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My result is accepted in a journal as an errata, but the editors want to change the authorship

We submitted a result claiming that a paper by an associate editor (of the same journal) contained a proposition that is proven mistaken by us, and furthermore, the proof of a theorem is incomplete.
The editor wrote to me: "the associate editor and others reviewed your submission. They conclude that your result is correct, but is not important enough for a correction publication. The result will be published as an errata, and the associate editor will write this errata." The editor ask us if we agree to this approach.
We were busy consulting with other researchers about this unusual letter.
After four days the editor formally rejected my paper and send me an errata written by the original authors, citing my preprint. Their errata does not formally include new results. The errata contain the associate editor's name as the formal author.

Academically or ethically, what did they do wrong? What can I do here?
To me, it is like a big unfairness. Two very similar papers, one accepted, and one rejected.

A fair thing could have been to invite the original authors to co-author your submission. The editor could have facilitated this. I think it sounds unfair :(

@Coder Good to hear about it. You add to my confidence in persisting in this!

"Their errata does not formally include new results" and "Two very similar papers, one accepted, and one rejected": Does your submission contain any new results, apart from reporting the mistake?

@Snijderfrey Our result is disproving their old results.

For most journals, an errata is not a 'new paper'. However, in my experience the proper thing would have been a 'Comment on ' by you, with the original authors having a chance to have a 'Response to Comment on '. The response could well be 'yes, they are correct'.

I do not think your new title describes the situation as you have described it in the body and in comments. "My result is accepted in a journal" - your submission was not accepted. "the editors want to change the authorship" - the editors have not changed the authorship of anything, rather, it seems that the original authors have received your feedback that they made a mistake and then published their own errata, written by them (not by you).

This is weird.  An unpublished, un-peer-reviewed "result" certainly does not constitute an errata.  Authors can only write about their own results and articles that have been published at the time of writing.  A new result that changes a paper's interpretation should simply go through standard publication pathways.

@ScottSeidman Integrity is hard. Very hard. Ethical behavior is hard. We have entire institutions that try to uphold these and are mocked incessantly about it. Corruption, evil, and scandal exist everywhere. Academia is no different. Nobody likes when applying the rules hurts them. Most people will protest the application of the rules against them, even if only internally. Only some of them will cross a line, and fewer still cross them to the point of any severity. But it isn't weird at all to see someone with influence using it to mitigate consequences.

@DavidS, I don't understand even a little bit what this has to do with integrity, but it mat be because I don't know what it means for a third party to publ8sh an errata.

@ScottSeidman If the OP is being treated in any way differently because the paper being corrected is that of an associate editor, that has to do with integrity. It is the institutions integrity to treat all submissions with the same level of scrutiny and fairness. I'm skeptical that this journal invites all of the authors to write their own errata based off of 3rd party corrections that are accepted as correct but rejected as warranting a formal submission. This whole thing has to do with integrity.

@DavidS I have absolutely no reason to suspect this poster is being treated differently than anyone else because the author is an associate editor.

Short answer/summary:
I take it that you felt as if you were submitting more or less an "original work", even though it's very much based on correcting an error in a published paper.
I think that the editor instead treated it as they would treat a submitted complaint about the quality of something they've published and treated this more as an investigation of that paper than a manuscript submission. There may have been a miscommunication of expectations somewhere along the line.
I think you likely spent way too much time on this and that's why you're upset. I also think it was mishandled, but there's probably not anything for you to pursue here.

More detailed answer:

We submitted a result claiming that a paper by an associate editor (of the same journal) contain a mistaken result.

It probably would have been better to contact the authors of the mistaken result with your results first, rather than submitting as a paper.

The editor wrote to me: "the associate editor and others reviewed your submission. They conclude that your result is correct, but is not important enough for a correction publication. Instead, the associate editor will write an errata." The editor ask us if we agree to this approach.

This is pretty much the editor's call: whether the correction can stand on its own, just like whether any original submission is notable enough for that journal. It's not clear to me whether you expected the associate editor/original author to see the paper, but they did. It's possible there was some confidentiality breach here, probably in an ideal case the editor should have clarified with you that they planned to share your manuscript with the original authors before doing so.
On the other hand, it seems like they've treated your submission not as if it is original work but as if it is a report to the editor about a paper they've already published. In that case, it would be entirely reasonable to share the criticism directly with the authors immediately. It seems like that's the route the editor has taken.

We were busy consulting with other researchers about this unusual letter.

That seems sensible to me.

After four days the editor formally rejected my paper and send me an errata written by the original authors, citing my preprint. Their errata does not formally include new results. The errata contain the associate editor's name as the formal author.

I think this was the wrong action by the editor, since they gave the impression that they were waiting for your feedback. Maybe they thought 4 days was enough time and assumed no response was coming, but that seems a bit quick to me.
However, an "errata" is not a publication in the same sense as your submission. Your paper was rejected, but I would not consider this as an article of theirs that is "accepted". Rather, they had to admit, in public, that their paper was wrong, and correct it. This is the same thing they would have (or should have) done if you had simply sent them an email at the beginning and said "hey, we found this problem". They've given you credit for detecting the error by citing your preprint.
Given how many "wrong" results are out there with their authors stubbornly defending them, I'm having trouble finding a big problem with authors who are eager to rapidly correct the record as quickly as possible once aware of their mistake.
If your paper has value on its own, besides just correcting this error, you would be free to submit it somewhere else. If not, an erratum seems reasonable to me. Usually these are issued by the original authors; it's good that they credited you for detecting the issue by citing your preprint.

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You cannot force a journal to publish your paper if it doesn't want to. Perhaps they were wrong to reject your paper, but it's their decision and there's no point in dwelling on it. There are many journals out there, so you can submit your paper to another journal (which hopefully will make a more objective decision), and if they think your contribution is useful then they will publish it.
The errata paper submitted by the other authors cites your preprint, so it seems like they are acknowledging that your paper has priority in discovering the mistake in the previously published result. That is good and proper, and also means that when you submit your paper to a new journal, you will not have to worry about a priority dispute rearing its ugly head.
The only possible unfairness I can see here is that the new errata paper was accepted by the same journal where the author of the paper is an associate editor. Perhaps the paper does not deserve to be published, especially since they are merely repeating (with appropriate citation) your demonstration of the earlier mistake. But injustices like this happen all the time - if I had a penny for every time I saw someone else's mediocre paper get recognition it doesn't deserve, I'd be a rich man. And in any case, publishing an errata paper is no great honor, and is unlikely to be very helpful to the careers of its authors. So again, while the episode you're describing does sound a bit frustrating, I'd recommend not worrying about it too much and focusing on your own work and publications.

They ask me if I agree with their approach. I was busy consulting with other researchers, and after only four business days, they suddenly send me a new errata!

I might plan to have the journal to disclose all communications between the editor and assoc editor regarding my result.

@HighGPA you are coming across as very unreasonable. Let it go, is my advice. No one owes you anything and you will only antagonize people and hurt your reputation if you make these sorts of demands.

@HighGPA: "I might plan to have the journal to disclose all communications between the editor and assoc editor regarding my result." You seem to assume that you can somehow enforce this disclosure. That seems very unlikely.

@JochenGlueck On the grounds of conflict of interests?

@HighGPA: I believe you might be missing the point. If you write to the journal "I want to see all the communication about my submission on the grounds of a conflict of interest" and they simply reply "No, we will not disclose the communication" - then what?

@JochenGlueck then you file a GDPR request :) (this is a semi-joke, but I have seen this happening in similar situations (not in a science journal))

First off, based on your responses to all the comments, I think you have a very mistaken view about the prestige of being an author of this errata. This is not something to be proud of or to put your CV. The original authors had to admit there was a mistake in their work. Rightfully, they should be the ones to acknowledge this.
It sounds to me like you wanted to publish a commentary type article correcting the prior work, but the editor (likely rightfully so) decided that this did not constitute significant new knowledge or worthy of even publishing as a commentary, but rather was sufficient to elicit a brief errata/correction from the original author.
So if your true intentions for your work was to correct the scientific record, you have succeeded! Congratulations! Frankly, I think this is the best outcome in that the original authors have publicly acknowledged their oversight.
However, it sounds like you were hoping to turn this into a publication of your own. This did not work out as it was not deemed significant enough. Now with respect to being an author on this errata, I again urge you to read my first comments, and those of others in responses. This is not a CV line item or something to be proud of.
Stop wasting time stewing over this and move on. It's a borderline or dubious thing to stake your claim on anyway. A slight correction doesn't always warrant a new publication when a simple errata/correction/admission can be issued. Focus on your original work.

Why not being proud of proving a published, peer-reviewed paper wrong and even correcting it? This is worth credit and putting it into one's CV!

@usr1234567 Because according to the editors you didn't prove a paper wrong, you found an error in a paper which did not impact the main scientific outcomes and didn't even warrant a published comment. To be a successful academic you need to develop a good sense of what is worthwhile and what is not. You can waste your whole life going down meaningless rabbit holes, dying on hills nobody cares about. The value of a website such as this is the ability to provide advice to young academics to steer them from nonproductive or even professionally harmful career paths.

