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Taking a graduate version of a course I took in undergrad
I am currently a second year masters student that will be applying to PhD programs in CS Theory. I have finished all of my required coursework for graduation, but my tuition is essentially free and I enjoy taking classes so I am looking for one to take this semester. The few that I am very interested in are full (with no chance of additional spots opening) but there is another that I can take.
My problem is this: It is a introductory graduate level combinatorics course. My undergraduate degree was heavily focused on discrete mathematics so I took two combinatorics courses (one that had a similar syllabus to this one until about halfway through the class). I did ok in the class as an undergrad but not as well as I would have liked in terms of grades.
My question is this: How would taking this course look to PhD admissions committees? Would they think I was sandbagging not taking serious coursework or simply retaking a class to boost my GPA (I would like to note that this is not the reason I want to take it. I am interested in the sections of the course that I did not have in my undergraduate class, but the difference between the classes will probably not be known to PhD admission committees. That is, they will just see Combinatorics for both.).
My undergraduate GPA was quite low, but I have good research experience. In this sense, my main goal is to minimize the impact of my undergrad GPA on my admission chances by taking graduate coursework and doing well (so far, my graduate GPA has been very high).
Thanks in advance.

Edited to clarify "sandbagging".

What is sandbagging?

I edited to clarify.

Not sure about in CS specifically, but in the humanities it's very common, if not required, to take a graduate course in something you took in undergraduate. You'll be approaching things from a different angle and/or going much deeper into the topic.

To be clear, are you only asking about this from the perspective of a PhD admissions board? i.e. you don't want answers about what is best for your personal development/actual learning?

My exact problem has been solved (the professor changed her mind about opening spots). However, I meant solely from the perspective of a PhD admissions board. I think this would be a difficult thing to include in a personal statement, so at first glance the committee might interpret it as me simply taking easy classes.

More generally, a graduate level course "covering" the same material as an undergraduate course, might actually be much deeper and give a better understanding of the material. The professor would be a good guide to whether it would be valuable or not. An, not exactly equivalent, example is the Advanced Calculus course that follows Calculus in many undergraduate math programs. While the list of topics is about the same, Advanced Calc is much deeper, with a different purpose.

You said your exact problem is solved, but I want to answer in a more general way.
PhD admissions are not uniform or even consistent year-to-year. Additionally, the at some departments, the professors who are on the admissions committee change year-to-year. Thus there is no magic bullet for admission into a PhD program.
In my opinion, someone like yourself who has undergraduate research experience, will be in a situation where the admissions committee won't care about your exact courses on your transcript. Your GPA may or may not matter, depending on the whims of the admissions committee.
Most likely your success with applying is a completely subjective decision made by people: and like all people they are biased and irrational. I am not trying to be insulting. All I am saying is that you cannot expect a process which is subjective to work like a deterministic computer program: where the same inputs result in the same outputs; where if you change your initial conditions slightly, but taking a graduate course, your outcome will be affected by it.
I will also add that some PhD program/departments may have objective thresholds. For example a GRE minimum score, and no matter how strong the result of your application is, if you scored lower that the threshold, your application is thrown out.

For an undergrad, taking graduate level coursework is generally(*) not going to look like "sandbagging".  The very fact that it is a graduate course strongly implies that it is "serious coursework", and not just "taking easy classes"
It's pretty common for a university to have graduate and undergraduate courses with similar titles, e.g. "combinatorics".  That does not imply that the courses have significant overlap, or that it's inappropriate to take both.  Normally I would expect the graduate-level course to be substantially more advanced.  The undergraduate course might be focused on elementary results and techniques; proofs might be omitted or handwaved.  The graduate course would likely be aimed at preparing students for research in this area; careful and rigorous proofs would be a primary focus.  An undergraduate course in combinatorics might be a prerequisite, or the corresponding material might be covered rapidly in just a few days of the graduate course.
So I certainly don't think that the graduate course would look like you were "retaking" the undergrad course.
(*) This assumes that the graduate course is one that's intended for students preparing for research in this field.  So exceptions to this rule might include:

Courses that are part of a professional masters program, intended to prepare students for careers in industry, K-12 teaching, etc.  In such courses the actual material might not be significantly more advanced than in an undergrad course, though there might be extra attention paid to applications, pedagogical methods, and so on.  But you might not learn much new mathematics in such a course.
Courses intended for students from other fields.  For instance, there could be a graduate-level statistics course intended for psychology grad students, who need to learn statistical methods to conduct psychology research.  But the actual mathematical material might not be any more advanced than an upper-level undergraduate course.


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Citing a revision of a 2nd edition book
I'm wondering how to reference a book The Jepson Manual, 2nd Edition shown below.

Baldwin, B. et al. (ed.). 2012. The Jepson Manual, Vascular Plants of
  California, Rev. 2, 2nd ed. University of California Press.

I wondering about citing the revisions which are available on-line at eflora. There are now two revisions of this second edition. Should the revisions be listed in the citation as above or some other way? And should I keep the book date at 2012 even though the online revision 2 was 2014.

It depends on the referencing style e.g., APA, MLA, Harvard, etc. Which one you are using?

If in doubt, give full details. That way, your later reader who needs to check will get whatever the current (or available to them) version might be, and in case there is a relevant discrepancy will be able to track down your exact reference.

There are two basic approaches to citing a "live resource" of this type, depending on whether you are citing an aspect expected to be durable or that is expected to be particular to that particular version.

To cite an aspect that might be particular to a particular revision, e.g., a text quotation taken from a certain entry in the manual, you should cite in just the way that you have shown (modulated for the particular referencing style).  In this case, a good way to think about it is that "Revision 2 of Second edition" is just a fancier edition number that includes some sub-structure.
To cite an aspect that is expected to be durable, e.g., California having a high diversity of plants due to the high degree of variation in geography, it is more appropriate to use the citation form for an online resource, where you note the date retrieved but might not bother reporting the particular version, since the reader should expect that future revisions will still be just as valid sources of the same information.

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Will auditing impact graduate school admissions?
I am in my last semester as an undergraduate and in a class in a field that I do not consider myself knowledgeable (but interested). I fear that I will be stressing rather than learning. The audited class will be a part of my final transcript, it will not appear until I am done with the class. I am also applying to graduate schools this semester, will this impact me? (It is not a part of my major, it relates to my minor, but I have fufilled the requirements for my minor so it is still an extra class, and as an auditor I do all the work (tests and assignments) and come to every class because I want to learn)

If the course is in your major (in which case you probably can't audit it unless you have already met your requirements) or related to the field of graduate study you are choosing, auditing it might make you appear to either lack aptitude or interest in an important area if there are other reasons to question your record, such as if your grades in other courses relevant to your major are poor.
If it is a side interest, unrelated to your future area of study, then there is most likely no problem.
In either case, an admissions committee may consider it almost as if you hadn't taken the course because they have no way of assessing what your level of participation was, if you even showed up for class, etc.
(this answer applies to one course; if it seems like you audited every course you could in your undergraduate career that might say something else about you and suggest you were dodging a full workload - that doesn't sound like your situation here)

Ok. I somewhat fall into the second category which you have mentioned, the course is a graduate level biotechnology class and I am applying to biochemistry programs. Do you suggest that I keep the class graded although I may earn a lower grade? (Also I have taken two other graduate level classes in biochemistry and biotechnology and have done well in them, but I don't see that happening this time)

@123mcm That will probably be for only you to decide, but I'd wait a bit and see if you get some better responses here. Obviously the best option would be for you to keep the course graded and put in the necessary effort to do well in it - if you aren't willing to make sacrifices like that to get into grad school, the actual experience of grad school is going to be quite a shock.

"I'd be suspicious of your aptitude and interest" I would assume the student audited because it was cheaper (maybe free) or because they had hit the cap on classes they could take for a grade.

@AnonymousPhysicist Those are some alternatives that haven't been relevant at institutions I have been at, thanks for the added perspective. I haven't heard of auditing ever being cheaper or free, certainly some instructors might allow an under-the-table audit but that wouldn't show up on a transcript in any way. In either case, I think my wording in the answer was unintentionally extreme, I may edit; I meant "suspicious" only in relation to other factors, like poor performance in other major-related courses - instead, I think it came off like it was a big deal.

I also don't know if this helps, but (1) on my transcript it will read that I took the course twice, but different topics (2)I only need one more class to graduate and it is not the course that I am referencing here (3)it is not a part of my major, it relates to my minor, but I have fufilled the requirements for my minor so it is still an extra class, and (4) as an auditor I do all the work (tests and assignments) and come to every class because I want to learn, (5) my school will denote if I don't come to class or do not fufill the requirements set forth by the instructor.

"auditing it might make you appear to either lack aptitude or interest in an important area"  re-examining this answer, this is just wrong.  Generally the alternative to auditing is not taking a course at all.  Auditing indicates a higher level of interest than not taking the course.

@AnonymousPhysicist Why not take the course for a grade if you have aptitude and interest in the subject?

See my previous comment.

@AnonymousPhysicist OP specifically says they want to audit the class because they are concerned about the stress/grade.

