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Are end-of-term student evaluations taken seriously?
My question is in the title, but I'm specifically curious about the case where all students give a professor a negative evaluation. In that instance, does the department/university stop giving him new courses? Does it have any effect whatsoever?

It depends on the rules of the institution. Where I did my undergrad, absolutely nothing.

I believe at most universities it would be one factor considered when reviewing the professor. However, there are many other factors (including whether the prof was forced to teach the course against his/her preference, how are reviews in other classes, temporary personal situation, and many more).

A few years ago I taught two sections of the same course, nearly back to back.  They had the same lectures, same reading, same assignments, and very similar exams.  I got good evaluations from one section and terrible evaluations from the other.  Happily, department heads understand that sometimes you just get a cranky class.

It depends on the university, the class dynamics, and the position of the professor/lecturer (i.e. are they ajuncts or casuals? Or are the tenured/continuing contracts? Are they solely there to teach, or is teaching a small component to their research expectations?)
Short answer: Generally not. Student evaluations are taken with a large cup of salt. This is because the anonymity of evaluations allow for students to provide unhelpful, derogatory and discriminatory comments without repercussions. If there is trouble with a class, the professor/lecturer may have already brought it up with the head of school/faculty prior to the course ending or evaluations coming through.
I would also be careful in claiming that ALL students will complain. You might find that some students are only agreeing with the loud voices who are disgruntled, but may not feel the same. Students also often tend to only provide bad evaluations, students who really enjoy the course do not always tend to indicate as such on student evaluations and this is taken into consideration. We are more likely to provide negative feedback when we are displeased, than we are when we are happy.
Women and individuals of colour/disabilities and so on are more likely to receive bad evaluations based on preconceived biases that students may not even be aware of. These are also taken into consideration when evaluations are received.
Student evaluations can be helpful regarding what the professor can do to improve the course (structure, content and so on) but they are not helpful in assessing the popularity or whether students like a professor. It's not a professor's job to be liked by the students nor is it a popularity contest.
The best teaching evaluations are those where students have carefully considered their responses and provided constructive feedback for improvement. Anything that reads as malicious or aggressive is ignored, and anything that says one thing which can be contradicted with evidence (i.e. a student claiming that a professor didn't spell out expectations, where in fact, there is hard evidence supporting that the professor did) will be ignored as well. If a professor received contradictory evaluations (i.e. one student saying really positive things, others who say exact opposite on the same topic) there is a general assumption that the student who says the negative things did poorly and is frustrated with their grade.

a good source on gender bias in student evaluations is Gender and Student Evaluations: An Annotated Bibliography available here: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/gsebibliography.pdf

this answer is too long.

Comparing student feedback to inter-faculty review feedback can be very helpful as it tends to pick the more useful criticism out of the background whining.

It depends.
If it's a research institution, the professor might not have been hired for their teaching ability to start with. Often times, however, they are still required to teach a couple courses. Large amounts of negative evaluations often cause professors in this position to be shifted to "research only".
If a professor does not have tenure, student evaluations can serve as a basis for refusing to grant that professor tenure.
If a professor does have tenure, I'm honestly not sure what happens. I imagine the repercussions would be university specific, perhaps even department specific.

Reputation of bad teaching can lead to minimal raises.  Or to a "request" from the chairman that the professor attend a workshop on improving his teaching.

When I was a student, we did an interesting experiment on this, with the professor's consent.  In a class of about 30, on evaluation day, the professor left the room briefly while we schemed about a collective set of outrageous lies to tell.  I can't remember the full set, but it definitely included "always shows up drunk, if he shows up at all."  Then the whole class filled in some variation of these lies on our evaluations.
Later the professor reported back on the results: nobody ever said a word about it to him.  Our conclusion was that, given such a coherent attack on a professor widely known for his excellent teaching, the people processing the evaluations must have simply decided that it was a fabricated as a prank and tossed it out.
The moral of the story is this: students generally vary widely in their experiences and their preferences for a class, and I expect that unanimity in anonymous dislike would actually be taken less seriously than specific and factual criticisms from individuals.

I'm not surprised.  At my institution, the instructor receives the original teaching evaluation forms after the bubbles have been scanned.  Nobody scans or retypes the narrative comments on the backs of the forms, and therefore only the instructor ever sees them.

I think that awsoci answered your question quite well. But to add to it: student evaluations are taken seriously, or at least they should be, if a trend appears. Student evaluations are generally mixed with bare evaluations that were hastily completed, or overzealous ones, or those from students who are disgruntled for whatever reason. Therefore, I think that evaluations would only become a decision making factor if a trend began to appear, which was supported by other data.

And even then, it depends on the trend. For example, let's say we discover the professor with the lowest student feedback ratings also happens to be the professor who assigns the most challenging projects and gives the toughest exams. What have we learned? That this professor is "too hard?" Or that students  prefer a "softer" course with less work? And how would a department head – to quote the O.P. – "take that information seriously"?


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In-class pop quizzes (online) and how to moderate them
I teach an undergraduate course in thermodynamics. In class pop (surprize) quizzes account for about 10% of the grade. I use canvas for my in-class quizzes (and to collect homework assignments, start discussions).
The class room I teach in doesn't have computers so when I set up an pop quiz on canvas, I generally let the students out of class during the last 10 minutes to log in to one of the several campus computers to take the quiz.
However, I know that our computers aren't top notch and one can easily spend about 5-7 minutes just logging in and another 2-3 minutes launching a web browser to access canvas.
Given these technical issues (that can't be sorted out because of a lax IT department) I generally keep my quiz open for about 9 hours. This also takes into account the other classes that my students may have to rush in to right after mine which might prevent them from attempting the pop quiz until later that day.
Isn't this unfair to students who take the quiz immediately? By keeping my quiz open for 9 hours, it takes away the surprise component of it substantially. Is there a way I can do this without having to have quizzes on paper and in-class?
Should I just be mean and keep my quiz open for only the 20 minutes or so at the end of my class?

Edit: I was thinking about this and I thought of a couple of things that I'd like to add:

One way to nullify this is by announcing that there would be a quiz in the next 3 days. That way, the students will try and learn and not just haphazardly flip through their textbook as I assume they would if it were a true pop quiz.
I could tell them that the examinations which account for 70% of the grade will be tough and it would be sensible to be honest with pop quizzes.
Borrowing from Zenon's comment below, why not mix multiple choice questions with single valued answers with only 1 attempt?

Is anyone forced to take the quiz immediately?  I don't think so.

Given the limitations of the material of the students and at your disposition why do you do a quiz on internet? You can be assured that students talk between themselves. I think that you should simply do the quizz in class with pen and paper to be really fair.
If you have a large number of students, you could do most of the quizz as multiple choice questions and use a device (scantron?) to correct them automatically. As a complement you could have a few questions with one word answers.

good point. However, doing the quiz online provides some advantages: 1) The quiz grades itself and the imposed time limit ON THE QUIZ works. 2) This provides me with metrics that I cannot very easily collect as to what portions is a certain person faltering in vs the rest of the class.
As to the students talking between themselves, that actually gives some perspective to my dilemma: who is the biggest loser? The one who cheats. The quicker they understand it, the better.. I suppose?
Thank you for your answer. But I would really like an opinion on how better to do this.

Not to mention, It is easier to use canvas for quizzes than grade 80 papers with varying scribbles on them.

@drN are your question multiple choices? Most places have facilities to correct those automatically.

I have multiple choice questions. You mean facilities like the "scantron" thingy? Your question provides me with inspiration. Why not mix multiple choice questions with single valued answers that the person HAS to know to answer it!

@drN Yeah I was thinking about the 'scantron' (is that really how it is called?). Also, about the 'learning', I do completely agree with you that the cheaters are the biggest losers. Sadly our system doesn't work like that and grades is mostly the only metric used until you get to grad school/job. And having a mix of Multiple choices with single value answers could be a simple way to get most of it done by a computer and yourself taking not too much time to correct the rest. I will add it to my answer if you don't mind.

Sadly now system works with total immunity from cheatin! :( Thanks for brainstorming with me! I'd love to hear more from you or any one else!!!

Up to a certain level (at least I like thinking so). My pleasure and I hope other answers will be posted!

