text:
Including unofficial teaching experiences in CV
I'm going to apply for a PhD Program and for writing my CV, I'm wondering either include my experience in teaching some courses in online learning platforms or not?
Can such experiences be regarded as official (and acceptable for academic people) teaching experience? All in all, including that is positive or not?
More specifically, I have two video tutorials (collectively 15 hrs) on most prestigious Iranian online learning platform (see it as Iranian Udemy) and I want to apply for an Australian university. Content of the courses are strongly related to my proposal. So, is it considered relevant?

In the unlikely event that there is a formal requirement on teaching experience, it’s up to the them to decide what fulfills it. In that case, it may be worth contacting them to see what kind of proof they require. But if that were the case, you wouldn’t even be considering omitting this experience, so I presume this does not apply.
For everything else, I would not worry too much about what is an “official” experience and what is not, but rather on whether it is something that demonstrates or enhanced qualities relevant to your success as a PhD student.
The only way something can be negative on your CV is if it is ridiculously minor (say, you only tutored for one hour), your CV is already filled with more powerful stuff, or it is obviously irrelevant to the position you are applying to.
You have to be the judge of the former points, but even if the program does not explicitly mention teaching experience as something it values, they should consider it relevant:
not only for its own sake, as you may be required to teach during your PhD, but also because it enhances your communication skills and requires a deeper and structured understanding of the subject matter, which in turn is particularly relevant if you taught advanced topics or they were related to the program’s subject.
If it was voluntary, it additionally evidences commitment.
If you list your teaching experience, make sure that whoever reviews your application can understand what you did there:
What did you teach?
In what format: Was it rather a lecture, an exercise session, personal tutoring, or something else?
(From your description, I presume something lecture-like, and lectures are usually considered more valuable as they require more effort.)
Mention if there any quality evaluation or other quality control (e.g., how well your tutorials were viewed or attended), but do not worry if there are none as this often applies to teaching experience.


text:
Retract an already submitted recommendation letter (written for an undergrad student)
In the middle of the current semester, a student in my large lecture class (of an undergraduate course) asked me for a letter of recommendation, to supplement his application to transfer to another, much stronger, school. (In case this matters: this is in the U.S.)
He is one of the quiet students: while he doesn't actively participate, he doesn't cause any trouble either. So during that first half of the semester I didn't have any personal communication with him, and therefore I didn't really know him; I mean I didn't have anything to say about him as a person. But he attended class, and his first two midterm test grades were A (90+ numerically). So I told him that I agree to write the letter, but it would be short because I can only write what I know about him, which isn't much: I could only say that I've known him for half of the semester and that so far he has been performing really well. The student said it's fine. So I wrote and submitted a letter of recommendation.
This was a month ago. Fast forward to today, and by now he's like a totally different student: he's still quiet and doesn't cause any trouble, but he often skips classes, and his third midterm exam was an F (50 out of 100).
I know that it's not about me, and I don't take this personally. It may sound like he changed his ways as soon as he's gotten what he wanted from me, but that would be silly of me to assume. Probably it's just that he believes that he's already in the other school and doesn't care about this school anymore.
But my dilemma is that now I know that he is not the kind of student that I described in my letter and recommended to be accepted to the other school. By putting my name on the letter I effectively vouched for him and his ability to perform at a certain level. To me, it's as if I made a promise to the other university, but now I see that I misled them (albeit unintentionally).
Do you think it's a good idea to contact the other university and request that my letter of recommendation be retracted from his application package? Any thoughts or advice?

Have you spoken to him? Perhaps there's something in his personal life that led to this drop-off?

Agree with @AzorAhai ; Life is not that much simple to conclude that " it's just that he believes that he's already in the other school and doesn't care about this school anymore". For example, in my country, even such an the application takes lots of paperwork that I wouldn't even be able to find enough time to sleep every night.

@onurcanbektas: Agreed. Somehow I feel that this is the case, but of course I could be wrong. That's why I said "probably", so I didn't say that it's a definite conclusion. :-)

Or maybe he lost his inspiration because the application was rejected. And maybe that's because your letter was not strong enough :p

Aside from any issues surrounding the recommendation (which I don't think you should retract), you've noticed a change in the student, and should probably approach the student to see if you can guide the student to resources for help.

@ScottSeidman: That's what I normally do with my students. (Not that I want to boast, but in our department I have a reputation as one of the few instructors who pays so much individualized attention to students.) But to be honest, I haven't approached this student, because I don't know how to have such a conversation with him without mentioning the letter.

In the scheme of things, the letter is not as important as the well being of the student.  In a conversation where you're setting yourself up as a potential advocate, bringing it up does not seem appropriate.

I don't understand the problem with the student not caring about his current school anymore. Why would he? He's transferring soon. No need to cause trouble for the poor guy—he's clearly already unhappy where he is.

It sounds like the student is having problems outside of school tht are causing them to be distracted and/or not present... I would suggest both talking to the student or reffer them to the school councillor for a chat. ... If your school doesn't have a councillor then maybe suggest some mental health and stability clinics that are trained to handle vulnerable people. ..  Even speaking to a GP can be beneficial. . .  I would also ask the student WHY the sudden change... Show them the 90% compared to the 50% results and explain your concerns !

I think you should do nothing.
(Nothing with respect to the letter, that is.  You may of course want to consider intervening with the student as you would with any other student whose performance suddenly drops off.  As Azor Ahai says, he may be experiencing some sort of academic or non-academic problem.)

By putting my name on the letter I effectively vouched for him and his ability to perform at a certain level. To me, it's as if I made a promise to the other university, but now I see that I misled them (albeit unintentionally).

I don't see it that way.  You couldn't possibly make promises about his future performance, and the receiving university will not have interpreted it that way.    They are well aware that "past performance is no guarantee of future results". Provided you made an honest assessment based on what you knew at the time, your letter was in no way misleading, and you have no obligation to correct it.
Proactively sending a followup unrecommendation would come across as somewhat vindictive, and I think it's sort of an ethical gray area.  The student consented to having you send a letter, sharing his academic progress, at a particular time; I think it's a little questionable whether that consent extends to having you send additional letters.  (However, if the other university should contact you to ask about him, I do think it would be appropriate to give them an update on his more recent work - but to me that feels different.)
That said, I don't think the student is really likely to profit from this anyway:

Your initial letter, saying "I've known him for half a semester and so far he's doing fine in this one class", can't really have done much good for his application in the first place.  If the other university is "much stronger", having such a letter, in place of a very positive letter from someone that knew him well, may have sunk his application from the outset.
If he does receive an offer of admission, it will almost certainly be contingent on continued satisfactory academic progress.  The other university will review his final transcripts before he actually starts in the program.  If he receives a poor grade in your class, they may very well revoke his admission.  Indeed, discussing this possibility with the student may encourage him to shape up.

I don't agree that it is an ethical gray area. The student may assume incorrectly that there's some kind of threshold passed, but admissions can contact your recommenders and follow up any time if they want to. I don't see why the follow-up contact can't go other way.

@ASimpleAlgorithm Assuming I read the situation correctly, the professor gave the letter of recommendation to the student; not directly to the school he was applying to.  This suggests to me that (reasonably IMO), the student had a chance to read the recommendation letter and what it said before they submitted it.  The issue with the follow-up contact going the other way is that it was the students choice to include those specific words from the professor.  The student wouldn't have included them if they were negative, so making it negative after the fact isn't really fair to the student...

... For an extreme example, imagine getting a letter from a professor that says you were an excellent student over the past semester, so you provide that letter to the institution you are applying to.  Then you find that you're rejected, because the professor called the school back to say "I thought about it some more and realized he's a bad student".  It's obviously not fair, and this is essentially a much less extreme version of that.  What good is the professors recommendation if they can't even be held to their word anyways?

@JMac: I wouldn't guess that the professor gave the letter to the student; this would be very unusual in US academic culture.  Here, letters are almost always sent directly to the destination university, and the student is expected to waive any rights they might have to read them. OP says "I wrote and submitted the letter", which I understand to mean "submitted it to the other university".  And the wording "asked me for a letter of recommendation" is commonly used to mean "asked me to submit a letter of recommendation to the university".