An audited course on your transcript only indicates that you turned in a form to audit a course.  It provides no other information, and nobody will give it any further interpretation.

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Is it uncommon, at this point, not to have heard back from a PhD program that I interviewed with?
I interviewed with a program about 1.5 months ago and I have not heard anything back from them, and I am starting to worry a little. (US student/domestic application)

Maybe. In my country, the process could take a few months.

They did not give me a time frame.

Most graduate schools in the US abide by the shared April 15 guideline, and so try to get out all offers much earlier: http://cgsnet.org/april-15-resolution However, on TheGradCafe there are hundreds of results still being posted per day: https://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php It's certainly reasonable to check up on your application after the first week of April, because it's awfully late in the usual season for most programs.

You should send a thank and then do a follow-up. It's a job you are trying to get in a bad economy. Get that job! Be scrappy and show you are the most professional and have follow through. Compliment them on the honor to have been selected for interview with such a reputable and acomplished person, institution, etc. Tell them you looked further into their research and interests and would consider it an honor to learn from them. Play ball, get in the game or someone else will!

It doesn't hurt to ask. But first make your best to make sure you are informed about the timeline of the scholarship. This includes when they should send out the selection results.

I'd say follow up via email, requesting information about the status of your candidature. If you don't get a reply in a day or two, try calling them on phone. It's your career so you have a right to know about this. It might even be seen as keenness to join, in case they are undecided.


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Will the graduate school that I've been accepted to reconsider my admissions offer?
I was accepted into a graduate school and intend on going, but I got a B- in a chemistry course and now I'm worried about this. I don't think that the rest of my grades will be this low. My GPA > 3.5 currently. The last time I made a B- was over two years ago. The requirements for matriculation are getting a BS/BA and finishing with good standing.

Read the fine print of your acceptance letter.  In the U.S., as long as you keep to whatever conditions were stated there, you should be okay.

Congratulations on the acceptance. Chill out and go take a blissful walk.

@mehrdad : You aren't supposed to answer questions in comments. You should expand on this excellent answer below.

Almost certainly not. Every program/department/country is a little different, but in general I'd say a single lower-than-average grade at the last minute isn't a signal that someone isn't ready for graduate school. Especially in situations where the acceptance was based on far more than grades: statements of purpose, letters of recommendation, fit with the department, etc. If you failed a bunch of courses in your final semester, that might be seen as a red flag, but a single B- isn't likely to faze anyone in the slightest. You'd need a lot more than that to threaten your good standing (which in my experience is taken to mean 'not in any kind of trouble academically or otherwise').


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Who to ask for REU recommendations?
I'm applying for several astronomy REUs, for which you can have 2 letters of recommendation.  I have three faculty members in mind:
1) Engineering physics professor I've known for many years personally, and is the PI for the lab I've worked in for a year.  I haven't taken his class yet, but he seems to have a good opinion of me.
2) Astronomy professor whose class I took last semester.  He knew me by name early in the semester since I asked good questions during and after class and participated a lot, although I always had to work during his office hours.  I got an AB in his class.
3) Engineering technical presentations instructor who was impressed by my projects.  He told me at the end of the semester that he would be happy to provide a strong recommendation should I ever need one.  However, the programs are for astronomy and he teaches courses on writing/speaking.  And he's a faculty associate rather than the other two professors.
My instinct is to ask the two professors, but I'm not sure how much professor #2 would be able to say about me.  I'm especially uncertain because #3 would write a very strong letter, albeit more lightly weighted.  Any advice?

By faculty associate, you mean number 3 isn't a full professor?  If that's the case I think the answer is easily 1 and 2, especially in light of the less related field.

Correct, he's an "associate faculty associate" whatever that means.  Thanks for your response.


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Academic integrity and plagiarism issue related to an idea. How to handle and communicate?
In 2018, I shared an idea with an assistant professor from another university. I shared this because this is an idea many people are working on and are developing approaches to solve it.
My PhD advisor himself is not the one from this problem area, so I had little help from him. This is a project I prepared and developed, as other sections of my PhD were getting done. The other section of my PhD use the solution developed by this project. I thought this solution could be a separate chapter and a good paper itself.
Being from biology/genetics background I am very familiar with the problem and solution I came up with. I had to learn python programming on my own to write solution to the problem. In the beginning I had difficulty putting maths together and writing it into a programming language (python). Nevertheless, I achieved more than I had expected by learning myself and by getting a lots of help on stack overflow.
I thought that sharing this with the one working on a similar avenue might give me some insights and corrections if there is any. The professor (from another university) received the email and said it was “interesting” and was looking forward to reading the paper, in just 2 lines. I received no further communication in following months and I felt that he/she did not had a time to look into it.
This is the idea I have been trying to develop in my PhD since 2016 and I had something prepared by early 2018. I shared this idea around the mid of 2018. Around the end of 2018 I had some health issues which was going on for about more than a year. The health issue had become chronic and I had to take a break for little more than 2 years. And I just recently (2021) started on the process the last couple of months.
I recently realized that the professor had taken my idea, twisted it a little bit, gave it a new name, and published an article (a single-author paper) in 2019. When I came across the paper, I was really shocked because the idea was so similar to the approach I had developed. He included some sophistication because he is mature than me in terms of academic training. This incident has frustrated and angered me over his non-professionalism. If only he/she had just mentioned me on the paper (saying that there was an unpublished work on progress) or consulted me on it I would have been fine, but he/she just took the idea and changed a little bit to make it look his/her.
The work I had shared with him/her is on Github as public repository. The reason I put it in public mode is because I was less worried about it being stolen. I find people in academia to be honest, and I also wanted other people (especially biologists) to use it and help develop it by receiving feedback, and questions. I did receive interests from other academicians.
These are the links to work I had put on github and question I had asked about it several times on stack:

https://github.com/everestial/phase-Extender
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/186396/solve-the-phase-state-between-two-haplotype-blocks-using-markov-transition-proba
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2716192/how-to-convert-a-detailed-mathematical-statistical-compuational-process-into-ma

I have prepared an email response about this violation (a draft) to that professor (who I had shared my idea with), and had almost sent it. But, I am currently gathering myself to prepare for how to respond to this. I have also cc’d the head of the department and dean of the arts and sciences of that university. However, I expect he/she will be defensive about it and even possibly be worried and angry. So, I want to think with a cool head and develop a more professional approach to handling this problem.
How do I take this forward? Please help.

So are you sure that the professor was not already working on something similar? As you note, many people were working on it...

The professor had a collaborative work published with someone else but that was not similar (the approach) to what I had proposed. Other academic people are also working on the problem but they are looking it from the level of the population. I however started looking into the problem from individual level - assuming that taking the slow approach and solving the states of one individual at a time helps provide better solution.
What surprised me is that he took the similar markov chain approach with a little advanced maths/stats than I had proposed. I am very sure he was inspired by my idea.

I do not know how it will be possible for me to talk about the details and grain of the subject here in stack. But the approach I had developed was not what others were doing. Suddenly after I share the idea, that particular professor took the similar approach just in less than a year. Plus that professor never had a single author paper before.
People working in similar fields can readily tell how a simple hint of an idea can give them an insight about each-others work. I am quite confident he was inspired by my idea. I know the burden of proof is on me.

This incident has frustrated and angered me over his non-professionalism

Don't. Being prepared for the open conflict is not the same as having pent up frustrations, and building yourself up for a big dramatic entrance involving their higher-ups is most definitely not a great idea at all. Speaking of which...
CC'ing their dean is a fairly bad idea as well. The university wants nothing to do with that and will, in general, protect their own staff in cases of lab rivalry (which is the territory you're stepping into). If needed, the correct escalation of this conflict would be to the journal editorial board: they're the ones responsible for the integrity of published articles. A retraction based on plagiarism would hurt that professor's reputation/standing within the university way more than you would achieve making noise next to their dean's ear.
Most importantly: get an impartial evaluation of whether this scooping was so heavily reliant on your idea. At very least, try to get your lab head's advice on this: even if that's not their subject area, you must be able to articulate how your idea was unique and how that perceived offender has reused it, and their extensive experience with research in general might be enough to evaluate your claims.
Finally, if you establish that the offense, indeed, took place - email that person directly first. State that you felt unfairly left out, be direct but not aggressive. Maybe it was something as innocuous as they forgetting the origins of the idea (provided they have not used the code in your github repo) and publishing an erratum to that article giving you proper attribution is possible. If they prove uncooperative at that stage, raise the matter with the journal editorial board, as stated above. The best way to protect your rights is by taking one step at a time - if you go all out from the very start, it may very well fizzle quickly if the other side simply states "oh sorry my bad what could we do to rectify this?". If this happens, it is you who would be perceived as making lot more noise than needed, potentially putting you into the category of people one would rather not work with nor would recommend anyone doing so.

You catch more flies with honey...

I have prepared an email response about this violation (a draft) to that professor (who I had shared my idea with), and had almost sent it.  But, I am currently gathering myself to prepare for how to respond to this.

