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Is it ethical to split the research contribution to increase the paper count?
My university has a rule that all students need to publish at-least a couple of papers in SCI rated journals.
A senior told me that it is better not to publish the research contribution in a single paper. The length of paper is not an issue here. The act is meant for increase in paper count and hence becoming eligible to receive the degree.
Assume that the research contribution is on a task T. If I manage to get a couple of methods that perform better than the existing methods. One is accuracy A and another one with accuracy A' where A' > A.
The senior asks to send the algorithm related to A to an SCI journal and  submitting method related to A' after enough amount of time on a pre-print site so that it can be sent to another or the same SCI journal for acceptance.
I believe that it does not fall under the category of unfair means. No one can object if I decide to do so. But, I have doubt on whether the act is ethical or unethical to do?

The more people game the ridiculous reliance of academia on h-indices to sort people the faster this system will be abandoned for something better.  Ergo, it is the height of virtue to maximally inflate your paper count and/or participate in citation rings, etc.

@Him "The more people game the ridiculous ... the faster this system will be abandoned for something better." [citation needed] Since "publish or perish" was imported from the US to Europe around 30 years ago, it went from "nice to have" to "must have". Universities have moved from self- to (science-)externally managed entities which means that KPIs and pseudo-"objective" measures now matter. Yes, it's desirable to abandon them, but it is not going to happen anytime soon. Nonetheless +1 for your comment for the good intention.

Does this answer your question? Salami Publication

Anyone remember Lance Armstrong's argument? Everyone is doing it so if you don't do it, you might as well not compete. Salami slicing is not the only way. I have seen large research group where everyone's paper puts everyone else's name on it so everyone ends up with a large number of publications.

@stackoverblown: Mind you, that's also unethical.  Though the result is IMO not quite as bad: Salami publication generates a bunch of half-papers whereas spurious attribution generates full papers with spurious attribution.  Of course, you can get an even higher h-index by combining both strategies (please don't!).

@Brian "You are strictly forbidden to take honey from the honeypot hidden on the 3rd cupboard in the kitchen."

@DanielHatton I cannot guess, no. And I am not sure I see where you are trying to leading to. More hints?

@DanielHatton I didn't realize that, thank you for that information. I believe that also established universities in down under came under industry-style management and that the UK is now trying to copy that (I wonder why they would want to learn from a "convict colony"?).

What you’re describing is basically salami publication. When done with the goal of artificially inflating your publication count and at the cost of reducing the effectiveness of the communication of your ideas and results, I think there is a strong case to be made that it’s (at least mildly) unethical. However, as discussed on the linked Wikipedia page, people who wish to rationalize such behavior have a few reasonably valid arguments they can use to deflect criticism of unethical behavior. So, while it’s certainly not the best practice, it’s also not the worst. Perhaps more than being unethical, it is a shoddy practice used by mediocre people with mediocre ambitions, and will not help a person get a good reputation.
With that being said, if your institution is setting up graduation requirements that strongly incentivize its PhD students to engage in unethical behavior, it really has only itself to blame when they end up engaging in such behavior. In that case, there is also a strong case to be made that it is the institution that is behaving unethically, and that carries a large share of the blame for any unethical practices of its students and faculty.

Upvoted, especially for the last paragraph.

Is there also a name for the opposite? Cramming together too many loosely related results?

@Džuris - There isn't a widely used name for that.  But see https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/114747/term-for-the-opposite-of-salami-publishing?rq=1 for some candidate metaphors.

It might be worth to also point to publish or perish where you are rewarded for publication numbers (as part of funding/contract extension/promotion).

Ironically, some journals insist on salami publishing by refusing to publish long papers.

On the other hand, the salami slicing publication styles implicitly requires the most stable (in term of academic position) author to write a review paper every 3/4 years, to get a full picture from the mountain of papers produced and to give credits to all the salami-slicing co-authors being part of an interesting overview on the topic.
Review papers are despised because they do not bring anything new, however in times of unordered science progress, as the one we are in, due to the grants structure (see ERC, claiming to promote only excellence) I think it is the only meaningful approach.

The use of publication metrics for assessment is unethical. This approach of "salami slicing" publications to game those metrics is an entirely reasonable response to the unethical situation you and your supervisor find yourselves in.
Perhaps, further on in your career, you can fight back against the system you find yourself in and improve it for those that come after you but - for now - you should concentrate on getting your degree and follow your supervisor's advice.

