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Why do mothers list their children's dates of birth on academic CV?
I've heard anecdotally that some mothers will list the dates of birth of their children on their CV, but I've never seen it done myself. The intended effect seems to provide a kind of excuse for lower output around those dates, I suppose. Is this common? Am I totally misinterpreting the motive?

This is common in Europe. Parents are not supposed to (and to some extent not allowed to) work during maternity or paternity leave. Thus, such periods are deducted from your phd-age, tenure clock etc.
Quoting from the ERC Starting Grant 2017 call:

For maternity, the effective elapsed time since the award of the first PhD will be considered
  reduced by 18 months or if longer by the documented amount of leave actually taken for
  each child born before or after the PhD award. For paternity, the effective elapsed time since
  the award of the first PhD will be considered reduced by the documented amount of
  paternity leave actually taken for each child born before or after the PhD award.

And from one of the largest commercial foundations supporting basic research in Denmark, which explicitly states that the CV should contain this information:

In the case of maternity leave, the number of months on leave, times two, will be deducted from the seniority.
  The specific dates for the period of maternity leave must be clearly stated in the CV/resume.

"In the case of maternity leave, the number of months on leave, times two, will be deducted from the seniority." Times two?

@TJCrowder Yes, indeed times two (and maternity leave here is a slight mistranslation of the Danish term "barsel" which is gender neutral).

Times two (at at least >1 makes sense). A newborn does not suddenly stop needed lots of attention, time and energy after maternity leave is over.

Listing periods of parental leave in your CV is not really the same as giving your children's date of birth, though. The latter seems to make as much sense professionally as (say) listing your children's names.

@DanPetersen: That depends on how tightly coupled (by law in the place where it happens) the birth date and certain important dates for, say, maternity leave (staet, end, ...) are. Why not provide the nost concise piece of information (date of birth), if the other information can be deduced from it?

@DanPetersen "[Listing the child's date of birth] seems to make as much sense professionally as (say) listing your children's names." Of course not. The date of birth often explains things in the CV such as gaps in the "talk at conferences list", changes in position and such which sometimes make committees members stumble. Note that hiring processes in the US and elsewhere (at least in same places in Europe) are quite different in many respects and one particular instance is that in Europe some data is used that is explicitly forbidden to use in the US (such as gender, age, family status…).

@Dirk I understand that there's a large cultural difference between the US and Europe about these things. What puzzles me is that I'm a European working in Europe and I'd be extremely surprised to see children's date of birth on a CV, but I'm seeing these comments here saying that it's a common phenomenon in Europe. In what European country is this supposed to be common?

Germany. Most. CVs I've seen have birth dates of children, sometimes even names!

I'm sorry but this answer only applies to a subset of European countries. I would remove the first sentence and specify in which countries this applies.

Well, I uncovered a few via Google search, so they definitely exist.  It seems to be more of a European thing - which is probably because maternity/paternity leave here is often more generous than, say, the States - so taking your six month entitlement will result in a more noticeable gap in your CV.  I wouldn't describe it as an 'excuse for lower output' though - more an explanation of what would otherwise be a gap in the CV. Also, it should be noted that it is not limited to mothers.
If you conduct a search on a term such as 'academic cv "child born"' you will find a number of examples of male and female academics who provide the dates of birth of their children in their CV.

I don't see how this answers the question. The question asks whether it's common and why people do it; linking to four random women's CVs does nothing to answer either of those things. And it's kinda creepy.

It does not seem to be common but it does occur, particularly in Europe.  People do it to explain why there is a gap in their CV.  I linked to the CVs to provide examples in support of what I was saying.  Finally, I felt it might be of interest to people to see that this is not unique to women, which is why I linked to a man's CV as well as three women's.

Just to say, that I never intended to be 'creepy' by including examples, @RoboKaren was looking for evidence which is why I included links but I have amended to give the search term I used.

"Creepy" wasn't really the right word. But introducing specific examples risks making the discussion unnecessarily personalised. Also, please bear in mind that there are half a billion people in Europe. Four people does not a phenomenon make.

I live in a European country with generous parental leave laws, but I've never seen this. What is common are entries in CVs along the lines of "Feb 2012-Aug 2012. Paternity leave." In particular, if you're applying for grants and jobs and there's a rule that applicants can't be more than X years out of their Ph.D., you are often allowed to deduct time spent on parental leave, so it's important that the exact duration is on the CV.

An alternative that I've seen (though not often) and which feels a bit less weird to my American eyes, is to list the time of parental leave under the employment section.  These are the two examples I remember, and which made a positive impression on me as handling this point very nicely.  Including the details of employment status (change of title, travel leave, parental leave) seems clearly relevant to me, while listing birthdays of children feels like it's mentioning things I'm not supposed to be considering during hiring (family status) and comes off as strangely European in the same way as putting a photo or your age on a CV.

In the US, I have seen this a few times when they are concerned about a "gap" in employment - only a few times.

Adding the Personal details on a professional CV's such as birthdate, age, spouse's names, marriage status, gender, ... make many US readers cringe.  Details of employment status  when stated at a higher level (parental leave, etc) work well  and don't give impression of being naive to US expectations. I really don't care and feel embarrased knowing if it was twins or not, or if it was parental leave to care for orphaned nieces and nephews.

Likely this came up often already but on: "comes off as strangely European in the same way as putting a photo"  It is only to be hoped no-one has photos on their professional websites or at least no-one looks at these sites in that context. Incidentally, in the other direction I subjectively feel to see more family photos and other personal information  on US 'professional' websites than on European ones.

Australian perspective: There are many situations in academia where family commitments would be taken into consideration when evaluating academic output. A few obvious contexts include: grant applications, job applications, and promotion applications.
Grants: As with the European example, most Australian early- and mid-career grants which are defined in terms of years post-PhD allow for that date to be extended based on parenting commitments.
For example (quotes thanks to @Joel), the ARC (the main government grant giving body in Australia for non-health related grants) state that:

"Periods of unemployment, or any career interruptions for child birth, carers’ responsibilities, misadventure, or debilitating illness will be taken into account." - source

Or for this year's DECRA grants (i.e., a major early career grant in Australia):

"A DECRA Candidate must at the closing time of submission of Proposals: have been awarded a PhD on or after 1 March 2010 or ...The ARC may grant an Eligibility Exemption for the DECRA Candidate who has been awarded a PhD on or after 1 March 2006, together with periods of significant career interruption... The following types of interruption will be considered... maternity or parental leave..."

Employment: Many universities would have HR policies related to employment and promotion that look at what is sometimes called "achievement relative to opportunity". In such cases, time off due to parenting responsibilities reduces the "opportunity" part of the equation.
Legal/cultural context: More generally, Australia (as with many countries) has anti-discrimination legislation. This creates legal obligations, and it also forms part of a broader cultural initiative. Universities (who award jobs and promotions) and the government (who award the big grants) tend to be progressive on such matters. Anti-disrimination legislation include many categories, but of particular relevance here are parental status and sex (i.e., females are more likely to take leave and have more of the primary care responsibilities, especially in the months leading up to birth and the year or so post-birth).
Implications for CVs: I think it would be more common to have a couple of sentences explaining the timing of parental leave and noting that consequently academic output was reduced during that period. That way, the relevance between the birth dates and the CV is made more explicit.
Language and the word "excuse": Finally, I wanted to comment on your statement (my bolding):

The intended effect seems to provide a kind of excuse for lower output around those dates.

It is not meant to be an excuse. I think the word "excuse" implies that reduced output needs justifying. Rather, the legal context and the associated cultural change is trying to frame parenting commitments as fundamental to a functioning society. So instead, evaluating output relative to opportunity is framed as "the default". Therefore, for some people opportunity is indexed by time. But for people who have had major parental obligations, it is indexed differently to incorporate the time away due to parenting commitments. Perhaps, this is a subtle distinction, but I think it is important.

It may be worth adding this quote from the ARC webpage: "Periods of unemployment, or any career interruptions for child birth, carers’ responsibilities, misadventure, or debilitating illness will be taken into account." (and also telling people what the ARC is).  I assume NHMRC has something similar.

Also in this year's DECRA announcement: "A DECRA Candidate must at the closing time of submission of Proposals: have been awarded a PhD on or after 1 March 2010 or ...The ARC may grant an Eligibility Exemption for the DECRA Candidate who has been awarded a PhD on or after 1 March 2006, together with periods of significant career interruption... The following types of interruption will be considered... maternity or parental leave..."

great. quotes added

I was thinking that it was a shame that we hadn't had any comments from people who have included their child's name and birthdate in their CV, as it would be helpful to get their perspective in order to understand the 'motive' part of @pburg's question.
Today I came across this blog post written by Megan Rivers-Moore, Assistant Professor at Carleton University, Canada, who has included her children's names and birthdates in her tenure file (she doesn't specifically say CV). It's hard to distill the post down to a few words, but the gist seems to be that she considers her pregnancy and subsequent transition to parenthood important enough in her life to be relevant to those seeking to understand her as a professional.
While acknowledging that it is just one person's perspective, it is well worth a read, I think, as it gives some idea of her reasons for so doing.

