text:
What should I do if I did someone else's homework a few years ago?
A few years ago, while I was working as a freelancer, I did something very stupid. On a freelancing website someone posted a few exercises about ordinary differential equations and asked someone to solve them (I don't remember the details exactly, but I think it's safe to assume it was their homework).
I did the project. That's the only time that I cheated and I regret it. Now I'm an undergraduate student and am thinking about going to graduate school and maybe even getting a job in academia after finishing graduate school (I dropped out of the school and just started the school this year, and that's why I'm still an undergrad).
What are the possible consequences of what I did and what should I do now? Should I tell it in my resume (for graduate school and possibly when I want to get a job in future) or just pretend it didn't happen or something else?

@Ronald I was an student (probably in a different institute but can't be sure since I don't know the identity of the other person)

If the only concern is that this issue returns back to you, I do not think someone can pin you down for helping a student's homework. Indeed, someone asked you to do it to earn money or something different, and you did it. You cannot check every time if a posted question on a website is for homework or not. If you did an online exam, however this can have maybe some consequences if you are in academia and this issue has been told to the Dean of the university etc. but I am not sure.

Related: Moral dilemma in unwittingly being paid to complete a student's work

Also slightly related: Cheated on an exam when I was eight years old. Should I tell graduate admissions?

You don't know who the other person was, they are hardly likely to remember, and wouldn't admit to it anyway (would anyone?), you weren't the one cheating, so admitting (to what exactly?) is futile, to all except your conscience, which seems mightily troubled, unneccessarily. In some religions, there's a church facility to purge yourself of that.

Someone paid you to do a job and you delivered. What they did with the result is not your problem. Why would you even say that YOU cheated? If you manufacture knives and sells them, are you responsible for what the buyer uses it for? No.

@DanieleTesta maybe. If you manufacture and sell to someone a knife when it's obvious they're going to use it to stab someone, I would say yes, you are partly responsible.

@kat So every weapon manufacturer are to blame for all the killings in war then. Think again. They definitely know that they weapons will be used to kill someone.

@DanieleTesta Actually, yes kinda…

@mmeent That's your opinion, not the law. You cannot please everyones opinion, but you can follow the law.

Assuming this was several years ago and not a continuing pattern, the fact that you raise the question suggests you have learned something in the interim.
You should do precisely nothing about the old transgression. Someone else got a benefit they didn't deserve, but it was a small thing in their overall record. Likewise, while your actions can't be commended, I assume it was a small thing overall in your learning process.
Let it go. Let the past remain in the past.

It's not even certain that "someone else got a benefit"; it depends on whether that one homework assignment affected the course grade (which would be rather unlikely in my classes).

We're also assuming that the work the OP submitted was, well, good! But +1 for move on, and know how it feels, so the next time someone asks for "help", you can see what the outcome would be.

I have this mental image of a world in which we are tattooed with each of our sins. By the time we reach 40 there isn't room for the next one. Thankfully.

@Buffy If our sins were all were public, I think there would be many fewer of them.

You cannot expunge the past but if you have learned from it and have determined not to repeat it, the matter is ended. Do not plague yourself with pointless guilt for one of life’s trivial learning experiences.

@KyleJones there is no indication that it would be a case so far... There is limit on punishments but there is no limit on misdeeds/crimes. Would be there much difference in punishment if one helped to cheat 10 people vs. 1000 people? As well doing stupid things just to publish them in social media does not look even trying to get people to do less stupid things...

@Buffy So, there could be a use for middle-age spread?

This makes no sense at all. You didn't cheat. Eventually the supposed student may have cheated. You didn't have any obligations towards his school. The school doesn't have the power to forbid you from solving ODEs. There is no legal, moral or ethical dilemma here.
But you may have or acquire enemies/adversaries and they may try to frame you. So you should never give ammunition to your potential enemies so never talk about this anymore.

By the way, who cares about homework? If a test is meaningful it must be done in a controlled environment with oversight to make sure nobody is cheating otherwise it doesn't really matter.

I prefer this answer to Buffy's for the simple reason that OP is completely guessing about the ultimate use of this freelance assignment and inventing an ethical violation out of whole cloth.  If someone posts a request for solving ODEs to a freelance site, OP is free to solve them, and he doesn't have to care what the client will use them for.

Disagree: there are moral and ethical obligations to not facilitate cheating.  The OP's behavior hardly seems like a major crime, but to say that it was entirely acceptable is too far.

He contributed to cheating, and this is absolutely despicable. He also got paid for it (that is why he did it - it wasn't voluntary work).

"By the way, who cares about homework? If a test is meaningful... [etc.]" The instructor gets to decide that. Not you, not me, and not someone using motivated reasoning to argue their way out of an ethical transgression. Shades of "if they leave their door unlocked, they deserve to get robbed".

@DanielR.Collins. Sorry I don't live of a fairy tale world I live on a real world. There is no right and wrong it all about risk management. An honest person is just a person that is averse of the risk of getting caught being dishonest. A dishonest person is just a person less averse to that risk. None is intrinsically better then the other, just different SURVIVAL strategies that are context dependent. Most of time being honest is a better strategy but... Also, there is no shade: "if they leave their door unlocked, they PROBABLY will to get robbed and it is just NAIVE thinking otherwise".

@Mandrill There is a notable difference between "if they leave their door unlocked, they might get robbed", and "they left their door unlocked, so it's okay to rob them". Also, notice I said "might" and not "probably". It depends on where and when this is, and how long the door stayed unlocked. People leave their door unlocked in many circumstances; for instance if someone is moving in or out, they might leave the door unlocked during the whole operation, even when there is no one actually inside the house/apartment and a sneaky robber could have time to steal something.

@Mandrill I should add that your view of the world is disillusioned and somewhat depressing. As it turns out, it is possible to be honest, even in circumstances where the risk and consequences of getting caught are near-zero.

@PeterMortensen:  Not arguing with you, but I am wondering if you think that getting paid to do the homework makes it worse?  Also, I'm sure I've helped someone do their homework occasionally on stackexchange.  Do you think I'm despicable?

I'm having trouble figuring out if this is a real position?  Like, the answer claims that this isn't a moral/ethical issue, but then a comment states "There is no right and wrong it all about risk management.", which seems to argue that there's no such thing as morality/ethics in the first place.

As Jesus said, “Go forth, and sin no more.”

You're over-thinking this. Do nothing about it. It is entirely legitimate to answer peoples' questions on-line. If we had to screen all of on-line questions in regard to possible exams or quizzes, nothing would get done.
For future, though, of course, if the on-line questions demonstrate weak prior effort, and you suspect it's someone trying to get other people to do their work, sure, don'd buy in.
But it is not your job as a technical person to "police" peoples' requests to  you for explanation of technical things. Sure, be a little aware of obviously cheat-y things, but that should not be your major occupation.

Disagree on "overthinking"; there's nothing wrong with thinking things through. Just like solving ODE's, once you have solved the problem once completely, the next time you see a variant the solution becomes more intuitive. If something is puzzling, intriguing or troubling, it's always better to think it through than it is to try not to think about it.

@uhoh, well, yes, but/and "with hindsight" there may have been no problem at all. Yes, good to think about it... to a point... etc. A significant point is that (in my observation) people who are concerned about good action worry a lot more about things than people who don't care. It's good to think about things, but it's not good to over-load oneself with unsolvable problems, etc. "Gosh, no simple answers..."

Personally I have always heavily loaded myself with potentially unsolvable problems, and occasionally I get lucky. However I would not recommend anybody else do so. :-)

Times are different. This is the age of the internet, and "The internet’s not written in pencil... it’s written in ink."1
I think you should go find the post and screen-capture or archive it and record to the best of your knowledge your thinking at the time and reason(s) for participating in the forum.
It sounds like you participated for profit, and if it seems you've done this more than once now that you check, document it all, along with your notes now. They're not contemporaneous, but at least they can have a time stamp.
Once that's over, then you can forget about it knowing that in the event that you end up in a career path where people go look you up exhaustively, you can answer any questions credibly.
You might end up in a mathematics career in an institution where they do background checks or competing for a competitive position, or even running for political office some day.
If you have the notes, then even though you've taken the luxury of forgetting about it you still can produce the complete story. Background checks do not look for trivial imperfections so much as they look for potentially leverage-able information and things you may hope nobody ever finds out. Being open and forthcoming is the best way here.