Let me put my Editor's hat on...and for clarity I'm not affiliated with the journal you're dealing with.
First, an Errata is generally sent by the authors of the original paper to point out an error in their paper.  What you sent was not an Errata but rather a Comment. Had I been the editor handling your Comment, I would have asked the paper's author to respond and assess whether or not your comment and the response are significant enough to warrant publication.  Usually, I send both out for an external adjudication.  And if the discussion is warranted, publish both your comment and the rebuttal and possibly your response to the rebuttal.
Sounds to me like the Editor didn't think the error you pointed out was that significant.  Don't take it personally, it's just business.

Not sure that last sentence conveys your intent properly; you may want to take a second look at it.

I guess that this question relates to the same paper as your earlier question (An editor thinks a correction should be posted on the author's website rather than published. Is he sticking to the academic ethics?).
The situation here seems to be:

Someone has published a paper that contains an error.
You have written and submitted a paper about that error.
The editor has decided that your paper is not sufficiently interesting/significant/substantial to merit publication.
The editor has, however, brought the error to the attention of the original author.
That original author has acted to 'correct' the record by publishing an erratum.

Nothing here seems inherently wrong. Of course, you can argue about whether the editor's assessment of your paper as 'not suitable for publication' is correct or not, but this is a matter of editorial judgement.
If your paper is a valuable contribution in its own right, then the work is not wasted: you can revise the text in the light of the published erratum and then submit it elsewhere. On the other hand, if an erratum that "does not formally include new results" makes your paper obsolete - well, unfortunately that probably confirms the editor's view, and the original error did not merit the attention you gave it. This is what the professor in your earlier question was also trying to tell you.
Suppose someone writes a paper that includes the sentence "All grass eats cows." This is a surprising claim, with major implications for our understanding of biology. I could take that statement at face value, and invest a lot of time and effort into disproving it: I would need several fields with different varieties of grass; a truck-load of cattle; and a control herd that lived on concrete. After a few years' careful study I could then write a paper reporting that no cows had disappeared, and questioning the veracity of the original statement. Of course, this would be ridiculous. While the scientific record should be correct, not all errors merit explicit correction.

So for the same result with my name is rejected, yet the result with associate editor's name must be accepted? –

@HighGPA you will not get very far in academia with this attitude. Focus on writing good work and publishing it, and you will have a good career. Spend your time and energy ranting about perceived injustices, and you will get nowhere. If your paper was rejected, try to understand the reasons why this happened and how you can move on - possibly the work is still publishable if you approach this with a positive attitude, for example by making appropriate improvements to the paper and submitting to another journal.

@HighGPA as for the other author's paper getting accepted, that should be of zero interest to you. Any time you spend complaining about it is time you could be doing actually useful work that will get you ahead in your career goals.

@HighGPA I think the point you're (perhaps) missing is that an erratum is not a new publication: it is an update to an existing one. Whereas a new article (i.e. your submission) has to be inherently substantial and interesting to the readership, an erratum does not -- the substance lies in the original submission.

@DanRomik The lesson I learnt here is that, in academia, correctness is not very important and contribution is judged subjectively. To more further I have to make friends, amass power, and reject competitors' papers.

Are you implying that the author of an erratum has to be the original ones?

@HighGPA I agree with “contribution is judged subjectively”. As for the other things you mentioned, you seem to be reaching conclusions that are completely unrelated to anything anyone here has been saying. But that is your right I guess.

@DanRomik It's very easy. If you agree that contribution is judged subjectively and you also agree that we are chasing positive outcomes, then, one conclusion is that the more friends we make the more likely that we are going to get positive reports that are subjective.

Your description lacks details, so this answer also draws on generalizations based on what you described.
The editor chose to publish an erratum. Errata are minor, almost by definition. Here's how Wikipedia describes them:

An erratum or corrigendum (pl.: errata, corrigenda) (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author's error.

And here's an actual published erratum

Maslovsky I, Gefel D. What Causes Clubbing? Am J Med. 2005; 118:1350-1351.
The second author’s last name is Gefel.

It should be clear that if someone were to write to the journal pointing out that the second author's last name was misspelled, they do not need to show a formal proof (with websites, LinkedIn profiles, and whatnot) that the second author's last name is Gefel. They'd be wasting their time. The misspelling is obvious to the authors, and it can be trivially fixed.
A more sophisticated example is this question on the Physics SE. The author saw the question, acknowledged it's an error, and included the correction in a PDF file on their website. Why is it just a PDF file on their website instead of a republished book with the errors fixed? Because again, the error is minor and do not materially impact the author's message. If this book were actually a journal article, Trever Thompson (who wrote the question) should never expect to publish an erratum with calculations to prove that there's a mistake.
In this case the fact that the editor chose to publish an erratum suggests that they don't view the correction as a big deal either (although they acknowledge the error you found is indeed an error). They further do not consider their results to be compromised in any way. That's why they are publishing an erratum.
Notably, the erratum workflow is different from the standard journal article workflow. In particular, peer review is unnecessary for errata. Errata aren't actual papers, publishing an erratum is not an achievement, and you'd be crazy to list an erratum on your CV.
I don't know the contents of your preprint and the editor's erratum, but if the erratum really says something like:

In our paper, equation 2, M should be m. The authors thank High GPA et al [cite] for bringing this to our attention.

Then they're not doing anything inappropriate. If anything, you'd be the one coming across as inappropriate for making a mountain out of a molehill.

Many thanks. I updated some details. We disproved their proposition, and our result was “accepted”, but as errata. The thing is, the editors want the associate editor to write the errata.

@HighGPA Do they cite you as origin of the erratum? I understood they do cite your preprint.

@HighGPA That's what an erratum usually is: a correction written by the original authors. It's not its own paper. They're acknowledging you as the source of identifying the error by citing you. It's not meaningful to say your "result" was "accepted" as if this implies your manuscript must be.

It looks to me like you have different expectations than the course of action they took in response to your paper. I have two ideas for you:

Contact them about it and explain your situation. There are people on both sides, and there can be emotions involved, like yours right now. The best you can do is to communicate your problems with each other and come to a conclusion on how to resolve them together.
If you are just unhappy that your paper won't get proper recognition, publish it on your own site and ask them to include it in the errata or find other ways to better point to your paper.

I understand that situations like this can bring up many emotions, but taking any unreasonable actions while facing small problems like this will only bring you harm in the future.

May I ask, for example, what is an unreasonable action?

Sorry, I was referring to your comments in different answers and I should be more specific. What I had in mind were mainly comments about disclosing all communications between editors and trying to disputing the current result (using errata instead of your paper).

@HighGPA be careful with words like demand. Only use it if you have the power to enforce that demand. What are your options if you demand that all communications between editors be disclosed and the journal says "no"?  Demanding without the power to back it up just sounds unprofessional, weird, unreasonable, etc. This is true inside and outside academia.


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Will the publications on Open Acess journal (like Hindawi) harm the PhD application to economics or finance departments in USA (or MPhil in UK)?
How will the departments view the PhD, PostDoc, and AP applicants with SJR tier Q3(4) publications and/or publications on open access journals?
Personally I believe that at the specialization level of Postdoc and AP, committees are looking after publications on specific good journals rather the name of the publisher. But at PhD level I am not sure what will happen. I doubt that the super busy faculties in top departments will bother reading the applicant's publications in detail just because s/he paid $100 application fee.
Is a publication on a Springer journal (but with SJR tier Q3) looks better than an open access journal with tier Q2?
We often do not have time to go through an article in detail. In academia, will you pay more attention to articles published by prestigious publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Sage, academic societies, Etc.), provided that all the other credentials (affiliations, ranks, names) of a paper are the same?

Assuming you are talking about mathematics (given your profile) then the answers will differ depending on whether you are talking about PhD applications, PostDoc applications, or Assistant Professor applications. It will also depend slightly on which country you are applying to, since some countries operate Research Assessment exercises where "having papers in esteemed journals" matters

@YemonChoi economics or finance departments in USA

When faced with a similar situation, it was hard for me to evaluate the work: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/7908/929

@StrongBad Some pay-to-publish venues are more selective than others. For example Hindawi's acceptance rate is 7%, much lower than the "big five".

I find it hard to imagine anyone thinking better of a paper just because people have to pay to read it.

source: Stack Exchange

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Conflict of interests and the assignment of referee for a very narrow field
Consider a very small scientific field with three major contributors and a total of 15 authors, all of them had coauthored with everyone else.
In this field how could the editor choose referee for new papers, if he must adhere to the conflict of interests policies?
I know that some editors handle coauthor/students' paper or assign the paper to the previous coauthor of the author. Is that a common practice for a small field?

The small field was naturally extended from some important results back to 50s -70s, some of those researchers are still alive, but inactive. The importance cannot be doubt by the larger field, also because of those important results historically.

Can you give a hint about the general field? If it is within mathematics or physics, for example, it might be easier than if these 15 invented something entirely new and mostly unrelated to existing science.