This is known as ''salami slicing''.  It's not exactly unethical, but it's definitely discouraged.
It's most helpful for other researchers if you collect the relevant and similar results in one place where they can be conveniently accessed.  Salami slicing is the opposite of this because you are taking similar, connected results and then dispersing them out and spreading them all out into separate publications in different journals (all of which need to be paid for in theory).  This is clearly unhelpful and not good practice for a researcher working in a community of other researchers.  Reputation is important in academia, and it will not help your reputation if it is blatant that you are engaging in this practice in order to inflate the quantity of your publications.
In general, this is an important thing to emphasise: quantity is nice, but quality of the publications is the primary thing and this is what your reputation will primarily rest on.  If students are being encouraged to reduce the quality of their publications by splitting them into lots of smaller papers, then this is just bad practice.

It might be worth to also point to publish or perish where you are rewarded for publication numbers (as part of funding/contract extension/promotion).

It's officially discouraged, but in practice it is the only meaningful way to consistently achieve the expected publication number. Something like truckdrivers life:
A company is paid 100% for their service, only if they bring their goods in 12 hours from Warsaw to Luxembourg. By law, a driver has to rest x hours every 12 hours of driving. The company is discouraging the driver to drive for more than 12 hours, but it is requiring the goods to be in Luxembourg in 12 hours. Warsaw-Luxembourg driving time? 12 hours 40 minutes.
Yes, it is discouraged ...

Cynical response here - but do you want to graduate?  Do you need these papers to graduate?
Does each piece of work stand on its own? Will it get published in great journals broken apart?  If so - they do what you need to do to graduate, and to meet those KPIs that might be stupid but still affect employment/income/graduation.
Sure it might be nice to keep them all together, it probably would make for a stronger paper - but if it means you cannot graduate then you've gained the warm fuzzy feeling of not breaking up your work, and that far worse feeling of failing out of your degree.  If it means delaying completion - what will that cost you (tuition fees, funding lost, job opportunities)?
As for ethics - it really is shades of grey.  There's absolutely a balance between degrading the quality of publications and meeting KPIs.  But if the papers stand on their own, and meet the scientific standards for the field, then do what you need to do.  If, however, this means that you have two substandard publications, or that you need to target low-quality journals, then it's not unethical but often counter-productive career wise.
If your second piece of work shows your earlier work to be wrong, and you know this, then yes it would be unethical to publish the earlier piece.

I don't think this is merely salami slicing, but something less ethical.
Salami slicing, in my understanding, is when you have two related results which you choose to publish separately rather than in a combined paper. In that case, it is a trade-off between having two weaker papers or one stronger one, and I don't see that there is anything particularly wrong with either option, particularly when it is the natural response to some external pressure.
However, here you appear to only have one result (that you can improve the accuracy to that of A'), and to want to get a weaker version of the same result accepted before you tell anyone what your real result is. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but the fact that you talk about delaying submitting the second paper suggests that the existence of A', if disclosed, would prevent your results on A from getting published. In that case I think you would be misleading the journal by not disclosing this.

I understood that he has 2 methods, A and A+. A that improves state of the art and A+ that improves it further. Obviously if A+ gets published first, nobody would care for method A, so he needs to publish A first (or together with A+). And if he does publish A first followed by A+, nobody would even notice he intentionally postponed A+ because this "we did X and it is the best", "now we did Y and it is even better" is how most if not all of science works and worked.

@ZizyArcher Yes, I think that is accurate. But "we did X and it is the best" is simply not true in this case, since OP has already done better. (And the fact that nobody would know does not make something ethical.)

@Zizy: "Nobody would even notice" == "you can get away with". Even your words imply unethical behavior. Just because you won't get caught doesn't mean it's right.

@EspeciallyLime One can always argue to himself "let's submit A to the peer-reveiw, maybe I missed some important things and it is all wrong" and in the meanwhile double, triple-checking the results from A+ . Yes, double checking means only "let's upload paper A+ to our svn server so I can track down modifications" ...

@CrisLuengo This equality is questionable to put it mildly. I am simply observing that his hypothetical succession of papers is indistinguishable from ordinary progress in field. You either publish just one paper when you abandon the problem/field/..., or you publish many papers that build on previous ones.