Washington Post Echoes of Biden’s 1987 plagiarism scandal continue to reverberate
Wikipedia Joe Biden 1988 presidential campaign

1 Erica Albright quote from The Social Network


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How to choose the right institution for pursuing tenure-track?
I've got 2 offers for a tenure-track position (computer science). One at a well known "tier 1" institution and one at an institution that would be considered "tier 2", both in the US.
Most people I know in academia would immediately go for option 1, considering it a great opportunity. While I do agree that this would look great on my CV, I'm somewhat cautious due to reports that tier 1 institutions are very reluctant granting tenure to anyone who doesn't find the cure for cancer...
I'm well aware that getting tenure at a tier 2 institution won't be a field day either, but looking at their previous record, a high percentage of assistant professors at that institution did make the cut.
Any advice?

First: Congratulations!!

It's news to me that it's very difficult to get tenure in tier 1 institutions in cs without curing cancer unless you define tier 1 as "Harvard" and "difficult" as "used to be difficult"

@Suresh: For example, the answer to this question seems to indicate that: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/568/what-percent-of-assistant-professors-generally-receive-tenure-and-how-does-this?rq=1

Can't really answer the question, but god do I envy you for this problem :D congrats!

Friendly tip: it's "pursuing," not "persuing!" ;-)

Congratulations on your two offers ! As for your question, it's hard for us on this forum to gauge your choices. Tier 1 and Tier 2 are tricky categorizations (bottom of Tier 1 ? top of tier 2 ? area specializations ?). More generally though, it sounds like you're worried that getting tenure at the Tier 1 university is extremely difficult.
But this is something where some data gathering might help. It shouldn't be too hard to determine the number of cases that went up for tenure at T1 in the last (say) 5-10 years, and how many were successful. This is in fact a legitimate question to ask the chair of the department. You can ask how the process works, and you can even ask current assistant professors if they feel they're getting good guidance on the tenure process.
You should do the same for the T2 university as well. Then you'll have more specific information to work with.
No one can tell you whether you will get tenure at T1 or not, but with this data you can get a sense of whether it's "yes unless you mess up" or "no unless you cure cancer".
You can also try to determine which university offers you the best home for your research efforts for the next X years without worrying too much about what comes at the end of it. This is not to say that you should walk into a situation where no one gets tenure, of course, but your data collection should help with that.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How should I cite a screenshot in APA style for my student paper?
When adding a reference to an image that is a screenshot, what is the proper way to cite in APA style?
Also, who is considered the artist in this case? The person who took the screenshot, the website where I've found the image or the creator of the software?

Unless the content you are taking a screenshot of belongs to you, you should cite the source as usual, in order to avoid presenting someone else's ideas as your own (i.e. plagiarism). However, in APA, square brackets may be used to add clarity when a source is unusual.
So, for example, if you were citing a regular journal article it would look like:
Last, F. M. (year). Title of article: Subtitle. Journal Title, volume#(issue#), page span. doi:
If you were taking a screenshot of this journal article, I believe you would cite it the same way, except note the screenshot format following the title.
So it might look something like:
Smith, J. D. (2020). Psychology of citations: An ethnographic study [Screenshot by INSERT NAME]. Fake Journal, 3(2), 24-37. doi: 10/12345x12345
I don't think there is section in the APA 7th edition style guide that specifically mentions screenshots, so this is my best guess. It's not like taking a photograph, of which you would in most cases be the undisputed author.
TL;DR: The important thing is to clearly state when you are sharing someone else's work or ideas, so personally I would advise against citing yourself as the author of a screenshot; cite the source of the screenshot instead (e.g. webpage, movie, etc.) and merely indicate what type of source it is (i.e. a screenshot) followed the name of the person who took the screenshot in square brackets.

Generic APA format for websites and the like is:

Author, A. (date). Title of document [Format description]. Retrieved from http://URL

In your case, Author, A. would be (IMHO) the author of the screenshot, Title of document would be something descriptive of the image (probably depends on what you want to highlight / why you're "citing" the image), Format description would be something in the lines of "Image, screen capture".

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/


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How to credit Creative Commons icons in a Bachelor's Thesis?
I am currently working on my bachelor's thesis in computer science in Germany. I have created a few charts/graphs, making heavy use of icons downloaded from http://www.thenounproject.com/.
Most of the icons I did use are published under a Creative Commons license. I am not sure how to credit the authors of the icons. The website states the following for books:

The attribution should be displayed either on the same page as the symbol, with the colophon, in the bibliography or Credits section.

The license text (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) states the following for attribution:

If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.

I don't think it makes sense to credit the authors of the icons in the bibliography of the thesis though.
How is the usual procedure to give picture credit in theses? Is it considered appropriate to use these kinds of graphics for illustration in academic contexts?

Theses usually have an acknowledgment section at the beginning where you can add a sentence. In my thesis I added something along the lines "I would like to thank developers D1, D2 and D3 for their codes C1, C2 and C3 which were used in the course of this work". In the bibliography you could give a web link.

Thank you. I have updated the question since it appears that a lot of "licensing conditions" do apply.

Personally, I would go for the colophon option. This will be a natural place to look for anyone who has ever read a book, and it doesn't "interfere" with the scholarly work you are presenting.
Captions of figures are also fine, but if you use the icons in more than one figure, I would definitely prefer to place the credit in the colophon.
In the end it is primarily an aesthetic choice, but I agree with not putting them in the bibliography.

The text would get a bit too lengthy for the caption, so I will use the colophon. Thanks.

I would add the information to the figure caption. Something like "The icons are courtesy of ABC." If there are a lot of figures with difficult to attribute icons, I might refer readers to a footnote or even an appendix. I am not sure that the icons being released under creative commons really matters in terms of how you attribute them.


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To which department code should I send my TOEFL score?
I'm thinking about applying for some US physics graduate programs. In the graduate admission procedure about where to send the TOEFL scores, I've often read the sentence "use the institution code ****, department code is not needed." However, the ETS website forces me to choose a department code. Now there seem to be two possible choices: there's the department code 76(physics), and there's the code 99 for "other subjects not in the list". The latter might at first seem ridiculous, but I found some schools explicitly demand department code to be chosen as 99. So for the schools that do not make such explicit statement, which code should I choose? Does it matter at all?

You would better to ask the department you are applying for. Call them or send them an email to them.

@Parsa: thanks for the advice, I'll probably do that. I ask it here simply because there are many schools that are not explicit on this, so I thought there might be a general rule.

My assumption on schools that request 99 for other is so that the results will definitely end up in some central office if that is institution policy.

As far as each department or university has it's own code for English tests such as IELTS or TOEFL; it is better to visit the admissions web pages of the universities or schools you are going to apply. If you do not find the code you are looking for, directly contact the admissions department to ask for their reference code for the tests. Besides, some codes of the institutes may be published on the website of each test (but the contacting the school is more sure in my opinion).
As a general rule in my academic life, the only sure source for such information is the website, help desk or contact person of the institute you are applying to. Asking these questions here or from your friends generally do not help you because they may not be sure about the piece of information they are giving and you may face difficulties for the wrong directions. So, always stick to the source of information you need to boost your progress up and avoid difficulties.

Thanks, this is a possibility I've thought about, but it is good to have it confirmed.


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What benefits are there to university alumni mentoring undergraduate students?
My faculty is starting a mentorship initiative where they match undergrad students with alumni from the same program. I was contacted by one of my old professors, and asked whether or not I could be a mentor.
Now I have been in mentorship programs before; and I currently have a mentor myself, but I have always been the mentee, never the mentor. I have to say I never considered what the mentors have to gain in these programs. Is it mostly charity, in the sense that you selflessly help/guide the mentee, or are the intellectual/practical benefits to mentoring, particularly within academia?

(1) What type of mentoring are you providing? Helping with classes? Helping with career decisions? Helping big brother/big sister style? (2) How is this actually related to academia?

@eykanal regarding (2), as an educator, I have thought about trying to create such a program at my school. I would be VERY interested to see the answers to this question.

@eykanal Re: (1) Help and guidance with career decisions and academic/professional advice is what the information says. Help with classes are not relevant for the sake of this question. (2) There are mentoring programs in academia, and it's very relevant as to WHY a person would want to mentor. Academia is actually pretty much built on these mentor-mentee relationships, as far as I can see.

What can a mentor gain from the mentor/mentee relationship?

Altruistic answers:

Passing on learned knowledge and lessons is a hallmark of a society. What you learned as a student, employee, employer, citizen, etc. is important so that once your brain and the brains of others in your generation are pushing up daisies, the knowledge isn't lost, and repeating mistakes can be avoided. Many people consider this a satisfying endeavor.
As a role model, you can demonstrate moral, ethical, compassionate, etc. strategies for using the education you got from the school. Knowing that you've led someone down an ethical path is a good feeling.
You can act as a sounding board for your mentee's questions about your field, and for the types of questions that don't routinely come up in class. There is a certain satisfaction in being able to answer questions based on your experience.
There might be new ideas that your mentee knows about your field that you can learn from. While you pass on your wisdom, you also have the opportunity to learn some of the new ideas that are being taught today.