I don't think we should have an answer that points to any identifiable individual, especially in this context.

@RoboKaren Why? While I'd agree it could be odd to link CVs that happen to mention this, I think the situation is quite different when the mentioned person decided to write and to publish a text on the very subject.

Many European countries have strong law-bound parental leave benefits - also for the kids' fathers - it is likely there to provide  explanation to future employers for past gaps of employment - or for parental leave.
And there is also a completely different mentality regarding these matters. Calling parenting an "excuse" for the presumed higher value of employment will definitely give some eyes on you so to speak.

Here in the US, unless you're a politician running for office, this is not common and it's hard to imagine a worse idea for a professional woman's CV.  It needlessly invites male stereotyping of women as unreliable workers because they leave their careers to have children.
From 'Motherhood Penalty' Can Affect Women Who Never Even Have a Child, NBC News, April 11, 2016:

In a 2013 study, Mary Ann Mason, professor and co-director of the Center for Economics & Family Security at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, revealed some alarming outcomes for women in academia: Women graduate students who are pregnant or mothers with young children are 132 percent more likely to be working in a contingent position, while men with a young child are 36 percent less likely to be in a contingent position. Contingent positions are non-tenured, adjunct, or temporary jobs that are not secure. ...
"Pregnant women and mothers are assumed to be less committed to their careers, and every time they leave the office or ask for any flexibility, that commitment is further called into question," Slaughter said.
"This kind of discrimination is institutionalized," said Lisa Maatz, a policy adviser with the American Association of University Women. "It's a part of the culture, it's a part of the decision-making process. Right now the assumptions about women's roles, as stereotypical as they may be, are driving decisions and those decisions disadvantage women."

In an earlier comment since moved to chat, I was asked to consider a hypothetical case, that "a woman 5 years past PhD applying for an academic position who reports having 2 children would have her output judged as if she were 2 years post PhD", possibly allowing her to qualify for a grant with a time-since-PhD cutoff.  But putting this on a CV also reminds readers that she still has two children under 5 who will be competing for her attention for at least the next 13 years.  In a situation like this, I would try hard to disclose this information in some way other than my CV, e.g., an email, a cover letter or explanatory note on your application that puts them on notice why you're disclosing this information and isn't likely to be circulated as widely.
The best strategy for professional women is a CV that minimizes any personal information that isn't directly supportive of why you're the best for the job you want.  If you have a break because you had kids, especially here in the US, make them ask.  You will both recall the exact moment they received information they cannot consider in a hiring decision.
From Pre-Employment Inquiries and Marital Status or Number of Children, US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

The following pre-employment inquiries may be regarded as evidence of intent to discriminate when asked in the pre-employment context:

Whether applicant is pregnant.

Marital status of applicant or whether applicant plans to marry.

Number and age of children or future child bearing plans.

Child care arrangements.

Employment status of spouse.

Name of spouse.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. (Comments cannot be moved to chat twice on the same thread, so further comments posted here instead of in the linked chat room are subject to deletion instead.)

I imagine myself among those who have some fractional understanding of bias about child-bearing, child-care, machismo, and misogyny, although being a cool ol' white guy I have (... sigh...) not experienced too many bad things myself. Perhaps the worst [sic] was being fairly athletic while claiming to be a mathematician, long ago. (Some kinda weird faint-praise thing, maybe.) But/and, yes, there is weird self-inconsistent stuff about being a parent in the U.S. The pretense is that it is acknowledged as "being ok" (whah? professionals oughtn't be parents?!?), but there is an equally obvious...

... "understanding" that "serious people" will not let "that kind of thing" "get in their way". (Oop, have I used up my quote allowance?) I've seen some tenure cases be denied (c. 1990) unreasonably due to sub-text about child-bearing ... Heaven forbid... "I'd never do that!" >:-( ... To my perception, the realpolitick in the U.S. is still "show no weakness" (perhaps even while pretending to...). In a lucky environment, some ("empowered") people may be around to mitigate things... but don't count on it. All very complicated. In fact, sooo complicated that I'd ask that anyone interested in ...

... my considered opinion could email me at my easily publicly visible address. Send cookies, in any case. :)

I think you are being needlessly harsh on men. In my experience women can be just as prejudiced as men. Further, if there is a drop in productivity, better to explain it than make the search committee guess.

@StrongBad Unfortunately, across the course of my career, I have seen things that lead me to believe there's a much stronger gender bias than we might be comfortable with.  Yes, women often participate as well, but men are more likely to be blind through our privilege.

@StrongBad: If the first sentence just said "stereotyping of women" instead of "male stereotyping of women" then it doesn't affect the conclusion, since for the purpose of this question prejudice from either has the same effect. The ERC rule cited in user60974's answer assumes that fathers are only distracted by a child to the extent of the leave they take, whereas mothers are distracted to 18 months even if they take less leave and even if the father of the same child is doing full-time childcare. Don't know who wrote the rule, but it's a judgement that mothers do all the work.

... so I don't think it's all that important to the answer whether the prejudice that the answerer has observed has primarily come from men or from women, but as it happens since she's calling it "male stereotyping" I suppose has come primarily from men. You can disbelieve that this is the strong tendency, it doesn't affect whether the advice given here is good or bad. What matters is whether the benefit of having the leave taken into account outweighs the disadvantage of stereotyping, and perhaps that is something that differs by country, if the legally-mandated accounting is very different.

"If you have a break because you had kids, especially here in the US, make them ask." I don't get that. How do you propose to make them ask? They just might not ask anything, and instead discard the application for an unexplained gap/lack of productivity. Is there something I am missing? Or is this intended as some king of gamble. If they happen to ask then they are trapped? (I apologize if this seems like a naive query, but I honestly do not get the intent.)

@quid And thus, you may discover another of the nasty double-binds that professional women are often placed in.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

@quid, if there's a recent unexplained break on your CV, trust me, they will ask. :)  If they don't, they weren't interested and you weren't going to get the job anyway.

It also can look odd/sleazy to not give an explanation of why there was a break, however, @Noah_Snyder points out the way that negotiates between giving too much personal information (from US academic perspective) to giving enough information. Give the general outcome (parental break or parental leave or family leave or disability leave) not the personal details.

""if there's a recent unexplained break on your CV, trust me, they will ask." Do you have any experience with academic hiring committees? I have (second-hand) knowledge of a case where someone with a break was not shortlisted for an academic position, and someone without the break was when they were otherwise comparable. The break (and the fact that there was no explanation) was the reason."  Also, grant reviewers don't have a mechanism to ask.  If it's not in the application, it's not considered.

I know they do interviews like everyone else.  That's what they did to me.

The process to get an affiliate lectureship position at a non-PhD granting institution after already being involved in supervising a capstone project (and after a distinguished career in industry) is not subject to the same filtering process as a postdoc applying for a tenure-track position at a major research institution. It's a nasty catch-22, as @jakebeal pointed out. But it's not as simple as "they will ask" if they are interested. They are already discarding 90% of the applicants while shortlisting.  Do you have experience with with this filtering process (or grant application process)?

Joel, nobody does interview loops for an affiliate position so far as I know.  Those are just put up for a quick faculty vote.  To have had interviews, I must be talking about a full time academic position.

To arrogantly claim that specific group downvotes your post because they can't understand it's wisdom is a great way to harvest more downvotes... It also proves StrongBad's point: "In my experience women can be just as prejudiced as men."

Time to trim that as it applied to early voting, before I'd fleshed it out and added the quotes to explain my advice.  That said, I'm pretty sure that most workplace discrimination against women does indeed come from men.

Hah, just running through my list of things to downvote when I have enough reputation to downvote :)

@Tomáš Zato That's fine Tomas, I keep a list of twits not worth paying attention to.

In Europe, it's normal. I included this information in both my (individual) grant applications.
It's not an excuse though, it's an explanation: I stayed 2 years on maternity leave and I took care of my second son 24/24, so I was not working at all. Although my CV was considered outstanding by the grant reviewers, you cannot compare my productivity with that of someone who worked 2 years more than me, it would be utterly unfair.

What information does this add beyond the seven answers already here from seven years ago?

@AzorAhai-him- For one, it seems that this poster is a mother who listed this info on her CV, so she brings a first hand perspective.  Also, is there a convention (on stackexchange, or academia.SE specifically) against "duplicate" answers to the same question? I thought this is quite common. Besides, one can argue that it is useful to have a new answer simply because the other answers are seven years old and the situation might have changed.