First it is only unfair if not all students had the same information. If you say "the quizz will be open for 20 minutes" and leave it open for 9 hours, it is somewhat unfair. If you are clear, then they have equal chances. However that does not solve your other issues such as students chatting or cheating.
I think your real solution is: if you don't have the resources to make them take the online test in a decent way, just do it the old fashioned way.
I have never worked with scanning machines, but if they work fine it sounds like a good solution.
Another way of not having to grade everything is to have students take the test, then shuffle the papers so that another student grades them. You cannot have all your evaluation performed in this way, but you can do some. If you want to further decrease the chances that they do not grade tests honestly, you can announce that you will perform yourself a second correction of 10% of the tests, and that graders found cheating will have their own mark diminished or invalidated.

I thought of having them shuffle answer sheets among themselves to grade it but I think thats rather unfair as I am paid to administer tests and gather grades manually or via a computer! :P

@drN I don't think it's unfair… let's put it another way: having them correct their tests themselves allows you to give them tests more often (because it takes less time from you), which improves the quality of their education. Or it gives you time for more efficient things like improving the current curriculum and course material, and again they benefit from it.

I am grateful to your answer but for just this we must agree to disagree. I have to take into account what the students think or feel when their instructor asks them to shuffle papers and grade them. If it were done to me (and it has about 10 years ago) I would say that the instructor is being lazy.

An alternative not yet mentioned (caveat: this is a method I've done some work on) is to use a combination of QR codes and google forms. Then, the students can take it on their cell phones in class and the remaining students can take it pen-and-paper.
It does have the weakness that particularly savvy students can cheat by texting each other answers, but there's tradeoffs to every possible method of testing.
This could be more helpful than sending them off to the computer lab. Their entries will also be time-stamped so you can say you won't accept anything not finished before a certain time.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How to get a PC member's attention to comment on or review my submission?
I have submitted a thesis abstract to PhD consortium and my submission was accepted.
I just noticed that one of the program committee is well known professor on my thesis area. Actually, many of the paper citations contain his name. Now, I believe he was not a reviewer for my submission (I know because I didn't get critical -deep- questions about my work) but I don't have hard evidence for this.
what is the right way to get his attention to comment on my work?
is it adequate to email him my submission?

The PC member may be a professor, but I promise, they are human just like you and me. In your place, I'd find out the email address of professor and write a polite email making your case that

you are both researchers in the same field
you noticed the professor is actively participating in that special PhD consortium
your submission to that consortium was accepted
you have been following/citing that professor's work, but be very brief and direct about it! you're a researcher, but neither fan nor worshipper!
you care for a meeting at the conference to which that consortium is associated
you appreciate that professor's opinion

Or, if you really just care for feedback on that submission, you can flat out ask for an opinion on your submission.
These worked quite well for me. Also, direct approaches during coffee breaks are opportunities as well, but (T)PC members often have closed meetings during those so you would have to take your chances ...
But seriously, experts in their research areas care for the work of other researchers ... or you needn't care for their opinion.

I've added in the response to indicate that you have been following or citing that professor's work. If you are able to say, "I'm currently using your XYZ method from the Intl. Conference on Gidgets and Widgets to solve interesting problem" then you will likely grab that person's attention.

@Irwin has the right answer. Irwin, why not post it in its own right?

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


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What is a shared task? and what is the purpose of it?
I noticed lately the increase of conducting shared tasks, what are they and what is the rationale behind them? why do we need them since we already have workshops and conferences?

increase of conducting shared tasks In what context?

Like SemEval and qats2016 (http://qats2016.github.io/shared.html), to name two examples.

OK, so what do you not understand about the QATS 2016 one that you linked to? It appears to be an event like a hackathon where academics get together to actually work on a problem. Lots of workshops and conferences are talks only and no joint work. A shared task appears to bring the work back to a workshop.

What the rational behind doing so?

The rationale is to get a bunch of smart people together to actually solve or at least make progress on open academic problems.

The rationale is to get a bunch of smart people together to actually solve or at least make progress on open academic problems. I've never been to a "workshop" that actually did any work on the problem. Conferences are typically just people giving presentations and not really working on problems in my experience.

I've never been to a "workshop" that actually did any work on the problem. -- I have, but they're rare, and they have to be organized with that explicit goal in mind from the beginning. In particular: no talks.

Shared tasks are organized to tackle specific problems which are challenging to tackle by spare research groups for several reasons. Typically, it's the availability of data. One key element of a successful challenge is the goal: it has to be challenging, specific and possibly lacking data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the fields that has a very long tradition of challenges, to the point where plenty of advances are made because of their organization. Why?
Take the case of clinical NLP challenges. As a researcher, it won't be easy to have access to authentic de-identified clinical records from hospitals. They are hard to get, legally challenging to manage and distribute, and very expensive to annotate (they can't be annotated using Mechanical Turk or similar, you want domain expert to do the job). Finally, in the era or Machine Learning (ML), you don't want 100 clinical records, you want much much more. This is a scenario that prevents almost any research group to invest months of data acquisition for the sake of tackling a specific task. Moreover, if a research group interested in this endeavor exists, it will hardly release such data for free. It's more likely it will keep studying those data and get as many publications as it can out of it. But this is a pity because is cutting out everybody else from the discovery process.
In those cases, shared tasks are the solution. They are sponsored by several institutions, each one contributing at some level: providing experience, data, secure hosting and distributing infrastructure. With those pull of forces, interesting unexplored but important problems become attractive to researchers. As a plus, almost always, at the end of the challenge, the data become publicly downloadable to everybody (not just the attendees).
In terms of work, as a participant, the major part of the work is done before the workshop in your own research group. You work for months on a methodology that would solve the proposed problem. You attend the workshop only to meet the other participants, to present them your results, and share your tricks.
I've played both roles: participant and co-organizer. It's tons of work in both cases, but it's also a great pleasure to crack problems nobody ever attempted before, or to declare problems solved. ^_^


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Should I submit an article to a not-yet-indexed WOS journal, hoping that it will be indexed later?
I am planning to submit an article to an unindexed WOS journal. However, I think that since this journal in the WOS journal list, it will market itself one way or another and let's say in a few years it may be indexed and will have a great impact factor.
There are some key considerations:

the journal's publisher is well known UK publishing company
the publication cost is free
the volumes are published two times per year.
my field is computer and information security.

My question: Is it worth considering to publish with the long-term goals that the journal will rise (here the barrier to enter is not very difficult, but I think it's a bit lower than for already-known journals) or is it better to stick with the already established journals with good impact factors?

why don't you mention the name of this secret journal?

Its not the secret, but to avoid the the so-called "marketing purposes" i can say its "taylors and francis" journal

It seems to me that this depends on what country you're in (or plan to be in) and probably also on your employer. The main issue, in my opinion, is (1) whether anyone will care about indexing and impact factors and (2) if so, then whether the journal you're considering will meet that anyone's criteria by the time they care.

@AndreasBlass thank you for the feedback. I am Ph.D. student and also in academia. You are right, it depends on the timeframe and given that this is WOS journal from the well-known publisher, there are high odds that the  journal will be indexed in next 1 or 2 years. You are right about "where I am planning to be"

Nobody is going to care about which journal you choose, because nobody in CS reads journal papers.

@JeffE it is not like that, since in order to maintain the status of the university, academicians have to publish their researches to the rated journals on the regular basis. Another thing, the Ph.D. considers publishing the research also in the rated journals. The executives care much where the paper is published

@mydreamadsl Not at my university, we don’t.

@JeffE Unfortunately, there seem to be not only universities but whole countries whose governments use ratings of journals to assess the quality of research.

Fair point. And if you live in such a country, the answer to this question is clear: Don't risk it. Do the minimum work required to definitively check off the stupid bureaucratic requirement and move on.

@JeffE Thank you. This is silly, but it is true. Govs pursuing the ranked journal to promote academia and themselves on the international arena. Thank you. I will keep your considerations in mind


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Citing someone else's idea??? (but not published work)
I will preface that this is in regards to a Christian devotional to study scriptures from the Bible. I was tasked to put together a 25 day devotional that will be published physically and online by my church. I was given a copy of a similar type of devotional from a friend who gave me permission to use however I would like. I basically used it as the bones of the devotional; however, I have rewritten a bit of the material with our particular "church language", as well as changed, added and removed a bit of the content and some of the ideas. All the original studied scriptures are the same. The problem is that I do not know exactly how to cite this person's work. They did indeed write the basis of what we will be publishing; albeit, I do not have a publish date from them, or even a title of their work. I just want to cite their work and ideas properly as a majority of the basic content is not my own. Thoughts please!

