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Would it be ethical for a computer science PhD student to hire an assistant (programmer)?
I was wondering if it would be ethical for a PhD student in the field of Computer Science to hire a programmer in an specific domain; so that he could focus more on the algorithmic or mathematical part of the thesis. Would that be something ethical to do? Should the PhD student include this assistant as a co-author in the articles?

Your second question is answered in When does a paid research assistant become a co-author?

Related: Is it ethically questionable for me (an undergraduate) to hire “research assistants”?

Ethics aside, it is a bit abnormal.  Usually in academia this sort of situation is solved via collaboration.  I would strongly recommend that you seek out another academic to collaborate with rather than hiring out the work - it'll save you having to spend the money and you get the bonus of a networking opportunity.  Double points, in fact, since you will be the originator of the project and bringing this opportunity to others - academia is full of talented people just waiting for someone to throw them a fresh problem.

As a programmer, I feel this is related to https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370. If you're concerned that your code will be horrible but you'll want to release it anyway, then hiring someone who can make it be non-horrible might be a sensible investment. A matter of how much it's worth to you to have non-horrible code vs code you wrote yourself. Given that the top-rated answer in effect says "your horrible code is fine, there's no major benefit to it being not-horrible", maybe it shouldn't be worth much :-)

I don't think it is inherently unethical to do this.  If all relevant parties know about it and you scrupulously acknowledge this other person's work, then I see no specific problem.
Whether it is advisable is a different question...and one you should certainly ask your advisor.  I have to say that it does not sound like such a good idea to me.  Your thesis work is for you to do...almost by definition.  It is perfectly fine to get help from others on your thesis, and some people are better programmers than others (even in CS, I imagine), so getting some pointers from a friend is actually a good idea.  But paying someone to do a part of your thesis work just doesn't sound good to me.  Either the programming is an important part of your thesis or it isn't.  If it is, you should do it yourself.  If it isn't, maybe you don't need to do it at all, or don't need to do it to the degree that an outside professional would.
There is also the issue of the impression this subcontracting would make on others.  Perhaps the cultural norms in your field are very different from mine (again: ask your advisor), but I would have a rather negative impression of a PhD student who did this: they don't seem to be very committed to their own work.
Added: To be clear, I am interpreting the question as meaning that the doctoral student himself is doing the hiring: i.e., that this is his idea and he is using his own funds.  (If his university is giving him funding and simply asking him to pick someone to work with, then even asking the question "Is it ethical?" becomes less plausible.)
In terms of suspecting that this is not a good idea, I hope I was clear that this is my personal opinion, with experience from a field (mathematics) which is rather closely related to CS but is not necessarily identical.  As I said, the OP should consult their advisor about this.  However, for what it's worth I find it hard to believe that the reaction will be "Sure, spend your money."  While not unethical on the OP's part, it seems, shall we say, suboptimal if both advisor and student feel that this is the best way to proceed.

Research assistants are very common. In some things, they are a necessity. And, having suffered horrible research code, I wish more people had hired professional developers to do at least, part of their design.

@Davidmh: If the department or university wants to hire research assistants for a project (presumably one that has scope beyond that of the OP's thesis work, but maybe some PhD students have their very own paid assistants), that would be fine.  The OP spending their own money hiring some outsider is a different matter.  My main advice was to ask her advisor, but I find it hard to believe that the advisor's response will be "Sure, spend your own money on this project".

@PeteL.Clark I agree doing it out of the OP's own money is a very bad idea. But I wanted to point out that doing all the work oneself is not always possible or necessarily advisable.

@Davidmh I think that one should not do everything oneself is pretty much universally accepted. I think the main question here is whether it is a good idea to outsource part of your (!) PhD work to a contractor.

@AAA, I don't think academia is in the dark about how difficult coding is. Thing is, if something is hard, a professional can charge a lot of money to do it. Grad students, on the other hand, are cheap.

Maybe this should be its own question but: Pete, I'd been thinking that one of my grad students and I might supervise an REU/UROP to automate a bunch of algebraic geometry computations; she is currently doing them by hand. It's nontrivial that these computations are finite at all -- that's her first result. She has also already shown me interesting patterns in the hand computed data, where more data would be helpful. I thought that having supervised an REU rather than done the coding would only look good for her on the job market. Do you think a significant number of schools would disagree?

@David: I don't really have strong feelings about this either way.  I suppose that without specific evidence to the contrary, I tend to think that those who supervise REUs are "really behind" what comes of out of the REUs.  So if your student supervised an REU and your letter documented her contributions to the project, then it sounds good to me.

Sure, but I doubt you can afford it.
Let's see what the options are:

You can hire an undergrad part-time to write some of your code, but chances are that you'll spend more time digging up their bugs and teaching them it would take to write the code yourself. Probably not worth it.1
Or you could get a real programmer, but a good professional programmer is going to cost much more than a Ph.D. student makes, and probably even more than they cost (In the US the university takes a huge cut for each grad student in a grant, roughly equal to the student's stipend). Probably not worth it unless you are independently rich.
Making matters worse, even a professional software engineer isn't able to read your mind. Their job is to take extremely large systems with many moving parts and make them managable. As a computer science Ph.D. you're probably focusing more heavily on one particular componnet, which you're going to have to understand well enough to write the code yourself.

In either case it doesn't sound like a very good deal for you.

1Note that this only apply if your end goal is simply to avoid coding yourself. On the other hand, advising and supervising are extremely valuable skills and as an academic your job isn't just to do your work but to support the field as a whole. By taking on undergraduates you're potentially doing more for the field than you could ever do by hiring a professional, and future employers will take note. Furthermore, if you treat them as researchers in their own right they might have some valuable insights, but your question was specific to hiring them just to write code.

+1 for mentioning the cost issue. An industry level programmer (even at a beginner stage) makes considerably more money than a PhD student. However, if the programmer is being paid using by the institution or by the adviser's grant, then it might not be such a problem.

As a developer, I can confirm we make more than PHD students.

@AbbasJavanJafari, it is true that a grant could include a programmer's salary. In practice I haven't seen it much, probably because (outside the case of a huge research group) the funding agency is going to wonder why they should pay twice a grad student's salary to improve the efficiency of a grad student by 50%. They'd see more results by hiring two more grad students. Also a lot of the grant is supposedly paying for "education", not professional software.

@Shep, I agree, It is highly unlikely, unless it is a big industry related project and programming plays a major part. Otherwise, it is extremely hard to convince others to pay you to hire additional help when they are paying you to to the job and if you can't do it then maybe they should find someone else entirely.

@itcouldevenbeaboat: As a former PhD student, I can oh-so-painfully confirm we make less than software developers! Woe is us etc...

Some undergrads are better than a lot of real programmers.

I must say it's an honor to be downvoted by @PeterShor. I would agree that I was a bit dismissive of undergraduates, but I've never seen a lot of success when researchers treat them as tools to "just write the code". As researchers in their own right, I would agree with you.

I am going to outline why I think it is ethical and contrast this with the case described in the question Is it ethically questionable for me (an undergraduate) to hire “research assistants”?. Also, I am answering with a perspective from Germany.
tl;dr: Yes, it is ethical and it is routinely done.
The question linked above explicitly asks a similar question from the point of view of an undergrad. At that stage of education, as is also pointed out in RoboKaren's answer there, certain restrictions (might usually) apply (and in many cases, keep applying up to a Master's degree):

It is expected that the student works on their own.
The tasks are reasonably "low-level" in a way that it is realistic and expected that everything is done by one person.
The tasks are likely to aim at demonstrating skills with a lesser emphasis on producing a real product. (That doesn't mean that, e.g., Bachelor theses cannot yield an impressive small software. But in general, what is created is a prototype rather than a marketable full-fledged product.)

Once entering doctoral candidacy, however, some changes occur:

There is not necessarily a requirement that the doctoral candidate does everything on their own. (Please check the rules specific to your university to see whether this applies to you.) The doctoral candidate is supposed to choose the direction and make decisions on higher and lower levels, but that does not mean that they have to write every line of code themselves after the conceptual idea has been documented, or that they have to personally accompany all 50+ participants of a user study.
Related to that, the tasks are sufficiently large that they can be distributed to several people. If the research is funded by a third party, it is often the case that more than one person is funded by that project, so quite some work is done in collaboration.
While the software produced during doctoral candidacy is often still in a very ... say ... unfinished state, it is indeed expected that real research results are being produced. That means (related to the aforementioned user study example) that it is not sufficient that the doctoral candidate demonstrates once that they can conduct a user study by observing five participants, but actual user studies with several dozens of participants, and more than one such study, have to be done. There is no point in "torturing" any single person by having them ask the same questions 50 times, when the same can be achieved by distributing the workload to several persons.