If you would like to write to this professor about the incident, I recommend you avoid referring to this as a "violation" (or using other accusatory language) in the first instance.  A reasonable opening email on the subject would simply let this professor know that you are upset that you weren't acknowledged in his paper (or even invited to work with him on it), and you feel that you should have been.  It is reasonable to share your feelings on the matter, but you should come at the situation with an open mind and give this professor a chance to explain his own thinking on the matter.  In particular, you could reasonably solicit his opinion on what reliance he had on your work and why he chose not to acknowledge your initial idea in his paper (or offer to work with you on the topic).  If you can write your email in a way that lets him know how you're presently feeling, but acknowledges that he may have a different perspective to you (which you are open to hearing), you might get a sympathetic response.
It is unclear from your description whether there has been an actual academic integrity violation, but it seems doubtful to me based on your description.  While it can be a bit nasty in some cases, working on a general research idea you heard from another person does not necessarily require citation, co-authorship or acknowledgement.  Nevertheless, it would be reasonable for you to communicate to this professor the fact that it is difficult for a PhD student to come up with publishable research ideas and progress those ideas into papers.  Consequently, it sets you back when more experienced researchers take your research ideas and progress and publish them ahead of you.  (And contrarily, if this professor had offered to work with you on the paper instead, it would have been very helpful to your learning and your candidature.)  That is something that I think most professors will be sympathetic to, and it might be a useful learning experience for an assistant professor to improve his dealings with PhD students --- it might also be something that a junior professor isn't already cognisant of.
Of course, if you have reason to believe that this was an actual academic integrity violation then you can certainly escalate things after your initial contact.  That is an option available to you if you feel you have an actionable case.  I recommend starting off with an email that is polite in tone and seeks concilation rather than initial conflict.  You might find that it is a learning experience for a junior professor, and if you frame things in conciliatory terms you might receive some sympathy for your position (and maybe even an offer of collaboration in the future).
Finally, one last thing to note here is that this incident can be a learning experience for you in regard to the ability of experienced researchers to progress your research ideas ahead of you.  While you ought not close yourself off to the research world, you are now aware of the possible adverse consequences that can accrue when you share your ideas too broadly and too early.  As you progress your research career you will get better at judging when you have a sufficient research head-start to safely share your ideas without being "scooped" as a result.

I will briefly play kind of devil's advocate here.
First: was it your only idea? it is a pity, but now you know you can do good things.
Second: if you cannot swim against the flow, go with the flow. Write that professor, and discuss the possibility of extending that publication in a more consolidated work. You know, this way you put your foot on the topic, and you will still work on your "starting idea".
Third: it can really be that you sparked the light in that person's brain ... and then he forgot completely if he heard about the new idea in a conference, in a workshop, in a coffee chat. Yes, you know you triggered his thinking ... but are you sure he still remember you and your email?
Fourth: you can easily ignore the paper from that professor, work on your idea and send it to peer review. Or complete your thesis, whatever applies. Then after you completed your task, you can get in touch with that professor. Not to confront him/her, but to find a productive way out of this situation for you.

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Can someone call themselves Dr. so and so (ABD)?
Someone in my profession is referring to themselves as Dr. so and so (ABD). It is my understanding that they are not a Dr. since they have not completed the dissertation process. Doesn't it seem fraudulent to refer to yourself as Dr. without completing a doctoral program?

Yeah, it's obviously misleading, since "the thesis" is not a trifling matter. But there are (in the U.S., as far as I know) no clear "legal" rules about such references (in contrast to precise laws in Germany, apparently).

Just an FYI (ABD) means All But Dissertation.

Looks like a dupe of four other questions today...

By the way: it may not be fraud in a legal sense, even if the person has not completed a doctoral program. Not all jurisdictions have laws controlling use of the title "Dr."

Have some fun with this.  You can call him Dr ABD forevermore.

Take it up with Dr. Dre

^ Haha and Dr. Pepper! I did look this up and people were discussing ABD but I wanted to be sure that they are inappropriately referring to themselves as "Dr.". It is being used as their outlook signature. I actually thought they were a PhD and was just trying to figure out of what until I came across this informative web site and found out that they are not a PhD.

It absolutely depends on the jurisdiction. In the UK almost all the medical physicians one ever sees DO NOT have any kind of doctorate (they usually have two Bachelor's degrees: in medicine and surgery), yet they are always called by the title Dr.  Surgeons might well have doctorates but are addressed as Mr. Dentists used to be called Mr, like surgeons, but I notice nowadays that many prefer to be called Dr.  There is no law governing the use of the title Dr in the UK.

Yep, can't do that. Either you do or you don't have the "Dr." and if you're ABD, you don't.


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How can I publish a lot of papers quickly and easily, so that I can qualify for a researcher visa?
Can you give me advice, how can I publish easily and quickly in a number of papers?
I'm not really a scientist, I'm a web developer, but I really need to build a publication list. I need to publish at least 10 papers or maybe 20.
I want to build a publication list because if you publish (and you meet some other criteria - which I do meet) you can get an uncapped visa to the USA.  I'm currently being interviewed by top firms in the Silicon Valley, but even they are not able to guarantee the visa. The researcher visa seems to be the most flexible one and the only thing I miss is the publication list. The number 10 is because I consulted with an immigration lawyer and they have a 98% success chance with researcher visas.
I wrote a thesis for my Masters last year in an interesting and not really researched topic related to Web Usability and Search Engines and I think I can put together some articles in this topic. I'm also working on a second Masters in another university to investigate the problem's business/user behaviour aspects. Both are in the top 200 according to the Times ranking and Sanghai ranking, too. I'm planning a PhD, too, hopefully on Stanford, where I work with a professor.
I don't need to publish in Nature or Science, I just have to build a publication list.

If you goal is to really just publish, there are plenty of pay to publish venues and computerized paper generators.

You publish when you have results, which have to be novel, by definition. This is not something you can do easily, if we are talking about real research. A typical PhD, meaning 3-5 years of full work, will give you on average 4-5 papers.

I agree with the above comments; and I think that consequently this question is unanswerable in its present form. Please clarify what it is you're asking: what is the problem you are trying to solve by building a rapid list of publications? Is the quality of those publications really completely irrelevant?

I maybe wrong, but I believe there are countries where a hiring/promotion requirement is the number of publications with little to no regard for quality. Within such a crazy system, this seems like a reasonable question.

@StrongBad This situation also applies to some universities too. Students need to publish papers to get extra marks on their thesis and to apply for PhD positions. This way, the number of papers become more important than the quality of them. Because if a person has one published paper with good quality, may have less chance than a person with ten low quality papers in application process of some universities. It's so pity.

Publications are supposed to be useful for your readers, and only consequently to your own career. Publishing another 20 papers of presumably low quality is unethical in the same way as stock watering, and will strike back inevitably.

-1 The implication that publishing 10 papers even in moderate venues is quite easy shows very little knowledge at what effort is required for publication. Voted to close

If you only want to have a long list in your CV then workshop papers, posters and demos should be enough and do usually have very low entry requirements. Going for national (wherever you are) instead of international venues should help as well to lower the entry level. Additionally, you get the chance to travel to many different places (covered expenses, probably). I've actually seen this in relatively successful people, specially when publishing early to set precedence on a topic (and a favorable bias with it).

@DmitrySavostyanov I'd (very much) enjoy seeing some people being struck back by that, but they seem to be successfully progressing towards their retirement.

I strongly disagree with the votes to close.  The answer may very well be "No, that's not how it works," but the question is firmly on topic.

@JeffE the close votes are not for being off-topic, but because it's not clear what the OP needs these publications for, and some people think it's necessary to know this in order to answer the question.

I voted to close because the question needs clarification.  It's implausible that a web developer one year out from a master's degree really needs ten or twenty academic publications.  Asking how to do it "easily and quickly" comes across as trolling or asking for advice on how to cheat the system.  Is the research for 10+ papers already completed, with the question being how to get them written and published ASAP?  How to split one master's thesis into ten or twenty papers?  How to carry out the research for ten papers quickly?  How to publish research papers without actually doing research?

How to publish research papers without actually doing research? — Yes, precisely.  This is an important question of direct relevance to academics, whose correct answer is a slap to the back of the head.

@JeffE Is it possible to make that slap to the back of the head an answer? ;-)

First of all: I have to apologize for not following up this topic! I was suprised that although a lot of users answered, the question was closed because it was not clear.

I have a topic what is hot and not really researched in detail. I'm working on a second Masters  on another university to investigate the problem's business/user behaviour aspects. Both are in the top 200 according to the Times ranking and Sanghai ranking, too. I'm planning a PHD, too, hopefully on Stanford, where I work with a professor.
I want to build the publication list because if you publish (and you meet some other criterias - which I do meet) you can get an uncapped Visa to the USA.

I'm working for a very prestigous organization in Europe, I don't need it because of the money or something.  just want to get to the best firms. I'm currently being interviewed by top firms in the Silicon Valley, but even they are not able to guarantee the VISA. The researcher Visa seems to be the most flexible one and the only thing I miss is the publication list.
And again: thank you for your comments and answers and please excuse me for not responding earlier!