@EspeciallyLime Yeah, poor choice of wording. In the paper you would have "X improves on state of the art" or similar. Also, I am not implying his actions are ethical (or unethical). I am only saying results of his actions would be indistinguishable from case where he published A and meanwhile finalized work on A+ to be published later.

If you send paper A to a journal and A' to a preprint server, there is a clear chance that the reviewers look at the preprint A' while reviewing A. How does it look then?
Irrespective of your institutional guidelines, its always better to put your best foot forward, while submitting a paper to a Journal. Withholding can only backfire.
Edit after comment by Wrzlprmft
Thank you. Well, then my answer makes a "U" turn. If the institute measures the quantum of work by the number of papers, and if you feel that the research is good enough to be split into two and still both be acceptable to a quality journal, then its a good gamble...no question of being unethical. Neither the Journal nor the University has put restrictions on the timing of the research conducted/invented.

I mentioned after enough amount of time.

irrespective of the whether they look at preprint or not, reviewers can make out of existence of better method that you have withheld.

Don't try to fool a journal. The editors and reviewers have vast experience.

One of my senior already published atleast 9 papers in such way. So, I am not thinking that editors and reviewers can object.

Everybody knows, that one you start writing, research is going on. Once the paper is written and sent to a journal, you might have better results. But at some point you have to publish, othewise you could endlessly improve your paper with new results.

@usr1234567 : Here OP has already done research and came up with twp methods, one being an improvement over other. FYI.. the research is already done...OP wants to split. Thats not the same as, after you send a paper, then come up with improvement.

The question is not about the feasibility or consequences of the approach but the ethics.

@Wrzlprmft: Thank you. Well, then my answer makes a "U" turn. If the institute measures the quantum of work by the number of papers, and if you feel that the research is good enough to be split into two and still both be acceptable to a quality journal, then its a good gamble...no question of being unethical. Neither the Journal nor the University has put restrictions on the timing of the research conducted/invented.

In this situation, I believe, one has to worry not so much about ethics but rather about whether one contributes to the overall degradation of the quality of information exchanged through scientific publications. For an analogy, when you try to use your car less so as not to contribute to the air pollution too much, this is not the matter of ethics, it is the matter of survival.

@Downvoter: sorry if it sounds unjustified but I really believe what I wrote.

I disagree: The personal price of such behavior is (unfortunately) far exceeded by the personal benefit.  That's why people do it.  There's a net loss, but this is only in aggregate; selfishness is still rewarded.  Mind you, there's a benefit in convincing people otherwise.  In game theory, this situation is somewhat of an example of a "commons dilemma."

@Brian Maybe I expressed myself not clearly enough. I did not mean personal survival but rather collective survival. Specifically in this case, if you feel that it is more and more difficult to find in the literature recent new information relevant for you, you would be probably more and more reluctant to contribute to the increase of this difficulty yourself, no?

You expressed yourself perfectly clearly, but the expected impact (here, I use expected in the probabilistic sense, not the English sense) of personal behavior on collective survival is negligible.  Thus, a selfish actor typically has no reason to care about collective survival.  This is very unfortunate and the results are...bad.  Going a step further, the impact on personal behavior on collective survival is also typically delayed, exacerbating the problem.

@Brian Maybe you are sort of aggravating? After all, more and more people nowadays become ecologically conscious, sparing water, buying eco-friendly goods, etc. Why not expect the similar tendency with respect to information pollution?

@Brian (and another downvoter): besides, I did not claim that those who don't do it are driven by the motivation I indicated. I only want to say that this is the more relevant motivation than ethical reservations.

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Math/stat postdoc: how important it is to be a 'named' postdoc?
It gives me the impression that an 'endowed' (named) postdoc is more prestigious than ordinary postdoc (e.g. grants postdoc). My question is how important it is compared to other factors (e.g. publications, the brand of the university, etc) if one wants to find a TT position in an R1 research university.
'endowed'(named) postdoc: for example, Ritt assistant professor in Columbia,  Dickson instructor in UChicago

@artificial_moonlet +1, I'm also confused with what does "endowed" mean here.

Possible duplicate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/59645/101

@artificial_moonlet Thanks. I am in the US and I've updated some examples.