Less altruistic answers:

Depending on your field, having been a mentor looks good on a resume or in an interview.
In your case, you'll gain points with your former professor, who might be more inclined to write you a good letter of recommendation some day.

Decidedly bad answers:

Steer the kid in the wrong direction, and that's one less competitor!
You might get your lab cleaned because "it builds character."
In academia, if your mentee has good ideas, you can steal them and publish the results yourself.

3.3 reminds me of a line from Terry Pratchett's Mort. :D

Interesting answers, thanks for a rich list. Regarding the 1st category; I suppose most of the answers assume that one is actually positive about his/her own career choices. I mean if a last year student comes up to me and asks about how it is to do research, I'd likely tell him/her to "... go get a proper job!" :) Jokes aside, I feel like being a mentor is something that might require a lot of time and energy (socially speaking, as free time is rare as it is) and it seems to boil down to good will.

I view this as "paying it forward": someone who has received good mentoring advice should pass this onwards to others.
In addition, it's a way of encouraging promising young talent, and making sure they make their way through a challenging transition (from high school to college graduate is a big change!), and prepare them for their careers in the future.
It is also possible to gain new insights and experiences by working with students of varying backgrounds. Helping them has actually helped me to develop closer connections both within the administration of my university, as well as with colleagues at other universities.

From the mentor point of view, I think one important practical benefits of mentoring/tutoring is that it gives you access to a pool of students (your mentees, as you put it), from which you may find future interns/grad students/post-docs. This access can be used to try and recruit them, either for yourself, or within your network (or your field in general).
Also, it gives you privileged (yet indirect) access to the students currently enrolled in the program: if you wish to circulate, e.g., a job or internship offer, it will look more attractive coming from a classmate than sent to them from a stranger.


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Should I become a reviewer for Math Reviews after leaving academia?
After finishing my PhD in mathematics not long ago, I decided to move away from academia and pursue a career in the commercial sector. I'm currently not affiliated with a university. In the long run, I might return to working at a university some day.
Recently, I recieved an invitation to become a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews. I'm flattered, but also hesitant as I can't fathom how much extra work this will be and if there's a benefit for me, besides learning more interesting things in my original academic field of expertise (which I've moved away from a bit).

How much work is it to review 1 paper per months, roughly speaking?
Would you see being a reviewer as an interesting CV item outside of academia?
Doing the reviews is usually not paid, correct?

This question is similar to Should I agree to review papers as a postdoc?, which didn't give me quite satisfactory answers since I'm not in academia anymore.  It is also similar to Personal advantages of being a referee once you quit science? but that one is not about math reviews, which are different from refereeing a paper for a journal.

Have you seen Personal advantages of being a referee once you quit science?? I believe this addresses your titular question.

For those not in math, Math Reviews is very different than refereeing a paper for a journal.  You're not asked for a detailed opinion on its correctness and significance, just a summary of its contents.  It's a sort of extended third-party abstract.  It's published with your name on it, and shows up when people search for the paper on MathSciNet (probably the most comprehensive database of math papers).  Also, unless this changed recently, for each review you get "AMS Points" entitling you to a few dollars in credit towards buying stuff from AMS.

This will ultimately be volunteer work, and it is unlikely to benefit you outside of academia.  My suggestion is that you work closely to the reward structure of your current work and your career trajectory.

@ff524: I was not aware of this other question. As Nate Eldredge points out, Math Reviews is a different case than reviews for a journal, which makes this question a non-duplicate.

Great, perhaps you can edit the title and add the 'mathematics' tag to clarify the difference.

If you think there's a chance you might want to move back into academia at some point, this might be a reasonable way of maintaining some contact with developments in the field, and keeps your profile alive. However, I doubt it will have wider benefits.

If it is as @NateEldredge says, this is certainly not a duplicate.

For those who want to see an example, here is a sample MR review.  (You need a subscription but most universities have one, so from a university IP address the link will probably just work.)  That review is longer than most, because the paper in question is very high-profile, but it gives you a sense of what we're talking about.  Ordinary reviews probably average a paragraph or two.

Related: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/100596/should-i-become-a-mathscinet-reviewer.

I'm a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews (now best known by its association with MathSciNet).  My experience has been:

I usually spend about 1-2 hours to read a paper and write the review.
I don't necessarily look to completely digest all the details of the paper, but I at least try to understand what the results are, why they are interesting, how they relate to previous work, and a general idea of the proof techniques.
Note that, unlike the pre-publication peer review process, you're not expected to check the correctness of the proof, nor to make a judgment on the paper's novelty or significance.
They want you to submit your review within about 6 weeks of being invited.
You can set your "queue size", i.e. the maximum number of papers you want to have at any one time, to whatever you want.  When you submit a review, you can expect to receive another invitation within a few days.
You can always decline a review invitation if you are temporarily too busy, or if the paper doesn't interest you or fit your expertise, and they will just send it to someone else.
You can specify your areas of interest (by MSC code) and they send you papers that appear to match your interests.  If your interests shift, or if you start getting a lot of papers that mystify you, you can make changes.
It's a very minor CV item even within academia, and probably even less outside.
You do get a little bit of extra visibility, since reviews are posted with your name, and seen by anyone who looks up the paper on MathSciNet.
You do get paid, sort of.  You receive 12 AMS Points for each review you submit.  Each AMS Point is worth $1 (USD) in credit toward purchases from the AMS (books, journal subscriptions, membership fees, etc).  So it maybe adds up to a couple of free books per year.
Also, if you review a book for them, you get to keep it.

One paper per month seems like a high load, but I'm not as connected
to the journal reviewing scene as I once was.
I don't think much of
anyone outside of academia, national laboratories (NASA, Dept. of
Energy, etc), and some commerical R&D labs (Microsoft, IBM, etc.)
will care if you are a reviewer.
And, yes, reviewing is typically
done for no pay. Though, I would say that at least for active academics, you "pay" for reviews on your own submissions by doing reviews on others.


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How to choose a topic for a PhD in organisational behaviour?
I want to do phd in organisational behaviour. However, I am confused about how to chose a topic.
Beyond general strategies for choosing a topic discussed here are there any specific strategies for choosing a PhD topic in organisational behaviour?

Hi and welcome to Academia.SE, this is a Q&A site not a forum so question asking for suggestions like this one are not the proper format. The best persons to help you pick a topic are your possible supervisors, talk to them.

I've edited the question so that it focusses on the process of finding a topic. Asking for a list of PhD topics is off-topic for this site. I've also edited to make it clear that you are asking for domain specific strategies (as the general question about finding a phd topic would be a duplicate). The end result I think is a useful domain specific question.

Find a supervisor
A supervisor will typically help you refine your PhD topic.
So the first step is to identify researchers in organisational behaviour in universities you are able to attend. It of course helps if you have an understanding of the area that you want to work in so that the supervisor can see the alignment with their research interests.
In general, organisational behaviour researchers go by a range of names and appear in a range of different departments.
Look beyond organisational behaviour to also examine areas like human resource management, management, and industrial/organisational psychology. You may find such people in management departments, business schools, I/O psychology programs, as well as a range other areas.
Get to know the literature
Read journal articles in the field to get a feel for what is current. Some of the highest impact journals related to organizational behaviour include:

Journal of Applied Psychology
Personnel Psychology
Academy of Management Journal
Academy of Management Review
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Administrative Science Quarterly
Journal of Management
Journal of Organizational Behavior
Organizational Research Methods
Journal of Vocational Behavior

Attend major conferences to network and get to know what are the current issues.
Some of the biggest conferences are SIOP and Academy of Management in the United States.
However, there are many other conferences depending on your specific interests and where you are in the world. For example, Australia has an I/O psychology conference every two years.
Learn about practical problems
Organisational behaviour is an applied field. It aims to improve the performance and well-being of workers and organisations. So, it helps to learn about the practical problems that people in organisations are experiencing.
You can gain this experience in a range of ways. But in general its helpful to actually work or consult related to your area of interest. Talk to practitioners such as consultants, managers, and so on.

The ideas suggested in your link assumes that professors have the time, are willing and are interested to refine your topic. In my view, this assumption does not hold, 99% of the time. Even if they are willing, they will try to convince you to shew towards their area of research. Before coming to that point, you need to present your argument for your area of interest and try to convince the other person. I recommend that you  explore journal articles until you find a research gap in the literature reviews, findings and limitations sections. In my case, none of the professors I approached were in my field of interest. And  they did not have time to talk to me nor were willing take on additional students.
Also, get to know more academics in the field by engaging with them through forums, emails, university open days, etc. They could also be useful contacts  or references during the course of your study. With dedication, you are bound to achieve a breakthrough. Although a title is important, be prepared to revise it during the study period. Its findings, publication of a similar study, etc may influence the change of title.


