LaTeX. I am now a 2nd-year undergraduate studying to pursue a pure math degree (I especially enjoy number theory).
In all of my math classes, I write my homework up in LaTeX, even though my classmates write it by hand and finish their HW in half the time it takes me. Still, I really enjoy the way my final product looks. I don't get any extra points for doing this, I just really love proof-writing and especially finalizing it in a way that looks professional.
My question is this: are there any career routes that specifically focus on mathematical writing? Obviously, math researchers write their own papers, but I'm curious if there is something more to math paper writing.

You could join a publisher. Math publishers will often use TeX. Example advertisement from a quick search.

Experience teaching or developing IM K-12 Math
Excellent stakeholder and project team communication skills.
Strong computer skills with cloud-based systems, especially Google Workspace applications, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Zoom, and Slack.
Comfortable with:

Website editing/typesetting including basic HTML, LaTex, or another markup language.

Willing to learn:

The IM Content Management System (CMS), Wrike, Asana.

The key word to search for would be 'typesetter'.


text:
Starting from a URL, how can I programmatically look up the DOI of an article without scraping the publisher's website?
I have assembled a large collection of URLs pertaining to scientific papers from social media (e.g. "https://www.jni-journal.com/article/S0165-5728(21)00282-4/fulltext)".
I would now like to perform a bibliometric/scientometric analysis of these articles by looking them up on Web of Science, Scopus, or similar. However, most of these scientometric databases use the article's DOI as the entry point for querying. My question is therefore: how can I "convert" a URL into its corresponding DOI programmatically, and without having to scrape the DOI from the publisher's website? Essentially, I am looking for the type of link resolution that Crossref offers, but in the opposite direction (from URL to DOI rather than the other way around).
Any suggestions on how to approach this would be most welcome.

Can you expatiate on "how can I "convert" a URL into its corresponding DOI programmatically, and without having to scrape the DOI from the publisher's website?". Going to each website? Scripting with Selenium and API? ...

Maybe scraping would be OK, if the pages all contain the DOIs (you just have to search for doi.org) and if the DOIs redirect back to the pages themselves (you can use this as a check).

Most likely, you cannot use one approach across all websites.
However, most publishers use the same formula for their URLs, so you might be able to do each publisher by itself.

I suspect that you know the answer: There is a database (at doi.org) that provides the translation DOI -> URL. You want the opposite direction, but unless (i) you have access to the database itself, or (ii) the organization that runs doi.org provides an API for the reverse lookup URL -> DOI, you are out of luck: You simply cannot get the reverse lookup that uses the normative data. The best you can do is scrape websites, but because they only provide you with a publisher's view of the data (rather than the normative mapping from doi.org), you may get incomplet or incorrekt data.


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Can I do a PhD after being out of academia for almost 20 years?
I am a Japanese, currently living in the US. After graduating from university, I worked as an economic researcher in Japan for 11 years, and then I decided to study gender in the UK. I chose the UK since it was a one-year programme, and also because I grew up there.  I had my son right after completing my MA, then I just threw myself into raising my child, which was not easy but rather an interesting experience for my academic background.
Fast forward 18 years and our son will be off to the UK himself to start university, and I feel like I've finished one big project. I've done a lot of volunteering work at school and did some translation/interpretation works, but have been out of any "official" workforce or academia.  Will it be too difficult to go back to academia at this stage? It has been my passion to explore gender issues, so I've been trying to figure it out...  I appreciate any kind of advice!

It will be difficult, like all things that are worth doing. But probably less difficult than your successfully completed 18 year project.

You don't talk much about your financial situation. PhD programs can be expensive and funding for gender studies is pretty abysmal. It seems that you're semi-retired, but this is something worth considering. If your living expenses suddenly go up and you need to get a job, juggling both will be a challenge.

One can do a Ph.D. at any age. Lots of people come from the industry and are definitely older than their early 20s. There is a very eclectic mix overall, in the US, UK, Asia, etc. You just need to reach out to a potential supervisor and they'll point you in the right direction.

I don't see a problem with doing a PhD in an older age. I would say that you would have the advantage of being more mature and have probably project management skills due to your experience in industry.
You may need some time to "recall" the relevant theoretical part of your field that more recent graduates will remember from their lectures but I wouldn't think that is an issue.
The only challenge you may face is not being able to connect with other PhD students due to the age difference, but this may also depend on your personality and the lab environment.

You will face some hurdles. Your child-rearing will not damage your chances to get into a Ph.D. program, though getting funding will be more difficult. If you can self-finance, this is not a problem. Also, this is very discipline dependent since in most of the humanities, funding is not a given, in contrast to Computer Science.
You will also have to deal with the psychological costs of a Ph.D. Most people going through it will go through periods of self-doubt and have to struggle with ideas of just giving up. This is easier to overcome if you are young and have no accomplishments other than your studies. You need to make sure that you have a clear career goal instead of a vague feeling that you might have missed out on an academic career or that you are now in a different phase of your life.
You will also have to give yourself some time to retool. Even after a decade, discussion in a field has usually moved on and what was once hot and trendy is no more. Also, there is often real progress and methodology has become refined.
Be assured that you are not the first one to embark on a doctorate at a slightly advanced age. Just make sure you have the right motivation, deal with financing, have a career goal that makes sense, and know that feelings of inadequacy and frustration are common even among the youngsters.