Your new Columbia example isn't a post-doc, actually, but a regular position. The one at U Chicago  is a teaching position, which you may consider to be a post-doc or not. (included the names to be specific)

@Buffy I think at least a lot of people regard the Ritt assistant professor as a post-doc, since it is a three-year non-tenure track position. Some people combine it with NSF postdoctoral fellowship. Sorry for the confusion, but I am just taking in this sense.

@Buffy I think most people in mathematics would regard the Ritt asst. prof. as a postdoc, as they would any other three-year non tenure track position. These are the most common type of postdoctoral position in the US for pure math. In some places they are not classified as postdocs according to the institution’s internal classification system (for the purpose of benefits, unionization, visas and similar admin issues), but at least informally everyone refers to them as postdocs.

@DanRomik, I may have been misled by the title, especially at Columbia. Normally Assistant Professor implies tenure track. I can't find its actual definition online.

The Ritt is a 4-year position.  It has some specific attached benefits because it's not officially a postdoc (most importantly access to Columbia faculty housing).  All that said, I'd still informally refer to it as a postdoc.  It is quite common for math departments to have positions of the form "[Name] Assistant Professor" that are typically 3-year positions equivalent to a postdoc, this is unusual outside of math.  (I was an NSF postdoc at Columbia, but not a Ritt because it was the year of the stimulus package and there were six of us.)

Very few postdoc positions are endowed, and most of those are at universities that are already very good. As a consequence, the practical implications of being on such a position are relatively small: If you get one, you're pretty much by definition already at a good university, and the delta in prestige is pretty negligible.
What matters are (i) your publication record, (ii) which institutions you've been at, (iii) your letters of recommendation (all not necessarily in this order). What kind of postdoc position (endowed, grant-funded, teaching-supported) you had is not a relevant decision criterion in my experience.

I'll also point out that many "endowments" are really just grants from private individuals who want to see their names attached to something in academia. But the advice here about what matters is certainly correct. Actually, some of those endowments are from pretty terrible people, trying to buy a bit of respectability. But that is mostly ignored.

Can you say what gives you this impression? Because I’ve been around for a while and have never heard anything like what you are describing (in fact I’ve never heard the word combination “endowed postdoc”, so although I get what you’re referring to, I think it’s best not to use this term).
If I had to guess, I think you’re conflating prestige with practical matters that are unrelated to prestige. Getting teaching experience is somewhat important for people who want to get a TT position at a good US (among others) university. But that has nothing to do with prestige, who the position is named after, or where the funding for it comes from. For example, an NSF postdoc is considered more prestigious than most of the postdoc positions you’re referring to as endowed, and, while it comes with reduced teaching responsibilities, is not mutually exclusive with having them. Other prestigious postdocs that don’t meet your definition of “endowed”, and don’t have teaching duties, are postdoctoral fellowships at places like MSRI and IAS. Anyone considering between such a position and another one that does involve teaching would need to carefully weigh their options based on many parameters, including prestige, the teaching experience they will be gaining, and various other things. In many cases it will not be an obvious choice based on a simple rule of the form “position X is always better than position Y”.

Thanks for the clarification! It may not be a question with a definite answer, but I want to ask how important is the prestige compared to other factors for people who want to get a TT position at a good US university. More specifically, I am talking about the prestige coming from the position (named postdoc, NSF fellowship, etc) but not the institution.

Ok. Well, there isn’t any prestige that comes from a named postdoc as a general rule (although specific ones, like the Miller Fellowship at Berkeley, might have prestige, but in that case I doubt that prestige would be related to the property of being named), so I still disagree a bit with the premise of your question. Anyway, once we correct that small issue your question becomes a reasonable one, but not one that I feel I personally can say much about. Maybe others can comment about this though.

I am not aware of a prestige difference. At the institution where I was a postdoc, however, I have noticed at least three practical differences:

As a named postdoc, I was employed by the University and thus, in particular, had health insurance. At least one NSF postdoc during my time was, IIRC, classified as a contractor and had to rely on his SO (who was working in the industry) for health insurance.
As a named postdoc, I taught 3 classes per year, as opposed to NSF postdocs teaching 2 classes.
As a named postdoc, I got $55K per year, as opposed to (IIRC again) $53K for NSF postdocs.

The health insurance issue is bizarre -- NSF postdocs are paid by the university, not NSF, just like postdocs paid from any other source. They are treated like regular employees. They should get the same health insurance -- heck, we even bill NSF for fringe benefits that include health insurance...