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I had a "quarrel" with my bachelor thesis advisor, should I ask him to be my one of my referees for grad application?
Last year this happened to me :
I have asked a professor if he were available for being my graduate thesis advisor, now my bachelor thesis advisor is angry with me
After that, I decided to apologize with professor X: I sent him an e-mail in which I said that it wasn't my intention to offend him by contacting Y. I said I was sorry things went that way, and I thanked him for everything he taught me nonetheless.
After a month or so, he sent me an e-mail in which he said he pursued the research he meant to assign me on his own, and published a paper in which he mentioned my contribution. He said he was sorry that we couldn't make it together, but if I have to be honest it sounded to me as if he wanted to show me the occasion I lost: I could have authored another paper...
I switched to another field of study (same major, but different topic), and I have an excellent advisor. He knows what happened with my prievous one, and blames X, not me.
However, I need three recommendation letters for grad. applications, and I don't know whether to ask X or not for one. After all, I wrote a paper with him, and that's one of the strongest points of my application. It would be even stronger if the co-author could write on my behalf. In addition, its absence among the referee would be suspicious.
On the other hand, I don't trust X anymore. He already said "yes" to me smiling, whilst was thinking "no". He could act as if he wasn't angry with me anymore, and instead write a terrible recommendation letter...
So, any suggestion?

Based on your history with him, and the fact that he insinuated that you were "mentally unstable" in a previous email - no, you should avoid this individual like the plague.
Perhaps ask the head of the department for a recommendation, explaining the situation?  They may be able to write about your work in the department and explain why your first adviser was not asked to provide a letter.

Agreed (+1), but to me the fact that the old advisor claimed - mental or physical - abuse of a female co-student by OP makes it absolutely essential to avoid him. (Some) admissions committees might consider an eccentric (crazy) candidate; but if the other incident, true or false, is related, I cannot see OP being considered anywhere.


text:
How to obtain Microsoft code signing certificate for signing supplementary material for scientific article?
Our research results (mathematical models) can be supplemented by rather convincible and impressive visualizations of both scientific concept and experimental data. We produced this demonstration material in the form of executable files that could be downloaded from our website to run locally. The material is written in real programming language, not a wrapper around some third party tool. They were initially written as Java applets, now we converted them into stand alone executables.
To look somewhat "correct", the executable to share in these days must be digitally signed (here is the full explanation). Unsigned Java applets cannot run at all in these days. Unsigned MSI installers still run, but display various nasty warnings that may scare of half of the audience.
Our research group is not a company like AG or GMBH, so it is not included into databases where that allow true companies to be verified and obtain certificates rather easily. We really cannot register a commercial company just to sign our demonstration material.
This only leaves an option for the researcher to obtain the certificate as individual. While theoretically the procedure exists and appears simple (just present a few documents to the Notary), in reality we failed multiple times because for the certificate issuer such a researcher is a "strange person from the street" with not enough trust to issue this electronic document. One of the main they argumentation was that my citizenship does not match the country of the residence (that is, I would say, very common between scientists that move between positions over the world). Also they said they do not like how the Notary has done his job with document signing, while it was an official Notary, and I am not sure if any other could do better. I am in German speaking country, the instructions were in English and the Notary even said he is unable legally follow them. Finally they asked me to hire a true lawyer rather than just a notary, and at this point we were forced to withdraw.
After the long pause I have applied for the certificate for the second time, but to avoid wasted time and useless expenses with the Notary, tried to discuss these two problems with the provider in advance. As a result, my application has been immediately cancelled. Rather tough approach, I would say.
How is this problem supposed to be solved? Is there any institution or process that would allow researcher to sign his code for online sharing, using his academic identity as part of the trust? Random providers offering to issue such certificates rather cheaply basically do not want to go into any talks if you are not a commercial company.

I'd recommend contacting Microsoft. I don't know how it works for Microsoft; for a corresponding certificate from Apple you must be a registered developer ($99 a year) and have a company, which in the UK would cost you £12 to register and £15 per year; this seems to be much, much more expensive in Germany, so there might be another way. That's why I recommend contacting them. And they might accept some academic institution.

I would not expect research code to be signed.

I agree with @AnonymousPhysicist - anyone who wants to run your software will 1. not care about whether or not it's signed, and 2. likely be familiar with how to run unsigned applications. I wouldn't worry about it, you're just going to complicate the development-release cycle.


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What should I do if actually I found a serious flaw in someone's PhD thesis and an article derived from that PhD thesis?
Recently, I came across a PhD thesis and an article derived from that PhD thesis and found a serious flaw in them that actually makes their conclusions invalid.
In the first place, I was unsure if I'm right or not, so I contacted the guy that wrote the PhD thesis and subsequent article and described my concerns and I showed my calculations to him and asked if he thinks in fact there is a major problem in his PhD thesis and that article, which is derived from it. He responded back that embarrassingly, in fact I'm right and there is a problem but he can't do anything about it.
I didn't want to force him to do something but I'm just thinking maybe there might be a possibility to publish an erratum for at least that article. It's a major flaw and unfortunately it just invalidates the major conclusions of paper and PhD thesis. Surprisingly, the article is cited for 15 times and nobody found that obvious problem. My question: What's the best way to deal with these kind of situations that even author himself/herself admits that in fact there is a major flaw in his/her thesis or article?

"I'm right and there is a problem but he can't do anything about it."  Why not??

@PeteL.Clark That's his answer not mine that he can't do anything about it, but of course, I'm not convinced with this answer.

Right, I agree with you.  I am struggling to think of a situation in which it is not the case that he not only CAN do something about it but is ethically obligated to.  What I was asking was: what reasons did he give?

@PeteL.Clark "what reasons did he give?" Nothing! I mean I just didn't ask why after he admitted that there is a problem and he can't do anything about it, cause I didn't want to make this impression that I found something in his work and now I want to put him in trouble.

Can't the guy just add an erratum?

One possibility is for you to write a paper on your reanalysis. Often this would need to be something more than pointing out the flaw alone, but that may be discipline-dependent. If the flaw you have detected is a key part in your own analysis of your work, including your updated analysis in a larger article (while citing their paper) is a smooth way to point out how you had to change the method.
The second possibility is that many journals (at least in my area) allow for Comments on articles they have published. These are for just this purpose - to point out something 'wrong' about a paper that has been published. If the editors decide to proceed with it, the original authors are usually given an opportunity to craft a Reply piece to agree, disagree, alter, whatnot. Then they are published back-to-back in the journal.

Unfortunately, there is no option for putting comment about articles that  are published in that journal. My minor concern about your first option is that, I don't want my short letter, to show the flaw based on reanalysis, will be considered an offence to the guy who wrote the paper and PhD thesis. Despite the fact that indeed there is a major flaw in this article, he and his co-authors are big draws in my research field and I don't want to struggle with them. The main author is a nice guy, and he quickly took the responsibility for the problem, but I don't know about his other co-authors.

Should I prepare my letter and send to him and see if he actually agrees then send it to the journal? I mean I don't want to create an awkward situation cause I'm just a graduate student.

@AloneProgrammer - is the (faulty) analysis in the paper something central to your work? If so, in one of your papers you could show your analysis, and state it is different from the other paper. Leave it up to readers to figure out that the other is in error (at least for your usage of it).

Yes, in fact it is related to major part of my research. This idea sounds great I believe. Thanks!

To avoid problems with the authors of the original paper, you can invite them to write the re-analysis paper together and co-author it.

Knowing a bit more about the OP's work from past questions, this answer is definitely correct. This is not an area where things are truly wrong but this sounds like a flaw in approach. The correct thing to do is to publish a paper using a different approach referencing the previous paper, explain why the new approach is superior (let others decide if that makes the previous work inferior), and explain differences in the results. Or, as suggested, publish a Comment addressing the methodological errors. Do not write to the original editor, do not demand retraction.

I think pubpeer is a decent alternative to the journal's comment section. Is it worth mentioning?

@KamilSJaron I tried PubPeer but my comment was moderated and deleted.

@AloneProgrammer That's... strange? Did you get any feedback? In theory, they delete only rude or accusative comments.

Do not overthink it.
I have had similar experience and authors were reluctant at first (mostly because they have moved to another problem).
It is very dangerous to leave a flaw in the literature. Especially a critical flaw where others may build on it. This will lead to more chaos. I am aware some (well-known) people do not care about their old results being incorrect. But this is not what Academia is about. You should appreciate the peer review and rigorous findings more than anything else.  You already have contacted the author, offer him a collaboration (if seems right) on correcting the whole thing in the context of your work.
You usually have spotted the error because your work is related. On that particular connection re-analyze the claim and correct it. Include in your new paper the claim, prove why it is incorrect and prove the new correct result. This actually can be seen as a new contribution to your paper/thesis.
For me, I was very satisfied with the outcome; the first author of the other paper did mentor me for a while after we met at a conference.