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Applying to national lab post-docs (LANL, SNL, LLNL) - Letters of Reference
I am based in the US and my question pertains to cultural norms here. I finished my Physics PhD in 2023 and have been seriously applying to post-docs since the beginning of 2024. I took a year off to give birth to my first child and only applied to industry positions during that time. For personal reasons, I believe it would be best to pursue a postdoc at a national lab while I am eligible to do so; however, I am confused by applications that require letters of reference to be submitted along with the application or emailed separately.

Should I request "standing" letters from my references for all national lab positions?
My references are: my PhD advisor, a professor who knows my leadership skills well, and a fellow grad student who is now a postdoc. Is it better to have a professor for the third reference rather than a peer? I could ask my undergraduate research advisor.

Thank you for any advice!

At my lab (SNL) we ask for references which will be contacted directly (usually by phone) if we are considering hiring you. No letters need to be submitted.

Thank you! I agree that SNL positions have not asked for letters upfront but some positions at LANL do. I was wondering how to handle this, do I ask for a new letter per position or ask for a general letter to keep on hand for such applications?

Sorry to say I can’t help you with the other labs - never applied or worked at them.


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When may I apply for J1 again?
My situation is the following. Last year I got a J1 (the two year rule didn't apply) and spent 11 months in Kansas as a Research Scholar. Unfortunately, I had to terminate the contract and return to my home country, where I've spent two months.
A week ago I was offered another postdoc position in the US. According to the information I they gave me in the US Embassy where I called to clarify the situation, I have a right to apply for another J1 this year already, just need to pay SEVIS again. But the lady from the International Program Office of the US University, where I worked last year, insists that I will be eligible for another J1 not earlier than in 2 years.
I'm super confused.
Could you help me with the question?
Thank you in advance!

No one here would give better information than the people responsible for that in the institutions.

It sounds as though the "lady from the International Program Office" believes that you've got a two-year return requirement on your current visa. In any case, we're in no position to answer this question.

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


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Is Google Scholar good for cross-disciplinary analysis?
I hear in a lecture that Google Scholar is better than other databases such as Web of Knowledge and Scopus when it comes to cross-disciplinary analysis of citations. It was argued that Google Scholar has a better coverage of all disciplines (e.g., social sciences) while the classic databases favor science & engineering journals.
However, I tried to find a solid reference justifying this claim, but was unable to find.

I understand that Google Scholar indexes more web-based resources, but is there evidence that this favors less-indexed disciplines or simply Google Scholar indexes more resources for all disciplines (with the same ratio).
If this point is correct, could you please a reference (book or published article) providing an in-depth analysis.

More context might be needed. Are you interested in researching the effectiveness of individual databases? If so, then I recommend starting with the person you heard this from. Are you interested in obtaining the most complete literature search on something that is reasonably possible for you? If so, then it seems to me your question is not all that relevant for your needs --- you should use all the databases and bibliographies you have available to you.

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


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Tenure track position in teaching university versus non-tenure position position in an R1 school
I am early to mid-career academic in the field of business. Leaving a tenure-track job, I am currently considering two different offers with very different pros and cons. While I do not consider this next job to be my forever place and do wish to settle down in a balanced tenured role in the future, I'm having trouble deciding between the two:

Tenure-track position in a teaching University:

Offered at the associate level
Very small town, small University
3/3 teaching load
Relatively good benefits/support but not a huge amount of research support provided

Non-tenure track teaching position in R1:

Very reputable, large University
Offered a teaching assistant professor
4/4 teaching load
Relatively good benefits/support (for a teaching role)
Bigger town

Of course, the "tenure-track" position feels very attractive, but working at the R1 school will also help with building good relationships and networks for research in the future. I understand that it will depend on my needs and preferences, and any advice or opinions would be appreciated thank you!

A 4/4 teaching load seems... a lot, to also be trying to build relations and network?

Without stating what your goals are there is absolutely nothing we can say. You've already stated the differences between your two options. What matters is how they relate to what you want to achieve.

@prets true, but i was considering within the department, since other faculty will be more research active than those in the teaching uni

I do not consider this next job to be my forever place

In my observation -- albeit in mathematics, rather than business -- neither job is likely to be a good stepping stone towards a more research-oriented tenure-track job. People can and do move, but unless your record is exceptional this would require a lot of luck.
If you take either job, I would do so on the basis that it might be your forever place after all: evaluate the position on its own terms, rather than what it might do for your long-term ambitions.
Alternatively, you say you are in a tenure-track job now. I don't know your personal situation, but if neither of these jobs offers is a good match for your eventual goals, you might consider staying if possible.
Good luck.

I think this is a very important answer. In general, taking a teaching centric position with the hopes of somehow spinning it into a research career goes wrong at least as often as it works.

Thank you for the comment. My current role is supposed to be a balanced research role, but i am teaching 9 courses per year at minimum... so either options are in fact better than my current situation in terms of teaching load :S

This is a tough one because I don't know about the specifics of your situation. I would lean towards the tenure-track offer at the smaller school. Although I don't abide by the famous quote, "Better be first at a small Iberian village than second in Rome", I think there is some wisdom to it. At the small school, you'll have a bigger role, with students at your disposal who might not be graduate students but will nevertheless need undergraduate thesis projects and some of them might even be interested in research. With the tenure track position, you will be respected and you'll have a say in the inner workings of your department and school.
This is not to say that you'll not be respected at the big school, but remember that they are hiring you to teach. Teaching at a big school might mean teaching demanding students and large classes so you might not have as much time to work on your research as you might expect. Plus, I'm not sure that you can readily get involved in some research group or whether you'll be welcome to do so. At the small school, you can build the career you like, apply for research grants, develop classes, etc. And if you do manage to build a research group you'll be seen as a superstar because this is not expected of you. I think this might even increase your chances of applying and getting tenured at bigger schools after a few years at the small school.