@NateEldredge They also say that they specifically discussed and agreed upon what they were submitting.  Functionally it's basically the same thing, though I did miss that wording when I read it.  They would be going back on their word to two different people, which IMO would raise more concerns about their word than it would help clear things up.  Plus, the way it was worded, it doesn't even make much sense to contact them about it, since the letter only addressed the work they already had access to.  It would still be going behind the students back to change your recommendation after talking

@JMac: It is normal in this culture for the professor to tell the student, in broad terms, what they intend to write, but not to share with them the finished letter.  However, I don't see this as a binding agreement, and it certainly doesn't override the professor's obligation to write an honest letter.  For me, the issue is not really about whether the student expected specific content in the letter, but that the student consented to a one-time evaluation of their potential and not an indefinite ongoing reporting process.

@NateEldredge That's a good way to word it, and really what I was getting at.  A Simple Algorithm seems to be suggesting that the student isn't "in the clear" about ongoing evaluation from this professor.  Technically, it may be true, but morally the professor really shouldn't do that.  The letter was honest and reflected the work to that point.  The student didn't request ongoing feedback, so providing it to a third party unprompted is definitely at very least a non-standard way to deal with the situation between them and the student.

To clarify: my conversation with the student about the letter was very short, and in my post I described pretty much all of it. It took all of a minute or so. Then the letter was submitted directly to the university, and the student hasn't seen it and has no access to it (waived his right to see the letter), as is typical in the U.S. academia.

@JMac I'd describe the recommendation process as specifically designed to be "behind the student's back". You pick people you hope will write good ones. But they may not and are certainly not betraying any kind of trust if they include negative details in your letter. The recommender is not a tool for the student to use, or an advocate like a lawyer, they are an evaluator within the academic system to help others in the system make the best choice.

@ASimpleAlgorithm You yourself are calling them a "recommender".  They are specifically being used to recommend someone for the position.  If the institution wants evaluation, why would they even requests recommendations from you?  Wouldn't it be far more prudent of them to get this information without student input on who they should get this information from?  A recommendation is a tool for the student to use, to make them more appealing in the application process.  If for example, no one was willing to recommend you, then obviously there is less appeal.

@JMac Many recommendation forms have checkboxes ranging from "excellent" and "one of the best students I have seen" all the way down to "average" and "below average". Huge red flags of course at the latter end. I have seen applicants with these selected. Perhaps they even go below that, I haven't noticed any. It's still called a "recommendation". And the professor who did that is still called their "recommender".

@ASimpleAlgorithm And if you discuss with someone and they say "I will give you a recommendation based on what I have seen thus far", you aren't really asking them to provide feedback on future work as well, and by doing so they are essentially going behind the students back.  If the institution is looking for more information, they could ask that; but it seems like they could also ask that without a recommendation.  If future performance will have a bearing on a recommendation based on past work, then the recommender should make that clear to the student upfront.

@JMac I feel I've already addressed these points. A recommendation isn't a "deal" you make with a student. They require you give your contact info, and many people write in them "please contact me if you have any further questions". Those questions may well go beyond the scope of anything discussed in advance with the student. Again, if a student makes incorrect assumptions that is their mistake.

@ASimpleAlgorithm "So I told him that I agree to write the letter, but it would be short because I can only write what I know about him, which isn't much: I could only say that I've known him for half of the semester and that so far he has been performing really well. The student said it's fine."  It seems to me like they came to a clear understanding about what the recommendation would contain.  Sending new information, without even a request from the institution for further feedback or discussion with the student, doesn't seem right.  It's not like OP lied by saying he did good all year.

@JMac Yes I understand your position, I just disagree with it. Obviously this disagreement will not end. One final note. My perspective, comes from a side where students are constantly trying to manipulate, maneuver, con, and cheat their way through the system by playing these games to get a higher spot than where they really belong in the ranking of merit. Going along with it is unfair to other students, and does no one else a favor either, including the student who ends up in over their head.

@ASimpleAlgorithm In this case though, the school looking to recruit the student just has to do their due diligence.  They have recommendations for how half his semester went, but if they wanted a true picture of his performance, they should be checking up on his end of the year results.  If they only care about the first half-year, they wont bother to ask, and have to rely on information that was accurate at the time.  The professor providing that extra information is essentially butting themselves into something between the student and the school they are applying to.

@zipirovich I had a similar situation a few years ago:  I wrote a recommendation for Pharmacy School, then towards the end of the semester when the student was worried about grades, they asked me to look again at some exams that they thought were graded incorrectly.  There had been obvious changes to the answers or the answer was wrong and they still did not understand why.  I asked the advice of my Dean of Academics and they told me to leave it as the letter reflected my opinion at that time but if contacted, to be honest about my current feelings/thoughts, essentially as Nate suggests.

Agree.  It sounds like OP is imagining a scenario where a professor at the new school decides the student is a dud, relays this information back to the admissions office, who pulls the recommendation letters and notes who wrote them, and then in the future when they get another letter about another student from the same instructor or university discounts it on account of the first student.  It's true that OP is speaking on behalf of the university and in an professional capacity, but anything negative about the student is probably not going to reflect back on OP or the original school.

@eshier: Thank you for sharing your story! This is indeed even worse... or so it was, until this morning -- when I discovered that he cheated on the latest assignment (after the one that I described in my original post). So my guy beats yours. As everybody suggests -- and I'm very grateful for all the advice! -- I'm gonna let it be, although it feels all the more wrong... and I feel all the more terrible. :-(

Based on your statements, all that you vouched for is the performance of the student at that point in time.

What confidence can you provide in the new behavior of the student being his "true" character (rather than a sign of an unknown external pressure)?
In what way would you retract your letter that will not cause you to appear as being vindictive?
What reason can you give to retract your letter that is not covered equally if not better by the outcome that this student is on track to earn a lower final course grade on his transcript?

With so many unknowns, your first instinct should not be to retract the letter.

When you care first to know why the behavior has changed, call the student for a visit and give him a chance to explain why.
When you care first not to be seen as vindictive, call the student for a visit, explain to him that you face such a decision, and give him the chance to defend himself.
When you want nothing less than a recognition that your letter then was only for his performance at that point in time, allow the student now his time to complete his own record of his performance past that point.

To conclude, this link from an article in Psychology Today Jan 2013 also provides background for my summary of the opening statement to relate current behavior as a predictor of future behavior. Other citations could likely be found branching from this.

I agree with Jeffrey on the point that the letter is referring to an evaluation of the student at that point in time. For instance, Ted Bundy was highly touted by the faculty at U Washington while he was a student there because he did good work, and that was a fair evaluation at that time. The faculty can't be faulted for not knowing that Bundy was actually a psychopath and would later become a serial killer.

@ssjjaca but in your rather extreme example, if you had recommended Bundy to become a nursing student somewhere and later learned he was a serial killer. While you may be legally covered if the worst happened and surprised you all. But the original topic here would imply you later knew the truth about Bundy but the school didn't, and faced the "dilemma" of whether to notify them of the update. Obviously there's no question what you'd need to do in that case.

@ASimpleAlgorithm An example to your statement is that schools can and do withdraw degrees based on clear proof of academic misconduct to the requisite level even when that proof is found only after the degree was awarded. However, the counter argument here is, the OP has no proof of anything to justify any action; the OP has only inferences, speculation, and "hurt feelings" (as I would read between the lines).

@ASimpleAlgorithm I do not think there is a legal question.  You are free to write letters of reference for Bundy, Hitler, and other rogues without fear of legal consequence.

@emory Legal questions are avoided only to the extent that what you write is an accurate representation of what you know at that point. While they may have all been "good people" at some point in the past, any letter that would be written now cannot lie about them no longer being such. I have to imagine also that any letter written now should also avoid obfuscation about this point as well lest other types of legal questions are raised as a consequence.

A person writing a recommendation letter for another person vouches for the other person in general, not just at a certain point in time. The recommender implies that he knows the recomended (is that the right word?) well enough to vouch for him/her. -1.