Therefore, as long as the doctoral candidate is "in charge" of the conceptual development of the research and its results, it is completely acceptable to outsource some subtasks. One more point is that the doctoral candidate is supposed to acquire some first practical experience at hiring and leading a team of people.
With that said, I get back to my above statement that it is routinely done, in order to provide some exemplary real-world scenarios. I can think of both paid and unpaid variants of this:

In some places, doctoral candidates can often employ one or more student research assistants (usually Bachelor/Master students), for example, for support in coding. Note that these students are not paid personally by the doctoral candidates, but that their funding is provided by the same sources as the funding of the doctoral candidates themselves. Hence, they are not only allowed, but explicitly meant to work on the same projects as the doctoral candidates. (Still, these student research assistants are "hired" by the doctoral candidate. The doctoral candidate will have the idea that some tasks could be delegated, they devise and publish the job offer, they check applicants in interviews and pick the most suitable one, and they decide about what those student research assistants get to do. The only time the student research assistants normally get in touch with anyone beside the doctoral candidate who hired them is for signing their contract, which happens at some HR department of the university.)
Moreover, when doctoral candidates supervise a Bachelor's or a Master's thesis, they often define the topic and requirements in a way so the results from that thesis provide some input to their own doctoral thesis. Like this, it is also a form of outsourcing some of the work that eventually contributes to the doctoral research.

EDIT: Lastly, I would like to add a more concrete hypothetical example to illustrate what kinds of tasks might be performed by such a "supporting programmer":
Imagine a doctoral candidate who does research in the area of HCI to develop some new GUI elements. The creative research part of the work consists in learning about related work, developing a new concept for a GUI control, and drawing some sketches of it on a sheet of paper, as well as designing/choosing some test tasks to validate the hypotheses underlying the design.
Before this can be converted into a publication, much more work has to be done, though. An interactive prototype has to be programmed, based on the sketched design. It will have to be made to look somewhat fancy (3D/glossy look, animations, etc., whatever fanciness contemporary software GUIs usually feature), as otherwise, study participants tend to be extremely distracted by a directly visible lack of fanciness and unable to see through to the actual novelties of the GUI concept being tested, thus totally distorting results in the qualitative part of any study. Then, to ensure tasks cannot be criticized as unrealistic, some real, or at least real-looking, data has to be integrated into the prototype. That usually means adding code to load (and possibly import/convert) one or more existing datasets. If user behaviour is to be recorded and/or timed, the prototype needs to be prepared for that, as well, by writing certain interactions into a database etc.
The whole last paragraph does not contain a single "scientifically creative" piece of research, this is just straightforward work that has to be done, and it typically takes a few weeks to get right. Toward the end of the paragraph, we're even way out of the actual research domain of HCI and deep in low-level things such as I/O and database access. All of that latter paragraph is perfectly suitable for outsourcing, and a doctoral candidate will not automatically be expected to have done all of this by their own hands.
EDIT2: Another note, as various of the other answers refer to code quality: It is true that in the case of hiring students as described above, the quality of the produced code might be less than what would be provided by a professional programmer (typically not available in the settings I have described in this answer). However

capable students learn quickly (in particular when they are given actual tasks, not practice tasks)
even though the produced software is supposed to be somewhat stable, it will usually still be a "prototype" for a limited amount of uses and thus does not have the same expectations for maintainability or security as production-level code
doctoral candidates are free to choose and reject suitable and unsuitable applicants to their student research assistant job, respectively (and it's totally fine to hire someone for only a month first to check out how they perform)
as university staff, the doctoral candidate also has a partial responsibility to give less skilled students a chance to improve, and thus should expect that not every student supervised or hired is the greatest genius around; this comes back to gathering experience in leading a team, as that will often mean a combination of diverging skill levels during the later work life of the doctoral candidate, as well.

"Note that these students are not paid personally by the doctoral candidates, but that their funding is provided by the same sources as the funding of the doctoral candidates themselves. Hence, they are not only allowed, but explicitly meant to work on the same projects as the doctoral candidates." This is an important point: I took the OP's question to mean that the candidate is paying for the programming out of his own pocket.  This does not seem like a good idea to me.  If the institution itself is paying for an assistant, that's something else entirely.

The question asked by the undergrad is about hiring an assistant to pursue "outside" research interests, not thesis research or research that is "officially" part of his/her education. So it's very different in that sense.

In fact, I would go so far as saying that "Do not spend your own money on your academic research" is a good general rule of thumb.

@PeteL.Clark: Buying books to form a reference library is a major exception to that.

@aeismail: I agree (more than most: I have lots of books).

@PeteL.Clark: Actually, I don't see any difference between (1) personally paying for that programmer or (2) using a programmer hired by the university concerning the ethics. To me, the difference between these is that (2) happens very commonly, while (1) is hardly ever feasible financially for the doctoral candidate. With (2), it is still entirely the doctoral candidate who posts the job offer, who picks the programmer, and who assigns tasks to the programmer. Your answer sounds more like you generally oppose the concept of outsourcing any work related to the doctoral thesis. I have added ...

... a concrete example of a hypothetical research project where such outsourcing would be appropriate in my opinion (or, particularly, some CS research that crucially relies on some programming, which hence needs to be done, while at the same time obviously not being part of the "creative scientific contribution" that should be the doctoral candidate's own doing).

@ff524: You're right; I may have been distracted by the first paragraph in RoboKaren's answer to that question, which implies thesis research or similar.

@O.R. Mapper: I don't think it makes an ethical difference on the OP's part: as I said, I don't find the practice unethical.  However, the more I think about it, the more I worry that it may be, if not unethical, then certainly not a best practice, for the university to cheerfully watch students spend their own money on their thesis research.  In particular, in your concrete example the university doesn't sound very supportive of the candidate if they expect this to be paid for out of pocket.

@PeteL.Clark: That is certainly true (and to be clear, I have never encountered a case where a doctoral candidate would have paid such an assistant programmer themselves; at the same time, I have hardly ever met any doctoral candidates over here who did not at one point or another hire a student research assistant via the university). I agree that concerning the payment, the university could be judged ethically differently; the situation for the doctoral candidate and the programmer would be entirely the same, save for minor formal differences (who signs the contract, who transfers the money).

@O.R.Mapper: The ethical issues arise if the research assistant tries to hide the fact that he or she is not doing the work, and passes the "subcontracted" work as his or her own. In principle, paying the student with university funds should make this much harder.

+1. I like this answer for the example GUI research project. As an undergrad doing independent software development, I would get things done a lot faster if I had even one more person working on my current project. Tasks such as database construction/management, REST API construction, client-side GUI design and controller functions for server and client are all my responsibility. In reality, these tasks could be distributed. I'm sure that in many kinds of research, specific aspects of the programming can be assigned to another individual without much need for domain-specific knowledge.

I recommend that you consider your career goals. If you intend to enter a career as a software developer, then I would argue that it may be ethical with credits given but is not a good practice.
I have been a hiring manager and instructor in software development for the last two decades, and one constant that I have encountered is that the more educated software developers are, the worse their code is.
They can solve complex problems in code but their code is generally not maintainable. This is something that I have had zero success correcting.  This has become such a problem that resumes for software developers with a PhD or double-masters go to the bottom of the resume stack, under candidates with no degrees.

The Workplace has a question about this that can elaborate on the topic.

I will disagree with the other answers almost completely. If you are in a CS PHD (unless you are in strictly Theoretical Computer Science) and you cannot even code your own algorithms during the PHD,  then you are in the wrong business. It is perfectly OK to collaborate (not pay) with other people on writing / sharing the code but putting someone else to code for you (because you cannot do it) is silly to borderline dangerous. You cannot separate the algorithm from the code (unless again you are in strictly Theoretical Computer Science) and how the algorithm performs (on an actual experiment) is in direct correlation  with the algorithm's implementation.
How are you going to check if your hired programmer did a correct implementation? You cannot, unless you go exhaustively through his code, which actually might take you longer than implementing your version of the algorithm. But even then, you will never be quite sure. What you are going to do when you think of a new minor optimization? Write him an email, wait for him to implement it and get the answer 2 days later? Good luck finishing your paper in the next 3 years for such a workflow. But even if you manage to finish it, there will always be that 1% chance that something went wrong in his implementation and all your hypotheses will go up in smoke, when someone else implements your algorithm on his own and proves you wrong. What will you do then? Blame it on him? How will you be able to answer the questions about your work that someone else did for you? And say you manage to finish the first paper with the hired help and then he goes to another job. What are you going to do on your next paper? Hire someone else to maintain and expand the previous programmer's code?
Also as a PHD or a postdoc you may be put in charge (as a technical manager) of a research program close to your expertise that might be of significantly larger scale than a research paper. How you will tell your peers or more junior colleagues what to do, if you always rely on someone else to code for you. How can you separate what is doable or not within the project's timeframe if you never implemented not even your algorithms yourself.
When you become more senior (postdoc and beyond) others might actually write more code than you on your co-authored papers. But even then, you must be able to check their code for mistakes, inconsistencies and must be able to predict how the code / algorithm will perform on selected test-cases (unless again you are in strictly Theoretical Computer Science). This is not something you learn by pseudocode, high-level abstraction or shortcuts but it is something you learn by paying your dues by hours of debugging, coding and failed experiments. You cannot get a PHD in Math by letting someone else do the proofs for you. Why you assume CS is any different?