It's hard to believe a field can be completely cut off from the rest of the world and have only 15 active contributors. Even the pariah field of cold fusion has some 100-200 researchers. Granted because cold fusion is such a small field, even 100-200 active researchers might not suffice to find reviewers who have never worked with each other. It's also a polarized field where much of the rest of the world believes the 100-200 people still working on it are wasting their time.
That said, one can still find reviewers. I know one editor which implemented a 1-1 system: each paper would be reviewed by one person in the field and one person outside the field. As a concrete example, a theoretical paper on cold fusion can likely be critiqued by someone who knows Quantum Field Theory (which is much broader and largely independent of cold fusion).
Of course there's a bias here that you'll likely get one "accept" review and one "reject" review. The editor is aware of that however, and will take it into account.

Even if the field is small, one can usually find referees in cognate fields with no conflicts: presumably papers by these groups have a bibliography that extends beyond these groups, else the interest is overly narrow and the paper can be rejected as such.
(Aside: the handling editor is not necessarily a “he”.)

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Pre-print service like arXiv but with private option, so I can correct my mistakes without publicly advertising my mistakes?
As a student, I make mistakes all the time, and stealing my idea will not face heavy retaliation. I don't mind if someone comes up with concurrent works, but I do mind if my key idea is leaked. Many graduate students in my field therefore only use pre-print services if their papers are either publicly presented or conditionally accepted.
I am looking for a website that can do most of what ArXiv does, with an additional private option or limited visibility, for example an option to make the paper unindexed by search engines. This way, my paper cannot be seen for at least a few months. By doing so, I can at least claim that I am one of the first few researchers who got the idea right. And most importantly, I can privately correct my mistakes, if any. Publishing mistakes is embarrassing and sometimes harms one's career. Many mistakes will be revealed during the peer-review processes and I have a chance to correct them before publicizing.
Please kindly think twice before giving ethically and "politically correct" comments like no one will scoop me, everyone will cite me, and the scoopers will be punished. At least in my field, scooping and idea-stealing is commonly observable, and big-names don't care about publicizing pre-prints because they have resources to punish the scoopers. I do understand that keeping my work private might harm the community as the information becomes less transparent. However, it could also be possible that my un-reviewed flawed works misguide the community, and a paper reviewed will benefit the society more.
I personally wasted six months because of someone else's mistake in a published work.

I heard that in molecular biology there is a widely-used service to upload your research data, like protein structure and sequencing, to get a timestamp. The uploaded materials can be set to be private for a period, and fully disclosed later. A lot of people do use this function. This is not exactly what I am looking for but shares some similar ideas.
If I remember correctly, there is an interesting paper studying the scooping patterns with the aid of this database.

Solutions found! Zenodo and some other university-run pre-print services do have an embargo function.
Moreover, SSRN is a widely used repository, that, unlike arxiv, only displays the newest version to the general public, although still keeps a tag on the first submitted date!

Hmmm. Isn't the whole purpose of ArXiv to make the papers public?  Errors are a natural consequence of being human, actually.

@Buffy I guess people also use it as a partial evidence to defend against plagiarism accusations?

I remember several questions here discussing a very similar topic. Here’s one: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/13216/40589

This is not a good idea, but an easy way to do it is to print your manuscript out, put it in an envelope, and have it postmarked.  No website is needed.

Putting things on the internet is a terrible way to keep them private.

If you write your paper and put it in a drawer for thirty years, and somebody else publishes first, they will get the credit, even if you have proof that your paper was in a drawer the whole time. (It will invalidate any patents on the idea that somebody else files, but that probably doesn't help your academic career.) Just get your paper ready and submit it somewhere.

@PeterShorp Well, I want it to be circulated within a small circle rather than the whole public, at the beginning.

If you know who you want to circulate it to, just email it to them (possibly marked "draft—do not distribute"). If you don't, then I don't see how you expect a website could provide you with this information.

Wait, wait, wait....  You want to claim credit for a result before you are sure whether it's correct??  Sorry, but that's not how this works.

If something like this would work, then you could easily put something on the secret arxiv, circulate it to the friends, then submit it, juts to dicover then that someone else posted the same idea months before you on the same secret arxiv....

A private repository on GitHub would datestamp, cryptographically hash, and track changes to, your work.

@PeterShor, putting it in a drawer will no longer invalidate later patents in the US, at least. The laws have changed here.

If all you are worrying about is later claims you plagiarized and want a dated record of early work, have a notary sign and date your paper. They have legal standing. Your bank will probably do this for free and a lawyer will for a small-ish fee.

@jez Unless I am missing something, one can rewrite git history and the timestamps associated with commits ultimately come from the committers computer.  Does github record when commits were pushed?

Publishing the SHA-256 of your preprint on Twitter should be enough to establish you already have it written by that time. If you want to make it fancy, publish it on some public blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Just don't lose the exact same file you hashed.

The whole point of ArXiv is to increase transparency instead of hiding mistakes and pretending to have some superhuman ability which prevents you from going down dead ends.

You can put your paper on Zenodo and choose an embargo period during submission. You can even reserve a DOI without the paper being yet publicly visible. I think this gets you more or less what you want.

@Miguel you are the true legend!

@Miguel Can you modify the submitted version during the embargo?

I'm not sure. You can probably upload a new version during the embargo, and maybe even delete the entry before the embargo is up (i.e., before public release of the record). You can check on their website. It's a free service.

@NickS I think your example is perfectly fine as they developed the idea independently

> SSRN is a widely used repository, that ... only displays the newest version to the general public but this is the opposite of what you wanted to achieve, as it conceals any evidence that the previous versions did already contain the novel ideas for which you are seeking some proof of priority. Earlier timestamps are only useful if the corresponding iteration of the document remains accessible.
(It's also the first time I've heard of "SSRN", so a link would be nice)

@LouKnee link added! I might be wrong about the description, though.

By mistakes do you mean spelling / grammatical or more serious errors with the methodology?

@JosephDoggie Maybe both?

Basically, if I understand you correctly, you want proof of priority without publishing.
Well, this problem is well known from middle-ages and renaissance where people wanted to be able to prove they have the earliest solution without revealing what it is (so that if someone finds it, they can prove they were there first).
They often used anagrams, today you probably would use some private/public key combination for this (I am not a crypto expert, you would have to read up on this).
However, to be honest, this will look weird. The current position in science is: if you have done it, publish it and expose it to criticism, and you may gain priority. If you wish to monetize it, you can create a patent that is public, but protects your rights (in theory), or keep it a trade secret and make money out of it.
As for a website that supports timestamps for unrevealed papers, I am not aware of any, but of course if there were, you need to make sure you trust the maintainers. Furthermore, if you had one and if somebody publishes a completed paper somewhere else before your paper goes live, this will not help you. The fact that you had worked provably, say, for multiple years on the topic will at best prevent plagiarism charges when you end up publishing. But this, if it occurs, could be proven otherwise, e.g. lab diary, emails, etc. It will not make you the "first to publish". Don't forget, there are quite a few cases where people who had publications were superseded by later, but more visible publications. So, even open publications may be vulnerable to "post-scooping".
So, your question needs to be what one would need such a service for? I therefore doubt that people would set up such a system with obviously limited utility. Of course, this is not a statement that there isn't.
I understand that this does not precisely answer your question, but I hope I was able to put things in context and why your question may not have a satisfactory answer.

I don't necessarily need "first to publish". Just a valid defense against concurrent workers' potential plagiarism claims, if any. The privacy option is just an option. If I feel good about the paper, I'll make it indexed even if it is not yet accepted.

@HighGPA How would you be accused of plagiarism? You publish too slow or what is the scenario you have in mind?

Yes I could be very slow on finalizing a paper because I sometimes care about unimportant details too much. And, the journal I chosen could be very slow in handling my paper. Does submission record serves as a creditable timestamp?

@HighGPA Yes, in reputable journals, submission record is a very important timestamp. So, if your journal is 2 years in review (say), then you have two timestamps, one is submission, one is publication. Submission shows that you had the idea, and, in fact, the review process should help you iron out any defects.

I am not sure if this info is helpful: at least in molecular biology or biochem, there is a widely-used service to upload your research data like protein structure and sequencing to get a timestamp. The uploaded materials can be set to be private for a period, and fully disclosed later. A lot of people do use this function.

By the way, I badly want someone else to criticize my paper. However, a criticism in private is preferred at early stages. Some of my coauthors may be very slow so I might need a timestamp.

From the technical angle, you could use a cryptographic one-way hash function such as SHA1. Copy your text into a site like this one: https://hash.online-convert.com/sha1-generator  It will pop out a string which looks like "70b557f903e46b1434dd23143f0f3e21e1c42238", which you could then make pubilc. Later, make public the text of your paper, and the hash is proof that you had it earlier. But I agree with @CaptainEmacs's advice that, at least in my field, this would look strange.

@academic imho you should write your solution as an answer. I think it's a decent solution to OP's problem: yes it's weird and slightly paranoid, but if everything goes well it's never going to be used so nobody cares. If it turns out that OP actually needs to prove the timestamp on their work, it will be incredibly useful and therefore the method will be justified a posteriori.

If you do go down the hashing route, you must be absolutely certain that the file you are preserving does not change in the intermediate period. The whole point of a hashing algorithm is that it is sensitive to small changes. So if you add some whitespace somewhere, the hash will be completely different, and you'll lose your proof.

@preferred_anon you could possibly hash not the whole paper/text, but some paragraph/sentence of it which contains the gist of the idea. But I still doubt that's a lot useful.