@einpoklum Not in academia. Students may need two references, and may have limited selection of vouchees. A reference which is limited to what the lecturer knows about a student is not as effective as a personalised one, but certainly not a general reference, unless it contains sentences which imply the latter.

@CaptainEmacs: Anywhere. A letter of reference means more than just its contents. You could argue that the strength of the implicit voucher aspect of such a letter is weaker in Academia, I suppose, but I'm not even sure that's universally true.

@einpoklum Under your assumption, it would be impossible to write letters of references for a large proportion of students. Of course, a personalised letter is always far stronger, but basically, your criterion makes it impossible for a strong, but not noticeable/personable student to gain the formally required 2 letters for a grad application, without recourse. They are filtered out from the outset, just by the inability to get a personalised reference. I must say, this is a pretty drastic criterion.

@CaptainEmacs: 1. Most students don't apply to grad school. 2. In most(?) countries, you don't need an academic staff member's letter of recommendation to apply for graduate school. 3. A letter of recommendation to bypass an onerous technical requirement is something different to an actual letter of recommendation. Interpreted in context, I would construe it as saying "I don't have any problems with this person, why not let them in."

@JeffreyJWeimer The only legal question is that of libel ("a published false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation") but there is no general law against making false statements.  So if the false statements do not damage a person's reputation then you are legally safe.  However, if one is in the habit of making false statements then sooner or later, one will be called a liar - and it won't be a libel.

@JeffreyJWeimer but if there was a legal consequence for making false non-libelous statements in a letter of reference, no sane person would volunteer to write them.

A recommendation letter is/should as close as to your perception of the truth as possible as to the time of writing.
If you have sent it, retraction would be inappropriate (unless you got notice that the student achieved his marks by cheating).
Of course, a future recommendation letter may be not that brilliant, and you should let the student know that you'd rather not send another one if he asks you for it.

Exactly. The only reason to retract would be if the new circumstances, unknown to you at the time of writing would have come to light. Cheating is the good example.

Why not use this as a chance to open a conversation? "Hey, I noticed that you stopped participating after I wrote your recommendation letter. Is everything okay?"

Do you think it's a good idea to contact the other university and request that my letter of recommendation be retracted from his application package?

No. Because revoking a letter of recommendation suggests something extremely bad has occurred (as people very rarely do this AFAIK) - much worse than a student getting a couple of poor grades. More generally, unless you were misled into providing a letter, or if its contents is patently false (which is not the case with your letter) - I wouldn't even begin to consider acting to retract the letter.

Any thoughts or advice?

Yes. You should not have written a letter of recommendation for someone you don't know beyond a few numeric grades. Other than attesting that person has not misbehaved in class nor shown themselves to be incompetent - you can't really say anything meaningful about them. But a letter of recommendation says a lot. It imputes meaningful acquaintance with the recommended person. It suggests you know them and vouch for them, generally.

I disagree that the OP should not write a letter. If someone insists on writing a letter you can ALWAYS write one, as long as it is honest.If you know a student for few months and only his achievement you can vouch for is one midterm grade, then so be it. It won't be really very strong recommendation, but that is on recipient to judge. Etiquette dictates that you don't write letters that are not recommendations, but if someone would really pester me after refusing, I'd write the non-flattering one too. As long as you write the truth, it is ok.

@xmp125a: You wrote "if you know a student for a few months" - fair enough. But you don't get to know someone by virtue of him/her sitting in your class saying nothing.

This simply falls under "As long as you write the truth, it is ok". "To whomever it may concern, I know the mr. X from my lectures. He is always present, but did not ask any question and we had no verbal contact so far." As I said, it would be pretty bad recommendation letter, but if the person persists...

You should not retract the letter because it is perfectly correct. It was at the of writing, and it still is. The facts did not change, because the date on the letter specifies up to which date it applies. Regarding it's effect, I see no reason they will or should not trust the letter. They can assume his behavior changed in correlation with the transition to another school, which is correct. Whether it is caused or at all related with the transition is not clear at all, it may be completely for independent reasons.
Independent of that, I could imagine that the change is caused by the transition, but completely fine: He may have no use for the grades and the actual content of the lecture, because he knows he will have more in depth lectures in he topic soon, or because he lost interest in the topic earlier, changes his topic, and is no longer forced to learn it anyway. He could be the "previous student" in the new school.

You should not retract the letter. If you wrote it honestly, it represents the accurate picture of the student at the time of writing. There is nothing wrong with it, except as someone noticed, it is not a very strong recommendation, but this is not your fault.

Let it go.  I think there is a little bit of a logical/philosophical/character flaw in many academics (so valuing precision over a more Bayesian view of the universe) to want to regulate things around them. (We see the same things with reviewers that think they control if a paper is accepted or not, rather than just being advisors to the editor/author.)
You wrote a valid letter.  Going out on your own to write ad hoc (not requested) negative letters is uncool.  Settle down and be more phlegmatic, more Stoic, more Zen.
And don't you have something else to work on?  To worry about?  Go invent a room temperature superconductor or solve a Millennium Problem or something.

The OP asks what is right to do in this situation, not what emotions they should have. Also it appears that @guest transfers some of their feelings about reviewers to the OP. I think the first point about controlling reviewers deserves some attention... but in a answer to a different question.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Is there a lack of oversight of how professors interact with students?
Why does there seem to be a lack of oversight when it comes to how professors interact with students?
For example, consider the following questions:

How to deal with an advisor who wants a "friendlier" relationship with me than I do?
My professor is rigging data and plagiarizing. What can I do?
My first authorship is being turned into co-first authorship, what can I do?

I understand that these situations are not typical, but why is this able to exist at all in the academic world? In all three of these situations it seems that there is a complete lack of oversight of professors went it comes to their interactions with student and it seems their students can do very little if they are being treated unfairly.
I ask this because in many ways, it seems that academia is much more objective and fair than the corporate world. For example, one cannot get a faculty position at a top school by interviewing well or because their friend heads the department. College admissions tend to very (perhaps, even brutally) objective.  Lastly, outright fraud and theft of one's work tends to be low compared to outside academia. I suppose my point of confusion is why does academia fail to be as strict and fair at the professor/student level.
To give some context to my question, I work in the software industry and I am approaching this question as a total outsider.  It seems like the academic world tries to do everything it can to be fair, but I don't (as an outsider) see this with the professor/student dynamic.

Stealing patents, industrial espionage, managers leaving to bigger companies taking work conducted there to the bigger company,  illegal use of other companies patents without proper attribution (Samsung vs Apple lawsuit and vice versa), sexual harassment and managers stealing the spotlight from their subordinates is all over the corporate world. We are not a society of angels.

Your faulty assumption is that these extreme cases of unprofessionalism without real consequences don't happen in the corporate world (to be fair, the last question you linked is probably not very uncommon, but authorship discussions are rather peculiar to academia and hard to compare to something in the business world).

Also just to clarify, I am aware people are able to get away unprofessional behavior in the corporate world. My question was not, "Why is there no unprofessional behavior in the corporate world but there is in the academic world." My question was simply why does it exist in the academic world.

It exists in academia for the same reason it exists in the corporate world. Both are filled with humans, and humans are not always nice or ethical. Processes are in place to stop / prevent this in academia and corporations, but processes can only bring you so far. In practice, students / subordinate employees always have a hard time formally complaining about unethical behavior of senior staff, because the burden of proof is always on their shoulder, and if it goes wrong, it will go really wrong for them. So many times, they choose to just roll with the punches.

@xLeitix Well the main difference I see here is that universities exist to shelter the professors and students from the burdens of the "real world." Academia IS a more pure meritocracy; it is much harder to get a faculty position at a top university just because you have a friend there or because you interview well.  Likewise, one would think this level of strictness would rollover to interpersonal matters. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is just a rant dressed up as a question

@EnergyNumbers Honestly, I wasn't trying to rant (I am not even in academia, I don't really have any personally feelings about this). Would you mind leaving some constructive criticism to help improve my question?