"You publish when you have results, which have to be novel, by definition. "
Just one more thing: I do have results. I just will never be a scientist who can change the world. Let's be clear: most "research" done nowadays on the universities are about generating publications, not a real research, not about something new. I do respect real researchers who find important new results but most professors I met were just publication generators.

I have cleaned up the question and voted to reopen: I agree with JeffE's comment that the question is clear, just highly misguided, and I think the answers reflect that appropriately.

@jakebeal Actually I think this was unclear and difficult to answer in a useful way without understanding the OP's motivations for publishing. But the OP explained the motivation in a comment, so I've edited it into the post. (I think that now that the motivation is clear, this may get some answers that are more helpful to the OP.)

I find it strange that you believe you can get an uncapped researcher visa by creating a publication list just for the purpose, when people who are actual researchers, and have built up their publication lists with time and effort, as well as being employed as researchers, cannot always do so.

@Alexandros If you have ever done literature research in any topics, you can see that many respected professors are publishing practically the same material in multiple scientific newspapers, just with a minimal modification. Many live on the same topic in their whole life...

Ten or twenty papers in reputable journals is hard, and will take years.  So how do you get started?
Something that may appeal to you as a software developer is creating or contributing to open source software and writing a paper about the software.  An example from my field is the Journal of Statistical Software.  It's very reputable, and the many of the articles are essentially introductory guides to software that the author has created.  I'm sure there must be a web development equivalent.
You could also consider making friends with scientists and contributing to their research. For example, if you can help scrape some data from the internet, or help social scientists run a questionnaire (and then write what you did in the methods section of the resulting paper) then you can get your name on a paper without too much work.  You won't be first author, but that may not matter.  (As a statistician, I'm resigned to permanently being second or third author on papers.)

If you want to publish your Master's results, have a chat to your supervisor about writing a paper. You should not try to publish them without involving your supervisor(s)!
It's certainly feasible that a Master's thesis will produce publishable results, but more than one or two papers? No way, no how. It could easily take well over a decade of research to publish 10 or 20 first-authored papers in a respected conference or a reputable peer-reviewed journal.
In the eyes of a scrupulous employer, writing a large volume of low-quality papers simply to bulk up your CV will reflect very poorly on you. Having one good paper published from the results of a Master's thesis is a good achievement. Having 10 or 20 poor quality papers will just raise suspicious eyebrows.

My supervisor works for the military currently and she removes even the references/mentions about herself... It's difficult.
The number 10 is because I consulted with an immigration lawyer and they have 98% success chance with researcher VISAs. That's why I'd like to publish at least 10 papers.

And to be honest I don't need to publish in Science magazine or similar... I will probably never be a big scientist. As well as may of my current professors, who are not great scientists, too. But they still publish.

+1 for never ever...ever think about publishing or doing anything without consulting your supervisor !!! Don't even think about...

The rules for publishing articles vary by discipline.  Many of the people on here are in scientific fields, and the rules for scientific publication is much more strict.  What you find in many of the IT fields might be considered a 'white paper' than a 'scientific article'.
As you're in web development, I'd recommend looking at web development blogs that accept external contributions and cover the specific sub-topic you want to write about.  (eg, A List Apart got slammed after their first article on JavaScript, because they didn't have the expertise to peer review it properly, so they accepted some less than ideal code).
If your work involves building websites for a specific community, you might look to see if there are journals or newsletters in that community that accept short papers describing new tools & software.  (there's a growing push for software citation)  You might also consider if your topics cover other aspects outside of software development, such as psychology or design, and look for journals in that field.
I'd also consider who it is that has decided that you 'need' to publish; if it's a professor or boss telling you this, then can likely tell you where you should be publishing.  If you're just trying to bulk up for CV because of a percieved need, then try to find CVs of people with a similar background and see where they're publishing.  I've heard of people getting consideration when hiring for running blogs in their field (scientific field, even ... the blog handles outreach to the general public), or even for writing good answers on stack exchange sites.


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How to deal with co-authors' tardiness?
I have a paper due tonight, and I have done my part. I have also volunteered to compile the texts from the other authors and hand it all in (there's four of us). I have all texts except one and frankly don't expect to get it on time (our internal deadline was two days ago.)
How should I handle this situation? Leave the whole section empty, with an explanatory editor's note? Just take it out? Send an explanatory email to my lecturer?

"...to my lecturer" - I am assuming that this is coursework rather than a published article. You should ask your lecturer what to do. The earlier you do this the better chance you have for dispensation. The practicality of any possible solution depends on the exact nature of the work. You have tried to chase it up with the last co-author too, right?

Yes, this is internal work, not a scientific paper. And, yes, chasing up (including thinly veiled death threats) has not been successful so far.

I disagree with the votes to close.

The correct answer is not to wait until two days before the deadline to check in on your co-author's progress. Presumably this is no longer an option.
If the section is not necessary, take it out. If it is necessary, you and your non-tardy co-authors can try to get together and do it together before the final deadline.
You should certainly tell the tardy co-author what you plan to do (I mean the collective "you," as in you and your other co-authors).
If the tardy co-author's contribution doesn't make it in before the final deadline, then his name won't go on it either.
Note that if this was a paper being submitted for publication, e.g. a conference submission, and not for school, you would likely just miss this deadline entirely and have to wait to submit to another conference.

if this was a paper being submitted for publication ... you would likely just miss this deadline entirely True, but I also don't get saddled with (contributing) co-authors that I have no choice in ...

@Ingmar I also don't get saddled with (contributing) co-authors that I have no choice in - not always true

Thank you for your input. He did come through at the 11th hour, by the way, so for the time being this was just an academic exercise, if you will.


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Do people write research papers differently nowadays?
Revised.  I was thinking about the way I write research papers, it involves a lot of revising to even get a "first draft," and subsequently I do a lot of revising also.  Presumably this is fairly common nowadays, as computers have made revising papers easy.
However, in days of yore, before TeX/word processing, these revisions were not so easy, so I wonder:
Has TeX/word processing qualitatively changed the way we write papers?  Specifically: (i) did people do significantly less revising (or make fewer passes) before computers?  (ii) did people have different approaches to writing first drafts?
My understanding is that, in the past, faculty typically had assistants/secretaries to type up hand-written notes, and sometimes special symbols/figures would be drawn in by hand (by faculty? or assistant?).  Then I presume the faculty would go through and edit by hand, and necessary parts would be retyped.  Possibly there would be another pass of this, but I can't imagine that many more revised typings were made.  Did this mean less revising was done?
If so, did this force people to plan out their first drafts at the handwritten stages differently than now?  At least for me, I usually have a basic outline in mind and then just start writing and go back to revise earlier parts while writing later parts (apart from the intro, which is sometimes written last).  However, I guess this style is not so practical when writing by hand?
(Originally, my question was if word processing has changed the quality of papers, but that was deemed too opinion-based.  Hopefully, this is something people can answer semi-objectively from their first or second hand experience.)

This question is difficult to answer, since there were many changes in academic publishing beyond the typesetting. Arguably the most significant is that academia is much larger these days and more easily accessible.

I don't know about research papers, but people definitely write better plays these days.  Have you seen Shakespeare's spelling?

I think the effect of word processing, if there is any, is going to be minuscule in comparison with the other factors affecting the 'quality' of the published papers. (As a side note, some academics have such a poor knowledge of how to use these softwares that they would almost be better off using a typewriter).

Before word processors the chance that a given author had access to a stenographer and typist to help preparing the manuscript was much higher than it is today. One of the effects of the accessible, computerized document preparation has been putting a class of skilled, office workers whose job was to help with document preparation out of business.

Math typesetting means that anyone can more easily make use of notation, or more easily abuse it.

@ff524: I'm not sure if it's a "good" subjective question either, but it's something I thought people with a better sense of the history of their field than me might have an insightful opinion on.  Wow, that sentence turned out horribly.  Maybe I should've planned it out first before writing it.  Or revised it.

Unfortunately, this is not generally a site for soliciting opinions.

I think the question is answerable after revisions, at least anecdotally, assuming we have sufficiently many people here who remember writing papers 30+ years ago versus nowadays.

I may be in the minority, but I think this question is perfectly reasonable, and moderately interesting. Indeed, manuscript revision involves enormous overhead even with modern tools. With the kind of tools available earlier, it is hard to imagine how people managed. Did this mean manuscripts were less polished, or was the extra work put on the shoulders of typing staff? I'd be interested to see replies from senior people with a historical perspective.

@FaheemMitha Most of the above comments are from the original version of my question, which probably was too subjective.

@Kimball I see. Thank you for the clarification.