Thank you, i understand your points and they do make complete sense. While creating a research group will require big funding, i guess i will need to start there if i wish to go for the smaller school


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To Master or not to Master (again), or how do you fill a gap year?
Ph.D. Applications went wrong this year
I am currently a master's student in pure mathematics at a top university in the UK. This year I applied for PhDs across Europe and the US (10 applications), and got rejected from all of them.
I topped in my undergraduate university, which is not very well known, and had good recommendation letters. I think that I was immature in my applications (especially in my statement of purpose), and this is the main reason why they didn't go so well.
I am still interested in doing a Ph.D. in pure math, and so I would like to reapply again next year. However, I am unsure what to do in order to improve my applications. I expect that finishing my Master's with good grades will be good, but I can't just wait a whole year without doing anything.
Tips for reapplying + Filling a gap year
Do you think that doing another Master's will help me improve my applications? My current Master's is just one year, so I think that another Master's will help me get closer to where I need to be in terms of math to start a Ph.D. Plus, it will also give me time to mature a little bit more, and help me fill in this gap year.
However, this feels like a very big commitment. But still, I don't see many more options to continue studying pure math next year otherwise, as there isn't really any possibility of doing research assistantships and the like in pure math. Do you have any other suggestions for how I can fill this gap year?

In this day and age, you need to send more than 10 applications, and make sure you don't just apply to the top institutions in your field.

It seems your concerns are not on your academic preparation, but on your person maturation.
This is a very personal aspect, however if your academic track and your topic knowledge are above the minimum requirements to pursue a PhD (i.e. : you have good marks and you feel confident on tackling the unknown), I would suggest that instead of applying to a Master you look for research positions in big tech/finance companies or universities. It may be not close to pure math, but it will not hurt you.
You can also do something completely unrelated, like taking a part-time job, doing a semester abroad volunteering with some research institution/studente exchange program or some volunteering (since it seems immediate material needs or money are not a concern to you, you may afford that).
Finally, you may thing about pursuing a PhD on your own, looking for grants and applying to them: in many part of the world there are bodies to fund research based on applications, a PhD is then simply a research position with some link to some university professors, rather different than the US system where you get enrolled in a PhD program.

I had a friend who found a research position at her University (US) during her gap year. She described that experience as the reason why she later pursued a Ph.D. She consequently recommended that to other people thinking about getting into academic research.
Though I can't tell you what to do, I think getting some real research or work experience in your field is more valuable than getting another master's degree. Especially if you get a publication out of that experience.


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Career advice: Which jobs or positions are interesting for a computational physicist or data scientist? Industry, academia or something else?
I have a Ph.D. in physics (astroparticle, computational physics), and I'm currently working on my first postdoc in medical physics (radiotherapy, computational), a field in which I do not want to continue pursuing. I feel very lost on how to continue my career.
So I am hoping that if I tell you a bit about myself, maybe you can come up with suggestions on what sort of positions could be of interest, as I have not yet found something that interests me.
What I like about academia:

Thinking about complex things
Statistics, data analysis, simulating stuff
Being able to follow my own ideas
Discussing my ideas with peers
Possibility of home office & flexible working hours

What I do not like about academia:

Managing, asking for grants, bureaucracy, politics
Low salaries

Regarding academia, I have good qualifications so I think I could work my way through academia if I wanted to. However, I feel like a professorship is a managing position with no time for real research (please tell me if you do not agree). So I do not know if academia is for me. I am also currently tired of having to move so much and frustrated that I cannot see how I will ever afford a house.
Regarding industry, I fear not finding peers. I am also very creative and independent, so it would be a nightmare for me to have a non-challenging job following what someone else says. So I also cannot imagine a future in industry.
I thought of trying some sort of entrepreneurship myself, but I do not tend to direct my thoughts towards lucrative things.
So my question is: Do you know of or can you imagine some sort of position in academia, industry, or anything else that I could like and find a future in?

see posts from people like this on linkedin

what part of the world are you in? (Or more importantly, would be in long-term?)

In the long term I would see myself in Europe, in particular in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland.

Disclaimer: I left academia for "industry" right after my PhD and never regretted it. I am still close friends with multiple people currently in French academia, so I am reasonably up-to-date with conditions there.
A job is a job
I will start by a very general piece of career advice.
"Job" means that you do things that are, according to the majority of the population, unpleasant to do. Society pays you a salary to motivate you to do it. The salary allows you to do stuff you like when you are not working.
A specific job can be less unpleasant for a specific person, and that’s part of what should guide your decisions beyond salary (which is more objective). Academia does have significant perks; I do not regret them, because I consider the drawbacks to be too big, but I understand that different persons might have made different decisions.
However, very few people who do a job they love, that is, that they would keep doing even if they kept the perks of doing it (salary, talking with people during the day) without doing the associated work. If anyone tells you that you should ignore a work-related problem (be it a low salary, a stressful work environment, sexual harassment, whatever) because you’re lucky to work in $DREAMJOB, they’re being manipulative and you should not listen to them.
Academia vs. industry: general considerations
The difference between academia and "industry" is smaller than imagined by people who are not familiar with both. The variation within "industry" is vastly greater than imagined by people who have only ever been in academia (hence the scare quotes).
In my opinion, the biggest difference by far is that in academia, past a certain stage of seniority (somewhere around PhD or postdoc), you have no boss. Yes, you might have a person who needs to approve your timesheets, sign off your purchases, and so on. But you do not have someone who requests frequent status updates on your work; requests that you change what you work on because something else came up and that’s what you’re doing next week; etc. You still have pressure (to publish, to find funding etc.) but it does not come from a single identified person.
Having no boss is a big plus for some people. There are many small companies of one to three people where the owner does their core job of expert foobarer, plus sales representative, plus accountant, plus HR, and they end up working 70h/week. They would make as much money in 40h/week at FooBarCorp as regional expert, but they would have a boss, and they don’t like that. (Typical example: a single-employee computer repair shop vs. the IT hardware department of a big company.) It’s possible to go through academia without knowing what a boss looks like, because the boss figures (advisors) are much more likely to be absent ("I will see you in two months for a ten-minute meeting"), peer-like ("I am not really your boss, more like a more experienced colleague"), or abusive ("if you fail to impress me, you are worthless as a person") than outside academia.
Your list