@academic: do NOT use a website to hash, it could be hacked or even malicious; there are hundreds of programs for every possible computer since about 1970 to hash locally. But use SHA-256 or higher (standard since 2002); SHA-1 is now broken for collision (see https://shattered.io) and although that doesn't actually break this application less intelligent or informed people may not reliably make the distinction. Even better get your hash timestamped by a TSA or bitcoin, in case the published version(s) are lost or become hard to prove dating.

Worth noting that traditional cloud backup services typically have a revision log + the ability to upload documents. Given a trusted - in the sense of likelihood to be hacked or otherwise compromised - cloud backup service (e.g. Google Drive) would probably fit the requirements (allow switching from private to public with the original timestamp), but I agree completely with this answer that that would not be an advisable approach.

@preferred_anon I think the idea is that you hash version 1 of your paper.  Perhaps you notice some inconsequential errors (e.g., misspelled words).  You can produce version 2 but you must maintain version 1.  The hash establishes the timeline of version 1.  People can decide for themselves if the difference between versions 1 and 2 are consequential or not.  If you make a consequential change then the hash no longer supports the timeline of version 2.

@emory Of course - but in real life, people are often not so careful. It is after all easy to absent-mindedly modify a file without remembering it. Now imagine you leave the file sitting in your project folder for 10 years, as somebody might, and the probability of unwittingly making a change is not so low.

@preferred_anon If one (1) think one has an idea worthy of a Fields medal; (2) is not ready to publicly release it; and (3) can not figure out how to use git to version ones documents; then one has little credibility.

@emory Sorry, that's a non-sequitur. I know quite a few brilliant mathematicians that do not know how to use version control. H***, I know brilliant mathematicians which do discrete algebra and will not touch continuous spaces with a ten-foot pole.

@CaptainEmacs git does not have much to do with it.  if one wants a Fields medal but does not want to publish then one has little credibility.  if further one does not want to figure out git, then one has even less.

@emory I agree with the "not prepared to get it to published level"; version control has nothing to do with it. However, OP asks how to protect their work. Not sure it is so easy, and the service they look for does probably not exist in this form.

Focusing just on the mistakes angle. Don't worry about having mistakes in arxiv papers, its a preprint service for a reason people know they are not full reviewed papers so my contain mistakes (not that fully reviewed papers don't also contain mistakes).
You can always update the version in the arxiv when you realize a mistake. I usually update my papers after peer review which fixes issues picked up by the referee, but I have also updated papers on arxiv before peer review finished because I made some basic mistakes that made me look bad. But you know what I'm still in academia and i doubt anyone even remembers or has the time to go look at what changed between arxiv versions.

But that mistake stays there for ever for the committees to view anytime!

So? you'll be lucky if a search committee reads the published version of your papers let alone goes back and reads each and every version you have on arxiv.

This post should be downvoted because it does not answer the question. Still, I agree with it: the whole point of arXiv, as I understand it, is to distribute new research quickly, with everyone understanding that it is more likely to contain mistakes.

I haven't downvoted, but if you publish on arXiv, you should be reasonably sure that your paper does not contain glaring mistakes. It might be suboptimally presented and may contain minor glitches, but it is for everybody to see and is effectively public. OP is right to not want a paper in an immature state to be on arXiv. I would say, arXiv is for papers of which at least the authors believe to be essentially ready.

@BrianDrake Precisely. The point is to distribute new research quickly in a citable manner, which is exactly the reason why it is impossible to unpublish things on arxiv. I'd think thrice about better alternatives before citing a source that could suddenly vanish without any notice.

@Rob I do not have too much experience for hiring committees. But some PhD applicants do try to spot the technical and ethical mistakes of their competitors, and then send a mass email to possible PhD admission committee members. I personal know someone who successfully prevent his competitor to be admitted, by doing this.

@HighGPA "ethical mistakes"? What do you mean by that? I wonder about this person that prevented that competitor to be admitted - were they admitted themselves? How did they submit the compromising material? Anonymously?

If an academic committee hires somebody based on a mass email "exposing" another candidate's mistake, I'd considered that a bullet dodged. I don't think any school "prestige" can offset a work environment where you have to snitch on your peers as if this is 1984.

@CaptainEmacs By "ethical mistake" I mean the author seemed to faked a diagram with synthetic data; or the author did not cite a paper he supposed to cite; he did not credit a paper he supposed to credit. Although the author claimed that he never read that paper, the accuser still try to convince the committee that the all reasonable researcher in the branch do read the paper. In US some PhD program take one student out of 100. In the specific case, dozens of applicants united together to send out a lot of emails; some anonymously, some not. I am not sure if one of them is finally admitted

@juod I truly agree with you but those peers are hard to be spotted. Many of those emails are anonymous. Some email senders are smart enough to publicly expose the mistakes in the paper and then motivate other applicants to send out emails.

@HighGPA If the author faked a diagram, they deserve to be kicked out of the competition. This is not a mistake, this is fabrication, and a capital crime in science, in my opinion even worse than plagiarism, because it wastes everybody's time. As for failing to cover all the literature - what you describe is an accuser that clearly has some close interaction with the hiring committee. If they really spend time listening to denunciation stories by anonymous/applicant about omitted citations, that sounds like a pretty - excuse the word - sick environment; better not to be selected.

@CaptainEmacs The problem is, it is hard to prove that they actually faked a diagram, as Arvix does not require the full disclosure of data and code. Nothing is that black and white in real world, so I used the word "seemed". The accuser gives evidences, and the author gives counter evidences. There is no court rule on this. Regarding failing citations: this is not a minor issue; by claiming that others' contributions are yours is technically plagiarism, unless you could prove that you independently developed that idea. Just two cents.

@CaptainEmacs Sorry that people seems to interpret my "ethical mistake" as "a mistake that is not unethical". What I meant is a mistake that raises questions regarding the authors' ethics. Truly sorry for my English skills.

@HighGPA Basically, the only issue is plagiarism. And, yes, anyone can claim that. But even in parallel publications, there are lab books, mails etc. to disprove that. I am not aware of a service for safe deposit of notes to protect you against plagiarism. Claiming that someone fabricated data require much stronger evidence. Again, when that happens (which is rare enough), strong investigation needs to happen. Really, I would not think too much about that. If a department is rife with real or alleged data fabrication, you are better served staying away from it.

The website you are looking for probably doesn't exist and if it does it's moot because no one will check it. Then if another paper comes along with the same ideas, people will read that paper, not yours. Moreover, even if you have proof, i bet few people will actually care that you came first. (And, pardon my harshness, deservedly so, because you purposedly decided not to share your work with the community.)
The best way to avoid having mistakes on the Arxiv is:

Send the draft to some expert in the field that you trust asking them for an opinion. If they agree, they will certainly spot the most embarassing mistakes. If they decline, they will likely do so in a polite way and they will be happy that you chose to contact them since that means that you value their opinion. As a bonus, they could also serve as an unbiased witness to the fact that you had the idea independently, in case you get scooped at the last minute.

Use the "replacement" feature on Arxiv. You can always correct mistakes on your preprints. Sure, the older versions are still visible, but Arxiv by default shows the latest one and who is going to check an older version on purpose?

Also, the premise of your question seems a bit off to me: you would like to keep a result unpublished because you don't know that it's correct, but you'd still like to retain priority rights if someone publishes before you. But if you don't know that your ideas are correct, it seems to me that you have no results to claim priority for.
If you are worried that point 1. will actually increase your chances to get scooped, well, that's true. But academia thrives on the fact that ideas can be freely exchanged among scholars. The risk of being scooped is a price that I happily pay for a more open community. I have to re-apologize for my harshness, but if you disagree with this mindset, you should reconsider working in academia. (So I hope you agree.)

I haven't downvoted, but Point 1 is questionable. People have enough to do with regular reviews. Unless it is someone OP has a very good relationship with, it is unlikely to find a proper external reviewer outside of a formal publication. They can as well submit to a journal. As for your last paragraph putting OP in their place, it is really uncalled for. I happen to have the luck to work in a friendly community, the OP may have not. Even so, I sometimes did encounter some really nasty apples. If OP is in a unpleasant community (they exist, read academia.SE), their likelihood is much higher.

The best way to avoid mistakes is to have good coauthors!

Truly appreciate your words! I highly value your opinion. I do love to learn more. I agree that ideas should be shared openly, in a condition that the results are correct. I raised the original question because I frequently observe people rush to publish immature preprints to claim priority; sometimes, the claims in their abstract is correct, but the proofs or the experiments are mistaken. So if I don't rush to put a timestamp on my work, then someone else might publish something on preprint before me and later accuse me for plagiarism, even if their analysis is immature or incomplete.

Figshare, for one, has the facility to apply an embargo to an item such that the material (e.g. an attached PDF) itself is not visible to the public, though the content description is. The timestamp is in the History section near the bottom of the item page. It looks like it even allows generating a private link for reviewers to access the material, but I've not tested this with an embargo active.
I'm not sure what you gain over saving it locally though - your selected reviewers can steal your ideas whether you send it by private mail or via some pre-print site, and you'll only find out when they publish and thus win the race.
Edit: I've reflected on this overnight, and my second paragraph above is a bit too pessimistic: I still don't think your proposed route will help you seek redress after the fact (save for literal plagiarism - wholesale lifting of content) but I can see that having a third party recording timestamps would have a deterrent effect against people stealing the ideas. It also provides them with a specific date when the embargo will end and they can use the ideas legitimately. (Doesn't affect those having the same idea independently, obviously.)
Bear in mind though that applying an embargo commits you to publishing that preprint, so if the underlying concepts are totally flawed you will still have to write a modified version admitting so and publish that version.