I don't buy this.  Descartes' whole physiological framework is just about entirely incorrect.  The normal process of science is correcting it.  It didn't cause chaos -- it forms the hypothesis-driven framework of the scientific method.

@ScottSeidman errors happen indeed, and it is the author duty to make sure any result is correct before claiming it. It is also others' duty if spotted an error to fix it. But leaving a flaw in the literature just to avoid ''awkward situation'' (as suggested by the OP comment to Jon's answer) isn't the right thing.

Write to the editor of the journal. Offer your explanation and ask for the best way forward.
You might be lucky and be given a chance to write an article with your clarification.
The editor might instead decide to do a correction with varying levels of acknowledgement of you.

article is cited for 15 times and nobody found that obvious problem

The problem is not obvious despite your initial impression. It may be worthwhile dissecting and contemplating the complexity of the blindspot in this area. Was it obvious to you because you come from a different perspective? Have experience from a different discipline? Interrogate why the issue was not obvious to at least 15 publication worthy authors and not to mention a larger number of editors and peer reviewers.

Yes, I agree it will not be obvious unless you dig deep into the problem. I believe it was not discovered earlier by author himself or reviewers of the journal, because of huge ambiguity that exists in the literature of this area of research. It's not that difficult to catch the flaw in this paper, cause it's just about wrong Reynolds number, which could be calculated easily even by high school students. But, I'm just wondering why nobody did that before and why nobody realized simply if your Reynolds number is off by an order of magnitude, your results are simply wrong...

Nice idea to think about why it might be that no one has reported the problem until now. Worth considering that maybe some people have spotted it but not done anything about it. Another factor to consider is that those 15 citations may not directly build on the work, they may be fairly incidental citations along the lines of "Other methods previously used in this area are X (1), Y (2) and Z (3)".

Investigate and describe the ambiguity in the literature might be useful. It could be that most people don't appreciate or realise the ambiguity?  It may be worth discussing with colleagues or researching whether this is a  Reynolds number issue or whether it fits into a recognised category of errors?

@user2390246 The citations come from a close circle of researchers, who are really well known in my field, but they just cite each other. The worst part is that the result of this research come from a conference challenge in 2011 that six different research groups did an identical series of simulations and their results across these six groups are compared together. But simply, all of those simulations are built based on a wrong input (the simulations are highly sensitive to this input), which means their conclusions are wrong.

Maybe publish a series of articles using the "right" input then. It is more useful the describe and derive concepts around why and how this sort of errors and assumptions occur. In computing world, conceptualisation work is not as appreciated as it is from the other sciences especially psychology and safety factor research. But if you can conceptualise it, then you can then use that technique or knowledge to identify other similar errors or produce new checks and balances for such discussions in the future...

@AloneProgrammer, sounds almost like what my psych major friend used to say about his field: “Ten percent empirical research; thirty percent plausible guesses; and sixty percent quoting the others.”  Which (except for the specific numbers) I have come to believe is also true of medicine and software engineering.

@WGroleau in medicine we debate the numbers too. And try to collect more numbers to debate further. Lol.

But the point is that "everyone knows" X is true when actually if you trace it back, you find it was a hypothesis that was never tested.  (Or in some cases, known to be false to the few who bothered to check before it became common knowledge.)

This is what science is.  Not everything that gets published is correct or true.  Presumably, the literature of science is self correcting.  Someone will eventually address and correct it.  For example, Descartes' whole physiological framework is just about entirely incorrect.  The process of science fixed this, over hundreds of years, and still Descartes publications were an important part of that process.
If the area of research you're referencing is important, the error you hold to be present will misguide the community and harm future research efforts, and you're a participant in the community with sufficient credibility and standing to correct the issue, you might consider a letter to the editor or a rapid publication to a high profile journal.
If any of those criteria do not hold, your actions should be tempered.  If the publication you believe to be incorrect is on the topic of your personal research, the issue might find its way into the discussion section of one of your near-future publications.  If it doesn't reach that level in your personal research portfolio, you might just let it go, and let someone more appropriate address it.

The research is about simulating blood flow in neurovascular network, which I think it is important...

@AloneProgrammer "Importance" is not what is relevant here. Everyone thinks their work is important. You are not in a field where this type of error is treated as something to be removed from history. Build on the work with your better work.

"Important" is relative.  I'm talking more in terms of an error in a paper that can potentially change public health policy in an incorrect direction.  Think "vaccines".

@BryanKrause You are right. But, this one is not about our interpretation of results or even comparison of obtained results with clinical data, which I would say the variance in this area is huge and even conflicting results are not considered wrong, and as you pointed out correctly, it's up to readers and researchers to decide. But, the problem here is something more fundamental about the inputs of mathematical model, that is used essentially to build the computational tool and extract the results in this paper. A factor of magnitude lower Reynolds number is really a big concern in this area.

@AloneProgrammer That's fine, publish your work showing something different with different model inputs. This happens all the time. A correct reading of any biological/medical research is "given these methods, we got these results" - there are thousands of papers that use methods that have been replaced with better approaches. If your new results impact the field that is fine, that means you have potentially high impact work.

I have been in a similar situation, but on the other side. My own MS thesis and an article derived from it contained a major flaw. In short, the thesis was about investigating some static waves in a certain system, but the system itself is unstable in the very same model, with the instability length being comparable to the characteristic wavelength of the static waves in question. The whole investigation did not make any scientific sense at all, because the assumed system could not be physically realized in the first place.
I myself discovered the flaw a few months before submitting my thesis. I discovered the flaw pretty accidentally: I wanted to formally prove that the system is stable, but the result of my calculations showed that the opposite is true. I had never heard from my supervisor, who had given me the problem for my thesis, or from his colleagues that the system may be unstable. Everyone simply did not even think about that possibility.
And then I faced the dilemma as to what to do.
My final choice was to tell no one and to simply get my degree. I was an undergraduate student graduating from a Russian university, and getting my MS degree asap and moving abroad to get a Western PhD degree was my highest priority. If I had raised the issue about the flaw, I would have suffered a major setback in my career. I would have had to start my MS project over, and I am not even sure whether I would have been allowed to do it at all. If I had had a setback in my career, I would not have been able to win a prestigious PhD stipend in a Western country.
I should have checked at the very beginning of my MS project whether the system is stable. I should have, but I did not. Partially it is a fault of my supervisor, who directed my work in a very rigid way, giving me concrete tasks and deadlines. He never told me to check whether the system is stable. The official research plan, which I and he signed, did not contain any mention of a stability analysis. It was my own initiative to try to prove stability, because I felt that this was needed to make my investigation complete. I did not even talk to my supervisor about my idea to perform a stability analysis. After I discovered the flaw, I was sure that if I talked to my supervisor about the flaw, he would say the whole MS project had to be canceled.
After I submitted my thesis, my supervisor insisted that I write and publish an article derived from the thesis. I did not want to do it, but I had to. After all, I needed good recommendation letters from my supervisor, so I had to obey. The article was published in a reputable American journal and was cited ~20 times. Writing that article was the most unpleasant experience in my scientific career.
No one noticed the flaw, so I successfully got my MS degree in Russia, moved abroad, got a Western PhD degree, and some years later published an article explaining the flaw. I explicitly wrote in that article that my previous article and a number of other articles, which I cited, are invalid science. No one published a comment in response. In private conversations, my colleagues confirmed that my conclusion about the flaw is correct.
Why did I wait about six years to tell the scientific community about the flaw? Don't hate the player, hate the game. I simply could not afford a career setback. I needed my MS degree asap. I believe I made a wise choice. I would do exactly the same in the same circumstances. Who wouldn't?
Concerning your question, the principal thing is this: what's in it for you? Does the guy's article make any harm to you or your reputation by, e.g., contradicting your own articles? If it does not, then I want to tell this: there are so many wrong or misleading articles in science, there are so many awful things in science, and the guy's article is a drop in the ocean of all this. Why wouldn't you focus on doing your own great research instead? I guess the guy's article is insignificant anyway and is not even worth considering, just like most articles in science. I guess it is just a mathematical or computational exercise made for the purpose of producing a paper and earning a PhD degree. If my guess is correct, then you do not need to stoop to that level and search for mistakes in insignificant articles, and you do not need to harm the guy's career at its very beginning. I have articles published in Physical Review Letters, even as the first author, but I started my career with a wrong and misleading MS thesis.
Imagine you noticed a mistake in an article published in Indian Journal of Physics, whose impact factor is below 1. Would you care to correct the mistake by publishing a comment? I doubt you would. Not every mistake must be corrected. Some are just not worth spending time and effort correcting them.
My own principles are simple:

All physics journals that are "lower" than Physical Review journals are trash bins.
If an article does not interfere with my own research, then this article is none of my business.