Thinking about complex things

a.k.a. "having a non-boring job". Absolutely feasible outside of academia. In fact, most companies that recruit PhD try to put them to work on stuff that requires thinking (otherwise, why recruit those people? the non-thinking crowd is usually cheaper).

Statistics, data analysis, simulating stuff

a.k.a. "job topic". Absolutely feasible outside of academia. You just need to not apply to accounting or HR positions.

Being able to follow my own ideas

That one’s more tricky, though. In R&D divisions, you might have a big research project one year, find promising results, and have funding cut to zero the next year. Even if the customer agrees that you had promising results, money fluctuates quickly.
You definitely cannot choose the details of what you work on, but I promise you that R&D positions including interesting research questions, not just "optimize some knob-turning for my machine".

Discussing my ideas with peers

Absolutely feasible outside academia. Possibly even more so, but it depends on the company/team culture, and it is hard to know that before recruitment.

Possibility of home office & flexible working hours

Absolutely feasible outside academia. Depends a lot on the company, but those are questions you can ask during the interview.

Managing

Well, that one’s tricky.
In my view, academia does not require much managing duties from you (yes, if you want to get to the top of the food chain, but you can be a perfectly competent and happy late-career tenured professor with a couple of PhD students and interns).
In industry, many companies require you to take on management duties as you get more experienced. (In my opinion, this is a stupid decision, and the other companies that allow an "expertise" track are much smarter, because not everyone wants to become a manager or can be good at it. But that view has not reached the majority of HR bigwigs. I left a company over this problem.) You can, kind-of, ask the question in interviews, but it can be hard to trust the answer.

bureaucracy, politics

Unfortunately, present in every human endeavour. Arguably moreso in academia than in industry, but it highly depends on the company.

asking for grants

Present in R&D as well. The grants are more generous than in academia, and the grant-hunting process is usually less bureaucratic, but still there.

Low salaries

Yeah, the private sector does a better job at those. (It can be a 20% bump or a 200% bump depending on your country, topic, etc., but it is never negligible.)

I am also currently tired of having to move so much

The private sector does do a better job at those. Once you are set near a big-ish city, in a place where you speak the language, you can usually do all your career there. (If you want to work in the countryside, that might limit your options more - but then, that limits your options to basically zero in academia.)
Suggestion
The most natural fit for any PhD/postdoc who still wants to do research stuff would be R&D positions. Large-ish companies have designated R&D subdivisions, where you might be the senior expert of blue FooBars in the FooBar department in the Foo division. In a small-ish company, you might be the anything-vaguely-physics-related person. (In my view, the former is much closer to academia than to the latter. Both are interesting in very different ways.)
If you look at mid-size companies (roughly between 20 and 200 people), don’t discount job offers just because it says "engineer" in the title. "Engineer" can be anything between "write up technical specifications and check legal compliance" (boooring) and "do research (but the HR software does not have "researcher" as a label)".

"In my view, academia does not require much managing duties from you (yes, if you want to get to the top of the food chain, but you can be a perfectly competent and happy late-career tenured professor with a couple of PhD students and interns)"  That is managing, even if you only count direct reports -- but Faculty manage projects, too.

@ScottSeidman I agree that managing PhD students etc. is (people) management; my point is about scale. At least in France, the average faculty member manages one to three PhD students + postdocs at the same time. In the private sector, with an advanced degree and a modicum of ambition, it is hard to not manage at least five people by the time you reach 40. (Point taken about project management, but that is not the same set of skills as people management, and one might aspire to one of the two but not the other.)

A very big part of Project management is people management.


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Adding new experiment in results and discussion section
I'm writing a paper and found some straightforward additional things to do based on what I wrote in the Results and Discussion section.
I want to add a new experiment based on the findings and I am thinking about explaining the new experiment in the Results and Discussion section right away so that the narrative "flows" instead of rewriting the Proposed Method/Experimental Settings section (laziness is also a factor here). Is that appropriate or not?

If you add new experimental data to your manuscript and discuss them in the results and discussion section you also have to describe how you obtained the new data. That description should go into the experimental section. Please avoid adding too much experimental detail to the results and discussion section.
Exceptions are communications, letters, and other short article formats without different sections. Then it sometimes makes sense to include more experimental details in the text. But I am not a big fan of that, and it has to be critically evaluated in each case if it is really the best solution. Also in such cases, there is usually supporting information that is more suited for experimental details.
So you have to update both: The experimental section and the results and discussion section.