You can have this functionality without even trusting the hypothetical public server with any of your data treasure.  Free public timestamp authorities (which follow RFC 3161) allow you to timestamp your article so that it is cryptographically provable that the article existed before a certain date (when you requested a timestamp from that particular public timestamp server).  The technique is normally used for purposes of proving that certain data is genuine, i.e., coming from a particular originator.  First the data is signed by that originator's private key (in the originator's environment), then a hash is computed and the public timestamp server is asked to "counter-sign" the data (or rather, just the hash plus that server's timestamp). This second signing of a very short byte stream happens using the public timestamp server's key in that server's environment.
Software vendors use this technique not primarily for protection of priority or of their intellectual property, but rather in order to provide a permanent cryptographical proof that their private signing act happened before the vendor's own certificate (private key) expired or was revoked, one of which is bound to eventually occur.  Note that the public timestamp server does NOT have to store any record of whatever it ever countersigned, and its cooperation is NOT necessary for subsequent verification of authenticity of the data.
(I have simplified how this works.  There are additional transparency measures that prevent that timestamp server to maliciously backdate anything it wants to backdate.  The service is not stateless.)
So, you could even build the website you want to use yourself, at your home, with the main external component being the public timestamp server.
If you ever get into a serious priority dispute, you will be able to prove your case at a pretty high standard, unless they suspect you of outright hacking of data from a "real" originator.
There is however a big hole there.  You won't be able to present the corrected version of your article backdated.  You will only be able to prove what the article looked like at a certain point in time.  A combination of a "flawed priority article" and a "corrected subsequent article" is more likely to be taken as a proof that your "earlier" work was flawed and therefore unfinished (not yet in existence), so in the opposite sense to what you might want to attach to it.
Therefore you are better off to follow the normal practice and learn to publish pre-prints whenever you run out of the obvious ideas why your work might be flawed.  Initially, your teachers will help you spot such obvious weak points and address them while you don't have a publishable article.

arXiv will keep every version on the website, so people can always go back and see what version 1 or version 2 looked like, even when the paper is on it's 5th version (for example).
These are some places where you can put your pre-prints, and then replace them without a version history being visible to any outsider:

Academia.edu
ResearchGate
Mendeley
FigShare
Zenodo
GitHub (if you delete your version history every time you post a new version)

Also a PDF on your own website can often be picked up by Google Scholar: I've seen this happen to my own papers automatically even when I didn't want it to happen.

Can you make your Academia.edu or ResearchGate papers not indexed by google scholar?

@HighGPA Yes! First of all Google Scholar is not great at picking up Academia.edu papers, compared to picking up arXiv papers or journal articles, then you can also manually un-index papers in Google Scholar if they do pick up a paper that you don't want indexed.

I am sorry but how do I un-index a paper on google scholar search engine or the main google search engine? Do you mean that I can remove that article from my personal google scholar page?

@HighGPA I've seen articles removed from Google Scholar, but I would have to look up how to do it because I never did that myself. Removing them from a personal page is even easier. GitHub is not indexed by Google Scholar by default: many times I wished it was! Because I post papers on GitHub well before posting them on arXiv, but GitHub is only indexed by Google Scholar unless someone explicitly cites the GitHub repository (which is hard to do!). If you want to guarantee that it doesn't show up on Google Scholar, GitHub might be a better option. There's also FigShare and Zenodo.

If your goal is simply to timestamp the content, then you can create a hash and make that public. That is, you compute a MD5 or SHA hash of your pdf and tweet that, put it on your wikipedia page, or attach it to another arxiv submission.
This provides proof that your document existed at that time, without revealing the contents of that document. At a later time you can reveal the document and others can check that the hash matches.
If your goal is to make the document "public" without it being indexed or earlier versions being available, then you can put it on a personal website and use robots.txt to tell web crawlers not to index it. That doesn't guarantee it won't be indexed, but it will stop most things.

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


text:
Does anybody have a LaTeX CV template similar to this one?
I am looking for a LaTeX CV template similar to (of possible identical to) this one. Let me know if anybody has it.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~nika/files/Nika_CV.pdf
Thank you!

Why don't you contact Prof. Haghtalab directly and ask if they will share their template?

I thought that's why we had such forums...so that you don't have to cold-email people?

Hmmm, you just "cold emailed" about 100000 people ;-)

So did you. Like I said, that is what these forums are meant for. Not the individual's email.

Just go to Overleaf.  There are many similar templates.

That looks like (or at least very similar to) the kinds of CVs one can generate using the moderncv package.  There are various templates available for that package, e.g. here.

This looks like the popular modern CV package. It's a bit too popular to make you stand out, if you ask me. But then again, what makes a CV stand out is its content, not its layout.


text:
Is there scientific value in recreating existing papers in natural language processing for further languages?
For example, if a sarcasm detection (or sentiment analysis or any other similar NLP problem in that matter) paper has already been produced for tweets/news/media in English, will there be any scientific value if I try to do the same thing but for tweets/news/media in another language, such as Albanian.
I have an idea on where to get the data, and there isn't any previous research on these matters (or NLP in general) specifically to Albanian. Is it worth me doing a paper about it?

Yes, there is scientific value in the project you describe. When writing the paper, be sure to highlight any special handling you had to do for Albanian (or whatever language you choose). It will be interesting to compare the accuracy of the approach applied to Albanian vs. English.
It is possible (though I suspect it's unlikely)  that you might end up with results that simply validate that the approach works the exactly same in Albanian as well as English, and there's nothing more to say. That would still have scientific merit, but might be a little more difficult to publish in the higher-tier venues. If that happens, you could publish in a lower-tier venue (nothing to be ashamed of, as long as it's a legitimate conference/journal). Or you could make the topic more interesting by applying the approach to more than one language.

Further, if it the same model doesn't work for Albanian and English, the reasons why and the changes you make to work in Albanian may provide the insight needed to produce somewhat that does work for all (or at least more) languages.

And, if the approach does work equally well in Albanian then hopefully the research won't take too long, so it's less vexing if you can't find anywhere to publish.


text:
If the Professor who recommends me somewhere has coauthored papers with professors there, would the LORs hold tremendous value?
I heard somewhere a few days ago that while selecting a college for an M.Sc., it would be great for me to look up with whom the professors there have coauthored papers. This would mean that the two professors know each other and it would lead to a more trustworthy recommendation letter if written for a PhD.
How true is that? My guess is that it could make a difference but in the end it is mostly about the quality of research work that I have done.
I am from India thinking of applying to the US or UK in the future.

What country is this? In Austria this would matter much more than the quality of research. (SCNR)

Indian willing to apply to the US or UK

If you are applying for a Ph.D. (or an academic job), a strong recommendation letter from someone who is known well by the person making the admission or hiring decision is almost always a very big advantage.  It will ensure that your application gets serious consideration, and will give you the edge against similarly-qualified candidates.
That said, for M.Sc. admissions, the evaluation is likely done by a small committee, and if that committee does not include the specific professor who knows your recommender, it might not matter at all.

In my view (and I was MSc admissions officer at some point) recommendation letters at MSc level are largely a tick box exercise. I have admitted more than hundred MSc students and a recommendation letter hasn't made a difference even once. It is fine from my point of view that the student shows they can find somebody professional to recommend them, but as long as such a letter is not actively damaging, the box is then ticked and it doesn't make much more of a difference. Obviously I can't speak for all places.
This makes sense as well; applicants shouldn't have an advantage if they know somebody who published with me or XXX from our institution. Generally admitting students is not about whom they know but how good they are, and because 99% of recommendation letters are positive, I have to assume that there's very little information in them about the quality of the student. Even if some read a little bit less positive, this may be because the writer has a more critical attitude to recommendation letters, rather than the student being bad. People who write glowing recommendation letters for everyone who asks are around all over the place. Also recommendation letters at this level are quite regularly written by people who don't know more about the student than their set of results and maybe that they asked a few questions in class, but maybe not even that (at PhD level this is a bit different). Previous marks and course choices should totally dominate what's in recommendation letters. I'd go so far and say I'd be wary of institutions where this is different.

Which country did you work in, and can you elaborate on what is meant by "tick box exercise"?

In my country a BSc is generally 3 years long, and it is very customary to go for an MSc before a Phd. Would even that M.Sc. fall into this category?

@Allure: UK; "tick box exercise" means that providing reference letters is just something the students have to deliver. If they do, a "box is ticked" (the task is fulfilled), and the thing is not further looked at. I did read recommendation letters, but they were all positive and all written by people who had a regular position, so that was fine, and admission decisions were made based on previous results and occasionally admission test results.