@Aqualone "Also, is there a convention (on stackexchange, or academia.SE specifically) against "duplicate" answers to the same question?" yes?

It adds the perspective of a recent EU grantee, so that whoever reads this knows that it's a good thing to add maternity leave on the CV while applying to grants in the EU.


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How should I directly refer to works using the Harvard style?
I am not clear how a work should be cited directly in text using the Harvard style (specifically, the Harvard Bath variety). This is probably best explained through examples. Consider the alternatives:

In (Smith, 2000), the author explains that ...
In Smith (2000), the author explains that ...
In Article Name Goes Here (Smith, 2000), the author explains that ... (I want to avoid this very verbose although clear format, ideally.)
some other format

What's the correct way to do this?
I'd also be curious how the above applies when specific sections are cited, for example.

If you are strictly adhering to Harvard style your third verbose example would be used, and this is what I suggest to my students in writing dissertations. It is better to be clear and in this way it is also obvious that it is a citation by using the same style at every place in the corpus.
Other formats just appear if the writer was lazy; but others may have different opinions.

Thank you. It certainly is the clearest. My concern is mainly when article names happen to be long, in which case it becomes unwieldy. For articles, books, etc. with titles and subtitles, the tile alone can be used in such cases, perhaps.

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Why did most US Universities switch to semesters?
I recently meet someone attended a US school still using the quarter system.
Most of the country uses semesters, and I've heard several theories as to why, the most popular being that the semester system is easier for university to administrate.  I've also heard it is so the university breaks will line up better with K-12 school break schedule.
No one has ever explained to me why semesters or more efficient, or more family friendly.  I only know 1 person educated with the quarter system in the last 10 years.  Is there a reason most US universities adopted semesters?

Note that many universities (like the UC system) remain on quarters. And I have direct experience that the alignment of one kid's college semester with another's K-12 schedule is not very close at all...

Dartmouth adopted (and maintains) the quarter system since it makes better use of the physical campus, allowing more students with less infrastructure. Students have a schedule that requires that some of their "time off" be in Fall and Winter terms so that the campus is nearly always full. Professors also have an expectation that they will, at least occasionally, teach the Summer term rather than always having it free.

@Buffy: This might work well for Dartmouth because Hanover is one of those places people would want to be in summer :)

I'll let someone else address why schools ended up on semesters rather than quarters, but I'd note that there are some benefits to being on the "standard" academic calendar, whichever it happens to be:

Many internship programs are built around the standard academic calendar.
This is particularly extreme for law schools, where the internship experience is both very important and very structured.  Even schools on the quarter system run their law schools on the semester system.
Similarly, there are many one semester thematic programs that faculty might want to attend.  Spring semester programs typically overlap two quarters, meaning participants from quarter system schools have to either cut their participation short or arrange to be away from teaching for two thirds of the year instead of half.

So once it was clear that the semester system was predominating, other schools had incentives to hop on board even if the mildly preferred quarters on their own merits.

There's a running joke in Washington that the less-academic public school is on semesters (and therefore finishes earlier) so their students have a better shot at internships compared to the higher-ranked school which is on quarters.

There are arguments in favor of both semesters and quarters, but these seem to be inconclusive. (In the U.S.:) In fact, in the 1960s and early 1970s, many places were on semesters... but there was a fad of switching to quarters, so many switched. Then, in the 1990s, there was a fad to switch (yes, "back") to semesters.
So it does not seem to be that it was eventually discovered that semesters are better. Nor that quarters are better. Plausibly semesters are easier to administer, since there're fewer registration events per year.
On the other hand, students seem to like the shorter "marches"...

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How to deal with student's feedback about tutor
I'm a professor's assistant and design the exercises for his class. Each week the students are assigned some homework, which will be corrected by a tutor. I got an email from a student, who "complains" about his tutor.
In essence, he does not understand the grading of his tutor. While the tutor answers his questions during the weekly exercise about his grading, he does not honor the request to be more transparent in advance.
The student makes it clear, that he has no bad intentions, he would be satisfied if this is just the way it is (and he is just used to more clear grading from other classes). He didn't contact the tutor directly, because he doesn't have his email address and he wanted to raise awareness to this issue.
Now, I'm unsure how to proceed. We have a weekly meeting with all three tutors  and the professor where we talk about stuff related to the class, but I don't want to paint him in a bad light in front of the others.
Specific questions:

Should I refer to the student by name or leave him anonymous?
Should I mention this to the professor?
Should I speak with the tutor 1on1 or bring this up as a generic mention to all tutors?

The tutor is an employee? Like a grad student?

It's a mix of grads and undergrads.

Gotcha. In my sphere, a tutor would have been a third party that the student employs independently for extra help.

First understand that you are getting only one side of the issue.

You write that you are a professor's assistant; what is it that you usually do? That is, what's your job scope, what are typical responsibilities?

No, don't mention the student by name when speaking with the tutors. Yes, the professor should be made aware that there are issues, but that you will work to resolve them. The professor might need/want the name.
You may need to speak to the individual tutor to get their feedback on why they are doing what they do. There may be a good explanation that is actually student focused. Or not. But you need this feedback.
However, you need to spend some time with your group of tutors to make sure that they treat students in a uniform way. All of them should use the same criteria and the same policies. If that isn't happening then some students are being advantaged or disadvantaged over others. This, I think, is the most important element here.
But if you think a reprimand for the tutor is necessary, the professor needs to be involved in that as well.
And, it may also be necessary to reassure the student in some way that their concerns are being addressed. How you do that should also involve advice from the professor.

No reprimand at this stage. First you need to state your expectations of transparency and consistency, and give them a chance to implement them before you can reprimand them. I agree with the rest of the advice, +1.

"This, I think, is the most important element here." -- to be clear, you are stating that uniformity of treatment is more important than a student getting a good education?  "Poor grading feedback", if it exists, seems just as important.


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Response to a reviewer for a duplicated paragraph
I had a mistake in my paper and I had a duplicated paragraph in my paper. Now, reviewer told me that it is duplicated and ask me for a description for the problem.
I have deleted the paragraph but I don't know what to say in the response letter about the comment?
May you please tell me that what is a good sense response to tell to the reviewer about the paragraph. I think that it is not good to say that it was just a mistake.
Thank you

Was it just a mistake? In the future you should take one last moment to read through the paper before submitting...

@JonCuster Sure, as I told, it was just a mistake. Now, what do you think about the response to the reviewer?

If it was an oversight, just indicate that you have deleted the repeated paragraph. Simple and direct.

Say that it was a mistake and the extra paragraph was removed in the revised version.
I can not see the need for going further in this issue. You should be pragmatic, I bet that there are several important points to address in your revision and this is not one of them.

Sure, there is some other comments that I am responding to them. But because I need a good response letter, I asked this question.

Sometimes the best response is the shortest. :)

Agree. In particular, you should probably go point-by-point through the original notes, inserting your responses to each. Some of your responses will be long and technical; it's quite refreshing if there are also some that are exceptionally short (my favorites are "Done!" or "Fixed!").

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In peer-review, is it common for a reviewer to be shown and asked to comment on other reviewers' reports?
Some months ago, I was asked to review a paper for a computer science conference. I submitted my report about a week before the deadline, and I strongly recommended acceptance subject to a few minor corrections.
Just after the deadline, I was contacted by the programme committee member who originally asked me to review the paper. He sent me another reviewer's report (without a name or other identifying information) and asked for my opinion
of it. The other reviewer had recommended rejection on the grounds that an example in the paper supposedly contradicted the claim of the main theorem. I explained that the other reviewer has misunderstood the example (in fairness, the authors of the paper could have stated it more carefully), and I see that the paper was ultimately accepted.
I have never before seen or been asked to comment on another reviewer's report, but my field is primarily mathematics, where there is often only a single reviewer for a paper, and I have only reviewed a few computer science papers.
So my question is this: in fields where it is usual to have multiple reviewers, is it common to be shown and asked to comment on other reviewers' reports?
A secondary question would be: if it is not uncommon, does it mainly occur when reviewers take opposing positions on a paper, like in the situation I describe?

I don't know about other fields, but this is a fairly common practice in computer science.  Computer science has a very strong culture of significant publications in conferences, which have significantly different reviewing challenges than journal publications.
The key problem is that conferences typically have a large number of papers that all need to be dealt with by a fixed deadline and with a single iteration of revision.  This generally means that:

You have to cast a wide net for reviewers, and are likely to be trying out a "new" reviewer on several papers at once, rather than iteratively.
People typically commit to reviewing far in advance, when the program committee is formed, and may find themselves with less time than expected and no opportunity to ask for an extra couple of weeks to produce a review.
There is no opportunity for the cycles of dialogue between reviewers and authors that happen during the journal manuscript revision process: generally there is no "major revision" option, just "accept with minor revisions" and "reject."