A reviewer will likely find that rather confusing. A possibility is to restructure the manuscript sections as follows (or similar):

Experiment 1
Results of experiment 1
Experiment 2
Results of experiment 2
Discussion

Indeed the above possibility depends on how much freedom the journal allows in the structure: in certain fields, journals leave the choice of structure totally to the authors; in others, journals may define a mandatory structure.


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Nominating a graduate student for a mentorship award
I'm an undergraduate student in CS and I want to nominate my graduate student mentor for a mentorship award at my university.
He has been my mentor for a year and a half and over that time he has helped me a lot. We have worked on a project and published a paper together. He has also helped me a lot with graduate school applications as well as applying for awards/fellowships/etc. Suffice to say, there is a lot that I can write for him.
However, I've never written a letter to anyone and I am not sure how to structure it. I've written a first draft, but I don't like it. Specifically:

It feels like I am just listing anecdotes. Is this right or should I try to craft an overall narrative? What would such a narrative even look like?

It feels like I'm spending time on my accomplishments. I'm trying to say something like "he helped me by doing X which resulted in me achieving Y." I want to focus on the X, but I feel like by even mentioning the Y I am taking away from X, but also I feel like mentioning Y helps validate X. For example if I said something like "Because of his help with ABCD, I have admitted into several top Ph.D. programs", does this make the letter stronger or does it just sound like I am bragging about myself?

More generally, what do these types of award committees look for? I want to make sure I emphasize the correct things in my letter.

It feels like I am just listing anecdotes. Is this alright or should I try to craft an overall narrative. What would such a narrative even look like?

The overall narrative I've seen a lot is to frame it chronologically, recounting how your mentor's support furthered your development into a young researcher. This gives your letter a natural story arc that's easy to follow.

It feels I'm spending time on my accomplishments. I'm trying to say something like "he helped me by doing X which resulted in me achieving Y."

I've noticed that you use the word "help" a lot. It would read better if you can name specific things your mentor did. Did they teach you new skills? Give you good advice? Point out opportunities to you? If your university has some document on the duties or role of a mentor, read it and see what applies to your situation. If it doesn't, the internet may provide. You want to link the actions of your mentor to positive outcomes for you, while framing them more as guidance (instead of collaborative helping).

More generally, what do these types of award committees look for? I want to make sure I emphasize the correct things in my letter.

Firstly, try to find the award description- selection criteria can vary! Academia (and different cultures) vary a lot in what is expected from mentoring. The one such committee I was on wanted mentors who'd gone "above and beyond", holistically interpreted (i.e. we included pastoral care, which is not necessarily the norm).
Secondly, I presume you still have an academic supervisor, correct? If you're on friendly terms with them (or another member of academic staff), you could mention that you're nominating your grad student supervisor for the award, and ask if they have any pointers for you.

I like the chronological idea, but to that I would add that the first paragraph and the last paragraph should both be summaries of why the mentor deserves the award (and the award criterion matter a lot to these).

To add a bit to the answer of coffee_into_plots I'd suggest two things.
First, if possible, mention anything that the mentor has done that seems beyond the actual requirements of their job in relation to your learning.
Second, if possible, mention how the actions/tutoring/etc. of the mentor have increased your insight into your field as well as providing you a role model that you would like to follow.


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Can a husband be a corresponding author in a wife's research publication during her Ph.D.?
I recently observed that a faculty (husband) was a corresponding author in all the publications of his wife (first author) while she was doing her Ph.D. in the same department. Although the wife had a different advisor and her husband (a professor) was not on her Ph.D. committee, all the papers she published had her husband as the corresponding author. While talking to her it is apparent she has very little idea about her research and publications.
Would this be considered a conflict of interest? If so, are there any rules governing this type of research misconduct?

Note that "corresponding author" means different things in different fields.  In some, it literally just indicates which author is handling correspondence with the editors and readers, and connotes no kind of prestige or relative effort in the project.  If so then it might make sense for the more senior author to take on this role (more experience with the publication process, more stable contact info, etc).

Specifically for correspondence purposes, it can also make sense for the corresponding author to be whoever is in the most stable job, since their contact info is less likely to change soon after the paper is out. Presumably the author who is a faculty member isn't likely to change their professional email address etc., whereas the PhD student might once they graduate.

As Ethan Bolker points out, the title of this question does not appear in good faith. Rather you seem to be making a separate accusation that has little to do with the question title.

Corresponding author or coauthor? These are two different things. But I haven’t seen non-author being corresponding author. It may be unethical to have someone who is not actively involved in research as coauthor. But corresponding author—I am not sure.

I see no evidence of research misconduct in the question, but I see evidence of judgmental behavior by its author.

Or maybe she understood your malintent and was less inclined to speak with you about her research.

If you have strong evidence that there is unethical authorship, report it as soon as possible. Too many people have been getting away with this, and have been enabled by those who refuse to admit that it's happening on a significant scale.

Is (wife,husband) actually relevant? For instance it seems the same potential ethical question would arise for (husband,wife) or any two people with some kind of extra-professional relationship.

In my view, the way this post is written/phrased has sexist undertones and should be revised.

If you genuinely think ''gift authorship'' is happening, please report it.   We all know this is happening and it is absolutely unethical, we can stop this.  I had to put a co-author on one of my papers even though they did not contribute significantly and it still bothers me to this day, as it was a good paper and they contributed nothing.

Yes, a person can be a corresponding author in their spouse's research, even in all of their publications. Whether this occurs during the spouse's PhD studies or not is irrelevant. Who the spouse's advisor is or who is or is not on their Ph.D. committee also has no bearing on anything.
On the other hand, people who have not contributed to a paper at a sufficient level to merit co-authorship should not be authors. Your description of the situation is entirely consistent with a normal situation where the wife is a junior researcher and the husband is a senior researcher. It is certainly a possibility that the wife could have been gifted authorship of those papers by her husband without meriting it, but you provide no compelling evidence for this.