@LoneAcademic: Yes, I'm talking about an MSc that as a standard follows up on a BSc. I'm not quite sure I'm understanding your situation... so you have done research already before applying for an MSc? Do you mean an Undergraduate project by this, or do you have a higher qualification already from India when applying for an MSc in the UK or US? Or something else?

I am currently in final year undergrad and going to join MSc in Physics soon. But I am already trying to know how to get into a good graduate program.

I am honestly baffled by this answer. Considering that probably hundreds of hours have gone in to writing letters to you, and the content does not matter anyway, why are you not reducing them to a tick-box on a web-site saying "yes, I recommend this student"?

@nabla: I wasn't the one who made the rules, or who could change them. In fact many recommendation letters are generic and written in very short time, and still read fine. Investing too much time into them is indeed a waste (although this changes at PhD level).


text:
Is it appropriate for a journal to cancel an accepted review request before the deadline?
I have recently received an email from the editor manager of the journal. In this email, they mentioned, because of unforeseen circumstances, they need to cancel their request.
I am really confused because I spent a lot of time reviewing the article and I don't know why they did that.

Just curious: If it turns out that it is or is not ethical, what do you plan to do with the answer?

Would it be ethical for them to let you do the review when it is no longer needed? As an aside, a lot of questions throw 'ethical' around when it really doesn't seem applicable.

@Jon Custer, whenever I see this, my fingers go on autopilot and replace the term by "appropriate".

Doesn't that depend first on the wording of the original commission, modified by your relationship with the journal in general and the editor in particular?
I'm suggesting that cancelling the commission is entirely up to the journal and the real Question is whether the poor reviewer gets anything for the trouble already taken…

Why don't you ask them?

@Roland: I have received a very similar email recently. -- The same thing happened to me last December. I was very busy for a couple of weeks, and within two or three days of when I was going to work on it, I got an email saying my review wasn't needed. I don't remember how much I was told in the initial email, but I had followed up by saying that I had collected together several references that prove the result in a simpler and more elementary way (the article was not "original research", but rather mostly expository) although I hadn't yet (continued)

carefully gone over the author's proof (this was a mathematics paper), and I was told that another reviewer had already sent in a report saying that several aspects of the proof were not correct. Indeed, I had my suspicions because the paper was very poorly written, in ways that go well beyond issues with English language competency (although for this journal, the writing would definitely need to be upgraded quite a bit), but I hadn't gotten around to looking at the details yet. I was happy to get that email because I wound being busier in late December than I had expected.

@RobbieGoodwin Was the reviewer going to get anything in the first place? Seems unlikely.

@user3067860 Thanks and of course that's unlikely, and how was it not covered in my Comment: "Doesn't that depend first on the wording…"? "… whether the poor reviewer gets anything for the trouble already taken" includes a better or worse relationship, don't you think?

Is it ethical for journal to cancel accepted review request before deadline?

In some circumstances, it would be ethically required to cancel the review request.  The editor has avoided wasting more of your time by cancelling the request.
"Unforseen circumstances" probably means the authors withdrew the manuscript.
Canceling a review request can also occur when another reviewer has submitted a review which ensures the manuscript cannot be published.

I don't see an ethical issue here. It wasn't very courteous, of course, to not give you any reason at all. They could have just let you submit it and then buried it, I suppose. But it might have been done to save you some work if you weren't ready to submit it yet.
They have probably made some editorial decision that makes your review moot. I can't predict what that would be, but more likely a flat reject. Or possibly the paper was withdrawn by the author(s).
And neither is it very courteous to the author(s) unless it was withdrawn.
If you want an action item, write back that you've nearly completed the review and that you can send it along and that it might be useful to the authors.

"Useful to the authors" +1 - I have done that. After all, this is the most important part of the review. You already did the work, there is nothing to lose. To be honest, I would prefer that advisor role to playing the journal bouncer.

Totally not my field, but I don't get why you say "It wasn't very courteous, of course." - why would not letting reviewer know that no more efforts to review is needed would be more  courteous?

@AlexeiLevenkov, telling them why would be courteous. Leaving it unsaid resulted in this question.

I wouldn't call notifying the reviewer not very courteous. In fact, I'd call it the opposite. They were being courteous by informing the reviewer as soon as possible (presumably) once they know the review won't be needed. Doing so is the most considerate they can be of the reviewer's valuable time. They can't go back in time and not request the review. The best they can do is save the reviewer any future time and effort. The alternative would be to not inform the reviewer. If they didn't inform the reviewer ASAP, then I would consider that to be quite discourteous.

A journal I handled once received a paper which was proceeding as normal, except one of the reviews came back very quickly. The reviewer said he had firsthand knowledge that the author was not behaving ethically, and had submitted the manuscript without the consent of his co-authors, who in fact did not think the manuscript was publishable. When I saw that, I wrote to all the other reviewers telling them effectively what your editorial manager told you, and desk rejected the paper.
It's obviously a less than ideal solution and it's possible some of the other reviewers have wasted their time, but what else should (could) I have done? The alternative would be to let the reviewers finish the reviews and then desk reject anyway, which wastes even more time (for both reviewers & authors).
Therefore I see it as ethical, if only because the other option is even worse.

Just curious, in such a situation how do you determine if the reviewer is telling the truth?

One unclear point: Did you verify with the authors that they didn't consent or find it publishable, or did you desk reject solely based on the referee's report?

@GoodDeeds I verified bits of it (e.g. the reviewer said the author is the student of the co-author and they had had a falling out, and it was possible to verify the former statement with Google). The reviewer also gave details that would not have been knowable except to insiders, and there was other indirect evidence. I believed the reviewer. In retrospect it's possible I should not have, but I'd still be surprised if the reviewer was incorrect.

@Anyon: Presumably the “desk rejection” included some explanation.  If the information was inaccurate, the author could have responded to this with a defense of their position.

To give an unorthodox answer: if you're unhappy that you spent time reviewing the paper, and feel frustrated that the review request was canceled, one idea would be to look around the Web to check whether the paper you were reviewing has been posted publicly online as a preprint.
If it is, then in principle you could have discovered and read it by yourself. So you could try to use the reviewing work you already did to some benefit, e.g.:

give some private feedback to the authors (e.g., if you found mistakes, to point out relevant work, etc.); or
post an open review of the paper somewhere, in the spirit of open peer review

Of course, some additional efforts may be needed: reviewing for a journal anonymously is not the same as directly contacting the authors or posting the review publicly in your name. So you'd have to work more on this, which you'd have to see if you are interested in doing.
To be fair, what I'm proposing here is somewhat unconventional, so maybe there are reasons not to do it. But in my opinion, if you already did substantial work on the review, it'd be a shame to have it go to waste and these are options to put it to some use.
(Come to think of it, what happened to you is a pretty good reason to only accept to review work which is publicly available as a preprint, so as to ensure in advance that your work won't become useless if the request is rescinded.)

Probably not appropriate for reviewers to be contacting authors directly. Finding a "sneaky" way to do it is possibly even less appropriate.

If you have read for reviewing purposes a paper which is publicly available online, I'm not sure I see a problem of ethics with contacting the authors as if you had read the online paper. If you're really concerned about not giving them clues about the reviewing process you were a part of, you could wait a bit -- but honestly I don't see a real problem. (Reviewer anonymity is mostly about plausible deniability anyway, IMHO.)

If I were your editor you would probably not get new assignments from me if I learn of it.

Then too bad, right? :) Reviewing is volunteer work. And here the editor has asked OP for voluntary work and then rescinded the request and wasted their time. IMHO, they don't get to also be outraged if OP does something else with the work, which doesn't use privileged information (preprint is available online) and does not break reviewer anonymity (public preprint means you have plausible deniability).

@a3nm The point is, since reviewing is indeed voluntary and unpaid, the editor doesn't really have any teeth to bite the reviewer with . So they have to rely on trust. If you have just made two posts saying "my attitude is that I'll do whatever I like, unless you can sue me for it," bluntly I wouldn't want to have any dealings with you. I might just warn other editors about your attitude, as well. Two can play at sending private messages behind people's backs :)

@alephzero: I don't think that's a good summary of my attitude.


text:
How to cite works that is cited in the works
in APA 7, How do I cite works that have text cited previously.
For example:
Author Smith (2020) has a sentence in published works:

This is an important sentence (Jones, 2010; Franks, 2011; & Gates, 2014)

I want to use this sentence.
I'm a little confused on APA 7 rules.  Does it mean that this is correct?

This is an important sentence (Smith, 2020)

Or

This is an important sentence (Jones, 2010; Franks, 2011; & Gates, 2014)

Or

This is an important sentence (Smith, 2020; Jones, 2010; Franks, 2011; & Gates, 2014)

and if I have to include Jones, Franks, and Gates, does that mean they go in the reference section as well?  Does a reference section grow because of this, even though I didn't actually refer to them directly?
Thanks!

If the sentence is important, then (Jones, Franks, Gates) should also be explored as additional sources. Roland's answer is great, but if that comes up frequently, then consider reading all the sources and forming your own opinion instead of citing another author's opinion on other sources.

This. Some papers incorrectly interpret work (or even cite the wrong source!), and citing them instead going to the original source just propagates the issue. Also, imagine you publish a work, someone cites it, and then everyone else cites their work in lieu of yours, leaving you with only a single citation for your efforts. You've lost a lot of direct recognition that could otherwise be of benefit to you. Don't do that to others if you can avoid it.


text:
Chicago intext citation for different references on same sentence
Given a sentence.