All of this adds up to getting a collection of reviews with more uneven quality and less chance to work the differences through in dialogue.  Outlier reviews can be problematic: a very low outlier can cause an otherwise good paper to be rejected; a very good outlier can cause the authors of a rightfully rejected paper to feel that they were robbed of a publication.
One of the typical ways to try to deal with this (supported nicely by platforms like EasyChair) is to ask the reviewers to look at each others' reviews and to discuss differences.  This way, when there are major differences of opinion, the more careful and informed participants can influence the others to adjust their opinions, just as happened in your case.  Another mechanism (less commonly practiced, due to time constraints), is to allow the authors to write a rebuttal, which the reviewers are then asked to consider and see whether it leads them to adjust their scores.
There are other, more experimental methods as well---many computer science subfields take their conferences pretty seriously, and are constantly tinkering to try to improve them.

I've seen this for journal publications in computer science, too, especially when the referees disagree.  For example, my very first solo journal paper received a glowing report from one referee and a scathingly negative report from the other.  The editor forwarded my response, together with both original reports, to both referees.  (Only the positive referee replied; the paper is now listed as [1] on my CV.)

It's common for conferences that use the EasyChair system, for example, to show all reviews to all reviewers of a paper. Once you submit your review, you can see any of the others. With these kinds of conferences, the Program Committee (or a subset of it) often actually meets in some form, online or in person, to discuss all the papers under their scrutiny. This gives them an opportunity to figure out these kinds of problems. A good committee chair may ask one reviewer to revise their review in light of others if there was a mistake or misunderstanding.
That being said, I've never had this happen with journal reviewing. There, it seems more common for editors to take all the reviews into consideration and make these kinds of calls for themselves.

This isn't exactly the same situation, but in the first round of a paper I submitted in applied math, I received a glowing and a lukewarm/slightly negative review. When it came back to me, there was also what seemed like a tie-breaker opinion pretty much only saying "clearly worth publishing, but not in current form" (the paper was essentially copied and pasted from a thesis chapter which that review continued to say what it looked like). As the 3rd review made no substantial other comments, someone had clearly been asked to opine on the other 2 reviews, also underlined by, in later rounds, only getting feedback from the first two (obvious because of cross-references they made).
This gives anecdotal feedback to your question 2 - for journals, not conferences. It was a good journal in a rather dead field, in case that matters. I went to industry after and cannot provide insight into how common the above is.

As an editor, I can say that getting "tiebreaker" reviews (who may or may not be informed of the others) is fairly common practice. It also often emerges naturally from the flexibility in number of reviews required vs. the somewhat iterative process of getting reviews in the door: when the decision is clear, you can stop at the the minimum; when the decision is contested, you need the full suite of reviewers.

It is apparent that the standards vary between fields. In field with which I am familiar (in the Sciences) seeing and commenting on other reviews is not at all common (in fact I had not heard about the process before). Reviews typically go to an editor and is conveyed to the authors. Even in publications with open reviews where anyone can comment on the manuscript, there are specifically appointed reviewers that provide reviews that will be posted online as the manuscript is closed for further comments. this is the time when the authors get to respond and adjust their manuscript for continued consideration.
So the procedure you describe is not common to al fields by any means.

Similar to my field - I have never had this done as a reviewer or author, nor have I ever heard of it being done.

"the Sciences" is a rather vogue field name :-)

It is fairly common in computer science for program committee members to have a large number of papers assigned to them for review. They will often review some subset of these papers themselves and send the others to sub-reviewers.  (EasyChair makes it easy to do this and to keep track of everything.)  Usually, the program committee members will see all the reviews, whether from other members or from sub-reviewers. The committee will discuss the reviews and try to iron out any disagreements.  In some cases, but usually fairly few cases, this may involve going back to sub-reviewers, making them aware of disagreements, and asking for their help in resolving the issues. From your question, I infer that you were a sub-reviewer for one of the program committee members.  In that case, being shown other reviews and asked to comment on them is not the most common situation but it happens for a small percentage of the papers in a typical conference (well, typical among the conferences that I have some experience with).


text:
Writing Systematic Literature Review on the same topic
I was planning to write and also started writing a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on a specific topic. Unfortunately, while writing, I found out that an SLR on the exact same topic has been published most recently, probably when I was in the process of writing. Am I allowed to write it or stop writing my SLR?
If yes, then please do also tell me how do I cite that new paper, I mean what justification can I give to that paper being already published.
Thanks

In principle, you should only conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) if:

none has already been done recently;
the only ones recently done are deficient in some way (that you will clearly explain and correct); or
you adopt a very different perspective that adds something significantly valuable that is different from the recently published good review (e.g. you do a meta-analysis, unlike the other review; or you deep-dive into a specific subset of the literature that the other review covered only briefly).

In general, unless the recent review is quite bad, I think that the third option is the only good justification for publishing another SLR on the same topic so soon. Note: I am talking about justification from the journal editor's perspective of why they would agree to publish your review; you have to think in this way whenever considering getting anything published. Moreover, the third option is the safest, since you don't need to offend anyone by trying to make up bad stuff to say about the recent review to give the impression that yours is better--you only need to prove that yours is valuable in a very different way, not that it is better. And finally, the third option might sometimes be easier because you definitely should not duplicate the work that the recent review has already done--rather, when you find your own unique perspective or approach, you should spend all your time and effort on only that.
But if you cannot find a new, valuable perspective to adopt and the recent review is quite good, then I don't see anything for you to do other than appreciate their review and thank them for saving you from having done all that work yourself. Of course, in that case you would have no standalone literature review article to publish, but you could probably salvage the work you have done so far as bits and pieces of other related research that you may do.

Thanks for the assistance


text:
How can unaffilitated individuals sign up for Web of Knowledge / Science?
I am conducting a meta-analysis of literature and several individuals recommended that I use Web of Knowledge, instead of just Google Scholar. The specific part of it I would need would be Web of Science.
I am not affiliated with any institution; I'm just an independent researcher. I don't see any option to sign up?
On the sign-in page it says:

NOT REGISTERED?
Take advantage of many great features when you register.
Access Web of Science from outside your institution using **roaming** capabilities
Set up citation alerts whereby you are notified by email when an article on your Alerts list has been cited

Learn more about the benefits of registering for an account

However, when I follow the "Learn more" link I don't see any option to sign up and there are no further mentions of this "roaming" option.

Probably, like with many other products not usually marketed at the general public, you'd  use the "Contact is" link to ask them.

I originally misunderstood the "roaming" feature to sound like individual access, but I see now it just means remote access for institutional users.

First, as @Anyon suggested in a comment, email their contact form to see if they have a practical solution for you.
If that doesn't help, then I don't have a definitive solution to your very real problem, but I can point you to some possibilities that come from the fantastic article, "You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do?":

Go to your closest local university library. Their onsite wifi network might give you the online access you need. (I suspect from your related question [Meta-analysis using Google Scholar - are all years equally complete? that you might want to scrape the site, so you might need wifi guest access within the building to do that.)
If there is no nearby university library, try the largest nearby local library and see if they have access.
Try to get some sort of research affiliate status with a university, perhaps by finding an academic coauthor.

Sorry, but I cannot recommend the options in that article of questionable legality.
Best wishes; I feel your pain and hope you work something out! Please update your question with an epilogue if you do find a solution; I'm sure it will help a lot of people in your situation!


text:
How to reference the current year within a paper?
Whilst writing a paper about the use of digital technologies within education, it became apparent that it would be beneficial to reference the current year (in this case, 2016) to give the paragraph context, particularly with the rapid pace of change within this topic.
What is the best manner to make this kind of reference in the APA style?
Ideas:

At the time of writing (2016), current computing trends...
Currently (2016), computing trends...
As of 2016, current computing trends...

I don't think it's normal to reference the current year. It's sort of implied that all statements in your paper are limited to the time of writing, unless stated otherwise. And it's rather trivial to find the submission date, if necessary. So, something like "At the time of writing, current computing trends..." sounds perfectly fine to me.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, the only reason I think contextually it would be helpful is that I'm building an argument around the need to refresh educational technology constantly to keep devices current and usable for students; and that more than 3 years have passed since the last round of government funding for such devices, therefore passing the costs onto schools - which I argue isn't sustainable. That said, I suppose the argument could still stand without a specific date mentioned.

I think "current" may be a bit redundant with 2016, and certainly will become wrong in the future. I would either say specifically 2016, or say current and let your publication date make clear when "current" refers to, or reference the specific years of the sources you might be citing "As of Paul's annual report in 2016, computing trends..." I'll keep this as a comment rather than an answer because I have no idea what the specific APA style would be for this question or if APA even has a guideline on this.