I hope that my post will help you and others look at the issue from an angle different from the one from which many people see the issue.

I'm not sure but knowingly cover the flaw to just advance the "career", even if you cleared it up some years after the incident, is a research misconduct or not...

@AloneProgrammer Of course, it is a research misconduct. But if I had not elected to cover the flaw, I would most likely not have become a scientist at all. I could not afford two more undergraduate years in Russia. My parents did not want to help me financially any further. I had to get my MS degree asap and move abroad. At that time (late 1990s), living in Russia was very hard because of an economic crisis.

@AloneProgrammer Technically speaking, my MS thesis and the article derived from it did not contain any mistake, because I took a model given to me and investigated static waves within the framework of that model. The fact that the model is faulty is a separate issue. In essence, the message of my thesis and the article was, "If we take that model, we get these results." I was just an undergraduate student who had to do what the supervisor said. He gave me the model and ordered to do certain calculations. I did them, and I did them absolutely accurately.

@AloneProgrammer  As soon as I felt it was safe for my career to tell the community that the model is faulty, I did so. I know I violated the ethical norms of research conduct, but I was FORCED by the circumstances. At any rate, my MS project was insignificant research anyway. It was rather a training project that allowed me to learn how to do calculations and how to write a thesis and a research article. Even if the model were not faulty, the article would not have had any considerable impact. No one used the results of that project. People simply cited my paper.

@AloneProgrammer The only harm due to me covering the flaw is that a number of other scientists continued using the same faulty model for other purposes in their research, unsuspecting that the model is faulty. If I had told them that the model is faulty, they would have spent their research efforts for something more useful. But that would have put my own career in danger. Unfortunately, sometimes we face hard choices.

Surprisingly, the article is cited for 15 times and nobody found that obvious problem.
Not so surprising, my friend, as many people cite papers and books they have not read well, or read at all.
You can email the author, outlining the problem. They may or may not be receptive to your argument, they may or may not be hostile in their reply (or reply at all), and they may or may not be moved to publish an erratum. But you will have done all that you could.

The OP described already contacting the author in the question and comments under it, as well as the author's response.

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


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Undergrad CV – listing posters you presented but did not author
There seems to be a bias, particularly among more established researchers, to only include posters that they presented. There seems to be a trend towards not including (or including as abstract accepted) posters where they are listed as an author, but someone else presented.
My question is the reverse of that: If you were not involved in the project (thus no authorship), but presented the poster at a conference, would you include that on your CV?
Example: I attended a conference this year; my PI was supposed to present two of their posters, but couldn’t make it at the last minute. We’re currently working on extensions of that research, so I was familiar with the topic, but I wasn’t involved in those particular projects. I was also presenting at that conference, and so I presented my PI’s posters as well.
Is it acceptable to include those on my CV, with a note about “presented by [self] at [event]”?

Yes, it is acceptable. However, I would not list it in my "publication section", rather in a separate section called "Paper/Poster Presentations".
If you received any certificate (or letter) after the presentation, then that is a plus.

What kinds of certificates/letters might be offered?

@Nat Something like this: "This is to certify that Mr. James Bond presented a paper/poster entitled 'How to have a license to kill' in the International Workshop on Terror Avoidance 2017, held at University of Suspense during November 31 - 35, 2017".

Technically you can list whatever you want on your CV as long as it is accurate and not presented in a misleading manner. The main question is whether this is really an important asset and does not leave the reader asking “so what?”.
The only thing that you presenting that poster testifies is that you were once challenged and trusted with presenting somebody else’s work (and hopefully gained some experience). Whether you did a good job with this is impossible to tell for the reader. Presenting your own work at the conference is arguably a dozen times more valuable than this.
As you probably get a recommendation letter from PI as well, it may be more wise to have them mention this event in a positive manner, e.g., if they got feedback on your performance or can state why they trusted you with this task.
Finally, be sure that you do not list this event in a manner that may make somebody who just skims your CV think that you managed to present more posters about your own work than you actually did. Even if your CV is technically accurate, they may feel deceived.

I say No.  You take credit for your own research product, and don't take credit for other people's research.  Giving a poster presentation on somebody else's research is a favor, not a CV element.


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How to become a peer-reviewer?
I am in an interesting situation, I have a masters degree in electrical engineering but have been working as a software engineer for about 10 years. I have a lot of interest in doing peer reviews and contributing to research part-time in computer science. But I find it very hard to convince anyone to let me review their work.
My question is, is it possible to do so while working in a day job? If so, how can one go about signing up to do peer reviews? All the journals seems to want to see credibility before you can peer-review any articles or papers.
How can one get started midway through their work career?

I don't want to come off as dismissive and your willingness to contribute to science is honourable. But to give you some perspective: As an author, I absolutely would not want my paper to be reviewed by a reviewer who doesn't have significant experience with having their own papers reviewed.

I may be misunderstanding you here, but it sounds as if you're trying to do peer review as an extra "job". It is not a job - in particular, it is not paid work. Rather, it is just a part of the full-time job of being a researcher. A part that cannot be dissociated from the rest, because you can't have the skills for peer review if you don't write papers.

No, I am interested in research. Not looking for paid work.

@lighthousekeeper it makes sense. I see why it could get harder to just try to review work.

To be a peer reviewer, you have to be a peer - if no one is reviewing your articles then you're not really a peer. First step: start submitting research to be published.

As an editor, when I need peer-reviewers, if I don't know someone with expertise in the topic at hand, I look to see who has published peer-reviewed work in a similar area recently. No-one signs up to do reviews, it's up to me to go out and find them. Which means, if you haven't published peer-reviewed work recently, you aren't likely to get any invitations.
So, in my case, if you want to do peer-reviews, the first step is publishing something in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise, no one will know you're there.
This doesn't mean someone who isn't publishing is never qualified to provide a peer review. But if I don't know you, and you haven't published anything yourself, I have no way to evaluate if you are qualified to provide a good review.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the distinction between an interesting paper, and an interesting publishable paper, may not be clear to someone who isn't actively pursuing academic work in the area.

This is insightful. But in my case, it sounds like a catch 22. I need to find some editors to trust me but they wont until I have credibility and publishing a paper is incredibly hard especially since I no longer attend school.

@xoail Right. But "peer review" is quite suggestive: it is intended as a type of quality control among peers. If you are not publishing papers yourself and don't intend to, then you must agree that it would be odd to include you as "peer reviewer". I think what you are envisioning ("professional reviewers" that don't necessarily publish themselves being part of the reviewing process) could be possible, it is just not how academia has arranged itself to deal with the problem of needing reviewers for publishing papers. (And I'm not saying the current system is perfect either.)

@xoail A catch-22 is when you're required to have done A in order to do A. Here you're required to have done A (publish) in order to do B (review), and there is no requirement to have done A to do A.

@Earthliŋ but then don't I need to be in academia to publish?

you don't have to be in academia to publish. It is a lot harder to do so, but that's not unique to academia. It's harder to participate in any professional activity when it's not your profession.

@xoail There's several threads on publishing from outside academia on this site, https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3010, https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/3171, https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/27193, https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/385, and their many Linked questions (on the sidebar on the right) among them.

In addition to Thomas’ answer, peer review (in my experience) is somewhat of an “invitation only” closed club: journal editors need to know your name, and they do so because you have published in the relevant (sub-)field. And even then, editors tend to favour senior researchers or people they otherwise trust.
Case in point, I’ve published several papers during my PhD and (co-authored) during my postdoc. Yet the only peer review invitations I have received so far have been due to a specific recommendation from former group leaders to the editors.
This will probably vary across fields. But the fundamental principle is the same: editors need to put some level of trust into the competence of the reviewer. And since the research happens at the cutting edge (otherwise it wouldn’t be very interesting research), the reviewers are often chosen from a fairly small pool of people known to work at that cutting edge. Unless you have recently done outstanding, publicly known work in a field of active research, it’s unlikely that an editor would consider you as a reviewer. Merely having proficiency in already established methods is not useful.

Not necessarily. I've received requests from multiple journals in which I haven't published in. You can also be asked to review if your paper in another journal is a close match to the content of a paper they have received.

@aeismail So have I. Editors talk to each other (and to senior researchers). I wasn’t trying to say that you need to have published in that journal to be invited to review there. I’ll clarify this. (In fact you’re right, my phrasing was simply wrong. No idea how that happened.)

@aeismail you mean publishers? bcs it is normal to be invited by different journals, but is it normal to be invited from different publishers?