This answer mixes the PhD student's ability to do something up with whether they ethically should/have to this something themselves which are IMHO very different issues. OTOH it is true that outsourcing does not reduce the work to zero for the PhD student, and may result in a net negative gain. (±0)

I wonder where you take the premise "cannot even code your own algorithms" from. By the same logic, you would have to conclude that every software developer who has progressed in their career to become a team leader or something higher is incapable of coding because they outsource a part of their coding tasks to other developers.

@O.R.Mapper. Why not every PHD student hire his own programmer, according to OP's idea? So, in a lab with 5 PHD students, we can have an additional 5 "personal programmers". Of course those programmers should attend meetings with the supervisors since they do all the coding anyway and be co-authors at the related papers at the same time. So that the PHD students can think about algorithms for a month and sit idle for the next six months required for the implementation of the algorithms. Sounds reasonable to you?

@Alexandros: As I have pointed out in my answer, it is absolutely normal in some places that more or less all doctoral candidates hire one or more students for support, e.g. in programming. They do not attend meetings with supervisors because supervisors do not care or talk about programming, hence those meetings are not related to programming. It's the doctoral candidates' task to appropriately instruct those supporting students how to do those low-level tasks, after having discussed the "big picture" on a higher level with their supervisors.

@Alexandros: "So that the PHD students can think about algorithms for a month and sit idle for the next six months" - that's simply not how things work. The hiring and outsourcing is done for the very reason that typically, doctoral candidates do not "sit idle" for even only one month and hence have no time for time-consuming, but ultimately straightforward work such as programming based on a clear specification.

@Alexandros: As a thought experiment, scale things up one or two more levels. Do you see any professors spend months on writing code, hunting down memory leaks and debugging, because otherwise they would be sitting idle for months without anything to do?

If most of the programming work could easily fit in a general library, you can support someone to do an open source library.
It is not an ethical issue to reuse open source software.
But make sure that this piece of software will be well documented and available to help other people that work in your domain.


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Documentation or evaluation instruments used for accreditation of CS programs under The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)?
I was wondering if there is a repository about the documentation or evaluation instruments that are used for accreditation of CS programs under The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)? I mean it could be real data or examples on how an accreditation process is made. I know that there is some material on the ABET website, but it is very general.
Any help?

In my experience (Aerospace Engineering), the documentation provided to ABET during the accreditation process was stored in large binders, copies of which ended up on bookshelves in various conference rooms around the department. If you are able to visit an accredited department, you might be able to see them in person there. The CS department at my university is/was not ABET accredited, though the ECE department is. I don't know how either of those department treats their accreditation materials, but the ASE department left them lying all over for anyone off the street to see (more or less).

Really??? We kept ours in a locked room. Definitely wouldn't give access to just anyone.

@ff524, it might only have been in the conference room just off the chair's office, in which case, it might as well have been locked. Nevertheless, I saw the binders frequently, and I was not stopped when I opened one and flipped through it (as a student). What's so secret?

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Should a letter of recommendation be customised for each university when applying for a masters program?
I've just graduated in Brazil and I plan to apply in some different Master courses in US. I plan to apply to different universities and I did not want to ask my professors to write many different letters.
Should the letter of recommendation be specific to the university I am applying to or  can I use a generic letter for all applications?

possible duplicate of Who should write a recommendation letter?

I am voting to put this on hold as too broad: please revise to ask only one question at a time.

I gave it an edit to focus on the main issue that may make the question unique in relation to other questions on the site. I'd ask the digital question separately.

Never hold your own recommendation letter (looks unethical), let your current lecturers send the recommendation letter to the universities directly (via email for example), that you applied for.
Most universities, ask for two recommendation letters, by asking the information of the lecturers (e.g., email, address, phone, etc.) who do that for you. So the recommendation letters will be sent by your lecturers (e.g., email, mail, online form, etc.) to the universities you applied for; without you seeing/holding the letter.

In many cases, recommendation letters can be submitted by your recommeder using a web site and don't need to be mailed.

But I shoul wait one year after graduation to start applications (for personal issues). So I was thinking of taking the letters with me without the need of asking my professors for a letter one year after finishing the course. Is it really a problem?

@FELIPE_RIBAS Doesn't matter. You ask them then. Holding Your own letters means you told them what to write and you do agree with their opinion about you; and obviously you read it first hand.

I see, even though do not fully agree since they were willing to write their own opinion about me and I would just take them with me. I will talk with them. If for some reason I still take the letter with me, will it be any useful at any place or probably no one will accept?

@FELIPE_RIBAS  A letter that does not come directly from your recommender is worthless.  You might as well just throw your application fee in the trash.  As Brian Borchers points out, most applications are now done online and your recommenders will need to upload the letter to the website directly.  You can let them know now that you'll be applying in a year; that they can at least take some notes now or draft the letter.  But that's the best you can do.

It general, as the departments you are applying to are similar, your recommendation writers will probably write a template letter that can be quickly modified to a particular university. They should be specific enough for each university, but the overall picture of you will be the same in each.
Usually these days, these letters are done via a secure email or webpage of sorts where they can ask privately questions of your recommenders. (Probable e-signed) In the rare cases, I've heard of doing it through the mail, in which cases, I would help your recommenders with envelopes, with stamps and addresses.

Well, I am a student who also had to get two letters of recommendation from professors when I was in my university (I'm on exchange right now), and I think I have learned the lesson very well: do not write a generic letter and simply ask your professors to sign them. They have more experience than you, and they could even have passed through the same situation that you are experiencing right now. So why would you ask them to shut their mouths while you write all the stuff you want? It does not make sense, because they may know more than you about how the admission process works, and also how some universities like those letters to be written.
Since you still have some time (and planning that now is a good idea), my advice is to ask them to write the letters for you, and then you both sign. It's more natural, honest, and ethical.

But that is what I was going to do but it seems to be a bad idea since I will be seeing the letter (according to the other answers here).

And what is the problem of you seeing the letter? If the professor is willing to recommend you, he or she is probably not saying anything bad about you or compromising your application, right?

That is what I thought so. I was willing to take those letters with me and apply all by myself in the near future using those letters but it's being said that is better that my professor direclty send it to the university I am applying to.

Well, that can be true. It would be better if your professor could submit this letter by him or herself using a website. But, is it feasible? What are the chances of having your letter lost into bureaucracy? "Oh cool one more letter among our 1000 received today..." I would like the folks of the first answer to clarify this problem for us.

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Is it possible to work full time in an industry position while on sabbatical?
The standard situation in US research universities is for the university to pay one semester of salary for a year of sabbatical leave, and faculty typically take this sabbatical at another university or research lab, where there is a clear sense of how to fund the sabbatical.
I'm interested to know whether anyone has experience on how to (ethically) fund an industry sabbatical.  Specifically:

Is it possible to work full time in an industry position?  If so, do you get half-pay?  Half-hours?
What (ethical) obligations do you have to ongoing grants (say from the National Science Foundation) during such a sabbatical year?
What (ethical) obligations do you have towards the university that is paying a semester of salary?

Every university has a policy for addressing these matters, and it is best that you obtain the specific policy from your own institution -- a general survey of what goes on at other places will likely not be informative to your present situation.  Federal funding sometimes can be used to cover the other part of your salary -- but, again, it depends on the funding source and the rules of your institution.

(-1) Of course every university has its own policies ... but there is a generally accepted standard, and a forteriori so for NSF grants.

@AriTrachtenberg  So, if I give you answers that relate specifically to my own university, how will you use that information?  Wouldn't it be easier just having this conversation with your own university so you are clear that you are in compliance with policy?

@AriTrachtenberg, if there are generally accepted standards, please provide them as an answer.

@BillBarth Do you have evidence that the standards vary significantly from university to university?

@AriTrachtenberg, no, but you have asserted that there are standards, so I was hoping that you could provide them as an answer. I don't think everyone here even knows what these standards are.

I would have expected Brian P's answer to be as correct as possible under the given information. If the OP believes it is not, he should provide factual information corroborating why he makes this judgement, otherwise the comment (and downvote!) is not helpful. What does the NSF see as standard and what does the OP's university see as standard and what question does this still leave open?