@BryanKrause Can you please turn this comment into an answer so that I can vote it up?


text:
Why do researchers sometimes use extremely complicated English sentences to convey their meaning?
I will begin with a disclaimer, I am not an English native speaker, but I can speak fluent English and understand English in almost all research papers I read.
However, occasionally I come across some papers published in peer reviewed journals  with ridiculously complicated sentence structure using relic non-technical vocabulary that no one in the past century has heard of!
Here is one of my favorites:

The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally.

Whatever that means!
Don't get me wrong, the content of such papers can sometimes be informative, but I can't help but get frustrated over such over complication in language! I can spend days trying to decipher what the author was trying to convey and I occasionally give up on the entire paper.
So my question is, why do authors feel the need to hide their amazing ideas/contributions behind such language barrier? Would it hurt to write the paper in a simple fashion such that any reader with the required technical background can understand it?

auth'rs, wherefore thee doth this?

Is the paper unnecessarily complicated or the words are uncommon? Sometimes the proper term can be somewhat obscure, but such precision is often justified in technical works. (Same argument applies to structure, you can avoid misunderstandings by precisely expressing the ideas)

Seems like someone is copying others text, and adding improvements with such heavy words.

Occasionally papers are written as jokes. It's worth checking if the release date was 1 Apr (or 31 Mar to appear in emails on 1 Apr).

@Coconut LOL. Can you share your other favorites please?

Lots of researchers have bad English and high pride - it is a bad combination when one needs help in improving a manuscript.

I am in mathematics, which is famous for quite dense language. However, dense language is usually easier to parse, once you get the hang of it. I am not sure this is exactly what you are experiencing, but research English sometimes is clearer when complicated at a glance.

@Coconut It means the answer is 42.

Thee is singular and in tho objective case.

I posed this question to myself a while back, and was actually going to make it a computational linguistics personal project to examine the language of academics as compared to other contexts and genres. Alas, I have a million things to investigate, and no time. I would be very excited to see some actual research done on the language of academic writing. It seems to me that on the whole, disregarding field-specific lexical items, that academic language is much more dense than many other genres of writing. The reasons behind that, I do not know...

Re "...relic non-technical vocabulary...":  Perhaps the problem here is that the people who write papers tend to be intelligent and well-educated people who are, presumably, writing for other intelligent and well-educated people, not the least common denominator of popular culture.  Such language is perhaps a bit elitist, but hardly a relic.

Just give thanks you don't have to read legal opinions like these.

Though what, may it be asked, is clarity in writing? Clarity to one may be obscurity to another and vice versa. - And on a slightly more 'normal' note: Quite often the appearance of complexity comes from jargon inherent to a subject, which means a paper or phrase becomes more clear with increased experience.

@E.P. Those paragraphs don't seem to bad - if you have read Dostoyevsky in the past. Alas, I don't find quite the peace and time to settle down with a good book any more...

I can almost believe your example sentence. But that word "fathoms" is completely out of place. Are you sure you have it right? If so, I don't think a native English speaker can have written it.

Certainly there are portions of psychological factors ... either ego booster or being sheep herd.

Someone has tried to prove that the selection process of that journal is broken by sending gibberish, and being successfully published. This has happened multiple times.

@ChrisCirefice: There's already a huge body of research on the features of academic writing. You may want to have a look e.g. at Doug Biber's (2006) University language:  A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers.

@Coconut: What's the reference for your quote "The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally"?

@Coconut How can that be your favorite quote if you don't understand what it means ?

I always thought that native English speakers had the advantages when memorizing a definition or a quote

This reminds me of Einstein's quote "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

A lot of good people leave behind a lot of good quotes (or advises to follow), but nobody ever cares to follow them

I have never seen a paper with such English.

Please take extended discussion to [chat].

Please use a > quote instead of coding tags, AFAIK this confuses screen readers.

Hubris, or so I've always assumed.

@Flying Gambit, in the wise words of Mort "You don't have to know it to love it!" (Mort is some sort of fur-ball lemur in the children’s cartoon Madagascar) Point being, emotional connection like humour is often because a connection is realized but still can't be fully rationalized (nor would the average person be inclined to do so). We can learn so much from Mort.

Erm, for vanity, arrogance, stuff like that, no ? To feel and/or look superior, to distance themselves from "commoners", to position themselves above as many other people as possible, etc. Or is the academic environment so much different from basically any other one where Homo Sapiens is the actor?

@ChrisCirefice Not sure if it has been mentioned before, but you could take a look at Literatin to get the complexity of an English text. It's not flawless, but a fun tool to use.

That example is straight up bad english. I can *sort of * parse what its trying to say, but its incredibly badly written, I suspect by someone with poor language skills and a thesaurus

"The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally." This, in a way, looks like a thesaurus-based attempt to defeat some plagiarism filter, where one replaces original words (e.g. "estimates in a collaborative form") with their synonyms individually looked up from a thesaurus

@jcaron https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/, for randomly generated glory. They've got videos of their randomly generated talks at conferences, as well (and PDFs of the slides). I've spent hours, in tears, playing with their generator.

@jcaron As an aside, on that page find "The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking" and read through the conference rejection letter conversation. The conference's response to a request for reviews is absolutely spectacular.

Voting to close because this question presupposes that academics get together to come up with the most complicated way to word things.

@MadJack So in your eyes, "Why do people of kind x do y" is the same question as "What reason did people of kind x have for choosing y as their preferred method at their secret meeting"?

I've run into variations of this a lot in economics, and have a few observations.

Being good at research in your field is an entirely separate skill from being able to communicate ideas clearly.  Two Nobel laureates really embody the extremes here for me, both with brilliant research.  One the one side is Paul Krugman, who, regardless of what you think of his public persona, is an excellent writer.  His skill comes across even in his research papers, and even in his work from the '70s.  On the other hand is Amartya Sen, who it often seems to me can't express an idea clearly in one sentence if it could equally well be conveyed in fifteen.  Granted, Sen wasn't born in an English speaking country, but he left for school in England in 1953, so he's hardly new at this.
There appears to be some institutional momentum.  That is, you learn to be a researcher in your field by reading the work of past researchers.  That frames your concept of what quality writing in your field looks like, which you then adopt to some degree.
It can be a signaling method. This is related to the previous point.  For professionals used to reading papers written with heavy use of jargon or unnecessarily-big words, writing this way can make your work seem like it belongs.  I often feel like the use of latin phrases really falls into this category.  I myself enjoy the occasional ceteris paribus, for example, but it really isn't a very defensible practice over writing all else equal.  It isn't even shorter!

I think many of us could benefit from thinking about writing more clearly, but it also makes sense to know your audience and write for them.

Being good at research in your field is an entirely separate skill from being able to communicate ideas clearly. -- I strongly disagree, your example notwithstanding. The ability to clearly communicate ideas is an integral component of being good at research. A few outliers are so good at some parts of the research process that they don't need to be good at other parts, but they are outliers.

@JeffE You don't believe you can be good at research but bad at writing? That seems like an... unusual claim.

I have many unusual opinions. Yes, I believe researchers who cannot communicate are bad researchers. The entire point of research is to get new ideas into other people's heads.

@JeffE Lars Onsager, a Nobel prize winner who managed to solve deep and difficult problems that no one else could touch, was notoriously bad at explaining things at an accessible level.  Follow my link for some anecdotes.  Solving problems and "getting ideas into people's heads" are separate things, as Jeff said.

In your discussion of "all else equal", I would be careful with changing things into "simple English phrases" as a rule. English uses a lot of phrasal verbs and set phrases like "all else equal" which may be difficult for a nonnative speaker. For example, "disassemble" is easier to just look up in a dictionary than a phrase like "take apart", which has a special meaning that may be hard to find when looking up the words individually (if the reader doesn't realize it's a phrasal verb), especially in a foreign language dictionary, especially when "take" is included in so many phrasal verbs.

@JeffE No, entire point of communication, and not research, is to get new ideas into other people's heads. High quality research might never be communicated to anyone else at all. Now, in "modern" science, failure to communicate research results would strictly limit career possibilities in academia; but it can lead to extreme success in various business endeavors for example.

@user2338816 The point of communication is to get ideas into other people's heads.  Research is a particular form of communication where those ideas are actually new.

@JeffE The goal of a researcher is to predict the experiment result as precisely as possible. The goal of a teacher is to get ideas into others' heads.

@kubanczyk Not all research is experimental research.  But all good researchers are teachers, even if they're only teaching other researchers.  (Also, all True Scotsmen love haggis.)

@Szabolcs: Sounds like it should be counted as a valid research paper if you translate a valuable, but unreadable research paper into something that people can read and understand, even if you add not a single original idea.

@user2338816 research - creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.  How are you going to increase the stock of knowlege without communicating with others?