@SSimon: I have received invitations from both journals and publishers that I have not submitted papers to.

I wonder how they know your email? is it bcs you were the corresponding author? @aeismail

@SSimon Finding the email address of a person in academia is usually pretty easy. Look at their web site, or their department's web site.  If an editor really has difficulty finding a potential reviewer's email address, (s)he would probably just look for a different potential reviewer.

Whenever I have to suggest potential reviewers (another way to get into the "club"), I also need to add their email addresses. That's another way an editor could get to your address easily (basically the submitting author has to do the work of finding the most recent one).

In general, and I accept that there may be some exceptional sub-field I do not know about, peer reviews in Computer Science are conducted by researchers. You need experience doing research (viz. writing papers) in order to understand the quality of what you are reading. Most people are introduced to peer review during their PhD studentship when a program committee member delegates one or more of their papers to a PhD student, typically their own student. Once someone has a PhD, they may then be invited as a program committee member or a journal reviewer by the program chair/journal editor.

Nice answer! I find a little bit frightening, such a power in the hands of subjectively selected, anonymous people.

@peterh Yes, sometimes reviewer politics happen, sadly. : (

Reviewers may or may not be anonymous, in my experience most are not.

I have 25 years experience as an industrial researcher with an exceedingly short publication list (2 papers written when I was in school in the late '80s) and have been an active reviewer for years.
So emphatically NO! you do not have to be active in research in order to be a peer reviewer. It's a chronic complaint of editors and reviewers alike of how overworked they are, and yet they completely overlook the incredibly large number of people with advanced degrees that are not in academia. Or worse yet, insist that they are unqualified...
So go ahead and contact editors. It might be wise to temper expectations (don't bother with Nature or Science for instance), but start asking. And then once you  do start reviewing, be sure to record them with Publons. That will give you credibility so that you can work your way up the ladder.

This is a great response. I have a PhD so am used to the peer review process. I like to contribute as much as possible but at times it can be taxing in the least. I don't see why someone with a masters degree and 10 years experience in industry wouldn't be able to appropriately review research. Given that that the criteria comes down to approximately 1) is it novel? 2) Is it good science? 3) Does it contribute knowledge to the community?, these can be assessed by anyone who is informed, irrespective of their academic credentials. A lot of the answers here are far too negative!

There's a pretty big difference between a short pub list and no pub list.  Since the OP doesn't list publication experience, unless there is some sort of mentoring in place for the new reviewer, refereeing can become problematic.

Many journals have tried to combat this directly in recent years by offering reviewers a rating system (e.g., how is X on a scale from 1 - 5). In the instructions provided by the journal, they ask the reviewer a few basic questions to help them focus their review. Often the only bit left to do is to review the details of the method - I think someone with the OPs experience could check the technical vigour of the work. The rest is almost 'paint by numbers'

As an ex-Editor of a highly prestigious CS journal, I was always in need of reviewers (as all Editors are). But I would have never signed up someone as described by doctorjay (no offense intended)--mainly because that risks strong negative feedback from the submission authors (reviewers usually are not anonymous). I had enough negative feedback from submission authors about reviews by prominent researcher reviewers.

@NathanThomas Reviewers are supposed to be anonymous but at least in certain sub-fields/topics it is often pretty easy to figure out who at least some of them are, based on their reviews.

@E.DouglasJensen Absolutely. I deleted my previous comment. Not sure what point I was trying to make there but of course anonymity is a top priority (although some journals do allow the reviewer to reveal themselves)

It's usually the opposite problem -- once you start publishing, you end up on the page editors' lists of possible reviewers, and never get off of those lists again until you die.
Given that, the real requirement for referees is that they publish in the field they review.  If you haven't done so, you will have a hard time convincing editors of your qualifications.

One of the main issues (which I think has not yet been mentioned in other answers) is that to be a good reviewer you need to be current on what is going on in the field.  So if you're not an active researcher, it will be hard for you to properly evaluate new work in context.
So instead of looking to get more into academia starting by doing peer reviews, perhaps consider getting involved with research.  You could either start doing things that are of interest to yourself on your own and then contact experts when you make some progress to give feedback, or try reaching out to people/groups who you'd be interested in working with (preferably someone you know, like former professors, as "cold calling" has low response rates).

So if you're not an active researcher, it will be hard for you to properly evaluate new work in context. adding to this issue is (in my own experience) the fact of a much less generous access to published material when pursuing a job outside academia. Not every field uses arXiv-like pre-prints, open access - though increasingly used - is all but comprehensive, and enterprises tend the spend much less on pay-walled articles than research institutions and their affiliated libraries.

To answer your questions:

is it possible to do so while working in a day job?:

Yes. All peer-reviewers are done by people who have other jobs. The only caveat is to make sure you employer does not prohibit it (I do not know why they would, but there might be some (real or perceived) concern over intellectual property rights).

If so, how can one go about signing up to do peer reviews? All the journals seems to want to see credibility before you can peer-review any articles or papers.

Other answers have described the traditional approach for being a reviewer. I have used another method for one journal I wanted to review for: Network and volunteer to a reviewer.
Specifically, I had a mentor tell me to peer review as a way to enhance my standing within a professional society. He told me to email a former professor of mine who was an editor for a journal and offer to review for him. That got my foot in the door as a reviewer with the journal. In your case, do any of your MS faculty server as editors? Or, do you know any other editors? Perhaps you could reach out to them to be a reviewer. Send them a short note and volunteer to be a reviewer.

How can one get started midway through their work career?

If you're able to get your foot in the door, do a good job. Be prompt, be professional, and be rigorous.

Let me put some emphasis that the main - or even the only relevant - point is that that he was referred to the editor by someone already known, and assumed  to be competent to the editor. Only that established the assumption that he would be a valuable reviewer - concluded from the professors assumption of the same. The editor may have based his decision on this assumption alone, without caring about any other indications of the reviewers competence at all, and rightly so. Just finding an editor and asking him independently is totally different.

@VolkerSiegel I'm sorry, but I do not understand the point of your comment. Would you please try rewording it. I suggesting the OP contact people he knows who are editors. Your comment suggests am telling him to cold call people: i.e. "Just finding an editor and asking him independently is totally different."

I have written an answer, making it more clear, I hope. Please ask again if the answer does not clarify it.  I read it as suggesting cold calling known editors, right?

For some journals, you may register as a peer reviewer through a website. I recall certain elsevier journals, though the publisher may be considered expensive/restrictive for the research community. (In fact, a search for "register as a reviewer" in a web search engine does provide some entry points.) Many editors are suffering because they don't find reviewers for months! You simply have to write an e-mail to a managing editor (or to all the editors) of a journal. No guarantee you'll get a paper if you contact just the main editor of a single journal, but my best bet is that there is a pretty good chance if you contact all the editors of, say, 100 journals.
However, doing a proper peer review of a serious and well-written 50-page paper takes time. Up to several months, if you have to acquire knowledge beforehand and really go into detail. For such papers, during reading, you won't get enough grounds to stop and reject. Don't expect it to be doable in the evenings.

I definitely do not plan to do it over the evening and understand that some of them require good time and dedication that could last potentially months.

@xoail Good! Just wanted to make you aware of that.

Some journals (I can confirm this is the case for American Physical Society journals) have a form where you can recommend others as reviewers. This may or may not be the case in OP's field; if it is, some networking with contacts who are still in academia could do a lot to get OP's name into the relevant rolodexes.

Very long shot.
I have on occasion asked an editor who sent me a paper to review if I could pass the task along to a junior colleague (who had no reputation yet). The editor trusted my judgement, my colleagues did the job well and so got a foot in the door.
Perhaps contacting one of your former professors would work this way for you.

Oh, that is a good example of the situation described in my answer, published just three minutes earlier!

I can think of one counter-example to my experience as an ex-Editor of a prestigious CS journal who would never have reviewers such as the OP. That counter-example was a scientist at the (U.S.) Naval Research Laboratory. He never did any direct research or publish papers. What he did do intensively for a couple of decades was to follow certain topics of interest to the NRL in the best scientific research journals and conference proceedings, and retained and assimilated it. He had a prodigious memory and ability to relate to what was in his memory. I would not have hesitated to have him be a reviewer for these topics he followed.

Another answer  describes an example about someone without the qualification. In most answers he was successful in becoming a reviewer. That was after a professor who knew him provided a reference.
Let me put some emphasis that the main point is that that he was referred to the editor by someone already known, and assumed to be competent to the editor.
Only that established the assumption that he would be a valuable reviewer - concluded from the professors assumption of the same. The editor may have based his decision on this assumption alone, without caring about any other indications of the reviewers competence at all, and rightly so.
An example where this would make perfect sense is when the professor knew that the reviewer is qualified to publish leading edge papers of the subfield, but did not publish on it due to some unrelated reason. Say a psychological condition of chronic paper writing phobia.