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it does not seem to be about academia.

I just want to cite their work and ideas properly as a majority of the basic content is not my own.

Given that the majority of the content is not yours, you may want to make the person a co-author (or co-editor, etc.). That would appropriately recognize the work the other individual has made in the work that you have adapted.
Alternatively, if you feel most of your work has been editorial rather than creative, you could state:

by X (arr. by Y),

where X is your friend.


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Website for admission results?
Is there any website/forum where people post their application results? For instance a website where people write the name of university they applied for, their GPAs, their GRE/TOEFL scores, their subject, ... and the result of admission? I'm just eager to see some admission results from top US universities specially in Statistics and/or Computer Science.

Gradcafe.com has many of these aspects.

@RoboKaren It's actually thegradcafe.com

As others have stated, thegradcafe.com is the most used site for posting results. It seems that applicants from almost every discipline use their results tracker. However, it isn't very comprehensive when it comes to stats, and many people choose to omit the limited information that it can track.
Their forums are sometimes frequented as well depending on the discipline, while some disciplines have other common discussion sites. As far as I remember, the statistics forum at gradcafe was fairly active during the admissions season. I know that a lot of math grad admissions discussion goes on at mathematicsgre.com, while most economics applicants gather at urch.com. I'm betting that almost every discipline has some kind of forum or discussion site that people congregate at, but I am not as familiar with other fields.
If you're looking for in-depth profiles, these forums are often the best places to look. The sample size isn't very high, but most of the time they have some kind of "Profiles and Results" thread each year that people post in (e.g. stats, econ).

thegradcafe.com is a popular website that, as far as I am aware, is the only site that really covers most of what you're asking for. If you search for some key words you can get a spread of a single program or university, and you can see what kinds of students are getting in or rejected.
However, people don't always state all of their information... I have seen many people who just say they "got in" or didn't. So it isn't always the most helpful source for anything but statistics, which you want, but that can be moot if only four or five students have said anything about the particular program. This happens a lot. It isn't the best spread. I also can't imagine there isn't lying going on.
One lesson to take away from that website is that there's an amazingly broad set of students both getting in and being rejected by all sorts of universities... I believe that it's a much more complex process than in undergraduate institutions. Perhaps don't be so concerned about where you match up against a couple of people there. Ask your advisors, perhaps, where you may stand, or better yet, be in touch with professors at your chosen institution!

Warning to applicants: while useful in many ways, I was eventually refreshing grad cafe every fifteen seconds


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PhD supervisor is not willing to co-supervise?
I started my PhD two years ago on a specific problem. The problem is to study a given computer science structure from one specific perspective. My current advisor is an expert in that perspective and I got some results and publications with him.
However, during the last 6 months, I started to worry about my PhD thesis as there are no more room for novel results in that direction (several people tackled it recently). There are still some room for minor results and my advisor urged me to tackle them for my PhD thesis.
I am no longer interested in pursuing that direction and shifted towards the other perspectives of the problem as I believe there are still major results to come out of them. My advisor has no objection on pursuing these directions by myself (at the end he will put his name in whatever comes out of it!). Recently, I took a class with another professor and tackled one of the important directions of the problem as a class project and had incomplete but interesting results. The class professor was very happy with my work and advised me really well during the class semester to start tackling the problem. After couple of months of working, it seems I can really get something nice out of this.
I started to believe that, for my PhD thesis, the best thing is to have the class professor as a co-advisor. This will allow me to put in action and test rigorously several ideas I have in the other direction and make my PhD thesis more valuable.
I spoke with my current supervisor about the co-supervision but he insisted to make it as a collaboration instead of co-supervision. He has good relation with the other professor. And if it matters, I have my own external funding with no financial obligation from the current supervisor.

What should I do in such case?

EDIT on the collaborator vs co-advisor thing:
Because I had a specific problem and had a class with him (which makes it easy to work on the other direction) and the results were almost ready couple of months later, there was a collaboration. My advisor is not willing to collaborate again and urging me to do the minor results instead of pursuing the other direction. The reason I look for co-supervision is

Consult him in many scientific results I am not good at (neither my current advisor).
No commitment in advance for collaborations/ papers.
co-advisor may suggest a new perspective to the problem instead of accepting/rejecting what me and my advisor suggest.

What's the difference between collaboration and co-supervision?  I'm not sure why it matters to your advisor, but then again I'm not sure why it matters to you.  If you do good work, write interesting papers, and get good letters of recommendation from both faculty members, then I'm not convinced it matters who is listed as the advisor.  But maybe it carries some extra importance in your situation.

@AnonymousMathematician for me: its more of 1) Better mentoring. 2) Ability to work on other interesting problems.

@seteropere but why would whatever tag you put onto your collaboration with the other professor matter for (1) or (2)? I mentor a few people who I am not formally advising - why would I care as long as we get joint papers out of the deal? It's not as if it "co-supervising students" has any particular bragging rights. And why would your ability to work on a specific interesting problem depend on whether the other professor is a co-supervisor or a collaborator?

@xLeitix Because I have some general ideas but do not know what the best way to approach them.. The collaboration is almost at end now (it is a success story so far).

@seteropere: Perhaps you could clarify what you think this other researcher would do as a co-supervisor that he would not do as a collaborator.

Brown's Rule for finishing the Ph.D.: Listen closely to what your supervisor tells you to do and do it.  You can do the other research later.

@BobBrown I really liked it and for a moment thought this is what I should do.

My advisor is not willing to collaborate again — It's your PhD.  You are free to collaborate with anyone you want.  If your advisor doesn't like it, find a new advisor.

I think @BobBrown summarized everything that needs to be said.

Brown's Rule for finishing the Ph.D.: Listen closely to what your
  supervisor tells you to do and do it. You can do the other research
  later.

In detail:

You have some publications from your cooperation with your main supervisor. Excellent.
Publish another paper with your new collaborator, if you have not done already.
Then do another paper (those minor results) with your advisor. Finish everything there is to be done on this direction fast.
Finish PhD.
Do whatever you want afterwards.

This is by far the easiest route to your PhD.

I edited your answer to include the quoted comment. If you feel it is irrelevant, please roll it back to the previous version.

Yes. Definitely the easiest. but not the best route out of what I have.

@seteropere Why not the best? You can work on the "other" idea on your free time and work on your supervisor idea on official time. Then you are happy, he is happy

Downvoted.  PhD students don't have "supervisors"; they have advisors.

@JeffE I do not think it is the word that actually bothers you. Why do you downvote? The OP has produced solid results by both professors. Why don't you agree the OP wrapping things up on their first research direction, prepare the PHD thesis and presentation instead of wandering towards unknown waters that may pull her back a year. If she wants the other direction better, she can always try it later or on her free (Google equivalent of 20%) time.

I do not think it is the word that actually bothers you — It is not only the word that bothers me; it is also the meaning.  Yes, of course PhD students need advice on how best to achieve that goal, and listening to their advisors is important, but the blanket rule "and then do it" is too simple.  PhD students are learning to be independent researchers.  They cannot learn to be independent by following orders.


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Can I write a paper on software that I published a year ago?
I am a bachelor-level (software engineering) student. I made a GitHub repository more than a year ago, where I use machine learning and deep learning to identify movements in accelerometer signals.
As of now, the GitHub repository has a thousand stars. There is already research being made derived from my work. As a practical example, here I collaborated with someone to write a paper.
I wonder: Should I write and publish a paper on the first project, even though it's a year old? What are my options, if any?

Can you please [edit] your question to elaborate what would would constitute the novelty of your paper? The software itself, the employed algorithms, or something else?

I don't understand the title.

At the end of my graduate career, my undergraduate advisor finally got around to publishing the work I helped do as an undergraduate—six years earlier! So being a year old isn't a problem!

Yes, you can publish a paper, if

you have new ideas in your software that you developed yourself.
the ideas have not been published by you before.

If other people who have used your software also documented your ideas, cite them.