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Difference between "letter of motivation" and "research statement"
I am applying to a PhD position (theoretical physics, Austria) and the application asks for a letter of motivation, a CV, and a statement of research interests.
Given that I have no publications/employment, my CV is just a brief list of some grades, my skills relevant to the position, and a description of some of my coursework. My research statement describes my interests and experience in the field and gives more details about my research experience and its relevance to the PhD project.
So what is a letter of motivation supposed to contain that has not already been addressed by the other documents? I am not familiar with European academic requirements here.
Many thanks for any guidance.

The distinctions you asked about in your question do not match the distinctions you asked about in your title. Your title mentions "statement of purpose", and this is nowhere mentioned in the body of your question. That said, my guess is that a "letter of motivation" is probably something non-technical (unlike your research statement) that might be similar to what in the U.S. is called a cover letter, but I'm sure there are others here who are much more knowledgeable about this than I am.

@DaveLRenfro Sorry, that was a typo, the job advert mentioned a "research statement". Given this is for a PhD rather than an academic job, there is little technical I can say about my experience, which was why I was confused about the distinction. E.g. I have no publications, no conference presentations etc, and my statement is really just a description of why I like the subfield (plus a few details of about my dissertation).

I didn't realize that you were applying to a program in which you work towards a PhD degree. For some reason I thought that "applying to a PhD position" meant you were applying for a job that requires a PhD, although I think the most reasonable reading of "applying to a PhD position" is exactly what you said in your comment. Anyway, this does sound a bit strange for applying to work towards a PhD degree. I guess you would be expected to discuss reasons for why you're interested in your field, what your future goals/hopes are, why this PhD program is a good fit for you, etc.

@DaveLRenfro Indeed, in the end I emailed the professor who posted the advert and he said a similar thing (mentioning also that the cover letter should describe my technical knowledge and areas I am interested in). Which then begs the question of what should be in a research statement: perhaps European universities, given their longer Master's programmes, have higher expectations of research ability from their PhD students? If there are no more answers, I will probably just split my current statement in two, add some comments on why the university is a good fit, and hope for the best.

You can search more answers here on what is expected for a research statement in Europe, but I just wanted to confirm your intuition that the research statement is a bit more like a research plan or proposal.

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How can I email a professor to ask if I am still being considered for an RA?
So, I have applied to a Research Assistantship based Master's at a Canadian University. I have offers pending from other universities and would like to ask the professor if I am being considered. This is the email I wrote:

I hope you are safe and doing great.
Currently, I have received a few offers from other institutions. Their acceptance deadlines are beyond April and expect the first round of admission results of (your University) will be announced soon. I am taking courses on Power Electronics, Sensors and Motors (offered on Coursera). I found the interactive online learning quite helpful and once again thank you for suggesting me the courses a few months ago.
Just checking in to see how you are doing and what admissions timeline I can expect.""""

Is this an appropriate email?

If you got an offer from them would you definitely take it, or just add it to the pile you already have for consideration?

I'd take the offer if I get it from the professor's University

If you don't have to apply to other universities before the end of the month, and decisions are due soon from this university, why rush?

What do you mean by "their acceptance deadlines are beyond April"? To me, that sounds unclear, but if I had to guess, I would think the deadlines were sometime in May. If this is the case, you might want to wait a few weeks before sending this at all.

Given that you prefer an offer from them to all others, I suggest the following.
First, the opening and closing remarks are a bit trite unless you know this person already. You aren't writing to a friend, so keep it professional. I sometimes use "Stay safe" as a closing salutation now days, but nothing else.
But the important point is to leave out most of the detail.

I'm juggling some other offers now, but would very much prefer to accept one from you and would accept it if offered before I need to make a final decision. I wonder if I could have some decision from you by June 1. Also, thank you for the advice on things to do now. I'm following up on those and find them helpful.

That is really all you need. The date you give should be the drop-dead date for the other decisions.

The email is perfectly appropriate and not offensive. However it is a bit confusing and the clarity can be improved.
Specifically, your email does not clearly highlight the question your asking and it is easy to ignore or misunderstand the purpose (why you are writing) because there is a lot of other stuff in it. That other stuff is definitely good to include (I think the professor may like to hear it!), but your question gets lost in all the other text, especially on a quick glance.
Here is some advice on how to make your question stand out more clearly:

Put your question as early as possible in the email.
Make sure that there is a question mark after your question. This actually makes a bigger difference than you might think.