OP said "While talking to her it is apparent she has very little idea about her research and publications"

That could also simply mean they are junior researcher working on a particular aspect of the paper. We really don't know what kind of standard the OP is applying to her when they say this.

@toby544 I’ve met a striking number of PhD students to whom such a description would apply. A specific marital or supervision status isn’t necessary for this.

There can also be a sharp difference between how well a person actually understood  something when they wrote it, and how well they are able to convey this in conversation.  Especially when, as seems to be true in this case, many years have elapsed in between.  The researcher may have switched to other topics, and may not have thought about this one for a long time.

@toby544 We have no evidence that the OP possesses sufficient expertise in the topics of these research papers to have an accurate judgment of the author's knowledge.

Interesting. I don't think I have ever met anyone who was doing a PhD, or had done a PhD, who would ever be described by someone else as having "very little idea about their research." But it sounds like they do exist.

@toby544 When I started mentally categorising professors as having "very little idea about their research", I stopped trusting my ability to judge such things from conversation.

@NateEldredge Well said. I used to publish technical articles about SQL Server. I found myself often referring back to my own articles like notes because I had forgotten how to do something after a while of not needing to do it.

The last sentence of the first paragraph suggests that you are really asklng about whether the wife's academic record is fraudulent. That question has nothing to do with the title you provide or the circumstances you outline. I don't think you have enough information to ask that question, let alone answer it.

No, this is not unethical. People get to choose who their coauthors are, and not surprisingly people tend to cooperate with people they like. It is not uncommon for spouses who work in the same discipline to cooperate on projects, nor is that inherently problematic.

Your answer, and the preceding answer, appear to agree with one another in substance, yet you being with "No" and the other answer begins with "Yes" ... clearly because the OP actually asks the same question in two contrary ways (!!)... one in the title (answered by the previous question), one in the body. Your answer would be clearer if, for you said, "No, this is not unethical"

I just would like to point out that I don't quite agree with"People get to choose who their coauthors are": co-author is, or can be, who substantially contributed to the work; the distinction to acknowledgements is always difficult. But just putting someone on a paper "because I like them" or refusing to put, because you don't like them" is unethical and possibly problematic.

@Mayou36 It's clear (to me) that by cooperate on, the answer means substantially contribute together.

@jpaugh my comment (too late to edit) was meant for CrimsonDark, not for the answer. My bad!

Without a timeline of their relationship, which you didn't provide, there's no way to say whether or not there was a conflict of interest or not, so I won't bother to opine on that.
But yes, when there is a romantic relationship between two people, when those people work together there is always a potential for a conflict of interest.
However, a "potential conflict" is not necessarily "a conflict".
When there is a potential conflict, many universities require a reporting of that potential conflict up the chain of command.  After that, a usual action is to put some sort of conflict resolution plan in writing, and then to abide by it.  The plan can range incredibly, from simply notifying all that are involved in an impacted project that there is a potential for conflict of interests, all the way to external data monitors, depending on the nature of the conflict and the work in question.
Sunlight cures many ills.


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Effect of Master's grades on PhD application to top unis in Europe
I am a master's student in stem cell biology at one of the TUs in Germany. It's been one year of my program and my current grade average is 2.2 GPA almost equivalent to 75-80%. The thing is I am planning to apply to very competitive universities for PhD, such as ETH Zürich, TUM, etc. I am doing my best to gain more experience in the field I plan to work in my Ph.D. and even have good grades (1.0) (96-100%) in the subjects I like and want to pursue further. I want to know how much the grades matter overall for such competitive places. If I have enough motivation and experience in the field would it help to overlook the grade? What should I expect in terms of response from PIs in those universities?

Does this answer your question? Will one 'C' grade due to health issues ruin my chances of admission into a top grad school?

@user438383 OP asked specifically about Europe, which has a different culture in this respect than, say, the US. For example, recommendation letters may play a much smaller role.

Also relevant https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38237/how-are-ph-d-applications-evaluated-in-the-us-particularly-for-weak-or-borderl

and https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/176908/how-does-the-admissions-process-work-for-ph-d-programs-in-country-x

Applying the concept of "top universities" across different European countries is rather misleading, as the following sentence nicely demonstrates: "apply to very competitive universities for PhD, such as [...] TUM". That's not how things work in Germany; to do a PhD at TU Munich you need to find an advisor there and you need to find funding. For both points it's mostly irrelevant how "competitive" (whatever this means) the university is. It completely depends on the individual professor there with whom you'd like to do your PhD.

But admittedly, the marketing team of TU Munich did a great job in making it appear as if they had some kind of "graduate program" to which you have to "apply", similarly to how things work in, say, the US. But when reading the details one sees that there is no "application" process to become a PhD student at all, but that things work the same way as everywhere in Germany. (But this kind of marketing stunt seems to be a specialty of TU Munich; they do something similar for their Bachelor's degree in math.)