I agree with the other answer provided here, but I would also attempt to seek either (preferably) Academic or Industrial advice (companies have their own R&D departments and publish their own papers).
A Professor can give you hands on advice to approach publishing the paper in a specific manner to make your ideas stand out and justify their importance and relevance.
Congrats btw.


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Points to remember when having to write recommendation letter yourself
While it is an unethical academic practice, it is a fact that most recommendation letters for MS degrees in US and Europe from countries like India and China are written by students themselves. Students apply en masse; the faculty strength in departments in many universities is small; the few professors hardly get the time to write recommendations for all applying students. Moreover a 4-year engineering degree is dominated by coursework and professors are unlikely to get to know students outside the classroom.
Let us set aside the question of whom to blame for this practice and look at the question that comes up on most applicants' minds:

"In the event that I have to write a recommendation letter on my own, what are the points I need to bear in mind?"

I have the following points:

Ensuring similarity of language among all letters from a particular professor
maturity of presentation and avoidance of blandishment
Creating tonal differences among different recommendation letters.

Could someone elaborate on these points? The third one is oft-quoted but is found to be very tough to execute in practice.

No.  Just... no.

I've had to down-vote this, why should we actively help a practice many people think is wrong?

@AndyW: The moral question of right vs wrong is different. Consider a bright student from a bad college/department - where faculty members are too lazy to bother about education or research. Say this student has managed to get some papers in reasonably good conferences of his own and has topped his department as well.

Will all this suffice for him to apply? No. Recommendations are a must, and his profs simply won't write. What does the student do now? Let go of his opportunities because of the system's ineptitude? Or hack the system and write his own recos?

@AndyW: I was enforced to write letter of recommendation for myself several times. In our country when you ask prof to write LoR, most of them says "Write it by yourself and I'll sign it" (and if you continue to insist on academic honesty, you can find yourself without any LoR). In other case, prof may agree to write letter for you, but he doesn't know English at all. And you have to translate that letter to English (in this case it's highly probably that letters would contain similar phrasing). So, it's definitely wrong to write letters by yourself. But sometimes there's no other way.

Even in North America I've been asked for a draft of a letter before that the writer then edits/adds onto.

Say this student has managed to get some papers in reasonably good conferences of his own and has topped his department as well. — In that case, the papers themselves (assuming they're easily available) serve as compelling evidence of research potential, and the content of the letters is far less important.  Okay, you're good at classes, too; that can't hurt.

I too have known American students asked to write their own letters of recommendation, or at least provide the framework for professors who may not know the student all that well, but still think highly of the work they do know. Or where the professor thinks the student knows better how to tailor a letter to another audience (say outside their field).

Seriously, we have an open question on this site about strategies on how best to perpetuate academic fraud?  I am stunned by this.

The first point is impossible to carry out without a cross-sample of the professor's existing letters; obtaining such a cross-sample, however, is just as unethical as writing one's own letter of recommendation. The second is difficult for someone without experience of writing their own letters of recommendation, and the third point is challenging for anyone who isn't a good writer of his or her own accord.
In general, I have to admit that most letters of recommendation I receive from candidates in non-Western countries falls under the rubric of "not helpful to the candidate"; many actively hurt the candidate's chances by not providing any distinguishing information that can help me make a case for why this should be the one candidate in 20 we choose to admit. (Yes, we have an admit rate below 5% in my program!) On the other hand, having seen a number of candidates' applications with letters of recommendation that contain similar phrasing, I can attest that this usually raises my hackles—and usually leads me to rejecting such candidates from further consideration.

The ethics of the question is moot here; this practice is widespread, and the questioner is asking for a solution to his problem, not for an ethical reform of the international academic community.
The guidelines for such a letter would be identical to writing any other letter of recommendation. If you must write your own and have a professor sign off on it, read up on how to write a good letter of recommendation and follow any tips you may come across. You probably have little to no experience writing letters such as this one; there are many subtle nuances, both in what you say and in what you don't say. Take the time to write it correctly. If you find yourself completely stuck, ask someone else with experience to write it.
If you're having difficulty writing a letter about yourself, imagine you're writing about a colleague who has done all the things you have done. It may make the task easier.
Regarding trying to mimic the professor's style, if he asked you to write your own letter, then he likely asked all his other students to write their own letters. There will be no consistent style, and that will be a reality of this individual's letter. If the department/faculty member receiving the letter has received letters from this professor in the past, this likely will count against you, and you should consider that when asking this person for a recommendation.

...or is receiving other letters from the same professor at the same time as yours...

"The ethics of the question is moot here; this practice is widespread, and the questioner is asking for a solution to his problem, not for an ethical reform of the international academic community."  I strongly disagree.  Most unethical practices are widespread, done out of some duress, and so forth.  Committing such a highly fraudulent academic practice could be grounds for dismissal in most American universities, so this is not even necessarily professionally wise.  Moreover, encouraging others to engage in unethical behavior is also unethical.

@PeteL.Clark - "Highly fraudulent behavior"... that's a very strong term for something that is so widespread as to be almost ubiquitous. I appreciate that you disagree with the practice, but this takes place everywhere, both in and out of academia.

@eykanal: You can see from my profile the cultural background from which I make my statement: i.e., that I am an academic mathematician living in the United States.  In this context, I stand by"highly fraudulent".  I assure you that this practice is not "almost ubiquitous" among North American academics: at any institution I've been involved with, if it was discovered that a student wrote a graduate letter rather than the faculty member, it would at least be embarrassing and possibly worse.

The question indicated graduate programs in the US.  If you insist that foreign students are not held to the ethical standards of the programs they are applying to, aren't you telling people like me to avoid considering a large range of foreign applicants for admission?  Is that your intent?

I realize this is a very old question, but I guess no harm in me adding my two pennies even after a year.
I agree that it's not good practice writing letters for oneself, but, a lot of bad things happen in academia and this is one of them. It happened to me, and that with a good and dedicated professor: it was just a set of circumstances.
While I asked this person for a letter a few months in advance and he agreed to write it when I apply somewhere, when I stumbled upon my (then, potential, now, current) supervisors, realized we want to work together, there was about a week left to apply for the grant. When I asked for a recommendation, the professor was on a conference / trip and could not find the time to do it himself. He asked me for a "draft" to see what points the letter should cover which he actually did modify later. And I have a feeling he would have preferred to write it than to just modify my writing, but, hey, circumstances.
So, the points I was focusing on when I was writing the letter:

For each letter-writer I contacted, I had a specific purpose in mind. Each of those people could attest to a different set of skills and give a different view of me.
This particular letter was to attest how I have diverse interests (the professor had me on some small extra-curriculum classes), and how I'm good with working with students and explaining stuff (I did some T.A.-like work for him).
So, basically, I wrote about the experiences, facts and results that made me want to ask this person for a letter in the first place. Shortly: Keep to the point and don't digress too much.
Support your statements by facts.
(I guess) nobody wants a read list of synonyms for "awesome". A good rule might be: situation (in which the professor was working with you), result (of your working in that situation), conclusions and reasoning (about your ability, based on the situation).
Try to put the conclusions in context with what you are applying for.
If you are writing a letter attesting (among other things) that you have diverse interests. Maybe you're applying something that is slightly different from your current/previous works, and having diverse interests and an aptitude for learning is certainly a strong point.
Make sure your language is flawless.
Keep to a structure. (not like my bullet points)
A good one might be: firstly, introduce the professor. Shortly list all or some of the situations which make that professor a relevant and good choice for a reference. Secondly, for the "meat", expand on the reasoning for the recommendation. Lastly, summarize the good points and their relevance to the position you are applying for, and include a sentence explicitly saying that you the professor would recommend you. Something, maybe, like Based on my experience with Mister X., I would wholeheartedly recommend X for the position Y.
Don't write a novel. One page should be quite enough. (again, not like my answer :) )

I think this advice should not only help you to write a passable / good recommendation letter, but also increase the chances of the professor actually reading and reviewing what you wrote instead of just signing it. If everything is written concise and to the point, the professor (even the one with very little free time), might be more inclined to change things, because he can identify faster what he disagrees with, what he maybe wants to expand, add, or omit.