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When should an editor use reviewers recommended by authors of a submitted manuscript?
I am a newly appointed editor to a top journal. I have received my first manuscript assignment. I see in the journal system that the authors have provided preferences for reviewers for their paper.
I was wondering what is the norm like with respect to this. Do editors normally go by author's preference or do they ignore it? What factors should I take into account before considering author preference of reviewers?
On one hand this makes my task of searching appropriate reviewers easy but I suspect this might also give an unfair edge to the authors if the reviewers have some/any kind of bias.

As an editor you have a decision to make: is paper good or not. You may enlist help of whomever you want to that end. If you can get the kind of help you need from the people in the "suggested" list, by all means use them.

@BorisBukh Right, but since this is my first time, I wouldn't know ahead of time how helpful the author's preferred reviewers would be.

The way the preferred reviewers are used varies. Some go by these suggestions whole-heartedly while others do not. I lean towards the latter since my experience with some preferred names is less than favourable.
In my experience names listed can be good. I usually double check to see if persons seem affiliated in some way and if they do I avoid appointing them. As a rule, however, I try to find persons independently and based on my own experience. I tend to use the preferred names as back-ups unless my preference and the authors coincide.
The reason for my slight aversion towards the preferred is that some authors tend to list friends and other persons who are obviously close to the authors. I have seen many low quality reviews come out from such reviewers an clearly at a rate very different from independently chosen reviewers. Judging what is too close is not easy and sometimes it may be justified if, for example, the topic is such that local knowledge comes into play. For the reason of uncertainty I therefore try to at least mix them up so that one is chosen by me independently and the other is selected from the authors suggestions.
So, try to assess the quality of the preferred reviewers and at least try to find some to complement a preferred reviewer will be my advice.
It is also common that authors list non-preferred reviewers. I always stay clear of such reviewers since I do not know what lies beneath the sentiment.

I understand where you're coming from and I also would be leery of accepting the author's suggestions. However, as an author, I have often racked my brains to find suitable reviewers whom I don't know and who would be impartial. It's often a bit of a pita to do so. If the journal is just going to ignore my suggestions, wouldn't it be simpler all around if we were not asked to go to the trouble of suggesting them?

@terdon There's no problem with suggesting reviewers you know. Just make sure there's no conflict of interest such as joint projects, publications, or affiliations.

@silvado I don't mean "know" as in I see them in a conference every couple of years and say hi. I mean that I try to avoid friends and colleagues. People who might view the article favorably because it is mine. I have often worked in tiny fields where that is virtually impossible since we all know each other. My ethics make me avoid suggesting anyone who might be predisposed to give me special treatment. My point is that if the journals, understandably, avoid using my suggestions, it would make my life easier if they'd also stop asking for them.

So it seems the way to avoid reviewers in many cases is to list them?

I assume you're one new member of an established editorial board, with an Editor in Chief and other members of the board fully involved. Why not ask them what the convention is for this particular journal?

Yes, as a new editor you should really talk with the editor in chief and other editors.  If you have any uncertainty regarding duties or procedures, it's always better to ask than to find out afterwards that they think you handled something poorly.

Indeed. They assigned you because they value your knowledge in the area. But they will understand that as a junior colleague, you may lack experience, and will understand that you may need some mentoring.

@AnonymousMathematician I think since the journal allows authors to list their preferred reviewers, it should be within the rules to select one. I am wondering about whether this is the case in reality? I will certainly contact the editor-in-chief but thought I would get much broader views on the topic here.

@Ketan: There's certainly no harm in asking here too.  It's worth keeping in mind that journal web sites can offer weird options.  For example, some publishers use editorial management software that may offer authors options that just don't make sense for their field/journal.

@Ketan: And for the benefit of the rest of the academia.SE community, can you please post any helpful advice you get from your editor-in-chief as an answer to this question!

Be extra careful when following authors' suggestions for suitable peer reviewers. There has been a recent case of authors suggesting fabricated contacts as "reviewers", as described on http://publicationethics.org/news/cope-statement-inappropriate-manipulation-peer-review-processes. That case led some publishers to stop asking for reviewer suggestions explicitly within their submission processes.
Measures of caution that I find useful include:

Only choose an author-suggested reviewer if you can verify independently that this person is suited as reviewer, ideally from your own prior knowledge.
Don't use the contact address provided by the authors, but use a contact address that you can obtain independently, for example from the reviewer's university web page.
Verify very carefully that there's no conflict of interests for that reviewer, for example joint publications, same affiliations also in the recent past, or similar.
Don't make a decision if you only have reviews from author-suggested reviewers, but have at least one independently chosen reviewer.


text:
Whether to use the author name with numeric references when describing a particular study
I am a little bit confused regarding the best way to attribute a research paper in my thesis.
Example:

" The work in [1] proposed a new method for ..."
" John et al.[1] proposed a new method for ..."

Also, when I have the following context:

" our method results outperforms the results in [1] ... "
" our method results outperforms the results provided by John et al.
[1]"

Sometimes, due to space limitation, I can not mention the names of the authors every time which pushes me to use the paper only (like examples 1 and 3). Also, I think it is unnecessary redundancy to mention the authors every time.
My question is, is that OK? should I mention the authors of the work every time?
Are examples 1 and 3 accepted or weak?

To me all these examples look OK with the only remark that in Example 3 I'd say "results of [1]" rather than "results in [1]" but it's just grammar anyway.

I have seen both used widely. Personally, I find the second and fourth styles make for more coherent reading, since I don't have to constantly flip to the references to look up numbers.

There may be slight differences between fields (I am in the chem-phys-mat. sci triangle), but the short answer is no, you do not need to explicitly name the authors.
Stylistically, the "the work in [1] proposed" sounds rather forced and exactly as long as "Smith et al.[1] proposed". Note I am not a native speaker, so I have no clue what I am talking about. On the other hand I would definitely would leave the name out if I am talking about the same work over and over. Also, if you structure your statements like "This problem has been approached using this [1] and this methods [2]", giving the name is actually more awkward than leaving out.
I think it also improves readability. Compare "our method outperforms the name-of-the-method method [1]" with your examples (name-of-the-method: you explicitly name what is the main difference). Assuming that the reader do not know the reference list by heart, this kind of reference is more explicit and more informative than the other two.


text:
Where should I host a (simple) personal academic webpage?
I've finally decided to stop putting off creating an academic webpage for myself... both for the purposes of a job search and more generally to communicate what I'm about research-wise. But - where shall I put it?
The options seem to be:

My institution's personal webpages facility
My own web server at home
Some for-pay general-purpose webpage/website hosting service
Some gratis general-purpose webpage/website hosting service
Using one of the specialty academic-webpage platforms (which apparently exist)

What are noteworthy pros and cons of these options, in your view, that are worth considering (and might not be immediately obvious)?
Notes:

I'm a post-doc with a contract ending in several months, which may affect the choices, but feel free to answer this question for other stages in one's academic career as well.
I'm not interested in "Why I think provider XYZ is best"-type answers, although if you describe your experience and what you opted for, and provide a link, I think that would probably be legit.
The page is not intended to store any content such as copies of my papers, zipped source code etc - but it will have links to those. We're talking about a vanilla "about me and what I do and some links" kind of a thing.
Relevant question covering one aspect of my concerns: Institution domain or domain of my own for two of the possible options. Related but not-so-relevant question: Self-hosting vs Wordpress hosting for your collection of articles and blog.

This has mostly been asked before. (1) institution versus own domain;(2)  wordpress/blogger etc versus own domain

@JeromyAnglim: Both question seem to focus on which domain to host under; that's a consideration, but only one of them. The second question also relates to a blog and collection of articles, which my question doesn't.

No worries. Perhaps it makes sense to link to the related questions in your question to make clear how yours is different.

Note that you don't have to choose only one of them. For instance, I use a static website generator (like Jekyll/Hugo that have already been mentioned) and then rsync the output to both my university's server and a free hosting provider.

If all you want is a single static page, you can host a site on AWS S3 for a few cents a month, assuming you're not getting millions of page hits. Google cloud compute has similar capabilities. Just a cost consideration when comparing "real" web hosts (ones that provide server side scripting like wordpress). This doesn't take into account the cost of a domain name, or AWS IAM.

@tolos: That's interesting when comparing costs; however, I assume they offer nothing except for access to files, right?

Right, S3 is a place to store files that are accessible from the internet. It's part of Amazon Web Services (AWS) which covers a range of cloud products. Google compute and Microsoft Azure have similar offerings (hosting basic static content as one small piece of a much larger product). These are some of the biggest cloud providers ATM, though I'm sure you could find a similar product elsewhere.