@emory Easy -- keep results of your research to yourself for personal gain. Happens all the time everywhere. That's how much of business works. One consequence is industrial espionage. There is a huge amount of research that is closely held.

There are many examples of researchers in e.g. mathematics who are so poor at explaining things that they don't get cited for their influences, and others reinvent their ideas independently later, communicate the well, and are perceived as the original inventors. The latter ones are successful researchers.

@user2338816, ever wondered why so many research journals are called "Communications in [insert field]"? Research without communication is hardly possible in most fields today. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

My point has nothing to do with whether you should be good at both research and communication, or whether it's better to be. But it's strikingly obvious to me that you can be good at one and not the other.  I listed one example, and there are others.  Also, just because research is written using unnecessarily complex language, like the OP asked about, doesn't mean another expert in the field can't read it. Obviously people read and understand Amartya Sen's work; he's still not a very good communicator.

Sometimes explaining deeply intricate and specific things requires deeply intricate and specific language in order to be precise.  I feel this answer is lacking unless it hits on the option of sometimes the complication is necessary.

@JeffE Think of it this way: If a researcher is good in their field but bad at writing, they're still a good researcher because they've essentially converted a difficult problem (which perhaps only they, as a highly skilled researcher, can solve) into merely a problem of interpreting a poorly communicated idea (which a heck of a lot more people can solve). So they've at least completed the hard part of a problem. The rest just takes somebody to trivially rephrase it. In this view, a good researcher turns a difficult problem into a different, more trivially solvable problem (bad writing).

@JasonC I almost wanted to upvote your comment, but then you blew it by trivializing good exposition. It is not a trivial problem to rephrase complicated ideas in a lucid manner; this is precisely why many good researchers are notoriously terrible at communication.

@silvascientist It is trivial for others to interpret and rephrase a poor communicator's ideas in a lucid manner, certainly compared to solving the problem to begin with. It's why ideas from guys like Lars Onsager (referenced above) still managed to make it out into the wild despite being poorly communicated. Note that, reading between the lines, you and I seem agree: Good researchers can be terrible at communication. I'm countering JeffE's point above, not anything else (and to be clear, I mean JeffE, not Jeff).

I don't know any such papers, so I would argue they are at least not common in Computer Science (the example that you are apparently using). However, I have on occasion stumbled upon similar sentences in a slightly different context, namely when reviewing statements of purpose or job applications.
My bet is that nobody is actively "trying to hide their contributions behind language barriers", but that instead the writers are not native speakers and those sentences are an artifact of translating idioms, common sentence structures, or generally what "sounds good" from their native language into English. Common such "idiomatic translation errors" include overly long sentences for German speakers, omitting articles when they shouldn't for various Asian speakers, and using flowery and over-the-top language for Persians. I am sure there are many other examples.

For the specific case given by coconut in the comments I'd be pretty sure of this.

I've observed Asian speakers to also gratuitously add articles in places where they shouldn't be as an overcorrection.

I would say that non-native language users plays some part, but I have seen this sort of language used - though not to the extreme example cited in Coconut's comment - by native speakers as well.

“My bet is that nobody is actively ’trying to hide their contributions behind language barriers’” — I am 100% sure that this is false, and that certain researchers do in fact hide their vacuous ideas behind inflated speech. This has been observed for a long time and with particular frequency in certain disciplines (ahem positivism). In fact, there are many modern researchers do the same, and have been attacked for precisely this, although it’s become more fashionable to use (misapplied) statistics to obscure lack of substance.

@MarchHo: You might say they have an hypercorrection habit

Some scientists do tend to overuse jargon and complicated language in their writing, for various reasons.  Some might do so because they think it looks more impressive and "professional", or because they're so used to their own jargon that they don't realize others might have trouble following it, or simply because they've seen others writing in the same way and think that it's how you're supposed to write scientific articles.
However, the example sentence that you cite:

"The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally."

is much, much worse than just typical over-complicated academic writing.  Indeed, that sentence looks as if it was deliberately obfuscated to hide its meaning, or possibly the lack of any.  I can only assume that it was either:

badly translated from another language, possibly by a computer;
plagiarized from someone else's writing, with words randomly replaced by (near) synonyms to throw off automatic plagiarism detectors; or
actually generated entirely by a computer algorithm such as SCIgen.

In any case, I have never seen such writing in any reputable academic publication, but only in pseudo-academic "fake journals" that try to pass themselves off as legitimate academic journals, but have no peer review or other quality control whatsoever, and thus will publish any nonsense sent to them as long as the author pays them for it.  Basically, the point of such bogus publications is to let people pretend that they've done real scientific research and published it (and so hopefully qualify for degrees, grants and positions requiring evidence of past research), even though they lack the skills to actually do it.
If you find that a paper you're reading contains garbled writing like this, I would suggest treating it as a strong hint that the entire paper may in fact be meaningless nonsense, and not worth even trying to make sense of.

I believe this answer addressed one point that the others didn't: sometimes it looks like some researchers feel obligated to fill their writing with ornamental gibberish, so to praise their writing or some other sort of narcissism.

Yes, that example seems to be a joke. It looks like the sort of thing SCIgen and related programs come up with.

Great answer, and an excellent point addressing the superficial nature of such writing style, normally at home in marketing and sales. I just saw this in a car brochure: "The mature design of the exterior cocoons a human-centric cabin made for the pleasure of driver and passengers alike." Information conveyed: "Interior is user-friendly". The word choice and redundancy is there to elicit positive feelings and tries to bring the reader's attention to things beyond the actual information conveyed - marketing texts and OP's example from academia alike.

@user25972 Actually, what I was trying to get at is that I'm pretty sure the OP's example sentence doesn't convey any meaning. It's just random word salad. It might have been a meaningful sentence before somebody mutilated it with a thesaurus, but if so, any meaning it used to have has been all but destroyed. (If I had to guess, I'd say the original meaning might have been something like "The algorithm combines a global breadth first search with a local depth first search." But that's just a wild guess.)

@IlmariKaronen I was mainly referring to this part: "Indeed, that sentence looks as if it was deliberately obfuscated to hide its meaning, or possibly the lack of any." It's true that I took OP's sentence at face value, assuming it was taken from a context that lent it credibility and it wasn't meant to be complete "lorem ipsum". Thank you for clarifying.

Let me mention some points from two articles on this topic, with a request for more such sources:

Steven Pinker, Why Academic Writing Stinks, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014. (Paywalled link, download link.)
George Gopen and Judith Swan, The Science of Scientific Writing, American Scientist, November–December 1990.

In the first article, Pinker considers three explanations commonly given, and gives three of his own.
The cynical Explanation 1 is that there are certain fields, and certain academics, in whose case the bad writing is intentional: to bamboozle the readers, or as "emperor's clothing". (For likely examples, see Dennis Dutton's The Bad Writing Contest: 1996–1998 and Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate.) Even in the unfathomable example given here, this is a possibility. But having recognized this, we can move to the more interesting cases, where the obscurity is unintentional.
Then Pinker considers Explanation 2, academics’ “self-serving” one: that there is inherent complexity in what is being discussed, and therefore difficult writing is unavoidable. Although this is true to some extent (every field has its jargon), it is not a complete explanation. Even expert readers are baffled by articles from their own sub-sub-subfield. Pinker gives this example:

Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.

which he considers "not as concise, accurate, or scientific" as the plain:

Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false.

He also mentions an Explanation 3: that gatekeepers of journals expect difficult language. This is not true: every field has some papers that are well-written.
Instead, Pinker comes up with three other explanations (which I reproduce here in reverse order).
Explanation 4 is that academics simply have few (or no) incentives for writing well. Clarity requires practice, showing drafts to readers, and a toolbox of skills. This is a lot of work and the profession does not reward it (directly, at least). (And there are even some incentives against writing well, along the lines of the recent article on perverse incentives in academia.)
Explanation 5 is the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, it becomes hard for you to imagine what it is like for someone else to not know it. (Related terms: “false consensus”, “illusory transparency”, etc.)
For example, jargon and abbreviations that you personally use frequently can become second-nature to you while remaining opaque to readers (even your colleagues). There are names in cognitive psychology for two phenomena that explain why authors fail to think like their readers: “chunking” and “functional fixity” (jargon, but he explains them).

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed.
[…]
They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails.
A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

The other explanation from this article (the first and longest one given by Pinker) is based on a theory of different styles of writing, in terms of what kind of conversation authors imagine themselves to be having with their readers. Instead of writing in "classic style" (writing as presentation, for directing the reader's gaze towards the truth, successful when clear and simple), academic writing is often in a blend of two styles: a "practical style" (writing in a fixed template, for satisfying a reader's need for a particular kind of information) and "self-conscious style". This is Explanation 6, but it needs a bit of elaboration on what this "self-conscious style" is, and how it manifests.
In self-conscious style, "the writer's chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise".