A lot has already said in previous comments. I will add the following points.
When you wrtie a letter of recommendation for others or yourself for others to endorse, make sure you write and justify :

In which circumstances have you know the recommendee (student) and for how long ( 4 years undergrad.) in which capacity ( I am his professor of Biology) ?
What is your impression of his academic achievements and skills
(you have to back up with facts your statement) ?
What do you think of his character and personality ?
How much (strongly, simply) do you recommend him/her for other institutions ?

I hope this helps.

There is a larger question at hand:
Why have you people been historically trusting a signed piece of paper?
There is never any good proof the person who wrote the text has been honest, even if this person holds a professor position at some university.
Letters of recommendations is the historic absurd which make no sense whatsoever.
Me too I had my letters of recommendations written not by professors but by other people who knew me (I'm from Russia). Why? Because when I approached professors only one really took the time and effort to write one, while others honestly said they didn't know how to write something like that and they didn't know me well enough to be a judge to my character. They told me to get the text written any way I liked it and they would sign it. That was it. So I asked other people if they would be kind enough to write a few words about me and they were.
There hasn't been a history of writing letters of recommendations in my country, then what do you expect people to do if they wish to apply to a Western university? They do fake letters and they will continue to do so for as long as this stupid practice exists.
The best advice I can give here is to ask somebody else who knows you well and knows your subject area well to write a letter for you. If you attempt to write about yourself it may eventually suck.
One other thought: in some countries (notably Germany) there is a practice of putting watermarks in this sort of papers (sequencing of words, particular wording and other tricks) to convey hidden information about the person. Sometimes it would make sense to put a notice into the letter stating that this text has been written by e.g a Chinese professor who is not familiar with hidden language ubiquitous in e.g Germany. Should such things be discovered this should be attributed to mere coincidence and should be discarded as such, the text written should be understood as it is written with no "alternative" interpretation.
With regard to the hidden language of reference letters:
The keywords to google for are "Geheimsprache", "Geheimcodes", "Zeugnissprache". There are tons of pages. Just a few to provide an overview:
Geheimcodes
Der Arbeitszeugnis-Code

These are not claims but personal experience (I've lived many years in Germany). It's kind of common knowledge there, there are blogs, articles, sites and even books to teach both parties how to put those hidden messages in text, how to detect them and how to bring your employer to court for using those. If you google you will find tons of them. If you wish I can find you some links (in German).

Letters do contain phone numbers and email addresses, both can be faked, you can get a SkypeIn number from many countries. I knew a guy living in Germany who faked a Russian employer for another guy working in Canada. The system is flawed and there is little point in continuing to support it.

I'll update my answer to include the links momentarily.

Why have you people been historically trusting a signed piece of paper? Because most of those letters are written by our colleagues; people we know professionally, if not personally. Because it is very rare that we get only one letter from anyone, and we trust that other people are as concerned about their ethical reputations as we are. Because letters include Google-verifiable phone numbers and email addresses (even letters from Russia), so that we can contact the author if we have any questions or suspicions. Because most letters (like most people) are honest.

@JeffE: I admire your ability to google for names and contacts. Still, there are many older professors who are not very good at modern media and have but rudimentary Internet skills. For them it's hopeless to try to verify credentials in Internet.

@JeffE: "Because most letters (like most people) are honest. " - ideally yes. However (as pointed out in my and other answers) it's mode difficult than that. Not every student can 100% expect to get a reference letter, very much depends on his/her peers. And either they fake letters or they don't get any letter at all. Do you see here a way for them to be 100% honest?

While I appreciate your answer, this reads like a rant, and does not address the question at hand.


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During an application/interview should an applicant justify leaving a current faculty position (pre-tenure)?
I have been in a tenure-track position for 3 years and am going back on the job market. Would I be expected to "explain" why I am leaving, especially when it is pre-tenure? I suspect that a search committee might think I'm leaving because I felt in danger of not receiving tenure -- that is not the case here. However, my reasons for leaving stem from a two-body problem that I'd prefer not to disclose until after an offer is made.
A more concrete way of asking: how should the application cover letter look different, coming from someone currently holding a faculty position compared to a newly minted PhD?

Faculty move all the time. Sometimes it is because of personnel issues, sometimes because of divorce, and sometimes people just get sick of the town they're in and are convinced the grass is greener on the other side of the country. You don't need to give a reason until the job talk dinner when you'll be plied with alcohol and encouraged to reveal all.  Remember: most schools think that they're the best, so from their perspective you're applying UP. :-)

It's not uncommon for people to move because of two-body issues, and if you're not comfortable disclosing the specific reasons, one possibility is to mention (at interview time) that you have non-academic constraints that force your departure from a place that you like.
Having said that, you're not going to get an interview call unless you're a superstar and everyone wants you OR you have some positive argument for why you're interested in a particular university. So in your cover letter you'll at least need to provide some positive reasons.

Thanks Suresh. My impression is that it cannot help me (and can possibly hurt me) to reveal a two-body constraint before an offer is made.

That depends on the two-body situation.  If you're applying for a position in the same city as your partner who already has a stable position in that city, that's a reason for moving that wouldn't create any issues for your new employer.  If you're trying to create a situation where the new employer hires both you and your partner, then yes, you'll want to avoid revealing that until you have an offer.

Just watched a friend do this, with a two body problem. His line: the place he was at was a good fit, tenure was all but assured, BUT he was convinced the place he was interviewing was enough a superior fit to consider a pre-tenure jump. He would always fall back to that line of flattery. He and his husband were hired, after the usual two body drama; meaningless counteroffers, offers of a later position opening, etc.

could you be more precise on the last two sentences?

Sure: universities lie to get 2 bodies for the price of 1. The spousal hire is always 'later' and they can provide some other thing that is not that person's hire right now, and surely the hire will come. It will be opening next year and the spouse is an excellent fit and it is all lies and good intentions. The way to get the spousal hire is to hold out for it, and it alone. You must force your new dean to go out and argue on your behalf for the hire of your spouse. You must ignore the lies, politely. I have watched this happen many times. I do not miss this.

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


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Giving up good position because of studies
I earned my Bachelor Degree in Computer Science 5 years ago. From the moment when I have a diploma in my hands, I thought, enough I never return to academia, no matter what happens. I was very keen to start working.
By the moment I changed few workplaces. I wanted to try all kind of positions that computer science man can get. All my positions were not very interesting. I wouldn't say I became very experienced programmer, I have some experience, but I don't have a field I am good at, and actually I am not too worried about that. The main problem I think is I don't feel that I do something useful or something challenging, actually, I feel that I waste my time. I do my job, but I don't feel I contribute to myself.
Few years ago I realized that may be it's worth returning to academy. Simply, just because I remember it wasn't boring. I sent few application letters to few good universities in my country, but they didn't apply me. There were universities that just refused without any explanation, and in few of them I fault in interview.
In this situation, I decide if no official program is allowed, I can just take few courses of Master Degree in any university. The result of my first course was very terrible, I think I was the worsen student on the course. But afterward there was a gradually improvement in the grades (I never took the same course twice). This year again I sent few application letters with my grades, and I was applied by all universities.
The problem is by now I have a very good position in very successful start-up company. The position is very hard and almost all the time in the office I am under a high pressure, but of course, there are benefits of a successful start-up company, fast promotion, investment, but still I have a feeling that I am doing something wrong.
I don't have a decision yet, either postpone my studies or give up good position. Have you found yourself in a similar situation, when you have give up a lot, just because you want to do something you was dreaming about? Particularly, have you gave up you job for studies, and do you regret about your decision?
tl;dnr: A few years ago, I didn't like my computer programming job.  I was good enough at it, but the job wasn't very challenging and didn't offer much room for personal growth.  I felt like I was wasting my time. Even though I had sworn that I never would, I applied to grad school.  I was not accepted as a full-time student, so I just started taking classes as a non-degree student.  Initially I did badly, but over a few years I improved.  Recently, I was admitted to grad school.  But by now I have a great job in a fast-paced startup.  So I'm torn about whether to quit my job to return to school.  What do you suggest?

Do you like your current job? Quitting seems like a bet.