Making an answer out of some amplified comments, which I deleted...:
Prior to slightly-modern typewriters such as IBM's "Selectric" and some proto-computerized typewriters, mostly too expensive for individuals to buy, staff typists did not "add value" much (except for faculty who could not type), because they could not literally type special characters, which then had to be drawn in by hand by the author, by reference to the original hand-written thing. The typist would leave approximately the right amount of space to draw the characters. As you can imagine, making a boo-boo drawing characters onto an already-typed page was both all-too-easy and very annoying. In principle, one could make photocopies, but (let's say early 1970s) photocopies were much more expensive than now, and were typically much, much worse quality than a directly-typed page. (One could also type onto "mimeo masters", and draw characters on them, but this was incredibly messy, smelly, crazy. Mimeos were the closest thing to "private publication", but one could only make 30 or so copies before the "master" wore out...) The "white-out" of the time was not very good, either: it would often fall off the page.
For submission for publication, the hand-drawn Greek letters were typically to be underlined or circled in red, Fraktur with green, stuff like that.
Yes, the revise-and-retype cycle was burdensome. In effect, errors could easily be introduced by typists, and new/different errors the next time, after the author proof-read.
Since there was usually only a handful of typists per department, even the people with some seniority would have to wait a week or two or three for re-typing, adding another delay. But most people were reconciled to these delays, especially since learning to (genuinely!) "type" was not so typical in those days! That is, in high school in the U.S., people studying "business/secretarial" stuff, not planning to go to college, would learn touch-typing and shorthand. People "going to college" often did not learn to type at all, and possibly did not possess typewriters at all. For such people, there was no real choice but to give hand-written manuscripts to typists, even if the whole process was slow and crazy-making.
With the advent of the Selectric and such, and especially proto-word-processors that could treat non-Roman characters and do corrections and remember things, typists did add value, even for those who could type, because they'd have those machines, which were too expensive for typical individuals to afford. Serge Lang was an exception: prior to 1977 he had his own Selectric, and was an excellent typist (unsurprisingly). The hitch in using those things was "changing the balls", because not all characters could be available at one time. So this slowed things down quite a lot. The usual trick was to leave spaces for exotic characters, and go back and fill in by ball-swapping... which lent itself to the same annoying boo-boos as with hand-drawing characters into blank spots on a page. And not all characters were available... And any diagrams would still have to be drawn by hand.
With the advent of widely-available desktop computing either provided by math depts, or, eventually, cheap enough for individuals, again staff typists no longer added much value except for those who couldn't really typ, and the possibility of revising-without-completely-retyping changed everything. I note that pre-word-processing, seniority determined access to and priority with the limited staff typists, and wait-times for typing or retyping could be weeks. And as recently as 2005 I observed a senior colleague giving dictation to one of the few staff who could take shorthand, to type up a letter, and the person giving the dictation would make the now-almost-forgotten editorial marks on the typed copy, send it back for retyping. There was/is "status" in giving dictation or having typing done by others?
Formatting was not really possible either, except at publishers' houses. Sure, one could hand-draw, but they'd re-typeset everything, so any visual effects an author came up with were a waste of time. Perhaps the ugliness of mathematics manuscripts in those days (as in early SLN's) reinforced the quasi-Platonic mythology about the mathematics itself, since it sure didn't look so beautiful when clumsily drawn in by hand on the page!
The several years of the availability of desktop computers but without anything resembling TeX (mid 1980s) allowed much time to be wasted typing things up in file formats that were obsolete by the next year, etc. That was irritating. The desktop computers of the time had tiny memory, were literally slow, were unstable, and the daisy-wheel printers took a couple minutes to print a single page. And jammed. And...
Some faculty seemed not to mind demanding endless revisions from typing staff, but to me this was awkward, and just doing it myself was easier, since I had learned how to type. A significant number of the grad students at Princeton did type their own theses in the 1970s, but many did not. But the quality expected was really very low, so that lack of what nowadays would be minimum-allowed-quality was ignored.
All that effort expended to create even a crude document did distract from the content, yes. Cutting-and-pasting and moving things around and search-and-replace were really infeasible, not at all worth the trouble unless there'd be a major disaster otherwise. Just getting a reasonably correct thing onto the page was already a considerable accomplishment. Whatever had been more-or-less correctly typed so far was "frozen".
Thinking about it, it seems to me that there was much less self-critiquing done in those times, because it was so difficult to create an easily-readable document, typed or handwritten. That is, it was simply harder to subject one's own writing to careful scrutiny, because the typical copy would be (perhaps semi-legibly) handwritten, many cross-outs, pieces of paper taped on, white-out, ... In particular, the "notes" were much less an incarnation of mathematical ideas, I think, since they were inevitably a crappy version thereof. In contrast, nowadays it is possible to have "notes" that other human beings could read, etc. :)
Even before today's set-up, some people (including me) did try to skip the hand-writing step to the extent possible, exactly because hastily handwritten text was almost automatically not-really-readable by anyone else, and because typing prose could be much faster than hand-writing it, even with old typewriters.
A large difference seems to me to be in computations. "Long ago", of course all computations were first handwritten, and errors and revisions were a horrible mess. In contrast, nowadays one can typeset the first attempt to make it legible if not correct, and iteratively correct it, rather than repeatedly starting over, etc. This possibility, of iterative computation via typesetting, was absent in the dim past.
Also, getting other peoples' opinions was of course crazily slower: time-lag for typing-up, and then actual physical mail, further impeded by "campus mail" at both ends... in contrast to emailing a PDF. In fact, international mail ("air mail") often failed entirely... :)
So... "yes". :)

Thanks, Paul, for an informative and insightful answer.  I guess I should be extra impressed with the old masterpieces like Zariski-Samuel then.

Remark: The following answer was for the original version of the question (deemed too subjective) regarding the impact of word processing on quality of papers.
This question is really impossible to answer since it is impossible to compare new and old articles due to a lack of a fixed standard over time. Now in this case I think of now and then being a span of, say fifty years. The shorter the time span the more difficult any differences will be to identify.
First, the way articles are formulated has changed and the standards are in constant but slow change. Articles started out as letters (late 18th/early 19th century; usually directed to a person in a learned society) being publicly read to the society. These were very personal. Later, the more formalized writing started taking shape (late 19th/early 20th century). Second, the pressure to publish differs, which means articles are pushed through as quick as possible. We have gone from a situation where a paper every now and then has been replaced by n publications/yr rates to be acceptable (varies between disciplines). This can reduce the amount of time to be spent on each paper, on the other hand one can argue that one becomes more experienced. Third, the research community is growing larger and larger and although this is not directly affecting quality it means competition for resources and a necessity to write more and quicker. This will also feed back into the second point. As I see it it is not clear that we are going in any particular direction and part of the reason is that our reference as to what is good is also shifting.
So even if one considers the introduction of computers, it is difficult to assess changes because the reference with which to compare does not exist. In the same way it will be difficult to compare scientific research of the 18th or 19th century with research done today and state that modern research is somehow better by comparison. For a very good discussion on this topic I suggest reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press.

Perhaps it's hopeless, but that doesn't mean I can't still hope for an interesting answer, does it?  Still, even if people have no impressions of "word processing" (which I guess started around the '80s with TeX released in '78) making a difference in quality of writing, maybe that's an indication that there isn't much noticeable difference, and I can write my papers any way I please (which I do, of course).

@paulgarrett I think your comments could be turned into an answer.

I saw somewhere some information on a mathematical paper by C. L. Dodgson (i.e. Lewis Carroll).  He would hand write it, send it to a printer to have it typeset, then make hand-written corrections, send it back to the printer, and so on, several iterations.


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Ok to read my script in a 3-min presentation for a conference?
I have a 3-min presentation for a conference. I am an early researcher who has never done any presentation, so this will be my first.
Presentation is my weakness, and it is a challenge for me to give a smooth talk. I am feeling nervous.
Q: How common is to write out a script for a 3-min talk and just follow the papers?

Three minutes?! What kind of conference is that? That's barely more than an elevator pitch...

@Raphael I think that's a way to encourage students and early researcher. The conference has longer talks as well.

If you literally read a script, word-for-word, and do not have a teleprompter, you are going to be looking down too much and not looking at your audience enough.
Even if you write a script, it would be better to have notes that help you keep the main points in order, and practice until you can give the complete talk in the required time just glancing occasionally at your notes.

Agreed. Reading is a lot worse than reciting something you learned by heart.

Reading from a script is not a common practice, but should be completely OK for an early-career (and even more experienced) researcher if it helps them, not only to memorise what they wants to say, but more important, to give a good presentation to the audience.
This technique could be very useful for people who have little or no presentation experience, have some fear of public speaking, or are not so articulate in the presentation language (e.g., not their native language).
The "speaker's notes" feature in many presentation tools (e.g., Powerpoint) is there to be used by the speaker (if needed). For each slides, you can put either the key points to remember or the whole script. For the latter, try to make a structured (e.g., bullet points) 2:45-minute script, and highlight the key points in bold/colors -- could be easier for you to memorize and follow, then practice the script and improve it as needed.
But in order to give a smooth presentation experience for the audience, you still need to take care of the other aspects of your presentation skills (e.g., good slides, body language, eye contact, effective pointing at figures/tables on the slides while reading from notes, etc).

+1 I always struggle with giving good presentations, this is very helpful advice.

In my experience, reading from a script is common practice for people who struggle significantly with speaking English.