This may seem exceedingly rare to happen in the real world.  But since the answer of Ethan Bolker provided a second real world  example, in addition the one used in the first paragraph, just three minutes after I posted this answer, I allow myself to hope there is some non-zero credibility to it.


text:
Does an Israeli PhD grant you the right to call yourself Dr. in Germany?
I am a German citizen currently studying for my master’s in Germany. I am thinking about pursuing a PhD in physics in Israel (TAU) and I am wondering if the PhD in Israel is fully equivalent to the doctorate in Germany. Will I be able to use Dr. as part of my name when I eventually return back to Germany?

Not an answer to your question, but you might want to ask yourself whether this actually matters. I never bothered to get the two letters in my (German) passport. In fact, I renewed mine last week and did not do have them put Dr there, partly because of practical reasons (it seems more confusing then helping as it is not common practice internationally), partly because I think it doesn't belong there (see also https://ze.tt/weg-mit-den-doktortiteln-auf-klingelschildern-und-in-paessen/). So I would not factor this in into my decision to study there or not.

@damian Thanks for pointing this out but this was not to what my question was referring to. It was more if I can call myself Dr. And not if I can let it be noted in my passport (I don't care about this)

Ah, OK. Then I misunderstood.

I would guess possibly, but the only definite answer will come from the relevant authorities.
A quick search turns up the following results:
https://www.anerkennung-in-deutschland.de/html/en/assessment_of_higher_education_certificates.php
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/06-anerkennungd/606684
Leading to:
https://www.kmk.org/de/zab/central-office-for-foreign-education.html
This suggests there is a service that will assess foreign degrees regarding their equivalence for a fee.
There is also a website (in German) that will allow you to determine if your desired institution is recognised by the German state or not:
https://anabin.kmk.org/anabin.html
And lastly: You can always ask your local embassy/passport-issuing office when in doubt. They either know or can find out if the degree is recognised.
(Degrees from other EU countries are normally recognised within the EU without any additional fees.)
Edit:
Using the search of the Anabin website, "TAU" is listed as "H+".
Use the search here to find it: https://anabin.kmk.org/no_cache/filter/institutionen.html
Edit 2:
I have "two letters" in my Passport/ID card from a PhD in the UK, nowadays living in France. I did not need to pay any extra fees at the German embassy in France and my PhD Certificate from the University of Leeds was sufficient - which is also classed as "H+" in the database.

Your answer would be improved if you provide a definition of the “H+” rating.

@DanRomik On the website, they provide a not very useful German description which states that "H+" denotes an institution that is accredited in the respective country. However it comes with a disclaimer that the label doesn't guarantee anything and you return to having to inquire with the authorities for a definitive answer. I did consider citing the definition in verbatim, but then left it out at there would be no real benefit.


text:
How to work with an article in a foreign language?
After some digging, I found this article from 1969 which was referenced by an earlier publication I was interested in. Unfortunately, it is in Russian, is 13 pages long, and I know of no translation.
This is the first time I have had this problem. In general, if I want to find a way to read the article I am interested in, what should I do? Is it common to ask colleagues to help translate? Are there services which are commonly used? Websites, forums, etc.?

Try Google Translate, which will translate anything that can be copy/pasted: translate.google.com.

Having seen the results of google translate on technical stuff - I would get the output checked....

Did you try reading the reviews in Mathematical Reviews (MR) and Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl)? Also, it would help to uncover a commonly used English translation for the title (MR and Zbl will likely provide this), because quite often titles using Cyrillic letters are cited as "title-in-English (Russian)", and finding the appropriate "title-in-English" will be of great help in searching for other references to the paper, references that might tell you more about what it contains.

@artificial_moonlet: I'm familiar with the journal (for instance, Solomon Marcus published many papers in this journal, several of which I have actual 1960s and 1970s preprints of). Because this journal publishes papers in several languages and is not so well known, this journal does not have a sibling translated version associated with it, as is the case, for instance, with many Russian, Japanese, and Chinese mathematics journals.

Read it
Get the article machine translated. If you can not copy-paste from the PDF, it would be convenient to do some sort of OCR on it. An alternative that requires work is to retype the (relevant parts of) the article with a Cyrillic keyboard. There almost certainly exists software or internet applications for typing Cyrillic letters. I understand there also exist applications that recognize text from a picture and translate them on the fly.
Have, side-by-side, the machine translated article and the original article. Since you hopefully have domain knowledge, you can read the translation, figure out what the funny and strange parts mean, and get the gist of the meaning. When this does not work, check the relevant passage in the original article and use a dictionary to check individual words. If this is not enough, search for translations of sequences of words. Some of them might be fixed phrases or idioms.
Tatoeba is a fine website for seeing phrases in context and possibly their translations. It also has a non-trivial amount of mathematics sentences in many languages.
Knowing a bit of the language helps
You might want to get familiar with the Russian alphabet and rough pronunciation rules. Get a flashcard program, such as Ankidroid/Anki, and a suitable deck for it, and learn them. It should not take that long. The painful alternative is to have e.g. the Wikipedia page for Russian alphabet open on the side and checking the letters there until you remember them.
For a slightly larger investment, use something like Duolingo to learn the very basics of the language. This, combined with your domain knowledge of mathematics, will make it possible to read mathematical text with reasonable fluency surprisingly fast.
I know a bit of French and can read mathematics in French, Spanish and Portuguese so that I get the main points of the text, and in fact, have a read a couple of French articles in detail. I know Scandinavic languages and can figure out mathematical German, most of the time, without having studied it.
Workload of learning the alphabet
You can spend as much or as little initial time as you want. After the initial rush, this will require an upkeep of couple of minutes per day, and any other activity with the language reduces this to essentially nothing. Source: I have learned hirakana and katakana and upkeep them without learning further Japanese.
Workload of learning the basics of a language
Note that you are mainly interested in passive understanding of written text, which is one of the easier parts. Basics of pronunciation help, because you typically want to read text by pronouncing it mentally at the same time.
Doing as little as a single lesson of Duolingo, little bit of Clozemaster (more advanced) or taking on a relevant Anki deck slowly leads to progress, as long as you have a plan that ensures you learn what you learn fluently and move further every now and then. The daily amount does not matter that much; you want constant exposure to aspects of the language you have not mastered yet and some repetition of the (possibly very limited) aspects you have mastered.
Your objectives are to:

Get a feel for words in the language. This allows you to identify loan words and compound words or equivalent structures. Loan words are frequent and important in technical texts.
Learn a bit of grammar. Where is the verb in the sentence located? What about object and subject? How to recognise a question?
Frequent words like 'and' and 'or'. Prepositions, even though their precise meaning can be challenging; but at least you will know something is a preposition when you see it, and this already helps a lot.
Along the way, you will learn some vocabulary. Some of it helps (basic verbs, numbers), some not so much (animals, restaurants, etc.). But think of it as a bonus, not the substance.

Something like ten minutes per day, more or less every day, will already lead to slow progress, and every little bit helps much more than it should. This is due to your domain knowledge and knowing a related language (English) or maybe several; most people in world already know at least two languages.
It is a marathon, not a sprint; binging on the language is unlikely to give lasting results. Instead, the aim is to form a lightweight habit.
Verify
If you are relying on a particular lemma from the paper, for example, then it is worthwhile to verify you have understood it precisely correctly. Confusing, for example, "if" and "only if" is not nice in mathematics. But probably your domain knowledge helps you here, so that you will already see if the translation is wrong.

Many dictionaries do not give correct meanings of words when they are used in specialist fields... Engineering is a good example.

https://translit.net/ can help with transliteration to Cyrillic from a U. S. English keyboard.  You have to know at least a little Russian to use it, and it's too cumbersome for an entire paper, but I've used it for a phrase here and there.

Machine translation (Russian -> English) for math is pretty terrible. Both the equations and the terminology get botched.

@Buffy To be fair to the machines, I must say that I've also seen pretty impressive cases of human-botched Russian --> English translations.

What you suggest (OCR or typing) might be practical for the abstract, but I seriously doubt that busy researchers are going to type out a 13-page paper in an unfamiliar alphabet (much less to try to learn the basics of the language -- a famously difficult endeavor). Though I am not sure I have a better solution -- perhaps the department, or the Russian department, can provide a fluent speaker who can be paid by the hour? Having a native speaker who can help me skim the article and translate the important bits word-by-word would probably only take an hour or two.

A very minor comment: From my experience the google translate phone app works very well because you can take pictures and then translate parts of the text in the picture. I did this several times with russian papers. In addition, when reading a few Russian papers I started my own very small dictionary for mathematical terms.

@cag51 Expanded the answer.