An important consideration is "window of opportunity".  How long will you have the chance to go back to school?  Will the school be happy to let you defer for a year?  In contrast, if you leave your current job for school, is there a good chance that you could return to work there after you finish a masters degree?
Also ask "What are my long-term goals?"  It sounds like you mainly want to be challenged and experience personal growth; perhaps also to "do something useful".  Do you have others long-term goals?  How likely are you to be happy and on your way to these goals in 5 or 10 years if you stay at your current job.  Grad school can be fun, but it's often just a way to delay "real life" for a few years.  If you get a masters, will that really help you to be happier with your life and where you're headed 5 or 10 years after you finish school?


text:
What can I do as a graduate student to maximize my chances of obtaining a professorship?
I've already completed my first grueling year of the PhD program, and graduation is still a yet to be seen light at the end of the tunnel.  I'm very sure that academia is for me, and I really want to obtain a tenure-track position in my field (computational science).  I know that universities often look very highly upon doing a post-doc and accumulating plenty of journal publications.  Of course, open faculty positions are extremely competitive and I'm sure that everyone applying for them have those qualifications already.  I'm curious if there is anything else I do as a graduate student to help maximize my chances of getting a Tenure-Track Faculty position in the future?

I don't think there's anything "special" that's unique to applying to academia that a graduate student can do to increase the odds of becoming a professor in the long run, particularly if one is going to do a postdoc later on.
The two areas that might help are:

Gain teaching experience that goes beyond the standard "recitation section" leader—that is, into actual lecturing and other forms of direct interaction with students, as well as formulation of assignments and examinations. This might make a difference at schools which are more teaching-oriented rather than research-oriented.
Formulate a well-defined scope for your future research activities, and also develop the tentative outlines for the first few projects that you'd start in that field. This is an essential part of any professorial application, and the sooner you start working on it, the more polished it will be when you're ready to apply for positions when the time comes.

Beyond that, what makes someone a good candidate for a postdoc are essentially the same qualities that will help in being a good candidate for a professorship later on.

If the student is planning to follow the postdoc route, a web presence as a grad student doesn't make much of a difference, in my opinion, on increasing the odds of getting a professorship. But having a good web site helps a grad student regardless of career destination; so obviously it wouldn't hurt for someone thinking of an academic career.

In what sense do you mean "having a good website"?  What qualities does this entail, and how might it help in the future?

A good website should have your CV, links to publications, and a description of your current research (and perhaps planned research as well, if you're applying for positions). It should be well-designed to provide information, and easy to navigate. As for benefits: a good web presence will provide you with an independent platform to show off you and your work.

I think the single thing that most helped me get a tenure-track job was that during my postdoc I gave lots of talks at conferences and in seminars at other schools (something like 30 talks in 2 years, including those I gave at my postdoc institution).  First, this helped a lot with networking.  Second, and perhaps more important, all this experience gave me a ton of confidence in my ability to give good talks.  That confidence spilled over into the rest of my interviews, which was generally a very good thing.
I didn't really start giving many talks until during my postdoc, but in retrospect, I wish I'd given many more in grad school.
All grad students know that if you want a job in academia you should publish lots of good papers.  But many of them don't grasp the value of learning to communicate clearly and to publicize their work.  During my postdoc, I set aside 2 or 3 weeks to learn how to draw good pictures to go into my talks, and I think that skill has really improved their subsequent quality.  Personally, I do everything using beamer and tikz (presentation packages for latex).  However, your specific tool is not so important.  Ask around and find a tool that is widely used and supported by folks in your research area, then invest the time to learn to use it well.
The second really important thing you can do is network.  When I was in grad school, I had no concept of how important networking is for a career in academia (in fact, almost any job).  Many of my papers have grown out of conversations that started at a conference.  Once people know you, they invite you to speak (at their school or at a conference session they're organizing).  As you get to know more of the key researchers in your area, you find it easier to keep up with important new developments (which better inform your research, etc.).

Do awesome research.
Publish it.
Get famous people to rave about it.

Everything else is noise.

Assuming one has satisfactorily done 1 and 2, how does she go about doing 3 - doesn't it automatically follow from 1, or is there some "Self-promotion" involved?

Of course self-promotion (and parallel promotion and guidance by your advisor) is involved.  This is why PhD students should give lots of talks, why they should network at conferences, why they should have a polished web site, why they should develop fruitful research collaborations, why (in my field) they should publish at least one paper without their advisors.

I'm in your field, and I'm a bit later in the game than you are, as I completed my PhD in 2010. Here's some advice, in increasing order of importance.
A very good way to get a feel for what it takes to land faculty positions is to take a look at the departments you would like to work at in the future and scope out the Assistant Professors.  Many of them will have their CVs and Teaching and Research Statements updated to when they applied for the position.
You will need to cultivate several strong letters of reference, hopefully by working with some of the bigger names in your field.
Try to go to a few job talks, as this will also give you a sense of what a strong research agenda looks like, both in terms of accomplished work and future directions.
You will need some teaching experience, but being a great classroom teacher will not get you a job if your research portfolio is weak unless you are going to a school that focuses on undergraduate education.
Computational Science is a bit of a funny field, as we live at the intersection of several very different fields: physics, mathematics, computer science, and usually some scientific application.  These fields all have their own rules for hiring and promotion, and this is important to understand, because you will almost certainly land in a department that is not titled Computational Science.
You need to statistically look good, because the members of the hiring committee will have almost no other grounds for justification besides what is written in your hiring application.  This means you will absolutely need a good number of high-quality journal publications, preferably at least 5, when you apply for a faculty position.  Conference papers only count for a Computer Science department, and you may need twice as many to be considered in that direction.

I guess I would have to ultimately choose a target department in one of the intersecting disciplines, and publish well in that subfield.


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How many referees are required on a resume/CV?
I have looked at a number of academic resumes to get a feeling for what people expect. I see that the number of referees that people give at the bottom of their resume varies quite a bit.
My question is whether it is essentially always better to provide more referees or whether one should rather stick to a maximum of say 4 ?

I would not include any names in the CV itself; only the sentence "References are available on request."  If you do decide to list your references, the last sentence on your CV should be "Additional references are available on request."

@JeffE thanks a lot for your comment ! What would be your rationale not to include them on the CV ?

If you're sending your CV as part of a job application that asks for names in advance and your references  have agreed to write letters for that application, then I think it's okay to include them in the copy you apply with.  But if you're just maintaining an up-to-date CV on your web page, leave them off.

For whom? A student, a faculty member or someone looking for an academic position?

I assume you are creating your CV for some application (job or graduate studies). I understand that having three to four good referees is good enough. You need not provide more than that. I am particularly speaking about the academia in US and I  believe it would be different elsewhere (e.g. UK).
Of course you may put different referees according to the requirement. I mean you may need to create different CVs for different occasions. Some referees would be better able to acknowledge your work for a given situation. For example you may need to take a recommendation letter from a (for example) Mathematics teacher when applying for graduate studies in Math.
In fact I have also seen that many people do not put the references. In an application process, they are required to separately provide the names and contacts of the referees.

For entry level professorships I have had requests for between 2 (second tier school with no established research groups) and 5 (first class research group at a R1 in a desirable climate), with 3 being by far the most common. Adds requesting high numbers are often seeking stars and will often state that they will consider tenured placement for qualified applicants.


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How to formulate good problem statements in CS research

Short background: I started my PhD last November and now I am helping a master student writing his MSc thesis. I still have problems when I need to formulate a concise research question and even, at least in workshop papers, some publications fail in formulating clear research questions as well.
The topic the CS student writes about is the following. There is this work by Bracha on pluggable / optional type systems, e.g.  for scripting languages. The student wants to solve the same problem that these 'pluggable typesystem' solves. But he is using dependent-type theory, i.e., to check that values in the scripting language are valid according to a given type. This can solve (or better solve) problems related to scripting languages (e.g. security problems in web programming; because everything is basically a string in scripting languages).

I find it hard to come up with a concise research question. (And possibly also with a method to evaluate the approach).
So, my question is:

Are there any references that can help me to formulate valid research
questions?

The closest reference I have found is this mini-tutorial by Mary Shaw.
From Germany there is also a Memorandum that is interesting, but the focus is only on information systems research and not CS. (I can't find a link to the long version in either English or German yet.)

You mean something like this? (What does your advisor have to say about that? I guess he shifted this supervision on you?)

This seems at least a little area-specific, especially between more "systems" and more "theory" oriented parts of CS.