Therefore, below is my suggested edit to your email.

I hope you are safe and doing great.
I am checking in to ask: do you think I might still be considered for admission to your group? What is the expected timeline?
I ask because I have received a few offers from other institutions. Their acceptance deadlines are beyond April and expect the first round of admission results of (your University) will be announced soon.
Also, I found the interactive online learning quite helpful and once again thank you for suggesting me the courses a few months ago! I am taking courses on Power Electronics, Sensors and Motors (offered on Coursera by University of Colorado Boulder).
Best regards,
[your name]

By the way, your post here has the same problem as your email :) You wanted to ask, "Is this an appropriate email?" but your question was hidden because there was no question mark. I edited your post to make it stand out more -- do you see how it makes a difference? When glancing at your post, now I can clearly see your question.


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Copyright of reproduced figure which is based on data from other sources
I'd like to include a figure in an open-source journal, which looks very similar to a figure already published in another paper (paper 1). My question is if I need to obtain the permission to reprint the figure, or, if a "based on paper 1" in the figure legend is sufficient for including the figure in my manuscript.
The figure is based on experimental data from another source (Example et al. 2018; see the example plot) and a line which shows the results with their code (code 1).
My figure uses the same experimental data, but another code (code 2), which makes use of data in the original paper (paper 1) and therefore has the exact same curve as code 1.
Example plot
Thanks in advance!

If you literally reprint the older figure you need permission. However, if you generate a figure from data (that is properly cited) using a different algorithm, then the similarity of the figures is a coincidence. In such a case you have a new figure, not a copy of the old one.
There is another factor that may come in to play here. There is, if  I remember correctly, an exception in copyright law for things that can be stated in only one way. If there is only one way to say something, I believe the legal doctrine is, you can't copyright it. But I'm not a lawyer.
But if both the data and the algorithm are from the old paper it is murkier and you may need legal advice. A university research office can probably help.
"Looks very similar" is not the standard for copyright.
But your explanation of the figure's source should be clear from how you present it in your paper to avoid a claim.


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Should I include the proposed method name in manuscript Keywords section?
The JASA manuscript template contains the Keywords section to insert 3-6 keywords. Is it appropriate to insert there the proposed method name as one of the Keywords?
If yes, should I use method's acronym (well-sounded but not self-explanatory, a 5 letters-long word) or the full name (4 words)?

If the method is important to your work (e.g. if the method has a "blind spot" so the results might have a loophole) then yes, include it as a keyword.
As for whether to use the full name or the acronym, either is fine. When the template says "3-6 keywords", chances are very good that each group of words is one keyword. For example, "United States" would be one keyword, even though it's two English words.


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DOI for JMLR papers
This is probably a beginner-level question but how do I obtain the doi for Journal of Machine Learning Research(JMLR) papers? Most of JMLR papers that I refer to seem to be missing a doi. For ex, if you go to this page, and look at the bib entry, there is no doi information. I know arXiv doesn't assign dois, doesn't JMLR either?

Can you please elaborate - what does JMLR stand for? Journal of Machine Learning Research?

arXiv doesn’t assign DOI’s because it’s for pre-prints which can be, and are frequently, updated, which would make this confusing.
Why the Journal of Machine Learning Research doesn’t is curious. They have a Q1 SJR rank and seem high quality having glimpsed through the latest articles in Volume 20. You’re right - I couldn’t see a DOI on any of them. I guess the journal just doesn’t habitually request a DOI for their articles. For those that do, perhaps the authors specifically requested it, or perhaps they were exceptional or special issues and warranted the DOI. I’m just speculating.
But it’s not mandatory and it’s not a problem. As long as you have the journal and volume number, that should be sufficient for a reference (along with author, year, title of course).


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How do I use lemmas that are probably already proven, but including the proof myself is quicker than looking up a source?
Suppose I have proven several lemmas during my work that are neither original nor significant (these results were needed for applied engineering/CS research, not mathematics). I believe that if I spend enough time going through articles in minor journals/theses in theoretical CS/applied mathematics, eventually, I will find the statements/proofs of these results. However, it seems that finding these results may take more time than it took to prove the results.
I am curious whether there is a chance that not providing citations could be perceived as plagiarism in one form or another. Would it suffice to state that I do not claim that the results are original without providing a citation?