After your contract ends, will you be starting another position at a different institution? If so, the simplest approach IMO would be to set up the web page on your current institution's server. When you switch jobs in a few months, move the page to the new institution's server, and replace the page on the old server with a simple HTML page redirecting any visitors to the new page. Repeat this any time you switch positions in the future or until you decide to take the plunge and get your own private domain (I don't have one myself and don't really see the point for most people in academia).

If you're getting a service without paying for it, you're the product, not the customer.

@DanRomik - Much better to make a page elsewhere that will be there forever, and then link to it from each institution.  It would be different for someone in a long-term position.

@aparente001 that's a very debatable claim. Using an external web host will either require paying a recurring monthly payment and maintaining yet another internet account that you have to update whenever your personal details or credit card number change, or alternatively using a free service that will subject you to annoying ads and/or the indignity of an uncool web address (like sites.google.com/my-name etc). Each of these approaches would be considered "better" by a different group of people. My comment describes my own preference and what has worked for me personally.

@DanRomik - Your solution sounds great for someone with a stable, long-term position.  For the opposite situation, I'll respond to your specific concerns: credit card info changes -- yes, this will happen once every few years, but you will get several email reminders to update your credit card info; sorry, which personal details might change other than credit card info?; annoying ads: I don't believe wordpress.com has annoying ads, does it?; uncool web address: easily solved with wordpress.com for about $10/year for the domain name, I believe.  (Agreed, stay away from google sites.)

@aparente001 as I was saying, this was the approach I've used since I was a graduate student (and later through a succession of unstable, non-long-term positions and then to my current position) and I found it to be the best one for me. There is clearly no objective sense in which one approach is better than another, it's simply a matter of taste and personal preference. Perhaps it's also worth mentioning that the approach I'm suggesting is the one taken by the vast majority of people in my field (and AFAIK also in computer science which is OP's field).

@DanRomik - Glad it worked well for you.  Somehow I don't think someone would be asking if your approach came naturally to him or her.

Check out https://about.me/

@VerenaHaunschmid: I did, and didn't like it :-(

This doesn't sound like your website will have special requirements that an all-purpose CMS couldn't handle. My advice is to go for one of those "all included" packages by a mainstream provider with something like Wordpress, and find a nice-looking template. This is the easiest choice, it will guarantee up-time, and you don't have to spend valuable time to administrate or design the site. It is also not very expensive: Perhaps around 5-10 USD/month, plus a one-time expense for the template (5 USD and up). Two alternatives might be attractive as well:

Nerdy option: If you are familiar with GitHub, you can use GitHub pages to self-host a static website with Hugo or Quarto, which is nice if you work a lot with (R) markdown. Once it's set up, it's a breeze to update. Here's an example.
Thrifty option: Use google sites.

Details:

My institution's personal webpages facility

Pro: Demonstrates academic credentials and shows your affiliation. Con: Not much leeway. Will you be able to use it after you leave the institution?

My own web server at home

Pro: All the control you need. Con: Way too much overhead; perhaps you can't implement what you need after all.

Some for-pay general-purpose webpage/website hosting service

Good balance between control and ease of use.

Some gratis general-purpose webpage/website hosting service

Free comes at a price. Perhaps you'll have up-time issues, ads or no own domain, certainly less control.

Using one of the specialty academic-webpage platforms (which apparently exist)

See here.

I agree with these points. Institution's sites are ok, but you may very well loose it after you leave, and as @henning says, you loose control (I've seen many prof/lab websites held outside the institution probably for this reason).
For what it's worth, I use Wordpress.com - which is free.  It is easy to use, minimal effort, lots of nice layouts to choose from, and allows you to produce a diverse site (mine is a hybrid between science and science communication). There is nothing stopping you from linking other sites like GitHub or ResearchGate  from your website either.

Extremely nerdy option: Set up your website on a general-purpose cloud provider like AWS or GCP.  Pro: Ultimate flexibility, can run any application under the sun including things unrelated to your website.  Con: Probably massive overkill for OP's use case.

@Kevin: It's not very nerdy if you depend on Amazon or Google...

GitHub option certainly looks interesting. Thank you!

@einpoklum: Perhaps not, if you're thinking of running your own server.  But it is a lot more reliable than running your own server (Do you have redundant power?  Dedicated cooling?  Automated hardware failover?).

@einpoklum it's nerdy in the sense that it's a system that assumes you know everything you need to know to get a server up and running, including the command line, and the ins and outs of a Platform-As-A-Service's tiers, pricing model, and product naming.

For a personal website and occasional other applications, a (reserved, it's cheaper) AWS instance really isn't that much maintenance (provided you have the knowledge to do basic sysadmin stuff, which I suppose isn't a given). I do it myself.

Good to know. As long as the courts haven't clarified what this means, it could or couldn't include a personal website at a big hosting service. (My hunch is that Springer doesn't want you to upload your papers to academia.edu or sci-hub, they don't care where your personal website is hosted.)

My current setup is that I have a personal domain which redirects to my institutional website. I recommend this, as it gives you the best of both worlds -- you get the officialness of an institutional website, but also the flexibility of owning your own domain, and it's cheap.
Getting a domain only costs US$1/month and is very easy. (I use Google domains.) If I need to move my website to a different instutition or decide to use something like wordpress, I can simply change the redirect from my domain.
A personal domain also gives you an email address associated with it. You can port this between institutions and it looks more professional than putting @gmail.com on your papers.
Since I first wrote this answer, I have moved institutions and moved my website hosting to Amazon web services. This is a cheap option (~US$0.60/month), but was a pain to set up.

I think GitHub Pages would be a really good solution for you.
Note:

GitHub Pages source repositories have a recommended limit of 1GB
Their URL would be username.github.io
You can enable HTTPS support
This is something that github pages are generally used for

While you may very well be right, that is not an answer to my question.

@einpoklum - Actually, this is a fine solution. Github Pages allows you to essentially host your own static site by just using a github git repo. You may notice that the top answer already lists github pages, in fact.

@eykanal: It is indeed a fine solution, but that's not what I asked.

@einpoklum - I disagree, this falls very neatly under (4) in your original list ("Some gratis general-purpose webpage/website hosting service").

@eykanal: It does, but I wasn't asking for examples of these. Please read the question again.

@einpoklum You are correct, I presented what I though was the best solution to your problem when you asked for pros and cons to each of your available options. Mistake acknowledged. However, I stand by my suggestion.

Sad day, I can't upvote @henning 's answer.

@cOborski: ... which is why I couldn't bring myself to downvote. I'm going to use it (although perhaps combine it with links/copies in other locations).

So, I'm reluctantly +1'ing you because I created a GitHub page eventually.

Some existing free software, such as, for example, wordpress.com (which I believe is ad-free) would fit your current needs, and you could upgrade to wordpress.org later if desired.
Advantages:

security
eminently google-able
for $10-20/year, you can use a custom domain name (if you are concerned that a free domain name might look embarrassing)
stays the same when you change jobs

You could link, point or redirect from the university canned page to your own site, and then in the next job just do it again.
The most elegant solution would be Federico Poloni's: "I use a static website generator (like Jekyll/Hugo that have already been mentioned) and then rsync the output to both my university's server and a free hosting provider."  However, if you don't want to bother setting this up, a simple link works too.

Can you elaborate on (1) How this option is more secure than other options (2) Why security is an issue for this kind of content (do you think defacement is an important concern?) (3) Why the custom domain name is more relevant to this option than other ones?

@einpoklum - Security is built into software like wordpress. // Sites get hacked and next thing you know, your site is advertising Viagra. // Some participants on this page have talked about a canned domain name not looking professional, so I wanted to provide reassurance that a custom domain name is compatible with wordpress.com (and is low cost).

Umm... you were saying? And that's just this year's latest hack. Using a prime target like wordpress increases your chances of being hacked significantly compared to many of the other options. As for the domain name issue, perhaps you should clarify in the body of your answer.

@einpoklum - I'll tell you frankly that I'm getting an uncomfortable nya-nya vibe from your most recent comment.  Not quite enough to flag, but I wanted to let you know I would prefer a more respectful disagreement. // I took a look at the article you linked to.  At the end, it says, "the fix has automatically been deployed on millions of WordPress installations in the few hours after the patch was issued." // Edited post, thanks.

Well, you did write an answer which doesn't address the question directly - recommending one out of several hosting service providers - and with flimsy basis. I thought maybe I was missing something, but your comment doubled-down and made it, well, preposterous. Sorry.

It's hardly preposterous, @einpoklum. Yes, DIY makes you a lower-value target, but you're also far less likely to notice a large proportion of security breaches. A major hosting provider has teams dedicated to security; if your DIY gets hacked, you're spending six hours fixing it when you could be writing that paper.

@ArtOfCode: It's preposterous to claim that WordPress is a good option because of security when they occasionally get hacked. It is empirically insecure. And that's doubly the case when we're talking about a simple static website with some personal info, for which security is almost a non-issue.