We can use A,B,C or other methods.

How would each of A,B and C be cited.
like this

We can use A (Citation A),B (Citation B),C (Citation C) or other methods

or this

We can use A,B,C (Citation A; Citation B; Citation C) or other methods.

or

We can use A,B,C ((Citation A), (Citation B) and (Citation C)) or other methods.

Have you looked at the Chicago book or website? What did you find?

Ive looked around and the closest i have found is multiple citation for one topic, in the sentence (2nd method here). but that doesnt exactly fit here. as each of the mentioned items is different and has different citation.

I think
the 1st way is OK
the 2nd way is better (especially if there are exactly three methods and three citations), because it is more uncluttered
the 3rd way is wrong, because it has too many brackets.

i went with 1 for now as it seemed the least ambiguous and yes there are exactly 3 citatations

I would write something like

We can use A,B,C (respectively Citation A; Citation B; Citation C) or other
methods.


text:
As a postdoc, should I spend time learning new subjects or focus on applying what I know?
I've just started as postdoctoral researcher at a great institute. I imagine that they expect me to achieve good results and teach some classes.
But honestly, I feel that I still need to learn a lot more on many topics. So, is it a good idea to dedicate a few hours of my day to learn new topics? Or should I focus only on what I already know and on how to apply it in order to obtain more results?
It is a new stage of my life and any tip that may improve me as a researcher is very welcomed.

You might want to check out the following: What is expected of a postdoc?

I feel that I still need to learn a lot more on many topics — Me too!  After all, I've only been doing research for 25 years.  With any luck, that feeling will never go away.

@JeffE haha! Fine! Well, of course this feeling is the reason why one keeps learning and pursuing the truth. So, we may say that it is vital. On the other hand, when you've just finished your PhD, this feeling becomes fear and then you start to doubt your entire formation. Seems that everyone knows all the things and you know nothing. That's the problem. Thanks for the comment!

While "learning new subjects" vs "focus on applying what I know" may sound like a dichotomy at first it really need not to be one: Try to apply the things you know to new problems and learn what you need to learn to do this successfully.
Put differently: Learn new things more focused on the problems you are facing. It is really rare that you encounter a problem that you can solve by just applying what you know. In most cases, the actual problem at hand has some new structure that can be exploited in some way and this usually forces you to read up something new.
On the other hand, it can not hurt if you learn some things that are not totally related to your current research just to broaden you expertise. I do this when I got stuck on my problems and, coincidentally, it happens frequently that I stumble upon just the right thing to help me with my current problem.

thank you for the nice answer. It fits perfectly to my case since I'm a mathematician.

There is absolutely nothing wrong to dedicate a good fragment of your time to learn new things. Science is a dynamical thing and at some point you will be forced to learn new things/techniques etc (depending your field). PhD makes you master a rather small and specific area but to be a truly good researcher you should be able to see the bigger picture.
If you dedicate your time exclusively on the topics you already know then this could be seen as an incremental thing: applying what we know on new things is alright but it doesn't advance science: This needs to design new techniques probably using new tools from unexpected areas.
So, dedicate as much as you can on studying and expanding your knowledge/topics!

Thank you @PsySp! I've wondered about splitting my time between learning and thinking of problems related to research. But, since the things are new to me, I had thought that it could be a bad idea.

@JustaGuy Ιt's never a bad idea to think of new research problems/directions and learning new topics! Just be careful on how to split ad allocate your time.

For most people, the postdoc will give the most bang for the buck if your primary focus is on strengthening your publications list.
To do this, additional study may be needed.
If not, and you can spare the time, you could set yourself a cap on what would be a reasonable amount or proportion of time to spend on learning things that are, at the moment, tangential.

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


text:
Bad reference from PhD supervisor
My PhD supervisor and I didn't really see eye-to-eye on a lot of thing but I had thought we got along well anyways. I have graduated and have decided that academia isn't for me and I want to go into the private sector. I am having a very hard time finding a job, and I am not being picky. I am applying to industry scientist jobs and also for positions like sales reps or administrative roles. The truth is I am desperate.
Although I don't get many interviews one of the places I got far along with checked my references and said my PhD supervisor said she couldn't recommend me for the position, as I had problems with communications skills. It may be true that I am awkward, but I don't think that I am that bad. I also have my MSc supervisor as a reference and another professor in my department that worked on a group project. Now I have asked my department head to be a reference as he was also on my committee. Each of these people seemed happy to be a reference but so did my supervisor.
Is it a red flag that I don't list my supervisor? I can try to talk to her but I don't know what to say. I feel like my life is falling apart, I have to get my parent's help to pay rent and I'm worried my girlfriend will break up with me as it has been causing a lot of stress.
What can I do?

Sad, having such a advisor in first place

I think it's a major red flag that this is a surprise to you and that your advisor did not have a discussion about this in the first place. It's extremely important for potential references to be honest and up-front about what they can recommend you for and what they can't.

Given what you describe, I think you better not include your supervisor. Her recommendation will be the most dominant because she knows you the best. Given that in the best case you will get a mediocre recommendation, and in the worst case even a bad one, it is not worth it to include her.
Do not include her, but be prepared to explain why you do not include her. This explanation should be convincing, but not too damaging for you. For example, if you just say that you had conflicts with her all the time, your potential employee might conclude that you are a conflicting person.


text:
How to cite "obvious" things or make them credible?
I'm writing my thesis and I want to emphasize that the importance of energy, especially electrical energy, has increased tremendously and we are living in an information era which is fueled by electrical energy.
How would I make this sound credible?

Use and cite examples? (Growth of the use of Wikipedia compared to libraries or such).

What is "obvious" depends on the reader and it seems like you are at least in doubt about the obviousness of your claim. Hence: Find evidence! That's part of the job of a scientist. (In this example you may look estimates about up how much energy is needed to power the Internet or a data center or just how much electric energy has been produced every year.)

How would I make this sound credible? — Ask your reader to think about the technology required to read your thesis, and then publish your thesis online.

I look at it this way. When you write a Thesis, you should always assume that the reader will read it with an empty mind. You cannot assume what they might already know or might not know.
In this case, they may probably understand some sort of importance of energy. But do they realise how important it is?
As mentioned by @skymningen, use and cite practical examples or scenarios.

There are two claims here, one about increasing reliance on electrical energy, the other about the information age. You can operationalize both and look for data that supports the claim. The first claim can be operationalized  as electricity consumption (worldwide or in the OECD), over time. There's data published, for example, by the international energy agency. The second claim can be operationalized as growth in petaflops, available computers or smartphones per household, people having internet access, you name it.
Another, rhetorically nicer but less scientific, at least less scientific-sounding, approach to 'proving' the obvious is to use telling and vivid examples:

When a large-scale electrical storm  went through northern Virginia on
  29 June, electrical load in one of more than 10 Amazon data centers in
  the region failed to successfully transfer to generator backup.
  Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) serving that particular circuit
  eventually ran out of battery power and servers began losing power
  around 8pm PDT. This caused service interruptions for many online
  businesses -- including popular ones like Netflix and Pinterest
  (liberally quoted from here).

Also, there is this IEEE paper on worldwide energy needs of information technology.

It is often quite hard to state the obvious in a scientific context without making it sound like an unfounded opinion. The best thing to do is search for citeable literature. In this case I would, for example state that the use of electronic databases has sky rocketed and mention a couple of papers on that, for example :
De Groote, Measuring use patterns of online journals and databases, Journal of the Medical Library Association, 2003.
The best thing to do is cite like four of such papers covering a decade or so. Journals like Scientific American are good in this regard, as it is an indexed journal, but covers opinion and popular science based articles from reputable authors.

I like this answer, except for the Scientific American mention, unless you are talking about articles over 40 years old, or specifically citing the popular press rather than for a scientific fact. Scientific American articles can be high quality, but it is a magazine, not a journal, and not peer-reviewed.

@BryanKrause - good to see you here too! Science is also a magazine :) And for the purpose of stating the obvious Sci Am is fine imo. It's even indexed in Scopus.

Same to you. We can agree to disagree - I think it's definitely fine in other situations but I'd avoid it in a thesis, again, unless specifically making the point about popular knowledge (i.e., citing something like "the popular scientific press reports _____"). Science Magazine, despite the name, is definitely a journal, not a magazine. The main distinction is peer review.


text:
Citing own work within a paper and being anonymous
I am reading a paper in which the author cites his paper in a very explicit form. The reformulation of one of his sentence in the paper was in this form:

I have already made this point in a few papers, within a general
  framework in (Some Name) (1996) and in a related
  framework in (Some Name) (1999).

This paper is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. With this sentence, the author gives an explicit information about his identity and becomes non-anonymous to referees. By the way, he is a well-known guy in his literature.
Is it an acceptable situation ?
ps. I edited the question in order to avoid a confusion. I am just reading the paper and I wanted to know, by curiosity, how a such situation is considered in academia.

A quick note - it sounds like you are reading and not reviewing the paper so I'd like to mention that not all review processes are double-blind.  Even when they are, it can sometimes be nearly impossible to have complete author anonymity given the need to have properly cited related work.