Reading does not help give good presentations, reading is per definition a lousy presentation.

@user7019377: not by definition, and not universally.  Read presentations are often bad, it’s true, mostly because the speaker’s attention is in danger of being too focused on the text and not on engaging with the audience.  But I’ve also seen a few read presentations where the speaker was careful to avoid that and other pitfalls, and gave an excellent presentation.  It’s certainly possible — and for someone who finds the script helps with nerves, it may well be beneficial.

@user7019377 Reading is rarely good, but it may be better than the alternative.

@user7019377 And that's why most anchorman or entertainers do auch a bad job? Because they read off teleprompters?

@Dirk those with teleprompters read many different statements all the time. They can't have intimate knowledge of all those subjects and yet, wording is important. (And I suspect they still need training before it looks natural to read from it.) The case here is totally different because a researcher knows his own research intimately. A teleprompter is not available nor is he trained with it. A few keywords would be fine as a safety net I suppose, but reading from a sheet.

Practice, practice, practice! To directly answer your question: no, it is neither common nor advisable to simply read from a page at a conference. If it were, we'd all just hand out slips of paper or email paragraphs of text and not bother with real people talking. Giving a three minute presentation is not easy. Even for people who make it look easy, it's not -- that comes after lots of practice. I've been giving talks for a long time, and still I always write out beforehand what I'll say and practice it -- the words, the timing, etc. If you're new to this, and it's a 3-minute talk, you should be rehearsing this repeatedly, by yourself and with others (e.g. group-mates).


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Why hold conferences in a resort town?
I have noticed many academic conferences are held in small resort town. Why? Why not held in something like a 4-star hotel in the city center?
Attending a conference is a paid job, why should we travel to somewhere remote?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

I cannot talk about general customs, but for whatever it’s worth, a major conference in my field is held in a ski resort, off-season. This has two advantages:

This is what the resort does to survive during the warm seasons. Therefore I presume that it may be a relatively cheap option.
Except for hiking, there is nothing to do there. With conferences held in cities, it often happens that attendants take some time off to do some sightseeing or similar. Here, getting to the next (touristically boring) city requires you to rent a car and takes one hour. Therefore, the conference gets more attention.

On a similar idea, back when I was working we needed to organize a face-to-face meeting involving engineers from four different locations. We asked the corporate travel agent to pick the location, and they recommended Reno, Nevada, despite none of the participants working there. There were cheap midweek airfares there from all the home locations. There were cheap midweek room-rates, and the hotel threw in a conference room big enough for one person per room we booked.

Hmm - I initially thought holding it in a resort town would be a junket, but it's almost the exact opposite of one!

@AndrewGrimm: Well, it can still be a junket, and I presume some such conferences really are – it just doesn’t have to be.

A resort town is used to handling bus-loads of tourists, so it has all the facilities you need. Also they are glad to get the business during the off-season or during the week, so you get a good price.

You can tell practical from boondoggle. A conference at a resort town for practical reasons will be at a time when hotel occupancy is normally down - midweek in Reno, summer at a ski resort. A boondoggle will be at the most popular, fashionable time to visit the location.

This is an example of a social norm, which is a kind of large-scale Nash equilibrium. Namely, there is no special justification for why academics benefit from the perk of being able to travel to attractive tourist destinations for their professional meetings, other than the fact that this is the norm that has developed historically, and once the norm has developed, it is stable against disruption, since no particular player in the game (in the sense of game theory) that is academia has an incentive to disrupt it. The only people who might object are funding agencies who may prefer if conferences were organized in drab, cheap locations, but if ever any such agency were to propose to cut off funding for conferences held in interesting places, the people being funded would cry out that this would hurt the competitiveness of their conferences relative to other similar conferences being organized by people funded by other more permissive funding agencies, and the reform would be scrapped. This is precisely the general dynamic at work that helps maintain many Nash equilibria/social norms.
That being said, the tradition of having conferences in nice places also benefits scientists, and therefore science, by allowing them to do their work in a pleasant environment that is conducive to stimulating creativity. Of course, people in other industries would also enjoy these sorts of conditions, but they can't all arrange them for themselves, so perhaps the right question to ask is not why academia can do it, but why other industries can't.
Another thought is that holding conferences in attractive tourist destinations also provides an economic stimulus of sorts to the travel and tourism industries of many countries, so may not be a bad thing, and by providing employment to multiple economic sectors it attracts political support that again makes it difficult to eliminate this particular "market inefficiency" (such that it is).

See http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/84184/32436

Out of season holiday resorts are "cheap accommodation" - conferences can get a very good deal by almost guaranteeing to provide a block of hotel reservations etc of known size (so the hotel can call in the appropriate number of temporary staff for a few days without any "waste") at dates which are fixed long in advance. Universities don't usually have any accommodation available during term times, and even out of term, conference goers don't necessarily want to live in undergraduate-style accommodation for a few days.

@alephzero Conferences, at least in my field, usually don't happen during term time because faculty and students usually can't travel during term time anyway.

A large scale Nash equilibrium is called a Wardrop equilibrium

@MachineLearning that's interesting, I did not know about those, but from what I'm reading about this it seems that Wardrop Equilibria are only a particular kind of large-scale Nash equilibria associated with traffic and transportation. Social norms are another kind of large-scale Nash equilibrium that is completely unrelated to Wardrop equilibria.

" why academia can do it, but why other industries can't" -- They can and do, from my experience in a reasonably tourist-attractive town. Convention centers all over the country fight for the business. Dentists, cardiologists, real estate agents, SEO... It's given favorable tax treatment when it has a business excuse.

That differs a lot by discipline: in mine (sociology) the annual conferences of the different associations/societies/sections/etc. are typically hosted each year by a different university, and the conference takes place not in a resort or hotel but on campus. Only the really large conferences have to get creative in order deal with the large number of participants.

Almost the opposite in my environment. The really large conferences are necessarily in major cities because of the logistics. Most "resort" conferences I have attended were fairly small (about 40 persons,  say).

There are many possible reasons, depending on the field and the conference.

Many resort towns are no more remote than most cities for international participants. Some major cities have better connections, but hosting conferences in them tends to be expensive.
Hosting the conference at a university is usually the cheapest option, but suitable facilities are not always available.
In fields with many conferences, the conferences have to compete for participants. An interesting location can attract more participants to the conference.
While small conferences are generally run by volunteers, larger conferences may have to use paid help. Such services are often cheaper in resorts than in cities.
A conference is supposed to bring people together. This works better if the participants cannot escape to other activities.
Sometimes conference participants vote on the location of future conferences. As the alternatives are not necessarily known in advance, it can take very little to sway the opinion to support one location or another.
Volunteer-run conferences often have a shortage of volunteers. If there is only one reasonable offer to host the conference, the volunteers effectively decide where the conference will be held.

In my field (and the field I was in during my Ph.D.) important conferences are never held in small resort towns. So at the very least this is specific to some fields rather than others.
I think that generally this is a bad idea, since it discourages attendance by graduate students and interested members of the general public - and that the touristic/"vacationish" attractiveness of the experience to the people more central to the conference doesn't justify this. Also, if pricing is somehow an issue, you would think these conferences would be held on some university grounds, which I'm guessing should be cheaper.

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As a young academic in a third-world/developing nation (albeit not one of the bottom tier nations), I can address another issue not yet covered by the answers thus far, that of profit.
Conferences in my field of study (STEM) and in my region of the world (Asia) tend to not just be in visit-able places (not necessarily resort towns though, depending on the country), and the recommended hotels also tend to be in tourist-y sections of the town. This serves several purposes:-

Availability of services/amenities suitable for travelling individuals (laundry services, cleaner restaurants, public transport and/or Uber etc.)
Greater access to tourist-friendly resources, such as a larger proportion of English-speaking locals outside the hotel/conference center/resort itself.
"Additional" services unique to the destination (or of high desirability), such as local exotic cuisine, massage parlours, or even accessibility to the local red-light districts (anecdotal based on a conference I've been involved in before).

All of the above matter because one of the reasons (arguably a primary reason) for holding conferences is to generate an income, and that income depends primarily on participants being willing to come and attend (especially participants from outside Asia from more prestigious institutes). A destination which is boring, while suitable (based on the other answers) for well-established conferences is actually a disadvantage for less well-established ones.

Academic conferences, or at least the ones I've been to, and know of, are not run as profit making endeavours.

@JackAidley I'm sure your experience is correct for those you've been to and know off, but my answer holds for those I've witnessed the organizing of. Incidentally (and not unrelated) these same conferences are the sort I'd not bother to search for references from in the same way I would the well-established (and way beyond my budget) conferences.

I would say the main reason lies in the asymmetry between what is cheap for the presenting organization (say, the International Society for the Study of X) and what is cheap for its attendees. Take Hawaii, where my field has a conference (5000+ attendees generally) this year. My field frequently has conferences in Hawaii because Hawaii's conference center is made available FREE to the International Society for the Study of X. This is a totally separate economics from the fact that it is terribly expensive for all of us to get there from our respective Universities. But, this is generally how it works. Touristic places will allow the presenting organization to pay nothing or next to nothing. What the touristic place gets in return is an economic boost of an additional influx of a few thousand tourists who will spend on food, drink, lodging etc. on their Universities' expense accounts. (And contrary to some answers above, if a conference has thousands of attendees it would not at all be cheaper to hold at at a University than a convention center.)