No, it's not "preposterous", @einpoklum. It may not be the ideal solution for you, but there are several million people who use it for their personal websites for whom it's a good solution. Not liking a suggestion does not make it preposterous.

@ArtOfCode: WordPress is a very nice platform, what's preposterous is to give a non-answer to my question which extols WordPress on a point which is one of its weaknesses.

@einpoklum - How would html written by a random (non-web-developer) academic compare, in terms of vulnerability, against wordpress.com or wordpress.org? // But please note, I only mentioned wordpress as an example of some canned solution that can stay put when you change insitutions.

@aparente001: (1) If you meant to argue that canned solutions are better than the other options, please edit your answer to say that explicitly; that's not what it says now. (2) "How would... compare?" Very favorably: A non-web-developer would not write any scripting code, and would not dynamically access external resources, and thus would not create any security vulnerabilities. Of course, running your own web server is a different story; but it would still compare favorably to WP. WP gets hacked; your own web server may or may not get hacked.

@einpoklum - Could you clarify, when you say WP, do you mean .com or .org or both equally? // Have edited the answer; hope this is clearer than before.

@aparente001: It's WP.com that gets hacked, with vulnerabilities in the WP.org software (mostly, I suppose). So I meant WP.com .

@einpoklum - Well, you could go straight to wordpress.org software from the start, if you like.  By the way I read your profile, thanks for posting the info; thought you might like to know about "comuting" which I guess means "computing" and also a dead link at the end.

I'll strongly defend this choice (emphasis mine):

Some for-pay general-purpose webpage/website hosting service

But I'll tangent a little from the question itself, because I have answered questions by OP on unix.SE .  Yes, this is using information from outside of the question, apologies, but this still may be interesting for people with a similar background.

If you are capable of setting up that option it has huge advantages if your research (or simply interests) involve a lot of computing.  (And OP is a computer scientist).
The Bad side
There are plethora of platforms to build a blog, and the maintenance of such things is not as bad as it was in the '90s and early '00s.  Most platforms invested heavily in resilience, at the cost of some more work in the initial setup.  I'll argue that most of the overhead in having your own VPS running your website is during the setup.  If you do not tinker with it, it keeps working.  You may just need to clean up the logs at some point.
For an example, I just checked on a toy data warehouse I've created for a presentation 9 month ago (and forgot to shutdown).  It turns out I could do the same talk today because it simply works.
There is nothing wrong with joining this with:

Using one of the specialty academic-webpage platforms (which apparently exist)

You can just run it on a subspace (subdomain perhaps) of the website.  That would actually be a pretty good choice.
The Good side
But wait, we are talking about a personal website, a blog like thing, so why a data warehouse?  That is the first advantage.  For a talk I needed an example system so I just dumped it on my VPS and made it available through a subdomain.  There was no need to talk to the IT team of the building where I was doing the talk to allow access to some server, I just needed an internet connection.  Several other things I dumped next to my personal website over the years, some random examples:

Material for people that I've trained whilst overseas, much easier to share than asking everyone to bring a pendrive.
Example programs for my presentations.
My PGP key.
Maps of how to reach a venue.
A board to visualize combat in role-playing games on a tablet.
Crawlers that needed to run whilst the machine I was using at my institution was due for maintenance.

And my favourite:

All slides that I use for talks.

I really, really, really love that last one.  LaTeX Beamer produces slides that can be viewed directly by any modern browser (i.e. PDF, and Power Point has an export option too).  Therefore when I go somewhere to give a talk I do not worry that my pendrive will not be read by the computer at the venue, I do not worry that the format of the slides will not be understood by the software on that computer.  I only ask the organizer if the machine will have an internet connection and a browser (and I take the pendrive with the slides just in case).
In summary, you can share content with people (or with yourself when you're using an alien machine) by typing its name (URL).  This allows you to overcome several problems with technology.
The Ugly side
It costs money, yet not that much.  A domain registration costs some 10-20 USD per year, and several registars (providers of DNS resolution) will have reduced prices if you buy several years.  A VPS (virtual private server, which is cheap because you share hardware (but not IP)) for a personal website plus the perks I gave above, can be of the lowest tiers offered.  Providers that sell a VPS at 10-20 USD per month are often decent (free VPS' will involve considerable downtime so it is normally a bad idea for a website).
It requires some work, and some learning (but doesn't everything require it?  We all learn all out lives).  Therefore it is not recommended for not computer science people.  Note that not recommended does not forbids you from doing it, I know a very good linguist Lecturer who loves to tinker with technology and therefore his website.
You may also get absorbed into the website and tinkering with it to a point where you neglect other things.  But again, that is something that may happen in any of the forms of building the website that you propose.
P.S. It was my intention to omit provider names that I use, since OP states that discussing best providers is off-topic.  And, it does not matter that much since a there are several good ones out there.

One can put one's slides on dropbox, box, google drive, etc. for ease in presenting, or on one's personal website -- is a VPS really necessary?

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


text:
BSc in CPSC or CIS: How will this affect Grad School applications (Stanford, UBC)?
I am trying to decide whether or not I should pursue an undergrad in Computer Science (link to curriculum)
or an undergrad in Computer Information Systems (link to curriculum).
Specifically, I'd be curious to know if picking one over the other could be problematic later, when applying to a masters program in computer science (the CIS degree is much less theory heavy). I am interested in Standford's MS program, but if I go with the CIS program, I am concerned I will be filtered out in the selection process because I don't hold a brick-and-mortar CS degree with a heavy theoretical focus.
As a mature adult, I have financial obligations that constrain my ability take on studies full time, so I am leaning towards the CIS degree because it is offered through distance education (the CPSC degree is not), and subsequently applying to Stanford's Masters program which is also offered through distance education.
FWIW, I currently work as a developer full-time, and in my younger years I worked on a lot of random jobs, mostly non-applicable to my computer science interests.

The obvious answer here is: if you have very specific programs in mind, and a specific set of constraints that may hinder you, check with the upper-level programs you're interested and find out what their requirements are. If the master's program requires a bachelor's in computer science, then you have your answer. If not, then they may list what degrees they accept as "equivalent" or "sufficient" for their program.
But, in general, when in doubt, ask. That's what graduate officers and admissions staff are there for!

+1 for "ask". Just call some of the masters programs you intend to apply to and ask them for their opinion; they'd be more than happy to help you out, and their feedback is definitely more useful than anything you'll find here.


text:
Where to publish Ph.D. related articles in the IT field
I am currently working on my Ph.D. with topic “Research of the current methods and technologies for web sites and web application development“. I have some articles that I would like to share(and also I must have several publication before I complete the course) so I was wondering can someone advice me to and university/science organisations that publish students articles.
Thanks in advance

This is a question for your advisor.

Googling for "call for paper" "web application development" suggested following links which could be useful.

ConFoo Conference

IJCA

Actapress


text:
What are the pros and cons in sending a research paper to well-known author, before publishing?
Currently I am reading a research paper of a well-known author published in 2011. I did a slight modification in his method and the new method is very efficient.
Is it reasonable to send that paper first to the author before sending it to any journal?

Do you mean: sending a draft or sending a published (or: submitted, posted on arXiv) paper?

I've worked on a few method development projects and I'm of the opinion that it is a good idea particularly if the author is well-known and well-liked (if they are a dick or you don't like them, that's a different story).
The obvious reason why is because when they happened to see your paper going out for review which claims a "massive improvement" over previous methods, they aren't going to get upset at you and pull strings to make your life miserable. Furthermore, they might have insight whether or not the new method is useful or merely enhancing a particular error which makes it look good.
The only instance where sharing the paper might be a bad idea is if they happened to be working on a similar improvement. Receiving the paper may motivate them to scoop you.

Thank you very much. Author is still working in that area. I am just worried he may take my idea and publish in another form saying that my work is not that much appropriate.

@srijan Some areas have preprint archives (math, physics, and theoretical CS use arXiv.org).  These are public websites, where you can submit your paper before you submit it to a journal.  Anyone who wants can download and read your paper.  When you submit your paper here, it gets a time stamp, which can help with priority disputes.

@ Dear sir, my area is mathematics. Can you please tell me how can these websites help?

arXiv.org also accepts publications in mathematics. Check it out!

Oh, if you're in math, you're fine since arXiv is very forgiving. If you're in stem cells, or miRNAs, that's a different story. Actually in those cases you should never send anything to anyone. Even your significant other.

@bobthejoe I have got few papers related to my field. I want to know what they actually do? What about copyright? Do they improve your paper and send us back? How much time it takes for review? Sorry for this much question. Thanks a lot

@srijan: Maybe this should be a new question, but just look at the site.  You send them a preprint and they post it; that's all.  There is a short verification process to check that you are actually a mathematician and not a crackpot; otherwise there is no review at all.