@Raphael your link was helpful, but not not exactly what I was looking for. Thanks also on the pointer to ask my advisor. My advisor is currently on holiday and when he is back he is probably catching up with work and not easily reachable. Also I though I might get a better answer or new insights here.

@Nicholas Thank you as well for the link. It is a very good reference. However, I would need more examples (e.g., this is a good research problem/question) for different areas of computer science (e.g., theoretical CS vs. Programming Languages and Software Engineering; the MSc thesis falls in the latter).

@Suresh I think you are right on the point. I know theoretical CS publications that have similarities to math papers. Then there are areas where it is hard to come up with a good thesis for research work.

Perhaps I should start by looking at very good CS papers and look there for good CS research questions. But I would need very good 'everyday papers' and not something like Papers by Alan Turing.

Maybe look at the thesis proposal of Dan Licata which is in the very area your friend wants to explore. Or at least, the title of the work starts our right.

Another thing: look at (important) paperes of the field. They usually contain "open questions" or "future research". Try to figure out what the big players thought interesting but have not done yet, and start from there.

Often the correct problem formulation only becomes clear after you have the solution in hand.  It's relatively rare to actually solve the precise problem that you set out in advance to solve.  (Or maybe that's just me.)

Have you tried the following:

Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers. Chicago: University of
  Chicago, 1987. Print.

It's a very nice book and is applicable to CS (unlike many other research methodology books).

Formulating good research problems comes from experience. If you understand an area well, you will see the fundamental concepts.  From there, your problem statement is simply an articulation of these concepts.  For a beginner, this is very hard.  Advice: try to cut down the problems into sub-problems.  Some will be easy, and some will be 'hard', and solving them means the rests become easy or open new doors.  So construct a work breakdown structure (WBS).
Try to formalize the problem; i.e., derive a mathematical model for the problem at hand.  This will help focus your mind on key concepts or variables.  For example, for an optimization problem, you might decide on an objective function, and after that determine all relevant constraints.  This will be an iterative process.
Start with a toy example, with as many assumptions that you need to make it a toy example.  Then slowly generalize and once you have enough intuition, then formulate the key problem to be solved.

Problem formulation is crucial phase in the research process. It start from; what is known at certain point of time and what is gape/defect/uncertainty/challenge/weakness in existing knowledge/system/model/solution or answer to a quest. Also Problem formulation starts from thrust/quest/hunger for new knowledge/knowing to unknown or need for exploration/extension/enhancement of the existing knowledge at a point of time. Finally Problem formulation precisely needs to define and draft the statement of the weakness in aforementioned knowledge using crystal clear words with preferably directional hypothesis. In statement it should cover 1)what is required?, 2) desired inputs and outputs with desired features and inter-linkage.

I reviewed this answer because someone raised a Low Quality Posts flag. I must admit I failed to see why it's bad. It's not a spam nor abusive. I could not find any source it came from, i.e. it might not be plagiarized from somewhere. Would the downvoters explain why it's bad? Thanks.

@scaaahu I was the VLQ, but I didn't vote it down. I did it because I found it hard to understand. (Btw, the flag became "disputed".) Probably the downvoters had the same reason. Now I think maybe I was too eager to flag it, my habit is nicer in general.

@peterh Thanks for replying. I was afraid I was missing something so I asked the question. Now, I understand. Yes, I agree this post was hard to understand. But, please trust me, I have reviewed thousands of posts and  many of them are much more incomprehensible than this one. Sorry about the disputed flag.


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What is the most appropriate time frame to apply to a Postdoc?

Possible Duplicate:
How long before PhD graduation should I start applying for post-doc positions?

I'm about to start a Postdoctoral program of 1 year, after that, there is a high possibility that the project won't go on. Hence, I have to find a new position.
What would it be a good time frame to start contacting professors to find a second postdoc, I found that applying very early usually ended up in me being not a suitable candidate because I had no immediate availability.
I know that there is no one size fits all time frame, but in your experience, what would be a better practice?

Charles answer here (https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/5303/4231) applies to your case. Some positions will start right away and some positions will have a fixed start date set in the future. I suggest you start looking around 6 months into your 1 year postdoc, at first focus on positions starting later: that info should be in the job advertisment. Then, if you have not found something suitable, focus on positions starting right away when you approach the end of your postdoc.
Do not wait until your postdoc is finished to look for a new position.


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Can I reliably determine the quality of a journal by checking citation numbers in Google Scholar?
I have recently come across this journal International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA)
The journal provides acceptance notification within 15 days. This raised red flags, but then I performed a Scholar Search for thesai.org and seems that most of their papers have decent citations. So, how reliable is scholar search when evaluating the quality of a journal or how to interpret the results from scholar search ?
EDIT: As pointed out by Nate Eldredge in Publishing again acknowledging the original publication of oneself
this journal is on  Beall's List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers. But this again raises the question how reliable is scholar search then or what are ways to search reliably for a research papers.

See these related questions: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/101/how-do-you-judge-the-quality-of-a-journal and http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2034/does-impact-factor-reflect-the-quality-of-a-journal.

NO, even if you omit the phrase "in Google Scholar".

ah thanks. Lots of insightful resources there

Even in case you generally accept numerical measures such as citation counts or the h-index as a measure of quality, Google Scholar seems to be rather unreliable in them. In the case of evaluating individual authors, let me cite the Wikipedia article on Google Scholar:

Vulnerability to spam — Google Scholar is vulnerable to spam.[26] Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg demonstrated that citation counts on Google Scholar can be manipulated and complete non-sense articles created with SCIgen were indexed from Google Scholar.[27] They concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should only be used with care especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor. Google Scholar started computing an h-index in 2012 with the advent of individual Scholar pages. Several downstream packages like Harzing's Publish or Perish also use its data.[28] The practicality of manipulating h-index calculators by spoofing Google Scholar was demonstrated in 2010 by Cyril Labbe from Joseph Fourier University, who managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein by means of a large set of SCIgen-produced documents citing each other (effectively an academic link farm).[29]

I'm not aware of a case where this has been exploited by a predatory journal, but if a publisher wants to do that, it doesn't seem to be too difficult.

By "decent citations" I assume you are referring to quantity.  Attempting to determine the significance of a journal by the number of citations is a very bad idea; see for instance this paper showing that such things can be very misleading.
Just ask any experienced researcher in your field; if they're not familiar with the journal, you should probably stay away.

Potentially an even worse idea is attempting to determine the significance of a piece of research based on the significance of the journal it is published in.

The reputation of certain journal depends on the fact that who are the peoples who publish their work in that journal. If they are reputable peoples then off course the journal is reputable and hence is reliable. Now how could one guess about the reputation of peoples publishing in that journal?? Well that is the real thing that comes from years of research experience and your supervisor can help you on that.
The citation metric are not only sufficient. I have seen math journal with impact factor in fractions are much superior to journal with 3+ impact factor.

IJACSA has been accepted for indexing in the Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), a new edition of Web of Science launching in 2015. and its not indexed in SCI or SCIE. If you are looking for journal indexed in SCI or SCIE, IJACSA is not the journal.
https://www.researchgate.net/journal/2158-107X_International_Journal_of_Advanced_Computer_Science_and_Applications

This is not answer to the question: "how reliable is scholar search when evaluating the quality of a journal or how to interpret the results from scholar search ?"


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Advices to Manage Academic Department
I am a new faculty who happen to be chairing a department of 25 professors. Are there any standards/procedures I should follow to organize the work in our (computer science) department? scheduling, teaching loads, accreditations, QA, graduate projects,..etc are all duties need to be carried on sometimes in term basis.

All I can say is you got screwed. Universities should not allow departments to make new faculty (even if they are new with tenure) to be chair. That is just not fair.

@StrongBad Unless they were explicitly searching for a department chair, which does happen.

Hire a really really really good administrative assistant who is experienced in all university procedures. And start relationships with chairs of related departments who you can ask questions. Copy everything possible from them (forms/procedures/timelines).

@Dawn Please consider converting your comment into an answer.