@Eric as a start you could ask it from a neutral tone. Something like "Is there more unprofessional behaviour in academia than the corporate world" or "Is unprofessional behaviour handled differently in academia".

@StrongBad Fair point. I tied to address them.

@EnergyNumbers I don' think there is one. That is why I removed all mention of the corporate world from my post.  I supposed the closest parallel would be the intern/mentor situation, but even that is quite different.

Upvoting this question not because of the possibly unjustified assumptions in the question, but just because this is a question that needs to be properly answered. There may be many opportunities to refer to this question/its best answer in the future.

Do you follow Workplace.SE? You'll find quite a lot of questions that are very similar to the three ones you cite there. You may not have personally run into such issues at your own workplace - just as most people don't run into this kind of issues in academia.

I'm not sure that oversight is what is needed, so much as just having someone in the department to confidentially talk with. My department has a committee comprised of other department members, to whom you can privately bring any concerns, for this very purpose of overseeing the progress of graduate students and dealing with any problems. Is this not very common?

@Moriarty The school I went to for my undergraduate degree did not have this for its graduate students.

@Moriarty in my experience, expecting organizations/institutions to police themselves is not effective, whatever they might be.

@Eric: Your view of academia is a bit idealized. Even in semi-hard disciplines (economics, say), a lot of politics are being played, and matter greatly to your success or lack thereof. In fact, having worked in industry and gotten a Ph.D., I noticed less outside academia. My hunch (no quotation...) is that this tends to be the lesser the harder science the discipline is; but I could be wrong. I know ludicrous gaming anecdotes, which don't belong here, involving people who are superstars in their field.

Actually plenty of academic positions are not by fair assessment and review. In many cases, it is, who you know, both in admission to an undergraduate/graduate course, and for academic jobs. Many college admission processes are easily blinded by those who can afford to spend X amount of money as a donation to a new wing in the library. This is a rather idealised view of what academia is, which is no better than any other type of industry fraught with hierarchies and contentions.

" For example, one cannot get a faculty position at a top school by interviewing well or because their friend heads the department." nepotism is a recognized and hotly discussed problem in academia, though. (Even where there are formal rules/processes that are meant to prevent this.)

Much abuse in the academic world is directed against students. They are in an ambiguous position. They are often not considered working professionals, though in practice they are. I.e. they often teach and/or conduct research. They are usually not rewarded financially in line with their training and skills. They cannot easily move to another place till they have completed their degree. Also, they are more dependent on their mentor/supervisor than a working professional would typically be. And they are not accorded the rights that working persons normally are. Students are also less likely to complain because they need to have good relations with the faculty for their future careers. Often they are working with faculty members on projects. While similar situations/circumstances can arise outside academia, this combination is relatively unusual. The closest analogy I can think of is the institution of interns, who probably also endure abuse, though their stays are usually much shorter.
Anyway, this is fertile ground for abuse.
While this is not directly relevant, it's symptomatic that there is often much controversy/difficulty when students try to start Unions to protect their rights. This has been an issue for a good many years, at least in the United States. There was a famous case at Yale some years ago, for example.
Additionally, the institution of tenure is quite rare outside academia, though it exists. For example, judges have tenure. Tenured professors are hard to fire, and therefore are more likely to get away with abuse without consequences.
There is another issue, which is more speculative. But I'll mention it, anyway. This may also be country dependent. Foreigners entering Western countries, at least, are subject to employment restrictions. There is one notable exception to this restriction - namely educational institutions, which means universities in practice. This may not be universally true, but for example in the US, being a student is probably the easiest way to enter the country, and the main exception to the H1B work visa cap, the last I heard, were educational and non-profit institutions.
Anyway, in practice this means there are many foreigners in Western universities, both at a student and post-doc level, and of course at faculty level. Here I am only concerned about junior temporary employees like students and post-docs. In the US, at least, there is much institutional discrimination against such persons. They can't easily move to another job or university because of employment restrictions. Getting a non-university job is often very difficult. Getting employed involves an additional burden of paperwork. So, such people are, again, targets for abuse. This is not theoretical - I've seen and heard much to support this. Of course, foreigners get employment outside academia too, but for the reasons I have discussed, I believe the density of foreigners employed is particularly high in Western universities.

These are all good points I had not thought of.

The issue of foreigners is not only in western countries.  It happens in many places in asia as well.

Very good summary. From a German perspective, I'd say that for "normal" students, i.e. up to master level this isn't that much of a problem here: we have a nicely balanced system of rules and possibilities in place that keeps the possibilities of power abuse by professors in check. Part of this is that any kind of contract that has the slightest smell of power abuse is a) void and b) constitues acceptance of benefits or corruption as the professor is public official - and thus a criminal offense. BUT PhD "students" are nowadays frequently hired as employees on a research project and there...

... we also get the full dose of trouble as they are legally bound to do what their employer (= professor) says but on the other hand are still expected to present a reseach work of their own (old distinction: Diplom/Master thesis = research work under supervision, PhD thesis without supervision). For a Master thesis it is clear that e.g. the student cannot legally sign over IP rights before the exam is finished (i.e. they got their final marks after defense of thesis and all exams). But for the part-time employed PhD student IP rights automatically go to the employer (= university)...

@cbeleites Interesting comment. You should write your own answer. Even if it is Germany-specific, I think that is ok, since the OP did not specify a country.

To supplement a great answer by Faheem Mitha:
I would add that there are professions with very structured career (e.g. in medicine, law and military), and problems there are at least as severe. In general, the thing is a about the guild system, where the only way to become a professional is to get acceptance of a small community of professionals (cf. free jobs, where anyone can start and it is the market who decides).
Such systems have good quality control (i.e. there is no way around internal checks), but also generate huge gap between the already established people and the newcomers (which is an ample room for abuse - conflict with supervisors may not only jeopardize one's position in a particular company or institute, but the whole career).
As a side note, internships in the guild system are not only meant to teach, but also to control supply, so to maintain prices or prestige.

"cf. free jobs, where anyone can start and it is the market who decides". In other words, a job in an area without regulation, like dance instructor (in the US)?

@FaheemMitha Like most jobs (programming, running a shop, teaching dance...). In particular markets without regulation, but also ones in which formalities take much shorter.

The question makes a salient point, namely why it keeps happening (to whichever degree) even though everyone knows that it happens.
I think there are two answers to this question:

Professors don't really have any kind of training with regard to human resource management. As a professor, at least at research intensive universities, you are hired and promoted almost exclusively based on your research credentials. You may be managing a group of 20 grad students and postdocs, but almost never will these managers have gone through any kind of training that would teach them how to actually do this -- neither from the operational viewpoint, nor from the point of view of how to manage the humans that make up your group. It is certainly true for me that I have felt unsure how to deal with situations in my own research group many times. There is no formal structure in universities where you have to go through (or could even choose to go through) any kind of training that would prepare you for being in the position of a group leader before you get into it. Consequently, many professors essentially wing it day in day out and "shit happens". (The same happens, by the way, within the professorial ranks -- there is no training you can take before you become a department head.)
Among colleagues, it is usually reasonably well known which of the professors treat their students well and which don't. But what are you going to do about it? Once someone has tenure, the only stick you have is to open post-tenure proceedings or to have formal hearings to revoke someone's tenure because of abuse of students. Unless a professor sexually assaults a student, it is almost inconceivable to think of evidence that would stand in the court of law upon which a university could base revoking someone's tenure. So it isn't done. A department head might talk to a professor in a case where students keep complaining, but as there are no formal training programs or requirements for professors (see above), there is in fact very little that can be done in practice. (I'm not trying to make this into an excuse, it's just a cold hard look at the realities of a university, sad as it is in these cases.)

"Professors don't really have any kind of training...". I take your point, but you don't need training to treat people decently.

On the other side, the amount of abuse and harassment some professors get from students, especially female professors and professors of colour is appalling. It happens on both ends, not just by professors to students. There are no systems or training in place for either end. Both professors and students need support.

Not decently, perhaps, but good people management is a skill that can be taught, just like how to teach a class is a skill. Some folks don't need the advice, others would refuse to benefit from it. But a lot of folks in the middle might learn something useful to help manage their teams.