Receiving the paper may motivate them to scoop you. — Or it may motivate them to make you a coauthor!  (See "well-known and well-liked".)

I think JeffE's comment essentially summarizes the dilemma. If the person is a helpful person, they are going to be a helpful person. If the person scoops people, chances are you'll be scooped. Asking the senior professors for their assessment is probably the way to go.

@bobthejoe Problem with me is that I don't know him personally. Neither my guide know him. Thanks for replying.

@JeffE I don't know him personally. In that case what would be the best option?

@srijan: Ask someone who knows him personally.  If that's not possible, ask someone who knows someone who knows him personally.  But even if you can't get a sense of their personality, you can protect against scooping by first posting your paper to the ArXiv and then drawing attention to your ArXiv preprint.

@JeffE k sir , i contacted with him and i get a positive response. Still do i need to go fro pre print from arxiv..?

I think that the preprint (depending on your field, math sounds like one of them) is just good practice. Sounds like you're in a great situation. The only question left is whether he gets a name on the paper or an acknowledgement.


text:
In ACM in-text citations, should the first citation to a given source include anything except a number enclosed in brackets?
For example, suppose I am citing Dr. John Doe's Pie Are Round, Pi Are Not Square: Digitally Representing Double Entendres from Natural Languages for the first time in my paper.  Which of the following would be acceptable?

A particularly useful algorithm for ranking the corniness of natural-language jokes may be found in [3], where...

Doe [3] presents a particularly useful algorithm for ranking the corniness of natural-language jokes, where...

In his groundbreaking Pie Are Round, Pi Are Not Square: Digitally Representing Double Entendres from Natural Languages, Doe [3] presents a particularly useful algorithm for ranking the corniness of natural-language jokes, where...

Thank you...

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


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How to make a paper anonymous for reviewers when it heavily extends on your own previous work?
I am writing a paper that continues and extends my previous paper (the usual situation), and I plan to submit it to a journal that conducts a double-blind review. It is a research that started recently, so I have only one paper published.
The published paper represents a strong foundation of the research, which means that I would have to refer to it in the new paper at least a few times (basically the new paper extends it). While the peer-review is double-blind, the reviewers would then easily realize who is the author.
Therefore, I can't just cite it as it's someone else's research because it's obvious that I am talking about a paper of mine.

How can I refer to my previous paper completely anonymously so that
  the reviewers cannot realize who is the author of the new paper?

I am insisting on this because I don't believe that there is such a thing as a completely unbiased peer-review process, even when double-blind. I am new in the field, and I can imagine that this is where a reviewer could have prejudices. Stupid reason, but I already have an unpleasant experience with this.
I cannot cite the paper by removing the author and retaining the title, as it would take 5 seconds for a computer-literate person to find the full record.
On the bright side, while the previous paper is easily accessible, the reviewers probably would not be aware of it because it is from a conference that is not really in that field. But still, they would manage to find it with some effort.
Would it be acceptable that I mention that this paper extends my previous research that cannot be cited in order to accomplish the anonymity of a double-blind peer-review, and that the citation will be added later?

I think there is no way to do that. If someone wants to find out who has written that paper, they will. I even know someone who is able to identify the reviewers by their style of writing / type of changes they propose. You just have to count on the person just not being interested in who you actually are or being as objective as possible.

This, to me, is the fundamental flaw of double-blind reviewing. If paper B builds on paper A while demonstrating a very deep understanding of A's results, it's extremely likely that the two papers were written by the same people, even if, in B, they diligently refer to the authors of "A" as "they" rather than "we".

New researchers often worry about these kinds of things (biased reviewers, people stealing their work, etc.).  As you become more experienced, you realise that these things are very rare.

One other practice is to avoid referring to other authors as either "they" or "we", but only using their surnames. This is more feasible in some settings than others; in my field of mathematics it is often very easy to achieve with professional results (even if you talk about yourself in the third person). None of my last three papers seems to contain a "they" or "we" used to refer to authors of cited papers. There is still the issue that the author of your new paper may seem very familiar with the previous one, but there is no need to explicitly say that the previous work is yours.

If paper B builds on paper A while demonstrating a very deep understanding of A's results, it's extremely likely that the two papers were written by the same people — I suspect this is less likely than you think. I've read plenty of papers that built on and demonstrated very deep understanding of my work, that were not written by me (or my students). And I like to think I've done the same to other people's work.

@JeffE Yes, I don't think I quite nailed the point I was trying to make, especially since it's kinda hard to extend somebody's work without understanding it very well! People very often write a sequence of papers on very similar topic and it's often trivial to identify the group responsible for the paper. For example, all the early papers about a research operating system are going to have come from the group that built the OS; analyses of different aspects of the same large (but not CERN-large) dataset probably come from the group that gathered that data; etc.

Disclaimer: I work in a field in which double-blind reviewing is either completely absent or so rare that I have never encountered it.

Would it be acceptable that I mention that this paper extends my previous research that cannot be cited in order to accomplish the anonymity of a double-blind peer-review, and that the citation will be added later?

No, I don't see how that's possible.  The principle that you must cite work that you use or build on -- no less so if it's yours -- seems much more basic than your desire to get genuinely double-blind refereeing.  Moreover, if a paper continues previous work, can anyone sensibly evaluate its added value without having access to that previous work?  I can't see how.

I am a new guy in the field, and I can imagine that this is where a reviewer could have prejudices. Stupid reason, but I already have an unpleasant experience with this.

When you self-identify your reasoning as "stupid", there's a clear opportunity to think it through again.  The process of journal submission and publication has a non-negligible random component: it would be unwarranted to assume that an experience that you had once or twice will necessarily recur.  Your desire to circumvent an unfair refereeing process seems premature.  If you feel like you're being treated unfairly as a new researcher, there are more productive ways to react to this: make it more clear why your work is competitive with or superior to the work done by more established researchers.  I don't know of any academic field in which journals systematically don't want to publish work by new researchers that they believe is better than prior work just because those researchers are new.  It is also true, unfortunately, that new researchers can overestimate (and also underestimate!) the value of their work.  It is hard to hear that the thing you slaved over for months and years is not good enough for a second-rate journal in your field.  But it may be true nevertheless.
Let me say finally that I see a little irony in your approach: you lament your treatment as an unestablished researcher, but you are in fact more established than most people: you have published a paper that your present work builds on.  My experience is that it is much easier to publish a second paper on the same topic in a reasonable journal than a first paper, just as it is easier for an artist to sell their second painting for a reasonable price than their first.  In publishing the first paper, the journal has conferred on your work the important imprimatur of publishable value.  Insisting on throwing that away will probably increase your chance of receiving "anti-newbie bias" in the evaluation of your followup work!

The standard practice in my field (i.e., psychology) where blind review is required  is as follows:
Just cite your own previous work as if you were citing any other study that was not yours.
For example, if your name was Bob Smith and you published a study in 2015, and you are now writing a paper that builds on that study, you could write something like:

Smith (2015) recently extended research on X. The present study builds on the models proposed by Smith (2015) to ....

In a few other contexts, it can also be appropriate to black out some text with a note saying "hidden for purposes of blind review". I would not use this for references. But I have used it, for example, when I needed to state the specific university ethics board that reviewed a study.

Computer scientist here, exactly this. We tend to recognize that double-blind is best-effort. The authors shouldn't identify themselves, and the reviewers shouldn't try to identify authors. So 'We build on the models proposed by Smith (2015)...' is precisely the right thing to do.


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Can I ask for co-authorship if I share code and am willing to help applying code to the problem?
Recently I have been asked to share some source code I have written
with another PhD student. I have developed and used the methods in
that source code for the purposes of my own research. The code will
save her approximately 2 months of development/testing. I'm prepared
also to offer additional help with data pre/post-processing & writing.
Given the above, am I entitled to ask for co-authorship?

Keep in mind that being a PhD student, most likely the decision will rest with her adviser. Many advisers take the point of view that co-authorship requires a substantial contribution to the paper. And the key word here is "substantial". My suspicion is that you probably won't get authorship, however I also don't think you are out of line to ask and in your situation, and in your case, I probably would. But can you "claim" co-authorship (as your question asks)? No, I don't think so.

@Matt Brenneman Thanks. I have renamed the question. The methods that are asked are really enablers for her research so I think that contribution is there.

It depends a lot on how much she uses your code too; Just because it was shared, does not mean it'll be useful in the end to her, or that her final result will be sufficiently close to what you developed to be able to ask. I'd say keep in touch, and let her know that you'd like to help.

@Matthew G. I was instructed to give her the source code, so she is expecting to receive help.