I think that from an european perspective it is quite unimpressive (and even counter-productive) to focus so much on the unis being "top" unis.
To be considered for a PhD you have to show determination (like having good grades in the relevant subjects), to show capabilities (like having good grades in the fundamental subjects) and to know your inner motivations for a PhD.
Universities are not a conveyor belt to success, not even the top unis.  Universities are just a toolbox to let you research what you want to research. Apply to the universities providing you good infrastructures and sufficient funds to travel to conference/workshops. Rankings and "perceived" top unis are just a picture of the past, focusing on them you may miss good opportunities from other universities that will be top unis in the 4 years of your PhD.
If you get into a PhD program by a "top uni" without an extremely strong personal motivation on the reasons that brought you there and how the top uni can contribute to your research, it is likely you will be psychologically squashed by all the bullshit and marketing crap coming from the pressure of the "top" status of the uni and nothing more.

Ignoring all ranking and marketing wishwash: As far as doctoral studies are concerned, working in a "top uni" in a specific field has tangible differences from an average university. This is mostly because the people you work and interact with during your PhD influence your approach to research and thus, your career perspectives.

@lighthousekeeper that is your opinion, my european opinion is that if you are good enough to work and interact with people relevant to your research while at a top uni, you are good enough to work and interact with people relevant to your future career at an average university (local companies, other experts in the field). Top universities have a huge advantage at later career stage, when you need funds to start your own research group and similar. At the phd level, succes is still mostly in the hand of the phd (and possibly  its background).


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Reusing material from thesis proposal in final thesis
I'm writing my final thesis and there's a lot of material I would like to reuse from my proposal -- introductions, motivations, etc. -- and it would be nice to just copy-paste (and update a bit) entire chapters from the proposal.
But then I started to wonder what the technical status of a proposal really is. It's not archived anywhere, it's not "published" in any traditional sense. Is it a sort of first draft of the final thesis? Is it possible/legal/acceptable to reuse portions of it in the final thesis? Or is that plagiarism?

I would not call using your own work as plagiarism. In fact, I don't see anything really wrong with this approach. Research paper proposals are really the same way, no? You describe a problem, why it's important, and how you want to solve it. A completed research paper says the same thing, but provides data and conclusions in relation to it.

In fact, it is impossible to define this as plagiarism if you wrote it yourself, considering that the definition of plagiarism is: the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

I fully expect my students to reuse large parts of their prospectus in their dissertation.  But there may be disciplinary rules. As always, check with your adviser so that you don't get accused of self-plagiarism.

@Compass There is absolutely a concept of "self-plagiarism." If a student of mine writes a paper, fails the module, and has to retake that subject, then submits work from the previous paper, it will fail for plagiarism (their new work would not be original work). However, I would think it completely acceptable to reuse material from the proposal (but not from your other, previous work).

Your advisor should be able to provide you with the guidance.
In general, it is not plagiarism, and you can reuse the material. As you pointed out the proposal is not published. It is a confidential document outlining what you intended to do and is to be shared only with your committee.

If anything, I would think that parts of the proposal should be included in a final document. 50% of my dissertation was copy pasted from my proposal.


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Resubmitting manuscript somewhere else after rejection: Should I change who I list as my preferred reviewers?
Suppose I submitted a manuscript to Journal A which allows me to provide a listing of preferred reviewers. Further, suppose that Journal A rejected my manuscript based on feedback from two reviewers (I do not know if these two reviewers were on my "preferred" list).
Now, I want to submit my manuscript to Journal B, and I do not anticipate making any major changes to the manuscript (I will address all the comments made by the Journal A reviewers, but I will not change the paper by more than 10%).
My questions:
Should I suggest completely different preferred reviewers? Will suggesting the same reviewers again decrease the chances of having the article accepted?

It feels like you're thinking out loud and looking for some validation.  Feel free to edit your question, though, to bring into better focus something that you'd like someone to provide some information about.

Presumably you picked the suggested reviewers because they are experts in the field. That hasn't changed... and resubmitting the same paper elsewhere, without addressing the points raised by the reviewers, is just shopping around for somebody to publish you.

@vonbrand I will address all the comments made by the reviewers but I will not change the paper by more than 10%.

What did the reviewers say about your paper?  If they said it was good but not appropriate for Journal A, then there is no reason to try to avoid having the same reviewers.

Unpacking your question a bit, I think that the key issue that you are worrying about is whether one or two of your preferred reviewers a) got your paper rejected, and b) might do it the second time around.
Now, if you were not going to substantively improve your paper, just submit again and hope the randomness comes up in your favor, I think that would be a serious worry. There are other questions on this site where people talk about the frustration of getting the same crappy paper twice, and you really don't want to be that crappy paper.
If you're addressing all of the key issues that caused the first decision, however, then I think that you are unlikely to need to worry.  Let's break this down by the different cases that could occur:

At least one the journals might use none of your preferred reviewers: This sometimes happens, for a number of different reasons (e.g., the journal has particularly strict COI rules, or none of them might be available).  In this case, your concern is moot.
The journals select different preferred reviewers: Journals generally want most of your reviewers to be non-preferred, to reduce the impact of bias and groupthink, so if you supplied several names, there's a good chance that the journals will pick differently from them, and again, your concern is moot.
Your preferred reviewers like the paper: Presumably you chose your preferred reviewers because they are likely to view the problem in a similar way to yourself, and so if you got some good reviews and some bad reviews, there's a good chance that your preferred reviewers gave a good review once, and will do so again.
Your preferred reviewers rejected you the first time, but find your improved manuscript much better: If you successfully addressed reviewer criticisms, then getting the same reviewer is likely to help you.  This is because every reviewer is likely to have a different perspective, which may lead to focusing on a different set of concerns and issues.  Thus, you may actually do better being reviewed by somebody who previously rejected your paper, but whose issues you have addressed, than by an new person who may reject the paper for their own entirely unrelated reasons.
Your preferred reviewers still hate the paper:  Maybe they are prejudiced, maybe their issues simply cannot be reasonable addressed, or (more likely) you just didn't do as good a job as you thought in addressing their issues.  This is the only real failure case amongst the scenarios.