Did you mean "almost inconceivable" in the middle of the last paragraph?

Yes, sure. I corrected it.

@Calchas: I agree. It's just not how the system works currently. I think it would be quite useful to have more training.

Faculty misbehavior, even if it falls short of justifying revoking tenure, can still be punished to some extent, at least in departments like mine: People can get low (or no) raises. They can get lousy teaching assignments. They can get worse offices.  Of course, some people can ignore such penalties and continue misbehaving, but some people will get the message and shape up (or at least try to shape up).

Oversight rules vary tremendously, but at the end of the day, professors have a considerably position of power over students, no matter how many rules the university has to protect them.
In at least two Swedish universities I am aware of, PhD students have the right to change supervisors.  This rule is designed to provide the student a way out in case the relationship with the supervisor becomes unworkable.  I know at least one case where this happened, but having heard both sides of the story, I think it is rather a case of conflicting personalities than a case of abuse.  Of course, it's an undesirable situation in any case, but it does mean there is some form of oversight.  If it happens more than once to the same professor that their students switch before finishing, that's going to look quite bad on the professor.  Maybe it helps, if only a little.

This is the same in the UK and it is not unusual. Personality clashes happen and there is nothing wrong in dealing with them by moving people to different supervisors (with everyone's consent of course).

wow. Reading this from Germany I'm kind of shocked how a student possibly could be denied the right to change their supervisor... (I moved with my thesis to a different university) But as many PhD students nowadays are employees hired on a reseach project, we get there rather entangled situations as well.

It's a strange thing to ask why do bad things happen.
Bad things happen.
Rules aren't there to prevent bad things happening altogether. That would be an impossible goal. They are there to reduce the occurrences, and their consequences, as far as is practicable.
You have found some cases where bad things happen. You've then tried to extrapolate that to infer something about academia as a whole. And that inference is invalid. You've identified some possible bad things. All their existence shows, is that bad things might happen. Not that oversight is missing; not that there is an absence of accountability; not that there is a failure to redress wrongs. Just that sometimes, bad things happen.

The OP wrote

"...I ask this because in many ways, it seems that academia is much
  more objective and fair than the corporate world."

So I understand the question as follows: Academia seems, in general, structured to exhibit a lower degree of harassment, unfair practices, etc, compared to the corporate world. But it appears that in one particular "field", the professor/student relationship, Academia does worse than it does in other fields, like

"For example, one cannot get a faculty position at a top school by
  interviewing well or because their friend heads the department."

This we could call meritocracy (as a guiding principle). And meritocracy is a ruthless regime, where those with lesser merit, are, pardon my political incorrectness, lesser.  And however imperfectly measured, and bar exceptional situations that validate the rule, students have lesser merit than professors, in the specific field of activity that they meet and interact.
In theory and in imagination, armed with humanistic principles and the currently prevailing ethical ideals (not practiced ethics), at least in the Western world with which I am familiar, we could perceive of a meritocratic system totally free of (from?) abusive treatment of those with lesser merit.
And as @Energynumbers answer correctly points out, after all, the issue at hand is a matter of degree, and so we will have to measure it in order to conclude on how widespread it is, how frequent, how severe, and whether it has become the rule, or the exception that validates the rule.
My answer just says that the same rules that may make Academia "score better" than the corporate world in the eyes of outsiders, are those that create also the potential for seemingly conflicting attitudes and phenomena.

It's not merit, it's position (~ merit x time); so students, even very talented, have lower position than, even not as talented, professors. Compare it with jobs in which merit is important, but positions are not entrenched - like programming.

@PiotrMigdal Merit is not talent. Talent may be a signal of probable future merit, not more. This is not special to Academia, in business we usually worry about highly talented people because as many times as not they don't deliver up to expectations their own talent creates.

If you understand merit as "cumulative achievements" I agree, if "ability right now" then I don't. But in that sense, a good meritocracy is the later (as opposed to a system in which someone is still on top, because (s)he was good two decades ago).

@PiotrMigdal But how can you tell the "ability right now"? You extrapolate the "cumulative archivements"!

@PiotrMigdal I understand "merit" as "production right now" -not "ability" -"ability" is, again, a potentiality, not an actuality. And, statistically speaking, a student cannot produce/offer research, or education, or consulting services as a professional academic can. So, currently, the student has less merit than a professor. In a meritocracy, this tends to be all that matters (and let me clarify that I do not take the position that a meritocratic system is the "ideal solution" -it is just one more approach to deal with the issues that the co-existence of humans creates).

@AlecosPapadopoulos I know examples when a undergraduate student could lecture better than a professor, yet the roles are fixed with one's official title. Of course, statistically speaking its rare, but the difference between meritocracy and diplomacracy (^made-up, but I think its understandable) is that even if positions are obtained strictly due to merit, there is a lag between one's merit and positions. In meritocracy, it wouldn't matter if one is a tenured prof of a high-school dropout, as long as the state of current research is the same.

@VolkerSiegel No. You do linear regression rather than add all achievements. (The difference between f(x) and f'(x).)

@PiotrMigdal Hmm... What I was trying to say was that you estimate the current ability based on the known data on ability, using an extrapolation method. The method could be linear regression. Oh, I see that I wrote to base the extrapolation on the "cummulative archivements" - which would be one value, when I meant the individual previous archivement values.

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


text:
When should the erratum (or other published correction) for a paper be cited?
I am curious as to whether there are any accepted standard rules on when to cite, or not to cite, a published correction (erratum/corrigendum) along with a paper.
The meanings of these terms are not universal across all publishers, so for the purposes of this question, I will follow the convention of APS journals where errata are used for corrections by the authors. In my field (physics), I often see an erratum get between zero and a handful of citations, while the main paper keeps amassing them after publication of the erratum.
Clearly then, (at least in physics) there is no expectation that an author  should always cite the corrections. This is reasonable to me: If I cite a paper in my introduction about a related interesting system, the fact that the paper has a typo in eq. (33) isn't very relevant, so no need to have it clutter up the bibliography. On the other hand, it seems obvious to cite the erratum if my paper directly depends on the contents of the erratum. Presumably there's a line somewhere in-between. However, I have never seen this formalized. What if my work builds on a paper, but is not affected by the published corrections?
So my question is essentially:

Under what conditions should the erratum be cited? Are there any relevant guidelines, or rules of thumb?

(I also welcome any discussion on how the standards might vary between fields, or between different types of publications.)

As pointed out by @corey979 much of the work is now done for recent, online papers. The older errata are harder to deal with, since it is not nearly as clear that there was an erratum (although an author search in your favorite database should yield a hit).

I agree that the journals being online does help quite a bit, at least the for the first exposure to a paper. Had I been around before then I would probably have made an effort to always cite corrections, just as a service to the reader.

Errata are used for substantial errors in a paper, rather than mere spelling or grammatical errors.  Citation of errata with original papers helps reduce error propagation in research.  Unfortunately this is not as common a practice as it should be, mostly because authors are often unaware of an erratum, or believe that if they are aware of it, others will be too.  The problem of error propagation due to failure to cite errata has been studied in the context of physics research by Thomsen and Resnik (1995).  They find that the existence of an erratum does not decrease the citation frequency for the original paper, and the erratum is usually not cited with the original paper, allowing errors in research to propagate.
It is possible that this situation will improve now that most journals are online, owing to better online referencing of papers and direct connection of papers to their erratum.  When you look at a paper from its original source in an online scholarly journal, it is usually obvious when there has been an erratum.  However, it is still common for researchers to obtain papers from other sources where they are not alerted to this, and so this is not a panacea.  (For example, some authors print out papers and then read from printed copies.  If there is a later erratum, the researcher with a printed copy may have no idea that this has occurred.)
Though I am not aware of any formal "standard rules" on the matter, it is desirable to reduce error propagation in research, and so ideally it is best to always include citation of the erratum with the citation of the original paper.  That way the reader is alerted to the existence of the erratum, and does not propagate any error in the paper.  At a minimum the erratum should obviously be cited whenever the main citation to the paper touches on an aspect of the paper that is actually affected by that erratum (i.e., you should avoid error propagation yourself).  But even in cases where the erratum does not affect parts of the paper that were of relevance to the main citation, it is also useful to cite the erratum in case an interested reader decides to read the cited paper in full, and is not aware that there has been an erratum.  Evidently, from the fact that errata receive few citations, not many academics are doing this.
Speaking as someone who has published a mathematical paper with an error in an equation, and an erratum to correct that error, I would prefer it if all citations to my paper also cite the erratum with it, just to make sure that the original error does not propagate.  It is not offensive to an author who has made an error to have the erratum to their paper cited; we are already aware we fucked up, and it is a relief when others do the right thing to minimise the damage.