I think they like to feel they are on vacation. Some people told me how excited they were to go to Malaga and drink the specific sweet wine, eat some local sea food, go to the beach and swim, etc. Of course the pretext was they are attending a scientific conference.


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Can I use purchased graphics in an academic paper/poster?
I've purchased a bundle of infographic element sets (templates for charts, graphs etc) which are licensed for personal and commercial use.
Would it be generally acceptable to use a template I've purchased to display data in an academic paper/poster, and would I need to reference the original source of the template?
Many thanks.

"licensed for personal and commercial use" sounds like they are explicitly meant to be republished once you have acquired a license, but more information about these licenses might be necessary. Also, it could be relevant who has purchased the license - you, or your institution? In the former case, it is not necessarily guaranteed that you are allowed to represent your institution with these graphics, or for your institution to publish the paper/poster files on their website.

@O.R.Mapper we can consider this as an answer...

@O.R.Mapper I purchased the graphics myself, and yes they're intended for republishing. Since I'm only an undergraduate I think it's highly unlikely that the university would publish the paper/poster, thank you for the help!

There's two aspects to that: Licensing and academic ethics.
Regarding licensing, you write that you have a license that covers personal and commercial use. Probably commercial use will include academic (i.e., professional) use, but make sure that your license permits you to reuse these elements in a publication. For a poster I don't think it will be a problem. For a research paper, you typically need to transfer copyright to the publisher, which you can't for these elements. So that will need special consideration.
Regarding academic ethics, the way to answer this question is to think about the scientific contribution that is being made with these elements. Does the creator of these elements contribute in any way to the scientific content of your publication? If yes, you should give an attribution, if not, an attribution is not required.
It's not clear to me how much science did go into constructing these elements, but think of the following extreme case: When writing a paper, you obviously use graphic elements, which are the font of the letters, to convey your message. But typically, you don't attribute the creator of the font, because there's no contribution to the scientific content. It's really just the medium you are using to communicate your results, and you don't need to attribute that.


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What should I do now when this conference first sends me an "accept", then a "reject"?
A little while back I had sent one of my works to an ACM conference -just a National level conference. I knew my work was not one of the best they were going to receive, but given the quality of the papers published in the conference in the previous years, I was almost sure of an "Accept", and sure enough, an "Accept" did arrive around a week ago. But reviewer practically tore my work to pieces, saying that the claim is not novel, the data sets are biased, etc. And I do agree with him on most of the points.
Since the reviewer had given a detailed review, I had been working all week long to improve the quality of the paper and address all the points mentioned by him.
But to my great surprise, today I receive a mail from the PC chairs stating -

we had inadvertently sent an ACCEPT for your paper. After discussion with reviewers we have decided to not accept this paper.

This is, to say the least, unethical unprofessional. And my entire week of hard work in improving the paper just went down the drain I guess.
My questions here-

Should I put any endeavor in contacting the PC Chairs and ask them to explain this strange stand? Should I explain my stand that the work has been drastically changed and improved from what it was when submitted?
Does such a behavior make them accountable for any legal action from my side? And, is it worth for me to take such an action?

UPDATE:
Thank you all for your comments and answers. Posting this here just to make the story complete. My guide insisted that we should write to the PC chair, requesting an opportunity to resubmit since some of the previous review comments were not really justified and too harsh on us, and anyways our paper stands improved from what it was before.
So we did re-submit. And our improved paper was accepted as well! Rather having an unsatisfactory publication, I have a better paper at hand now!
So happy ending after all :)

Unsure why your admittedly unsatisfactory paper (given your agreement with the critical reviewer and subsequent changes you made) why you were "almost sure of an 'Accept.'" This is probably not a good mentality for any conference.

Grossly unprofessional, certainly, especially with the one-week delay.  But unethical?

@JeffE I think "grossly unprofessional" is going really far without knowing more of the background. It is unfortunate, yes, but mistakes happen to and by us all.

RE: This is, to say the least, unethical. And my entire week of hard work in improving the paper just went down the drain I guess. I disagree with this paragraph. I don't see how it's "unethical", particularly since you acknowledge the scathing review was justified. As for "wasting your time," if you've answered the criticisms by reworking the paper, at least you've gotten your findings in better order, which surely could be useful if you wanted to present at another – or next year's – conference.

@PeterJansson I find "unethical" far more objectionable here. Waiting a week before rescinding acceptance is a pretty serious mistake, however inadvertent.

@ChrisGregg I was 'almost sure', as I have said, because of the  quality of the papers published in the conference in the previous years. But I understand and appreciate your point...

I would suggest going for a beverage of your choice with a friend and venting. Then file the acceptance and rejection emails away so you can one-up your colleagues in horror stories.

Do you really want to have a paper accepted because you threaten to press charges or something else? Remember, this is science we are talking about... I would never try to force a journal/conference to accept my paper. If they don't want my work I send it elsewhere.

@Bitwise No... that's not my intention. It is just that I am disappointed at their behavior...

If you didn't book your travel yet or so, not really anything is lost.

@gerrit Coincidentally, I and my co-author colleague were discussing travel and stay options when the mail arrived !!

Rescinding an acceptance after a week could easily be unethical. What if the author had, on the basis of the acceptance, bought a non-refundable plane ticket to the conference location? What if (s)he had informed a department chair of the good news and now looks like a liar?  I'd say the conference should at least be prepared to make restitution for whatever actual damage the erroneous acceptance caused. Of course, in the present case, everything turned out well in the end, but I wouldn't want to rely on that in general.

Should I put any endeavor in contacting the PC Chairs and ask them to explain this strange stand? Should I explain my stand that the work has been drastically changed and improved from what it was when submitted?

I think an email to the PC would be appropriate.  Don't expect the answer to change, however, and it may very well have been an administrative oversight.  Even as a mistake, it is a relatively minor one that you don't have much control over.

Does such a behavior make them accountable for any legal action from my side? And, is it worth for me to take such an action?

No. Their decisions aren't bound by any laws (that I know of) that could force them to honor their original email.  If you make a big deal of it, you're likely to make a bad name for yourself, regardless of the mistake being on their end.
In the end, you've now got a better paper that probably shouldn't have been published anyway.  Your changes are now in place, and you admit to having improved it.  Submit it to another conference, and move on.

you've now got a better paper that probably shouldn't have been published anyway That's very nicely put, n I agree to it :)

+1 for "you're likely to make a bad name for yourself." In Academia, as in many other walks of life, your reputation is one of your most important assets. Don't create a reputation for yourself as difficult to deal with over a very minor setback like this. Fix the paper and move on to resubmit the improved version elsewhere.

@eykanal: I think that's great advice. Someone could take that even one step further, and sincerely thank them for the reviewer's feedback – which will likely prove invaluable in the long run. Moreover, because that feedback was extensive, it probably took significant time and effort to generate.

You can always try to send an email to the PC explaining that you used the comment of the reviewer to greatly improve the paper, and that you hope that the paper could be reconsidered in this improved form. I don't think your chances of acceptance are big, but you can always try.
In regard to the legal action, I doubt that you have anything based on which you can sue them. In addition, what do you hope to gain.

Without knowing what happened at the other end it is early to place judgement such as "unethical" on this circumstance. It is of course very unfortunate and also clearly something that all editors do not want should happen. Clearly the accept was prematurely sent away; that was the mistake. I would interpret the "discussion with reviewers" as the editor(s) trying to see if the paper could pass despite the reviews but such an action could seemingly not be supported.
Now the course of events have happened. You can certainly contact the editors to get more feedback, I am sure they would help you with more (scientific) information if they can. Under most circumstances (do not know how this applies to your manuscript), I would recommend you to take the comments you were given and work up your manuscript (which you have also done). The manuscript should now be better than before and it might be suitable to publish somewhere else. This is also something you can ask in your letter to the editors unless you and your immediate surroundings do not already have a clear picture of where it might fit for possible publication.
Regarding the legal bits, journals have no obligation to publish anything and can even reject a paper without telling why. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to do this since it would reflect very badly on the journal and the publisher but the decision lies with the editor(s) and it is final. As an editor, one must think of the reputation of ones journal (because a well run journal attracts good papers) which usually means trying to be as fair and open as possible.


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Add acknowledgments and self citations to paper only after the blind review?
I am writing a conference paper of the first time, and the conference I am targeting requires anonymized submissions for the peer review. But at the same time, we (as in, my research group) are required to acknowledge the grants and support of our funding agency in all our publications. Plus, I also need to refer to a previous work of our group.
Is it appropriate for me to leave out the acknowledgements section and the reference to my work while sending the paper for review, but add these details later on if and when the paper gets accepted?
Is appropriate to add details (the acknowledgments section, for instance) which were not a part of the paper when it went for review?
I could think of this as the only way to satisfy all concerns. Are there better suggestions from more experienced people in academia?