Their goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild.

Pinker considers many common flaws in academic writing to be symptoms of this style: metadiscourse (writing about the writing itself, as in "The preceding paragraph demonstrated…" which could be "As we have seen…"), professional narcissism (talking about the world of their profession, rather than about the world of the things they're studying: "In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have…"), apologizing (about how complicated/controversial their topic is), shudder quotes, hedging, and metaconcepts/nominalizations.
This last one is especially interesting: academics really do bucket their ideas using certain abstractions, but forget to unpack them for the reader. Plus, English makes it easy to make nouns out of verbs: instead of postponing something you can implement its postponement, and so on. The example from Explanation 2 above has many instances of this, as does this:

Prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance.

rather than

When we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice.

The point is that the authors may actually be thinking in the former terms and categories, and fail to write in "classic style" for the reader from the reader's point of view. I believe this is important enough to count as a separate Explanation 7.
And regardless of whether authors are thinking/writing in classic style or self-conscious style, it seems to me that many of these bad habits are things one can easily pick up from reading other academic writing, which is Explanation 8.

In the articles included in the same download, there is an overlapping explanation (Explanation 9): academics have many reasons for using jargon, and not all of them are good for the reader:

Academics turn to jargon for a wide variety of reasons: to display their erudition, to signal membership in a disciplinary community, to demonstrate their mastery of complex concepts, to cut briskly into a continuing scholarly conversation, to push knowledge in new directions, to challenge readers’ thinking, to convey ideas and facts efficiently, to play around with language.
(Helen Sword, Inoculating Against Jargonitis)

The other article (The Science of Scientific Writing by Gopen & Swan) is very valuable on some precise ways in which academic (especially scientific) writing is harder to understand than it needs to be. Its main point is that there are certain structural cues that readers unconsciously use for interpretation, but authors do not always satisfy those expectations. (Some of its points are also in this video, accompanied by this handout.)
For example, they consider the following paragraph:

The smallest of the URF's (URFA6L), a 207-nucleotide (nt) reading frame overlapping out of phase the NH2-terminal portion of the adenosinetriphosphatase (ATPase) subunit 6 gene has been identified as the animal equivalent of the recently discovered yeast H+-ATPase subunit 8 gene. The functional significance of the other URF's has been, on the contrary, elusive. Recently, however, immunoprecipitation experiments with antibodies to purified, rotenone-sensitive NADH-ubiquinone oxido-reductase [hereafter referred to as respiratory chain NADH dehydrogenase or complex I] from bovine heart, as well as enzyme fractionation studies, have indicated that six human URF's (that is, URF1, URF2, URF3, URF4, URF4L, and URF5, hereafter referred to as ND1, ND2, ND3, ND4, ND4L, and ND5) encode subunits of complex I. This is a large complex that also contains many subunits synthesized in the cytoplasm.

If you asked people why it was hard to read, most would mention the technical vocabulary and background knowledge required. These are obviously necessary, so one might consider such paragraphs impossible to improve. However, that is not the whole problem.
At the level of sentences, the article discusses some rough principles:

In the first sentence above, there are 23 words between the subject ("The smallest") and the verb ("has been identified"). Readers tend to treat what comes between them as an interruption, and pay less attention to it.
A sentence is expected to make a single point, or serve a single function. It is best if this appears at the end of the sentence (the "stress position").
At the beginning of sentences (the "topic position", what the sentence is about), the reader expects perspective/linkage and context.
So, readers are helped most when sentences consistently start with old information (linkage) and end with emphasis on new information. “In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing today.”

(The above is a crude summary; you can read the article for nuances.)
Based on some of these principles (and with some guesswork about the authors’ intentions), it rewrites the above paragraph to:

The smallest of the URF's, URFA6L, has been identified as the animal equivalent of the recently discovered yeast H+-ATPase subunit 8 gene; but the functional significance of other URF's has been more elusive. Recently, however, several human URF's have been shown to encode subunits of rotenone-sensitive NADH-ubiquinone oxido-reductase. This is a large complex that also contains many subunits synthesized in the cytoplasm; it will be referred to hereafter as respiratory chain NADH dehydrogenase or complex I. Six subunits of Complex I were shown by enzyme fractionation studies and immunoprecipitation experiments to be encoded by six human URF's (URF1, URF2, URF3, URF4, URF4L, and URF5); these URF's will be referred to subsequently as ND1, ND2, ND3, ND4, ND4L and ND5.

This still has all the jargon, but readers who understand it are more likely to arrive at the same interpretation as what the author is trying to say, and more easily.
But many authors consistently violate these principles and do the exact opposite (putting new information first without linkage, and old information at the end where it receives emphasis), for which the article has the following (continuing my numbering in this answer) Explanation 10:

The source of the problem is not hard to discover: Most writers produce prose linearly (from left to right) and through time. As they begin to formulate a sentence, often their primary anxiety is to capture the important new thought before it escapes. Quite naturally they rush to record that new information on paper, after which they can produce at their leisure contextualizing material that links back to the previous discourse. Writers who do this consistently are attending more to their own need for unburdening themselves of their information than to the reader's need for receiving the material.

I think parts of this answer may be guilty of the same intellectual overcomplications that it calls out. "readers look for the arrival of the verb, especially immediately after the grammatical subject." Really?

Thanks for posting this-- best answer in my opinion as it includes actual research on the subject.  My own pet peeves are papers that begin "There has been much recent activity/interest  in the field of ...." and the use of passive-voice everywhere.

@WeckarE. Good catch, you're right! With that sentence, this answer was itself guilty of using unnecessary jargon by thinking in the author's concepts, rather than the readers’. I replaced it with something that should be clearer (there are 23 words between the subject ("The smallest") and the verb ("has been identified")). Can you take another look? (To be clear, note that the issue called out is not exactly “intellectual overcomplications” (like "overthinking it"): sometimes the topic really is technical (I'm sure grammar is relevant to the effect here); the problem is with the writing.)

I think the example of the sentence followed by true or false is incomplete. The reader might infer that 'true' or 'false' is there to indicate the veracity of the preceding sentence, but only the first sentence say so, the second doesn't. The sentences thus don't mean exactly the same thing. In this case it can be fixed by adding "indicating veracity of the preceding sentence" (still clearer than the original sentence and captures the missing bit).

@KeithDavies You are right that the two sentences don't mean exactly the same thing. In fact, this may be one of the ways in which the plainer sentence is more accurate and scientific. The original sentence was trying to do two things at once: say what the participants read, and why the experimenters put "true" and "false" there. Simply saying "veracity was either affirmed or denied" leaves it unclear whether this was just the experimenters' intention, or the participants were informed (if so, the reader should be told that explicitly, else better to directly state what the participants saw).

@ShreevatsaR totally fair. In fact, I first read the example as if the sentence was presented as a survey of sorts. This was totally inaccurate!

@ShreevatsaR ... that said, on rereading I'm not entirely convinced that the original sentence was all bad. "Participants" is okay, "read assertions" (probably each is a sentence, but not necessarily), "whose veracity was either affirmed or denied" (might be simplified) "[(by the word 'true' or 'false' respectively) after the assertion]" is probably the least-bad replacement I can quickly come up with that precisely matches (what I expect was the) intent. Assuming 'true' and 'false' are the 'assessment words', I can imagine 'mostly' as one. I did not do well on true/false tests in school.

+1 for the Steven Pinker article, which I remember very well from a couple of years ago.

@KeithDavies We have a "curse of knowledge" thing here: after you've understood a sentence and reread it enough times, it stops seeming so bad, and you can no longer say what it seems like on first reading: you need a fresh reader. Here, again, I think you're pointing out that the original sentence and Pinker's rewriting aren't equivalent. Note that the plainer English version was not a context-free translation, but Pinker's best determination based on knowing the "sub-sub-subfield", the paper and the data. In whatever way the original sentence means something else, those are its flaws.

@KeithDavies For example, as you point out, the original sentence does not make clear that the "assertions" are in fact sentences; that the "assessment words" are precisely "true" and "false" and do not include things like "mostly"; and as for the vague agent-less "veracity was either affirmed…", I can only repeat what I said in my first comment to you. True, the original sentence can have interpretations other than the plainer version. That is why it is less accurate and less scientific: for good science you want the reader to have precisely the "true" interpretation, not a broader one.

Precision.
Writing a lot by myself I find that I tend towards long, complex sentences whenever it is important that I communicate a point as precisely and correctly as possible.
The use of difficult terminology is not really an argument here, as papers are usually geared towards an audience that can be assumed to understand the terms. Sure, as a non-expert in the field half of them will be like chinese to the reader, but such a reader is not the target audience.
On the contrary, specific terminology is used for the express purpose of precision. It has a well-defined, specific meaning within the field. If you read RFCs in computer science, for example, even seemingly simple words like "shall" and "must" have exactly defined meanings. Same in legal texts, where seemingly normal english words have a specific, precisely defined legal meaning. Every branch of science has its own terms that are understood by those practicing it.