Thomsen, M. and Resnik, D. (1995) The effectiveness of the erratum in avoiding error propagation in physics. Science and Engineering Ethics 1(3), pp. 231-240.

Really interesting reference, thank you! Your position of "always cite" is reasonable, but it's clearly not universally held, as (according to both the reference and my own experience) authors quite often leave out citations to their own errata. I wonder if there is somewhat of a field difference here, reflecting the different standards of rigor.

A typo in an equation could lead to an erratum if it could lead to the paper likely being misinterpreted. "substantial errors" lie on a continuum. It could be that most of the analysis is wrong and needed correcting or could be something more minor like "Fig 2 was generated using the parameters x=2 and y=3 as reported in the figure caption, rather than x=5 and y=7, as reported in the main text, the figure would look as follows if x=5 and y=7, which is qualitatively similar but note the difference in qualities A B and C." Such sort of errors are borderline as to whether the correction is needed

The big question is why the erratum was issued. If the error is a significant technical issue, then the erratum should certainly be cited along with the original article.
However, I can provide a counterexample where it is probably unnecessary to cite the erratum—-if the publisher failed to make a correction specified in the proof stage, and then published an erratum or corrigendum. This happened on my most cited paper—a grammatical error was left uncorrected, even though we notified them of it. The publisher fixed the error, and issued an erratum. Given that this all happened within a few weeks of the initial publication, citing the erratum is just a waste of time for everybody involved.

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

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


text:
I'm an independent researcher with a very long paper, how can I get help editing it and submitting it to a journal?
I am an independent researcher and have spent the past year writing a fairly extensive (60+ pages) research paper on a topic in probability/statistics. The paper is almost complete but there are a couple minor loose ends that I am having issues with proving. Furthermore, given the length of the paper I am not sure of the appropriate journal to submit for publication and thus am considering contacting relevant professors in academia for help/guidance. My plan was to offer co-authorship in exchange for help addressing these loose ends and guidance with the publication process.  That said, my impression is that research faculty are inundated with these sorts of requests and so I was not sure if this approach was likely to get a response. Is this practice frowned upon in academia? If not, are there general best practices for reaching out with these sorts of requests?

Update (2/8/22): The now 122-page paper is available on ArXiV here.  I was not able to find someone interested in helping due in part to the length of the paper.  I am still faced with the challenge of how/where to publish this and most importantly receive feedback. Having stared at this for so long I find that I am unable to see better ways to organize the paper and make it more readable. I did receive some useful feedback over on MathOverflow. In particular, it was suggested that I have done too much of the work to ethically bring in someone as a collaborator. This puts me in a strange place because I am really struggling to improve the readability of the paper without feedback and at the same time cannot get anyone to read it because it is so long. I was told I should move chapter 2 to appendices and condense chapter 3, which is where the "meat" of the paper is.  Some suggested publishing this as a monograph but I'm not sure.  I still am not sure about best practices for publishing works of this length.  How many journals accept papers with 50 pages of appendices? Guidance on how to proceed with getting this to an appropriate journal would be greatly appreciated.

What journals are the papers you cite published in? That will guide you on which journal it is appropriate to submit to.

@astronat Thanks for the comment.  This is typically how I would search for journals to publish in.  The problem is that this paper took an applied problem in optics and approached it from a purely mathematical "theorem-proof" approach and so the content of the paper is too math heavy for the optics journals most of the related literature is published in.

Is there any way to reduce the length of the paper (by splitting it into multiple papers, or breaking into appendices, or what have you)? My concern is that getting a stranger to read your paper can be tough, but a ~5 page paper is much more enticing than a 60 page paper.

@cag51 I agree that the length is a problem if I want someone to read it. Ultimately I think the paper will have to be split up into multiple parts for publication.  However, how to go about doing this in the proper way is one of the things I am seeking guidance on.  Perhaps I could select the main theorems of the paper without the proofs and write them up in a letter (~5 pages)? That way someone could read the letter and decide if they wish to take a closer look.

I'd guess it is pretty hard to find a publisher for a paper of that length. Even the original 60 pages is pretty long for most.

Have you considered posting about your work on Stack Exchange, so that readers can review thin slices of your work instead of the whole "cake"? In such posts, you could cite your long paper on arXiv.

@RodrigodeAzevedo I have done this with limited success. Here is one example.

Are there such things as developmental editors who specialize in math? This is what the person wants, although I am guessing if such a person exits they could charge a hefty sum.

It is about the right length for a PhD thesis, and all the background work would actually be appropriate in a thesis. Have you completed/started a PhD? Why not seek out an advisor? Edit; just looked at the mathoverflow Q. apparently that's what they said.

This is not my field, so I can't assess the technical results (and this is not our role in any case). But from looking through quickly, my impression is that you have a mix of paper and manuscript/textbook here. Consider:

Chapter 1 begins with three pages of "mathematical preliminaries", which defines terms such as the gamma function and the binomial coefficient. This makes sense for a textbook, but in a research paper, you would normally not define "common knowledge" like this.
Your later chapters (from the titles, anyway) seem to similarly spend many pages summarizing known results. Indeed, section 3.1 is a "brief review of photon transfer theory" -- four pages. Normally, the entire discussion of "textbook results" in a research paper would be less than a page (though conventions in your field may be different).
You then have some lengthy theoretical results. I don't have the background to determine whether these results are "exciting" / interesting (and should be a separate manuscript), or if you're just slogging through the work needed to define your algorithm (in which case, you will need to summarize the procedure / results without showing the derivation line-by-line).
Then, 58 pages in, you define your estimator and set up an experiment to test it. You seem to conclude that it works well. I'm concerned you don't have a state-of-the-art benchmark to compare it against, so how do you know it's better than what exists already? But I don't know your field, so fine, maybe my concern is misguided.

Based on this, I would suggest that you should split this two or three ways:

A paper based on your estimator. This will < 10 pages in which you describe the problem, describe your algorithm, and show the experimental "proof" that your algorithm works well. If there are any other "really nice" properties of your estimator, you can state those as well if you can squeeze them into your page limit. Keep in mind your audience: I assume your audience is algorithm users who are considering adopting your method -- so, you'll want to motivate them by showing that it works and telling them how to do it. Or maybe your audience is mathematicians, who will have different motivations. But no one will be motivated by a 122 page paper :-)
A manuscript intended for those new to this field. You seem to have quite a bit of this already, though you'll want to remove the "novel" bits that are not well-established results (or use your novel bits as examples).
If any of your theoretical work is an "exciting result" in itself, a separate paper there may be appropriate.

Getting the 1-2 short papers published should be doable, and the manuscript being on the arXiv is probably fine. You can cite it there...and you may find that you want to turn it into a full length textbook in the future, in which case not having this part formally published may be a good thing.

This answer is very good as it proposes a solution based on your seemingly main issue: Not knowing what your target audience is. I scrolled through the work for a bit and it seems like you wrote for students, applied scientists, and theoretical scientists at the same time.

It sounds like your question is: "My paper is way too long.  How do I publish it in an optics journal?"

Identify the most valuable result.
Go through your work word-by-word and remove what is not necessary to support that result.
Find that it is still way too long.
Write a four page, illustrated summary that shows the value of your result.  This should have a minimal amount of math.
Submit the summary to an optics journal with the document that is way too long as "supplementary information."  The summary should emphasize the value of the result, and only briefly summarize the method.