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


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How to grab the attention of a new area's big names to read my work?
I am a beginner researcher in a relatively new area. I published two papers in a conference directly related to the general field of my research (the general field is Artificial Intelligence or AI). Still there is no major conference for the new area; only one workshop and several special editions in top journals. As I am progressing in my PhD thesis, I see I am becoming a self-citation researcher.
Although the new area is attracting more people within AI and other disciplines, I am worried about my research. My advisor is happy and enthusiastic about my work. The big names in my research are well recognized in the AI field in general. My question is how to get their attention to read and therefore cite my work?

In my experiences, small workshops are better than big conferences to draw scientists' attentions.  The smaller the workshop, the easier it is to approach people.

Ask your advisor for help.

It's generally acceptable to e-mail senior scientists a copy of your paper. Say who you are and who your advisor is, describe your paper very briefly, and tell them that if they have any comments you'd be grateful to hear them.
Most will ignore you, don't take it personally -- it's not something that will "count against you", unless you do it too often, or to people who's research has nothing to do with your paper. Usually this just means they're too busy or have nothing in particular to say. But you might get a couple of interesting and/or supportive replies. I did, when I was a grad student.

Nice. should I prepare a canned email to all of them or target everyone + how my research is related to his/her work? should I be very selective? or send as much as I can? is there any acceptable rough number for how many people I email?

Get face-to-face time with them. Email is a “least effort” solution if you have no other possible way, but the way to sell your research is by informal discussions. There are many ways to get one-on-one time with big names, some of which you can pursue alone, some of which your advisor can help with:

Introduce yourself during a conference, preferably in a rather informal setting. If the conference has a poster session, engage the discussion if they pass in front of your poster. Otherwise, it is perfectly acceptable to spot them in the crowd, introduce yourself, and say “I have a poster over there and I would like to discuss one of my conclusions with you”. Just be polite, and courteous if you see they want to opt out.
In a smaller conference or workshop, just ask the guy a question after his talk, in a way that relates their work to yours. Possibly follow up with some discussion during a coffee break.
Get your advisor to invite Prof. Big Name to give a talk in your department, and among the activities scheduled during their visit, arrange for a discussion with him.
Invite (or get your advisor to invite) Prof. Big Name to be on your thesis committee!


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current PhD applicant applying to another university
if a current PhD student applying to another university within the same country, is it required to expose the fact that he/she is currently enrolled in another university?
is it a right for the grad studies office to know my current status?  if yes; why? what is the difference?
Specially in case if the student does not want to transfer the credits he/she has taken in the previous university.

Yes.  If you are a student, you should say so in your application.  Otherwise, your CV will have an unexplained gap for the time you've been at your current department.  Unexplained gaps raise red flags with admissions committees.
In your statement, you also need to explain why you are applying to the new department instead of completing your PhD at your current department.  Moreover, you must do so without disparaging your current department, even if you have legitimate cause to do so; nobody likes a whiner.  Good reasons to move include a change in your own research interests, your advisor moving or retiring, following a spouse.
Above all, do everything above board.  If possible, you should also request at a recommendation letter from your current advisor; if not your advisor, some other faculty member in your department.  If you apply secretly, you risk burning all bridges with faculty in your current department.
Credit transfer is a completely orthogonal issue.

Thanks Jeff. May I ask why If you apply secretly, you risk burning all bridges with faculty in your current department. I do not think there is a professor would accept a student telling him I want to move to another university. What about if the student rejected and somehow stayed with his current supervisor. Would you please elaborate more in your thought about this.. I agree that the student should tell his supervisor and thank him but after finding another opportunity (and officially accepted) not before.

I do not think there is a professor would accept a student telling him I want to move to another university. — Actually, most faculty I know would be supportive if the student told them in advance.  I have written recommendation letters for my own students who were unhappy in my department and wanted to move elsewhere.  (Some successfully moved; some eventually stayed put.)  My MS advisor wrote me a recommendation letter to move to another department for my PhD.  We're all still on great terms.

On the other hand, a sudden departure makes it difficult (or impossible) for the advisor to hire/admit a replacement if the student is needed for a particular project.  In that case, you're not just leaving; you're screwing over your old advisor.

Absolutely.  A PhD is a long-term relationship, taking two people's valuable time – not only for the duration of the dissertation but forever afterwards you will be linked to each other, affecting each other's reputations with your own.  It is an expensive and rare opportunity.  You should be completely honest on an application, and this certainly includes explaining any previous commitments you've made.  You need to explain exactly how and why you have broken them.  Frankly, I took one student who had stopped a previous PhD, and he stopped mine too, so I would be very unlikely to take such a student again.  Though a strong and clear letter of recommendation from the previous supervisor might convince me.


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Should a statement of purpose for a PhD application be single or double spaced?
I'm applying to several math PhD programs for the next fall term, and they all require a statement of purpose of 1-2 pages. However, none of them seem to give concrete spacing requirements. My statement is too long to fit under double spacing, but meets the requirement under single spacing. I've looked up this question but I've gotten mixed messages.

If you're working in MS Word, 1.15 is the minimum line spacing for readability, but 1.2 or 1.3 is more pleasant.  2.0 would only be needed for editing a hard copy.

It probably doesn't matter, although you should review the application instructions carefully just to make sure they don't specify this.
My impression is that admissions committees don't care much about issues like this; certainly I don't care when I serve on these committees.  In particular, I have no idea how many applicants have used single or double spacing, since I've never paid any attention to this issue.
The purpose of the length restriction is twofold: to keep the committee from having to read unpleasantly long documents, and to keep applicants from feeling they have to write a lot.  The precise cut-off is not so important, which is why it is usually not specified carefully (for example, by a word count or detailed formatting instructions).
You may annoy the committee if it looks like you are trying to cram as much as possible into your statement of purpose.  If you use a 10pt font and tiny margins as well as single spacing, it will look like you are gaming the system and trying to write a longer statement of purpose than anyone else.  That's not the impression you want anyone to have of your statement.  However, I don't think single spacing is problematic in itself.  Just don't go overboard with space-saving tricks.  (If you use an 11pt font and standard LaTeX margins, you'll be fine.)

FWIW, I read tens of SoPs every year, yet I don't remember the last time I read a double-spaced SoP.

I don't remember the last time I saw a double-spaced anything.

@JeffE A submission of mine had to be double-spaced recently. It took me by surprise.


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Postdoc interview result
I have given an interview for a Postdoc position at UCSF, USA by an Assistant Professor recruiting his 1st postdoc. I was interviewed three times (1st over phone, followed by two skype interviews).
In the last interview the PI described about his on-going and future projects and he went on to say "when you come here to my lab..." Which I believe was a slip of tongue.
At the end of the discussion, he told that I will mail you the decision letter in a couple of days. It's been a week since that happened but I have not got any reply yet. Does it mean my application is rejected or its too early to think so? When should I get in touch with him.

We know no more than you do. I'd give it another week, then ask about the progress of your application via email. Good luck!

@ Emma Thank you for replying, i agree with you but... its very difficult to wait in such case.

I know it's difficult, having been there myself. The only thing you can do is have patience.

Does it mean my application is rejected

No, it doesn't.
It just means that for whatever reason, the decision or informing you of the decision is delayed.

or its too early to think so? When should i get in touch with him.

You could get in touch now, or wait another week or so.
Before I started a postdoc in Canada I had the same situation and I asked (I think the PI had promised to let me know informally in two days, but then I still heard nothing after a week) .  The PI then quickly replied that she had to clarify some issues with the funding agency before she could inform the successful candidate.  Several more days later I had a postdoc offer, and one year longer than originally advertised.


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What is expected when submitting to a conference
I am planning to submit an abstract to a conference (pure mathematics). In the webpage they have the options of filling in the title, providing a pdf file of abstract and an option of providing a "full text/other file". I am not sure about the last option.
Do I provide one of my paper that I will talk about? That seems weird as I (most of the speakers I guess?) will be talking about a series of works. Or do I need to make a new pdf file, summarizing all the works covered? Or do I provide the beamer file? Or nothing at all?
Is it common that when submitting an abstract to a math conference, one has to also submit a file which describe their talk in some details?

It is typical to just provide a title and abstract.  In my experience, they are usually submitted in plain text or TeX format, not even in pdf.  You are never asked to provide a paper, though for some conferences you may be asked for notes later.  Based on your question, I guess the organizers want you to submit a file that they will just link to on the webpage for an abstract, which could be a pdf or plain text.  If you're still uncertain about what to do, just ask the organizers what they prefer.