@qoobit  FWIW, I'll just say two quick things: first, asking for authorship, in a case like this, depends a bit on the situation, the people involved, their motivations, etc. Secondly, "signficant"can be highly subjective. I remember a colleague having some terrible results he couldn't publish, and I came up with the key insight to explain his results (which was the entire basis for his paper),yet he thought my contribution was not "significant"

@Matt Brenneman Nasty case. Sorry to hear that.

I am using lots of computer programs in my research. They are certainly saving me more than 2 months of time — without those computer programs a lot of my research would be completely impossible. However, this does not mean that people who wrote those computer programs are my coauthors!

Along with your polite request of co-authorship, you could offer to actually help writing the paper, in particular the methods section, and an active participation to the overall writing.

@JukkaSuomela - Are you using programs that other researchers have written that aren't published in any form or released as open-source?  That makes a big difference, just like any aspect of research.  Using someone else's protocol from a published paper also doesn't make them a coauthor, but if they train you and help optimize it for your experiment, authorship may be warranted.

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20901/compiling-ethical-standards-for-coauthorship-across-academic-fields-and-regions

Make your code citable.

You can discuss with her and her advisor whether your help warrants authorship, but it would be rather unhelpful to refuse her even if she or her advisor declines.  I would say, if this is true, (1) Sure!  I'd love for more good research to come from my work! and (2) Since my project isn't published yet, we'll need to include a good description in the methods and it probably makes sense for me to be a coauthor.
If the target journal particularly advocates open-data and open-access, you might have to release your work in order for them to get it published.  It's important to talk through first to make sure everyone's okay with that.  In general it's a fantastic idea since it means that work is not so difficult to replicate, and if you have a valuable tool maybe others will benefit from it.  But when you're laboring to finish your own work in time and worried about its perceived novelty, it can seem a little less appealing.
Just have the discussion (in a friendly manner) now so there aren't any unpleasant surprises later.

Code is (hopefully) now considered as part of the regular research work. Thus, it can:

be requested by reviewers,
providing it will raise the chances of the paper to get accepted.

But more important, it can be cited, especially when the authors of a paper relied on someone else's code.
What does it mean for you?
In your case, you have several options:

you should make your code publicly available. This way, it can be cited (at least under the form of an URL in the paper). If you make it available through Github, it can even by cited like any research work;
a nice complement to the first item would be to have a publication, even a short one, that presents the results of your code, or the way it was designed if it is very specific and worth sharing. That way, you can ask the users of your code to cite this paper when they use your code;
eventually, your co-authorship status will depend on your contribution to your paper.

I put a friend of mine (whose code saved me a few days, I would say around 1 week) in the acknowledgements section of a paper of mine. He told me it was already too much, but I didn't want him to go unnoticed/uncited. It was just a matter of being polite and thankful for me...

So, you are giving your colleague some of your research code to use on her own problem. If she ends up using, or trying to use it, then I predict two things.
(a) You will end up having to help her understand the code well enough to use it. This is very likely, amounting to practically a certainty.
(b) You will have to adapt the code to work on her problem. This is still very likely, but not quite as certain.
I'd say (b) definitely entitles you to co-authorship. (a) is not quite so clear. If you just give her the code and don't do anything else (in which case she is unlikely to be able to use the code) then you definitely aren't entitled to co-authorship.
Whatever you do, you could still be denied co-authorship. However, bear in mind that you cannot (in my opinion) reasonably withhold the code (that seems to me contrary to what research is about) but you are not required to work with your colleague on her problem for nothing. Therefore, if you do end up spending significant amounts of time working with your colleague on her problem, then bring up the issue of co-authorship early. If your colleague or her mentors don't want to give you co-authorship, then ask yourself why you would spend time working on this project.
You also say:

I'm prepared also to offer additional help with data pre/post-processing & writing.

This is a separate issue which I'm not addressing here. I have just focused on the involvement which will naturally stem from you providing your source code. If I understand your quote above correctly, this refers to optional assistance you are prepared to provide.

FWIW, I would add there are definitely deptl politics that may play a role in the problem. If you are a grad student yourself,I might suggest discussing the matter first with your adviser or supervisor or even just the wise old guy in the dept who people go to for advice in the dept


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Is it a good idea to put detailed supplementary analyses to a publication on ArXiv or Zenodo?
I am often bothered by the fact that interesting information pertaining a manuscript ends up in the supplemental information because of constraints of space, formatting and narrative. It feels like wasting hard-earned results.
I am about to submit a paper which will be accompanied by supplemental information where I will put a very detailed analysis of some specific bit of the paper. This is too detailed to make it to the main text. Because I think they are nice results nonetheless and I would like to squeeze some juice out of them, I was thinking about putting the supplemental info as either an arXiv or Zenodo submission, which would assign it a DOI and thus make it citeable. It would make this info also more discoverable and accessible by someone who is interested in this part but not in the journal paper itself.
Is this a good idea or should I simply submit my extra data as regular supplemental info instead?

It is very common practice to create a MEGA version of your paper that contains all relevant material, even material that not necessary for the journal submission, to ArXiv.

@PsySp Not all journals are compatible with arXiv preprints. As a matter of fact, the ones I'm considering for this paper (which are published by the American Chemical Society) are not. So putting the main text on arXiv would preclude submission to these journals.

Would you be happy putting the supplemental material on a personal home page?

@aparente001 I would like the sup. info to have a DOI, that is the motivation to use a repository. My website would not offer this feature.

@Miguel: Do the journals even disallow postprints, i.e., posting your own version on arXiv after the paper has been accepted? Maybe with an embargo period? You can also check whether this policy of the journal is not overriden by applicable law (e.g., in France, the right for authors to deposit their works in repositories is guaranteed by law, under some conditions).

@a3nm I feel the discussion is barking up the wrong tree. Just to be clear: most journals (at least the ones I am dealing with) do not own copyright of supplemental material, only of the main text. What I do with the supplemental material is therefore up to me. My question is about getting the most out of my supplemental info, since I would not like for it to be only reachable through some obscure link on the journal's website.

@Miguel: If you are only asking about the supplementary material, then yes, I would think that it's great to deposit it, on arXiv or elsewhere, e.g., on Zenodo (which can host large data sets). It's just that if you do so, it's more convenient for readers if the main text of the paper is included also, so it's better to do it unless it is really disallowed in terms of copyright.

@a3nm Ok, I get you now. That sounds reasonable but it might be difficult to reuse the main text in practice.

Would a hybrid approach be helpful?  It sounds like you want the DOI that comes with an arXiv (for example) upload, AND the easy-to-find aspect of posting on something like a personal home page.  If you put code on e.g. arXiv, the documentation at the top could include a link to your home page, where you would hopefully have a pdf of the published paper.  Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything.

As far as I know, arXiv uploads do not get assigned DOIs.  See https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/62480/why-does-arxiv-org-not-assign-dois which seems to still be the case.

If the journals you want to submit your work are not "ArXiv-compatible" you have few options:
1)Put the excluded material in the appendix of the arxiv submission.
2)Make a write-up, put it on your web-page, and cite it in the arxiv paper.
3)Create a technical report (with a time stamp) and cite it in your article.
I think the time-stamp feature is critical here.

Normally I expect that the Journal would host supplementing information. If the amoutn and content is significant (e.g. complicated new method), then publishing an extra article should be possible in another journal and referencing that. And nobody keeps you from putting the preprint online as you would do usually.


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Is there anything special to the CV format for PhD applicants in Germany?
I want to pursue my PhD program in Germany. Is there any special format for academic CV to for applying there?

No, there is no special format for an academic CV in Germany. In general, CVs in Germany differ somewhat of Angloamerican CVs (see for example this newspaper article by The Local). It might be the case, that German professors and selection committees expect a more German CV. However, that should not be a boundary, as academia in Germany is internationally oriented. The Career Center of the RWTH Aachen offers an  English information sheet about German CVs that might be helpful. In addition, you could use the European CV from the  European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training as an orientation.

The format listed at the RWTH link is only appropriate for students before they get to the PhD; it's a resumé, not a CV. The two formats are different.

@aeismail That's right. At Post-doc level you would typically find the same CV style in Germany like in the US. The OP asked about a CV for a PhD admission.

The linked The Local article says "leave out any description of personal qualities, interests and hobbies". That seems to be oddly in contrast to the comments on this workplace.se question, where it was companies in Anglo-Saxon countries that were described as not being interested in any not directly job-related qualities, while such personal qualities and the like were rather the norm to be included in various other European countries such as Germany.

@O.R.Mapper More precisely, Gerhard Winkler advises in The Local to cut the "personal" stuff. He freelances as a consultant for job applicants and generally favours clear and simple resumés. Thus, there are surely others in Germany who would advise to add such a section about personal qualities and interests, especially for young job applicants. In my experience, however, Winkler's advice is better suited for the academic labour market in Germany. Of course, selection committees are interested in voluntary work and experiences related to the field of research.