This is not guaranteed to work if nobody's willing to peer review it.

Somewhere in the comments you mention "It just took a lot of work (lots of many nontrivial calculations)".
Unfortunately not all the work is relevant to be published, in published paper you may find that what is summarized in a very concise sentence (for example "the parameter X of the hyperbolic PDE of order 2.5 has been estimated by analytically solving for the kernel of the lagrangian in a complex hermitian basic solution") which can be understood by the specific community interested in the results of the paper (in the example I gave the comunity would be the imaginary lagrangian chemistry modellers).
There are papers very dense in their results, that are condensed in 10 pages, but they requires a lot of work of many people, however their work is just added as a very fat appendix.
It seems to me it is the case of your publication: you can easily go from 100 pages to 10 pages + an appendix of 1-2 section, each of 40 pages: please note that the appendix can be much less descriptive and it can be limited to the bare minimum (with references and so on, but with minimum descriptions), so it may be squeezed down to maybe 25 pages each.
My external observation is based on the fact that I can follow most of your publication without being in your sector (it's not a good thing :) ) and I found sentences like pag.11

Given the rich theory of Laplace transforms one might hope that
published tables of transform pairs will provide the necessary result
to invert this equation. Indeed, inversion w.r.t. β2 is achieved via
[19, Eq. 5.4.9] yielding an unbiased estimator for τ when κ1 is known
(see Appendix B). However, the final inversion w.r.t. β1 leads to an
intractable problem; suggesting the possibility that the estimator T
does not exist.

Which can be reduced to a much more dense (I am cutting a lot of corners, however the meat is that Estimator T may not exist, right?)

Estimator T could not be found via inversion (see Appendix B)

the preamble is useless: the reader does not want/need to be surprised, or teased, by the reading of your paper.
The results inside must trigger the interest of the reader, not the way you write it (one can even say that the paper can be boring, to a certain extent).

Yes, finding collaborators late in the game is hard. Too late now, but it is much easier to establish these early on where you can share ideas. And a late collaboration on a very large work is even harder.
But, I fear that you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. While I think it will be hard to find any publisher willing to take a stab at such a long paper, I think your best (caveat below) option, if you can find such a publisher is to submit what you have and look at what feedback you get.
I've assumed above that what you have yet to "prove" isn't consequential to the overall result. If it is, then you have to admit that you might be wrong, fundamentally wrong. In that case you have to deal with the "choke points" and examine the available evidence.
Alternatively, and maybe even better, is to mine what you have already done for a series of shorter papers that you can submit more widely and for which you can provide appropriate proof.
Combining the above ideas, if you can separate out those choke points into separate "papers" you might be able to get collaboration on the smaller issues by asking an academic or two for feedback. It might even be different people for different issues.

Thank you for the feedback. Indeed, I am past the choke points and was able to iron out the loose ends I had at the writing of the original post.  The problem now is of organization, making it more readable, and highlighting the key innovations.  Does it all make sense to me? Yes. But some of the feedback I got on MO was that it was difficult to extract the essential parts of the paper.  To do this would require a lot of reorganization, and without a clear goal in mind, i.e. where to publish and in what format, makes this reorganization effort much more difficult.

It is common practise to ask domain experts for help and, where appropriate, to offer co-authorship. As professors are busy, you might want to seek more junior researchers. (I'll refrain from explaining how to write an email, since you can find answers on this website.)

Keep the current manuscript to support your theses if you receive inquiries about them.
Make a goal of reading daily 5 pages of it and converting them in 1 page.
Put together the new manuscript with the single pages and re-read to check if it makes sense.
Repeat the entire process once again (if it’s still too long).
Submit for publication


text:
What to select for "type of source" for a paper in Microsoft Word?
I am currently doing my very first paper at university and am a bit lost with Word’s citation system.
What does a scientific paper (more specifically this one) classify as when it comes to “type of source” in Word?

This probably is a very simple question, but I am really having trouble finding an answer.
Here’s an explanation of my thought process:

It is certainly not a book nor a book section.
I don’t feel like it would count as an article in a journal or peridocal as from my understanding research papers are published as a stand-alone?
Conference Proceeding: I have no idea what that is, but I think it isn’t it.
Maybe a report? As it reports on findings that were made ... but I feel this is also not quite right ...
It is not a website.
I might use document from website, however this paper is available on several websites (at least through my Google Scholar search) that seem to have picked it up, however it was not originally published through them from what I can tell.
While I have it as a PDF, I don't think that is meant by **electronic source.*
Art: no
Sound Recording: no
Performance: no
Film: no
Interview: no
Patent: no
I have no idea what is meant by case. As in a lawsuit?
Misc is what I will pick for now, but I guess citing research papers in a scientific work isn’t something happening so seldomly that one would have to resort to misc.

I strongly recommend against using Microsoft Word for paper writing. Yes, it’s widely used. No, it’s not good at it. — If you’re comfortable with it, author your paper in LaTeX, Pandoc-Scholar or similar. If you’re not comfortable with it, at least use a proper collaborative editing system like Google Docs. — More to the point, do not use Word’s integrated citation system. Use a proper reference manager software. It will save you a lot of pain.

@KonradRudolph While true, some journals/etc. prefer Word as the format, by my understanding.

@KonradRudolph: TBH, besides the collaborative aspect - which can indeed be a strong plus -, Google Docs is quite ridiculous in typesetting capabilities, lacking features that were available on Word 6 for Windows 3.1 (one for all that left me baffled: custom styles). I wouldn't use it for anything moderately serious.

@MatteoItalia In my experience, paper writing doesn’t require most of these features. Personally I agree though: custom styles (and line intermittent numbers!) are crucial features for paper writing. But my former collaborators don’t seem to miss (or indeed, ever have used) these features. Incidentally, I’m not a huge fan of Pandoc-Scholar/Markdown/etc for the same reason. Just use LaTeX already.

@KonradRudolph: indeed most people I've ever seen using a word processor don't seem to know much besides "hard formatting" (and WordArt in the glorious days), so I see your point. It just makes me sad that a tool that could have so much potential is - as often happens - half-assed enough to be surpassed in useful features by 25 years old software. :-(

@MatteoItalia well normally I like to use InDesign for longer texts as I love it’s style capabilities, but since this is the first time writing a paper for our course we are supposed to do it in groups and therefore I deemed word to be the easiest as it has collaboration features without requiring version control that will probably just irritate my fellow students. For what I do word has been sufficient. I probably won’t write that many papers in my life, so for now I guess I will be faster with word than learning LaTex from scratch :D

To pile on a little bit: I won't argue one way or the other about using Word to write papers, but I would recommend that you try a separate bibliographic database system/organizer such as Zotero; it has lots of advantages, one being that your references won't be locked in Word if you decide to switch writing platforms.

@CrazyQwert You're wise to use the same tool as your collaborators. Good luck with your paper!

@BenBolker Zotero looks quite cool indeed!

@CrazyQwert Although most people are familiar with word, collaborating with them in LaTeX is possible: services like https://www.overleaf.com/ provide it is a webapp so no one has to install anything and even offer the capability to edit in rich text (similar to Google docs). So, you can work with all the features of LaTeX you want while your collaborators can work in an as simple rich text environment as they want.

The paper you link is not a journal article. It's published as part of a conference proceedings.
You can find the complete proceedings in which that paper appears here (link is to the SPIE page for the 1994 conference Telemanipulators and Telepresence Technologies).
To address some other points in your question, I cannot think of a legitimate research paper that was not published in a journal or conference. Publishing in this sense means putting the paper through peer review, an essential part of contributing to the literature if you want your work to be taken seriously.
Furthermore, conference proceedings are exactly what it says on the tin: proceedings (i.e. talks) from a conference that have been written up and published. Publishing in this way is more common in some fields than others, for example, in computer science, just like the paper you linked.

Depending on field, recent work might appear on a preprint server such as the arxiv up to a year or more before it passes peer review. In an extreme case where a student has moved on to other pastures, that might be the only easily citable version of the work available.

One standard set of examples of extremely legitimate research papers that were never published in a journal or conference proceedings are Perelman's groundbreaking works that won him a Millennium Prize and a Fields Medal.