Suffering from... verbosity myself, I can tell the aim is, indeed, accuracy. Using long sentences often serves to narrow things down, and obscure terms are chosen from among synonyms because they best fit what's on your mind.

Indeed, a big problem with language is that, in general, the shorter a word is, the broader the scope of meaning(s) to which it applies. Nailing down which meaning is intended then requires qualifiers.  To the casual observer, this can look like deliberately puffing up the language to seem more sophisticated, but often it's just what one must do to avoid being misinterpreted.

@kaay You can be accurate with few words, but it takes many to be precise.

@jiggunjer wondefully phrased, and captures in fourteen words what was about to take me a paragraph. Exactly so -- precision can involve long and convoluted language because it conveys exactly what the writer means, where 'simpler language' would be insufficiently precise.

A few things I've seen in my young career:

Age – A researcher who is nearing retirement age today would have been learning the ropes in the late '70s to early '80s. If they stay past retirement age they could be older still. The language changes over time.

Language proficiency – There are many researchers for whom English is a second language. When both the authors and the readers are using a non-native language there is bound to be some difficulty in communicating. Consider what happens when a German author is trying to translate the German in their head into English, and the Chinese reader is trying to translate the English on the page into Chinese in their head.

Background - One of my advisers was a literature undergrad. He didn't let the language get out of hand, but also wasn't afraid to use less common vocabulary if it was particularly suitable for the situation. Even with non-language backgrounds someone might find a concept or jargon term from an earlier part of their life to be particularly appropriate, without realizing how specific it is.

Laziness - Lastly, and most unfortunately, is that there are many papers that are just poorly written and poorly edited. Everyone understands that papers submitted for review are not totally finalized, but some have glaring typos or things like sentences that end

It's obvious that some of those papers had not been even cursorily proofread.

Professional or Scientific English has not changed significantly since the 1970s, AFAICT. Mostly you've had some added jargon for newer technology.

While it is possible that the outcome might be problematic, oftentimes I find that there are some concepts that are difficult to explain succinctly. I would not call these terms Jargon, but rather very contextual and specific.
Insofar as those words are appropriate for the audience, and maybe even clarified for those who are unfamiliar, then there should be no issue.
I don't think that the meaning is hidden, but it comes down to the depth of the topic. What may appear to be one word is actually representing 20 words and several ideas. As long as the sophistication of the word is a measure of the depth of the issue. I would say that the author is being masterful, rather than doing a disservice to himself or herself.
Whenever I see such a term, I actually think of it as a marker that the topic is more nuanced and complex. The additional time you spend, is not merely a 1:1 translation, but could actually involve understanding many different meanings.

Actually, there's nothing wrong with jargon that evokes a very specific meaning, where the vernacular equivalent is so ill-defined as to be worthless in a technical discussion.

In my field, computer science, papers are typically 7 to 12 pages long. That means authors have to take very complicated ideas and compress them into only a few thousand words! In my experience, our first drafts usually go significantly over the page limit. In our first revisions, we pick out a few ideas that aren't necessary to express our main point and cut them, saving us a page or two. Then, we're a handful of paragraphs over the page limit, and in order to keep all of the rest of the paper - which we've decided we really need - there are only two things to do: Play with the formatting, and reword sentences to be shorter.
When we shorten our sentences, it is oftentimes very difficult to avoid making them dense to the point of being a little difficult to understand. It's a careful balancing act between aggressively editing down the length of our paper and still keeping both the full meaning of our paper and an acceptable level of readability.
(I understand that computer science's short papers are rather unusual for an entire field, so maybe this isn't the case in other fields.)

These are some personal findings on this topic:

The word must not collide with the use of other words. In normal speaking, you know... (hand waving)... it's like... In a journal a word must have a clear specific meaning, which is something that the normal speaking is not and English is one of the worst languages for various reasons. The good thing in the wide vocabulary is that there is likely to exist a word that is more specific about what you mean like proffer which is a bit similar to offer, but not quite. The another thing is that you often end up saying things like: "from now on we shall mean with the word humpty a state of being dumpty" You then may not use the word humpty out of this definition. You may want to use a word that means something similar, but such that will not be used elsewhere.
Being specific means that one often needs to explain the idea more, which may end up making really long, in the case of a journal about 59 words, sentences, in order to convey the meaning in the manner that follows the procedure found appropriate in the journals, and which then having been used for a long time is customary.
Non-linear complexity of reasoning and concepts; something that a human languages were not indeed made to convey.
Non-native speakers make awkward translations. Something you may see probably already in this message. While being highly trained to write their thoughts in grammatically right English, the sentence may end up being a mess, but still right.

In peer reviewed journals you have to communicate your results in a very precise way. You can't just say things, for any statement made in the article it has to be immediately clear how that statement is arrived at. It's not allowed for this to become clear later, not even a sentence later. Either references are given at the end of the sentence or it is pointed out in that sentence (e.g. by saying "as we shall demonstrate in the next section"). It should be clear that writing in this way consistently throughout an entire article will inevitably lead to many awkward sentences.

As the other answers show, the reasons for using complex language are diverse. A good reason is that the author's idea is itself complex, and needs precise language involving many qualifications to express it. A bad reason is that the author doesn't have much original to say, but hopes to give an appearance of deep up-to-date knowledge by packing sentences with technical terms—the aim being, perhaps, to impress a reviewer who doesn't have the time to delve into the meaning (and possibly ascertain that there isn't much to be found), and thus possibly get the paper passed for publication. Nowadays, to secure an academic post, the publication count is all-important; whether what is published is actually worth reading is secondary. (As for citation scores, authors of this type typically generate impressively long lists of references by generously citing each other.)
Thus, each case of complex language needs to be assessed separately. In your example sentence "The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and [in] an antagonistic depth quest locally", I am inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt. I seems to be about an algorithm for minimization: a field at the intersection of numerical analysis and applied theoretical computer science. The sentence would make sense in the context that the algorithm operates either with reference to other algorithms functioning in parallel or as a parallel suite of algorithms. An analogy could be the deployment of a team of geologists prospecting for ore over a wide region: They cooperate as a team in planning the whole search; but, when a "hot spot" has been located, each of them goes off and competitively uses her own method to dig at an isolated patch in the hot spot.

I edit and translate papers, mainly in the social sciences.  I see a tremendous amount of writing that the author thought would make the work look more authoritative and convincing, and would make himself look more hirable.  I think that much of convoluted academic writing stems from what some people anxiously believe is necessary.  People think, When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and since they see a lot of fancy-looking writing, they try to make their writing fancy too.  More often than not, when I chop up their sentences and propose simpler, clearer versions, they are please and relieved to see their ideas coming off the page better.
Please give us a link to the paper you quoted ("The algorithm fathoms in a synergetic manner globally, and an antagonistic depth quest locally").
Without reading the context, it's impossible to really know, but -- perhaps they used "fathom" to mean determine the depth, and when they wrote "antagonistic," they meant to make some kind of contrast.

"I see a tremendous amount of writing that the author thought would make the work look more authoritative and convincing, and would make himself look more hirable." Which is basically the entire point that Howard Becker makes, although he also argues that some of it comes from signaling: "The tribe I want to be part of writes this way, there for I must."

Take a simple concept C, that has two connections A and B to related concepts.
Now if you take two concepts C, you can connect them in four different ways: {A-A}, {B-B}, {A-A,B-B}, {A-B,B-A}.  So using combinations of those two simple concepts, you can express only 4 other different concepts (and only two of those other concepts have free connections to build even more concepts).
You can thus understand that the combination of concepts to build more complex or more refined concepts is relatively limited: when you start with simple concepts, you won't be able to express an infinite number of concepts with them.
Once you've used up all the combinations of simple words, you're left with more complex words, identifying more complex concepts, to establish or describe your new ideas.
The sentence given in example, is actually very concise and clear, while transmitting a good high level picture of the described algorithm, which has a uncommon and surprising structure.  I cannot find a simplier way to express it. Using "smaller" words would imply having to use multiple sentences, perhaps a whole paragraph to give a similar description of the algorithm in question.

You can thus understand that the combination of concepts to build more complex or more refined concepts is relatively limited: when you start with simple concepts, you won't be able to express an infinite number of concepts with them. I strongly disagree with this statement -- the only way to build complexity is by stringing together simpler thoughts. A single complex thought may encompass many simple thoughts, yes -- but if it obscures the thought altogether (as I think the author is getting at), then what does that matter? Sometimes, many simple thoughts > few complex thoughts.

Is this answer an attempt to reproduce the issue identified by the OP?