On balance, then, I would recommend first thinking carefully whether any of your preferred reviewers might actually have a previously unexpected reason to be prejudiced against your paper.  If so, exclude that person from the set.  Otherwise, just pick the best preferred reviewers, and if they're the same as before, they're the same as before: most likely the concern is moot in any case, and if you've actually done real solid improvements in the paper that address the former issues, then even if you get one of the same reviewers again, it seems to me that it will be more likely to help than to hurt your paper's chances.


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How long should I wait for an IEEE conference proceeding?
I have an accepted paper in TrustCom 2014. The conference was held several months ago. However I could not find any information regarding the proceedings. They do not answer email. Is it normal? In general, how long after a conference are proceedings published?

I've specialized this to refer to IEEE, because this will vary wildly by discipline and society, but IEEE is a large and frequent category.  If you object, please feel free to revert.

For IEEE Conferences, the length of time depends on a few factors.
1) When are the final proceedings sent from the conference organizers to the IEEE indexing
2) How long it takes for IEEE to look through the submitted work
3) How long it takes for the conference organizers to respond to any IEEE issues or questions about the proceedings
You can get a relative idea of the length of time and status of your proceedings from this excel file provided by IEEE: https://www.ieee.org/documents/2005_present_list_of_titles.xls
As you can see, the length of time before someone submits their proceedings changes, and some have taken over 1 year, as in, the next year conference has happened before the previous one has been submitted.  The reason for this is that each year most conferences have a different set of chairs and organizers, so it largely depends on them.

For IEEE conferences (such as this one), there is a relatively standard procedure:

You should have gotten your own copy of the proceedings at the conference itself: typically with IEEE conferences these days this will be on a USB drive.  By the standard IEEE copyright policy, you can feel free to post your preprint on your website.
The full proceedings typically appears in IEEE Xplore a few months later, but there is a lot of noise and randomness in this timing.  IEEE is very good at maintaining communication and schedule before the conference to ensure the proceedings are ready for distribution at the conference, but are much more lax in following through after the conference has completed.


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Publishing vs. putting work online under a free license
Suppose a work (a book with abstract math research) is presented as LaTeX source under a copyleft license available at a public Git hosting service.
Will scientists be reluctant to cite such a work, because it was not published "officially"?
Having asked this question, I mention that in my opinion that publishing under copyleft in a Git repository is a better means to hunt errors than traditional peer review, because everybody can track and patch errors in the book. But will this real security convert to enough sense of security of academic community?

It's might be viable to do that as long as you're a known entity and can publicize it through connections. But if you aren't already well known in the research community, then it will probably just go unnoticed and/or ignored.

GitHub and it's likes would be more appropriate for Code Share. For your case why don't you take a look at Creative Commons and their work it may answer your concern. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12824

Academicians do not have time to review all papers - so even if in principle they can make corrections, it's unlikely that you will get too man Pull Requests. For sake of "making things public" an open license is great. But if you just put it there it's unlikely that they will even notice it.

GitHub is viable for mathematical publications. The stacks project https://github.com/stacks/stacks-project/ is hosted there and is well regarded in academia even though it is far from being complete. Of couse, Roger Fan is right in claiming that it is going to go unnoticed and/or ignored if its author is not well-connected -- which is exactly what happens with actual professionally published books these days.

There are two separate questions tangled together here.  The first is whether scientists will cite something that has not gone through a traditional peer review process, and the second is whether a copyleft / open source repository project is a good way to manage such a non-traditional publication.
To the first, the answer is most certainly yes.  Many non-peer-reviewed publications are not just cited, but highly cited, particularly technical reports and standards.  These do not undergo peer review, but if they are useful to people, they will cite them---sometimes thousands of times.
For the second, well, consider the fate of most free and open projects, whether on GitHub or elsewhere.  Almost every project of this type dies quietly in the dark, because nobody notices or cares about it.  Some, of course, succeed, and a few have massive impact.  The question is: why should anybody care about your project?  If they do, then copylefting in a git repository is no better or worse a way to manage the document than any other way that communities manage non-peer-reviewed documents (though make sure you do it with a CC license, not a code license).  If they don't then the technological or ideological elegance of your approach will make no difference.
The bottom line is: you are focusing on the technology, rather than the community.  You need to understand how your work will interact with your community, and then the technology is a secondary issue that will follow from that interaction.

In the old days, cranks would pay vanity presses to have their work published, then donate the books to university libraries, hoping they would end up on a few shelves.  Nowadays, they just put their work on line.  Simple.
One suspects that (in most cases) work is placed in non-traditional places because it is not good enough to be published in the traditional places.  I guess there are a few non-cranks who do this, but they are vastly outnumbered by the cranks.

Scientists typically only cite works that have been evaluated by experts, although reviews are not an error-free guarantee of truthiness. A good way to catch errors is to temporarily post a preliminary version, and then revise for reviewed-publication in light of comments that you get. Add the possibility that anyone could modify the work -- effectively making the book a Wiki-type publication -- then there would be even less trust in the work, if any random drive-by web-surfer is given permission to modify the book.

You say "any random drive-by web-surfer is given permission to modify the book". It is not quite true. Using Git version control system, everybody is able to make a copy of my book and modify his copy, but he wouldn't be able to modify my "main" version without my agreement to accept his changes.