Regarding your latest edit, did you you mean Is it fair enough to add details (the acknowledgments section, for instance) which were not a part of the paper after it went for review?

@scaaahu I meant exactly what I wrote. ... which were not a part of the paper when...

You're required to acknowledge grants and grant agencies in your publications. Right now, all you have is a submission. If and when the submission becomes a publication will be the time to add the grant information in, especially if the venue has a strong anonymization policy for submissions.

If the OP submits the paper to a jounal, when the submission becomes a publication would not be an issue. Would it be a problem when the OP submits the paper to a conference?

I don't understand. the paper has to be accepted either way. That's when it becomes a publication.

If it's a journal, somebody(editor, copy editor,etc) can add the Acknowdgement back in. Who is going to take care of that for a conference?

hmm. In my area, the authors do all of this. In a conference, the paper is accepted and then you're expected to produce a "final version" which is when you insert the information.

I think this is the answer I was after(at least for me).

I would preface this answer with the sentence: Yes.  It's not only appropriate, but also necessary.

I would go about it slightly differently. I would write the manuscript as you wish it to appear and then redact any identifying information. The redaction process should given a sense of what has been redacted without revealing the identity of the authors. See for example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/41995/efficient-ways-to-anonymize-a-document.
In summary I would not leave the acknowledgement section out, but would rather do:

Author XXX was funded by XXX and Author XXX was funded by XXX. We thank XXX for help with the fancy piece of hardware.

To your best ability, you should remove all identifying information for the blind review.  This includes removing author names and affiliations, avoiding phrases such as "in our previous work," and removing acknowledgements.  During the camera-ready portion of the review process (should your paper be accepted), you will add in that information.  You'll almost certainly have to make some changes to the paper, so if you are concerned about leaving space for an acknowledgements section, don't be, as you can't really predict the exact text right now.
As for referring to your previous work, make it as anonymous as you can.  In general, you should refer to your other work as if it was any other work--i.e., don't link it directly to yourself at all.  Although it may sound odd for an author to talk about himself/herself as if he or she was a different person, it's acceptable and expected in academia.

p.s. Good luck with your first submission!

I think the OP's main concern is how to add the personal information back?

@scaaahu is that it?  I think the question needs to be edited if that's the case; I read it to mean "should I take it out?" because of "Is it fair enough that I leave out the acknowledgements section..."

Please read the question title and the question body, we are required to acknowledge the grants and support of our funding agency in all our publications. and add these details later on if the paper gets accepted

@scaaahu Again, I think it needs clarification -- "we are required" could mean "we" as in, (1) researchers in general, or (2) my research group, or (3) my university.  I don't see the issue being about how to add the information, but if it is okay to leave it out for the blind review.

Chris and @scaaahu - I am not sure if I follow your comments, but I would say what both of you are saying is right. Yes my question was- is it fair to leave out acknowledgements etc. for the blind review, and is it fair to add things (i.e., the acknowledgments etc.)to the paper which were not there when it was reviewed. I have edited my question as well, and I hope it will be clearer to future readers. Pardon my naivety but this is the first time I am experiencing something called a blind review !!

@pnp Got it.  I amended your question slightly to use the term "is it appropriate" instead of "is it fair," to make it a bit more clear.


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Direction to university level instruction
I am a senior in computer science and I have tutored courses in Math and  CSC/CIS for the past two years and I enjoy it and studying research (aka reading industry evaluations and research essays that interest me).
The problem lies with my own thoughts on jumping directly into a masters, I do not believe my GPA is good enough to get past the requirements(3.25+) nor do I know if I wish to direct myself into research.My thought is to earn a graduate degree while working my job.

How important is an interest in research to working at a college?
Are "experts in the field" generally hired for education?
What are the best ways to get myself into academia without doctorate interests?

Hi, and welcome to Academia.SE!  I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding your question.  Can you please try to edit to clarify?

I edited my post, sorry for the clarification issue and I hope this clears it up

@Reed - I personally found the original question clearer.  Congratulations on the job offer.  You could ask about tuition benefits and flex time (to attend class) before you give them your answer.  For teaching at the college level, the higher the degree the better -- a Master's will bring better job security and pay than a Bachelors, and a PhD will be even better still.  But I agree with mhwombat that CS provides more fluidity between industry and academia than many careers do.  Last comment: You won't know how your GPA is viewed without applying!  You can apply without having decided yet.

How important is an interest in research to working at a college?

This depends on the college/university. Some are more teaching-focussed; some are more research-focussed.

Are "experts in the field" generally hired for education?

For computer science lecturers, industry experience is valued. So if you have industry experience, you might be hired for some lecturing positions even without an MSc or PhD. This depends on the country, of course.

What are the best ways to get myself into academia without doctorate interests?

At the moment, you don't have industry experience or an advanced degree, so I think it would be difficult to get hired as a lecturer, even at a community college. So here are a couple of paths you might consider:

Work for a few years in industry to get some experience, then apply for a lecturing position.
Enter a master's program directly after you have your bachelor's degree. You will likely be assigned some light teaching duties as part of your funding.
Large companies often accommodate their employees to continue their eduction. This typically includes paying your tuition, and allowing some schedule flexibility. So you might pursue a master's part-time, while working and gaining industry experience. A lot of master's programmes in computer science-y fields (e.g., data mining) are specifically designed for part-time students.


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Is it counter-productive to admit obvious weaknesses when applying for a position?
A bit of context before hand. I am a second year PhD student. In the course of my studies, I have slowly shifted from aerospace engineering towards computer science. Now, my research involves developing software applicable for aerospace systems. I am fairly competent in programming and related subjects, even though I sometimes find my lack of background in those subjects to be penalysing.
I found a summer program in which I am highly interested in. However, it was mainly designed for CS students. In my application, I want to make a case that even though I am not an ideal candidate for this program (which in my opinion is quite obvious, even though I have proven capabilities in some of the subjects required) I still think I should get accepted. One of the my main arguments is that everything I have learned so far on programming and related subjects was through self-study (mainly online tutorials), which shows I am highly motivated and can work independently.
So it got me thinking. In general, is it a good idea to admit his own weaknesses when applying for a specific position?

Well, the thing is that about every body who is applying to the same position might also be motivated and able to work independently. Instead of seeing your initial experience in aerospace engineering as a handicap, why don't you use it as an advantage? I'm sure you can highlight specific skills from this domain and use them positively in your application.

Yes that is a good point and a good advice, thanks. But that does not answer my question.

One issue with a summer program is that the pace may be faster than a regular term class, making it difficult to keep up if you don't have the same background as the other students.

You really didn't have any programming courses in your aerospace engineering program? Not even Matlab?

@FedericoPoloni Yes I did have a course in C++. I just learned everything else (MATLAB, Fortran) on the fly. I have since used Fortran extensively. However, my skills at C++ (which is what the program asks for) remains limited. I consider myself an intermediate coder, I know enough about it to know that I am no wizard.

Then this sentence is not accurate: everything I have learned so far on programming and related subjects was through self-study (mainly online tutorials. Do not unnecessarily make yourself look weaker than you truly are!

@FedericoPoloni That's one problem I have with programming. I never know if my appreciation of my own skills are over or under estimated. When you feel like you know your stuff, there's generally a very humbling experience right around the corner!

Describe yourself accurately enough to let the program organizers decide if you will benefit from the course. In that sense, yes, you should admit your weaknesses, but it's indeed counterproductive to actually phrase things that way - you are the applicant; it's not your job to decide what is a significant weakness.
You obviously think you are ready for the course and would benefit - let the organizers know what your reasons are, and why you are enthusiastic. If you are applying on the strength of being a good software developer in general, including a link to some public code you've written might help.
(And if you are feeling self-conscious about not having an undergraduate CS degree, go and get something like Cormen et al.'s "Introduction to Algorithms" and go through it cover to cover. You will hit most of the things you would be expected to know cold.)

thanks for the tip! I'll definitely check out Cormen's book

I disagree on "yes, you should admit your weaknesses." What is a weakness? One man's trash is another man's treasure. Let the data speak for itself and don't embellish your qualifications; speak about what you can bring to the program.

You can admit your "weaknesses" in ways that indicate how they are really strengths. So you don't have a CS degree and haven't taken all of the coursework, you do have experience programming AND you have experience within the aerospace engineering field, the latter is something that many students with a CS degree won't have.

So it got me thinking. In general, is it a good idea to admit his own weaknesses when applying for a specific position?

No.
Be well prepared to address the "weakness" if it is brought up.
Bringing it up invites focusing on it, in a time where you would probably prefer that they focus on your strengths.

I want to make a case that even though I am not an ideal candidate for this program (which in my opinion is quite obvious

This is not for you to decide, nor do you have all the data in your hand to even make that assessment: 1) you don't know the program; 2) you don't know your competition; 3) you don't know the department's needs.
Make your best case about what you can bring to the program and let your transcript speak for itself.