I assume it should be "I am reviewing.... this paper is submitted to a journal with  double-Blind reviewing" but I'd let the OP confirm and edit.

In retrospect, I am really not sure whether OP is just reading the paper, reviewing it, or reviewing it for a double-blind journal. Somehow, the question sounds like (s)he is just reading it ("published in a peer-reviewed journal"), but I guess I am not understanding the question then.

I think that OP is reading a published paper, but is pretending to be a reviewer in order to create an answerable question. In other words, this question turns hypothetical towards the end. It's quite unclearly written, though. @xLeitix.

@TRiG But how would that make sense? The blinding done to disguise the identity of the author is undone upon publication, so why would one expect it to still be there?

I've edited the question so it reflects the position of a reviewer. Otherwise it just wouldn't make sense.

Even without explicitly stating this, it is in some cases easy to guess the people behind the paper: simply count the authors in the reference list. Or in some fields there is only a (very) small set of people working on a certain problem. Some research institutes build their own software system, so when they talk about an improvement, etc. 9 out of 10 it is that research group. Finally there is also the writing style and common spelling/grammar mistakes people in a certain region make that partially uncover the identity of the author.

@Magicsowon Was that the case those times you saw it? Or what did the editor say when you asked?

If this is in the context of double-blind reviewing, the correct response to this situation is to alert the handling editor or PC chair to this situation. Different venues are differently strict about double blind reviews, so the response to the situation may vary between "well, we don't care if the authors wants to reveal himself" to a reject and resubmit (without the incriminating statement and a new set of reviewers). However, which of those it is is not your decision as a reviewer.
If this is not in the context of double-blind reviewing, you are aware of the identity of the authors anyway, and this statement gives you no additional information.
If you are just reading the paper (and not reviewing), as implied by the wording of your question, then I don't understand the issue. Published papers generally have publicly visible authors, and it is not clear that the incriminating wording was already visible during review. For instance, in many software engineering venues that nowadays use double-blind reviewing, it is customary to "blank" self-citations and to slightly change the phrasing for the review version to make sure that identities are not, or at least not obviously, revealed. This can then be changed back for the camera-ready version.

It might even not have been in there, but a reviewer asked why Some Name's work has not been mentioned, as it is relevant and so Some Name added that sentence after review (where it is not relevant any more that they are their own).

To pick up a necroposting, if this was not a review situation, this is fully valid.
I typically define a flag if the paper is anonymous or not, and include things like acknowledgements in the non-anonymous version only. If the anonymous wording in the paper sounds strange and I'd know no better, I'd also have two versions of this sentence, one anonymous but clumsy for the peer-review and one non-anonymous and better sounding in case of acceptance.


text:
Editorial decision with only one referee report
In an Elsevier journal, after some long time, I looked at the status of my paper on the tracking system and I realized that one of the two reviewers did not even accept the review invitation. One of the reviewer submitted the report.
Now, I see that the paper is in "Decision in process". Is that a bad sign? Can we say that the editor has seen the one negative report and decided to reject it?
Edit: I got a very harsh (and unjustified) referee report. This is why the editor decided with only one referee report.In this sense, the question was a logical one.

Why do you need to know?

"Can we say that the editor has seen the one negative report" What is "the one negative report"? How do you know that the report that was submitted is negative?

I'm an editor on an Elsevier journal, and their system does not allow me to make a decision unless I have two reviews.

@VitaminE: This is certainly depends much more an the field than on the publisher. E.g. in pure maths it is very common to have only one reviewer.

@user2705196 I am curious and there is nothing wrong with this I think.

@JochenGlueck Well, my assumption is that Elsevier uses the same web application for all its journals.

@VitaminE These systems are highly customizable, even though they have the same user interface. How many reviews are required depends on the journal.

@VitaminE: I'm not quite sure what makes you think that usage of the same software for each journal implies usage of the same configuration parameters. (As Wolfgang Bangerth points out, cumstomizability of software typically goes far beyond setting a few parameters.) Every article that I published in an Elsevier journal so far got reviewed by only one reviewer.

Only one referee report?  That's dodgy.  Elsevier is not such a reputable publisher.  I guess that's why they can get a way with one review.

@JochenGlueck simple. I work for Elsevier as well!!

@VitaminE if the system does not allow you to make a decision unless you have two reviews, what do you do if e.g. the first review comes back with "this paper is unpublishable because the result has already been derived in X", and on checking X you find that the reviewer is right?

@optimalcontrol you might be interested: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/153925/can-i-predict-the-fate-of-my-manuscript-from-information-other-than-a-decision

The editor has to make a decision and the decision has consequences for them as well as you. They don't have a lot of information on which to base a decision unless they happen to be knowledgeable in the field, which is certainly possible.
But with little information, they are likely to be a bit conservative in their decision making. If the one review is "meh" then it is a bad sign. If it is "marvelous", and they trust the reviewer, possibly having history with them, then it is a good sign.
Wait for a report back and respond appropriately when it does.
Even a paper with a "meh" review might be salvageable if the single reviewer suggests changes that would bring it up to something like "marvelous". Patience, grasshopper.

It is not uncommon to receive a decision based on a single reviewer report. I experienced this with several respectable publishers (e.g. Cambridge UP, SAGE).
In your case all you need is patience.


text:
how to evaluate the quality of scientific journal?
Hope that the question is not a duplicate, I could not find anything similar.
I am doing a PhD in mathematical economics but I usually look at math journals and I am trying to adapt some technical methods from there to economics when it is necessary.
What I am always curious about, as I am not familiar at all with mathematics journals, I don't know which journal is a good quality journal in mathematics (as there exists a huge bunch of journal in mathematics, if I am not wrong)  I don't know if the paper published in the journal is a really credible reference.
Besides Google Scholar citations, what are the best ways to understand if a journal (in the field of mathematics or other) is a well ranked journal ?

Btw, Google Scholar citations are inaccurate...

Also, this might be relevant: What metrics are used to judge a mathematical journal's quality?

There is no straight answer, since as Tom commented, "good quality" can have several meanings. Further, a journal can be considered good for a specific domain and not for another.
What I usually do:

Check the impact factor (and compare it with "known good" journals),
see some of the published works (Usually to discard automatically accepted stuff that has horrible english and worse results...)
Talk to other people with more experience. In your case, what do you advisor thinks? Or any other professors that usually publish in that area?

Another interesting concept is if the journal is correct for your work.
Nature is an awesome journal, but I caters to specific domains and requires a very high quality article. Sometimes it makes more sense to send the work to a "less good" journal that is specific to your domain and which "matches" the level of your work. As long as there is a proper review involved, it works.
(For instance, sometimes you don't have time to further develop something, or there is not much more to be done/improved, etc... instead of "losing" the work, you publish it in a "reputable", "less good" venue)
The ability to match  work <-> journal is important and comes from experience. If you don't have it yet, ask for the help of someone who does. That's why advisors are there! :)


text:
Citing a popular science magazine article
In one part of my paper, I give a reference to a one-page article published in Science from (AAAS).
There are some quantitative statements in this one-page article. However, I could not find any reference for these quantitative results presented in the article.
There exists a DOI number of the article.
My question :  Is it acceptable to cite this kind of article in a paper to be sent to a peer-review journal ?

Could it be more appropriate to "cite the source", meaning cite research articles that this article references or actually introduces? In that case, do so. Also, if those statements are found in other articles, although this one does not cite them, you should find them. Prove you did your research. If the statements are only in that article, I would still use it, but that might depend on your field and the relevance of the specific article, which is hard to judge.

If that's the only source and you've exhausted other options, why not? It's not like your work depends heavily on that result, right?

Interestingly, there are almost any stuff on Google Scholar on these qualitative results.Hopefully, my results don't merely depend on this reference.

My question : Is it acceptable to cite this kind of article in a paper to be sent to a peer-review journal ?

I have cited a popular science article (specifically, an article in Scientific American) as well as a citation to a fan-maintained video game Wiki in one of the best medical journals in the world.
If it's the most appropriate source, it is acceptable - and essentially - that it be cited.

Journals may have differing opinions about the what exactly you may be allowed to reference.  However, in most cases, I would expect that there would be no explicit prohibition on citing sources other than traditional academic references.  Obviously, if possible, you should cite something peer reviewed, or (failing that) an academic preprint.  However, sometimes such things are not available.
I have come across a number of useful citations to things that would not be considered normal academic sources.  Sometimes people cite conference presentation slides containing of preliminary results, which have not been published, but which somebody managed to capture a picture of with a smart phone camera.  Sometimes a result may be announced in a press release by a laboratory, well before the scientific details are made available to the research community.  (A short news piece in a journal like Science would be of a similar character.)  These are perfectly reasonable things to cite, if they are the only available sources of information.
Sometimes, I have seen even weirder citations.  In one paper my advisor published (which was a topical review relating to some work that had gotten a fair amount of media exposure), he cited a number of reactions to the subject in non-scientific media.  That included a comic strip, the Web site for a cult, and a statement by Lyndon LaRouche.  So even pretty outlandish things can occasionally be cited in legitimate (if somewhat less serious than usual) academic publications.