This is not answer to the question


text:
Biochemistry/Computer Science BS applying for top 10 Computer Science PhD
I am currently an undergraduate student at a large state university.
I have good grades (>3.90 GPA) in Biochemistry and I am now adding computer science courses. I am doing equally well in those (>3.80 GPA). But the majority of my research is in biochemistry. I did my honors thesis, worked in a wet lab for two years, and have two research publications. But these all have nothing to do with computer science.
I am really happy with the people in biochemistry and molecular biology, but not with the field itself. My biology advisors tell me I can probably do very well for myself in biochemistry. But I want to do computer science, since that is where my interests really lie. I like making algorithms out of strange algebras that don't exist and really fancy statistics that pretend they can think, and that is almost non-existent in my field of molecular genetics. I am not a fan of bioinformatics.
I already have research experience. But it might not be the right type of research experience. Nor do I have CS internships. Just lots of biology. Should I apply for those phd programs now, or should I wait until I have more research in computer science before I apply for Ph.D. programs?
Now suppose I apply for these top ten Ph.D. programs and I am rejected. How are reapplicants viewed within the academic cs community? Can I try again after a stint in your average brand-name company?

Why not just apply to a mix of top and middle ranked PhD programs as well as a few MS programs?

That's a really good point. But I also want to know about the higher phd places

In navigating my own applications over the years, I'm led to believe that the most important thing they want to know about you is are you going to be a good researcher. That you have publications in a technical field helps you a lot, it demonstrates you know the process one must go through in pursuing original work.
I will say that going straight to a PhD at a top 10 university in the field is somewhat of a leap without having much CS background, they won't have much evidence that your research interests are well-developed and that you are really serious about sticking with studying computer science at that level for 5+ years. But if they like what they see from your research and undergraduate coursework and recommendation letters (VERY IMPORTANT), then they will often just have you take a handful of pre-requisite courses at the beginning to get you caught up to where they think a beginning PhD student should be, e.g. taking some upper-level undergraduate classes that give you a good breadth of CS knowledge.
You would have a much better shot at getting into a Masters program in CS coming from your position, if you are willing to fund it yourself or take out loans. Oftentimes your PhD funding comes from a member of the faculty and so they need adequate convincing that you're worth the money.
My advice would be: apply to a few top 10 PhD programs you think you'd be a good fit for, apply to a few middle-tier PhD programs to give you some options, and then apply to a few MS programs if you think you'd be willing to go that route. You'll probably get an MS acceptance somewhere, you have a good shot at getting into a middle tier school, and you never know! They may just really like your application bundle and you might land a golden seat at a top 10.
And if you don't like the results, spend a year or two doing things to improve your application (CS research, online classes, work through problems in well-known textbooks, get a MS degree, read A LOT of papers and develop very specific research interests, etc.)

I actually see that you need to revaluate your Priorities about the so called Top 10 Universities.
I now see that the so called Top Schools are just Ranking Junkies.
Apply to lesser Known Schools in the USA Canada or Europe because the Top Schools attract too many Applicants for just 1000 Spots.
In 2002 Harvard Attracted 22.000 Applicants and now in 2020 it attracts 39.000 Applicants just for BA Degree Levels.
Top Colleges are now behaving like Corporations making money or mining their Students instead of Giving formal Education to their Patrons.
Hence Lies the Tragedy of College and University Education in the Western World.
So many students graduate with huge Student Loans worth averagely 45.000 US Dollars in the Grand Scheme of affairs.
College more important especially when it comes to Medecine Engineering and the Law.
Other subjects are just taking up land and Campus Space.
Besides one can also learn in the library and do Online Courses to add to the University Diploma Gained.
Less Known Colleges and Varsities have time for you and will enable you to become Outstanding at your Pace.
You see College must go at the Pace of your Intellectual Ability
Loren Pope said there is life beyond the Ivy League so do not at all disregard the State Schools and Universities in the USA Canada and Europe.
Be humble and get into a lesser Known to avoid Wasting Dollars and Precious Time in So Called Elite Schools.
Think about it we are the all the same humans no matter the School we attend for a Diploma or a Certificate.
The Editors who create Rankings assume that creating a Social Class will get People a sense of Ego Snobbery and Nepotism.
If one can write and understand Good English then one has a leg up un the World of Academia and Graduate Schools.

Why not stay in Biochemistry than Join the Queue for Computing.

In Africa we suffer from Power Cuts on a regular Basis and  Getting a PhD in Computing will not really help us a lot.

African Universitis  are granting Masters and PhD under Conditions that most Wwestrn Students cannot imagine as some Schools do not even have enough Libraries and Computer Centres for EditING and  Thesis and Dissertation  Submission in the year 2020.


text:
Is there anywhere to complain about the behaviors of editors of journals except themselves?
Two months ago, I submitted a paper to a journal. Within two weeks, editor in chief gave me: "Invitation to Revise". He himself read the manuscript and provides some comments.
I worked on his comments during the past two months. Today I finished the revision and submitted the revised version of the manuscript in the journal submission system. Eight minutes later, editor-in-chief emailed me that the paper did not accept, please see the comments to the editors and reviewers at the end of email.
There were two lines of comments, telling me could you please submit the manuscript to our new special issue, with a link.
When I look at the web page of their special issue, I found out that their special issue submission, will start some month later and its deadlines are much later. I don't have so much time, to wait for this.
What can I do? Is it useful to email to EIC?
When I don't have the right to submit the manuscript to two journals at the same time, what prevents EIC and editors from acting unethically?
Especially, when they have all the powers?
EDIT: In response to comments, the question is:
Is there anywhere to complain about the behaviors of editors of journals except themselves?

What can I do? — Decline the invitation and submit your paper elsewhere. They’ve rejected your paper, so there is no conflict.

I'm not clear on why you feel they acted unethically...IIUC, they rejected your paper but invited you to submit to a "special issue" instead, which was due much later...your options are to submit to that or to submit elsewhere...

@cag51, I have worked to make the paper ready to be sent to reviewers based on the EIC comments. He must tell either you didn't perform what I want or send it to the review. Not to tell me to submit to a special issue.

@corey979, I mean is there anywhere that author can complain about the unetithcal behaviour of editors of journals?

I will be the last to say that the current system for publishing papers is a good, functioning system. And it should be possible to call out e.g. the editor of a journal with a large impact factor if you have good reason to believe that he has a bias. I am totally with you on that, however, this really does not apply to the situation you described. There is no ethical problem here. It is within his rights to reject a paper even after changes have been done to it. (And he did not even reject it outright, he offered you something else, and your main complaint is basically that you lose a month.)

It's probably just supply and demand.  Your paper isn't good enough to make it into the regular editions, but he is going to lower the bar a bit to fill out the special issue.
I have seen this.  It's not nefarious.  In a way the regular/special difference is like the difference of journals with different importance, exclusivity.
In terms of what you should do:  I would lean to moving on to another journal.  And upgrade the paper based on the reviews.  Now, if the editor could tell you the paper was good to go (for the special), that is different.  But it sounds like this is not the case or else he would have just told you that at the time.  Being invited to enter another uncertain outcome of his would not interest me.  Yeah, you will have new competition at new journal, but at least you are moving on.  How I would prefer it.

In my opinion is not normal because the invitation to edit review the ms was from the journal, not the special issue.  Though this doesn't warrant publication (it depends much on the wordings) and a paper is accepted only when it comes to be, it seems that the editor pushes to fill in the special issue. ...

Usually, papers submitted to a special issue are promptly published online.  They may not receive an issue number until some time later, when the issue is complete.  In this situation, there is no more delay to publication than any other submission.  Nobody cares about the delay to the issue number.
You should check the journal's policies, and if necessary, ask the editor about the intended timeline.  If you do not like the timeline, take your paper to another journal.
Here there is no indication that the editor has acted unethically.  It is fine for the editor to ask you to submit your paper differently.  Editors might even think they are helping you by directing you to the special issue, because maybe people interested in the topic of the special issue will read your paper.