You do need to make some effort to find in the literature a result you think is known, but after that what you propose is common and I feel is fine.  I do it sometimes.  In such a situation, I tend to say ``the following is probably known, but we include a proof for completeness.''
Even if you find the all your background lemmas in the literature, it might still make the reader's life easier if you include some or all of their proofs.  It is really annoying to have to request seven obscure papers by inter-library loan, and then figure out all the different authors' notation, just to fill in a few pages of proofs.

I would tweak this to say "The following is surely known to experts, but we include a proof for convenience of the reader."

I disagree.  If you prove a lemma on your way to some result, you don't need to try to find out if someone else ever needed to prove the same lemma.  Just imagine how many lemmata have been proven over and over again.  On the opposite, I feel that especially mathematicians cite very few papers, as compared to say e.g. physics.

For completeness, no it is not plagiarism to state a theorem and prove it without knowing whether that theorem is available already in the literature.
Plagiarism is the purposeful appropriation of someone else's words, claiming that they are your own.

Yes, but it could still be considered sloppy research and possibly cause frowns in peer review, no?

@leftaroundabout Sloppy yes. Plagiarism no.

Perhaps, they may be best classified as 'mathematical folklore'.

Let me suggest that citing it as 'mathematical folklore' would be incorrect. Based on what you have said in the question, you have proven the result (you know it to be true) and you also are not aware of a proof in the literature, although you believe one exists. However attributing a result to folklore typically implies much more than that: that the result is well-known by many people in the field, but that it doesn't have a canonical published proof in the literature. As you aren't an expert in the literature in this area, these statements go beyond what you can claim; you would need to be aware, and not just suspect, that the result is common knowledge.

I believe that if I spend enough time going through articles in minor journals/theses in theoretical CS/applied mathematics, eventually, I will find the statements/proofs of these results.

A common scenario in applied research! My approach in such situations is to somewhat "downplay" the result; for example, don't state it as a theorem, but as a proposition.
And don't claim in your introduction or your list of contributions that you have proven a new result; focus on the new application instead, and the theorems are just there for completeness of the formal development or out of necessity. Finally, depending on how much effort you (or a coauthor) has put into searching the literature, either say that it is not known to your knowledge, or that it may be known, but you include a proof here anyway.
If you do all this and word it carefully, I don't think you are crossing any ethical lines by not citing the result. And you are certainly not committing plagiarism just by not being aware of something.

In general, I think someone is obligated to do due diligence in ascertaining whether a result is known.  However, I agree due diligence certainly does not require going through the literature with a fine-toothed comb.  Checking the obvious places (which it seems to me the questioner has done) is certainly enough.

@AlexanderWoo I agree with the general notion that "someone is obligated to do due diligence in ascertaining whether a result is known" but the argument here is that if your paper includes some lemma that you needed to use for the actual end results, and you explicitly do not mention that lemma as a result of your paper, you just prove it and use it, then the authors don't have such an obligation for these "byproducts" as they do for the actual results of the paper. A thorough literature review is required to justify asserting novelty or authorship of a concept, but not to just use it.

@Peteris The potential harm I can see in that is someone proving what they think is just a simple lemma, but which turns out to be (at least part of) a bigger unsolved problem, and gets overlooked because of being presented this way. This is probably vanishingly unlikely, though.

A neat way around this would be to say it is easily/ readily shown ...
That way you make clear that this is really only a step along the way and make no claim to novelty and it is a common hand waving technique. You could even relocate the bulk of the Lemma to the appendix if you feel that the workings don't add anything.
Though I'd ask if it is such an obvious thing to work out that you'd rather just do it from scratch, it is really necessary to be included. What does the reader gain? Ask yourself how this really contributes to the point your trying to make.

Some readers can be beginning PhD students, or from a different (sub)field or background, etc. Obvious is usually quite a relative concept, and some subfields of mathematics at least are quite difficult to get into due to the amount of obvious and well-known things nobody cares to write down.

When writing a mathematical paper, it is often a good for readability idea to dissect the proof of a big theorem into a series of lemmata.
In all likelihood, some of them will end up being sufficiently localised and technical that no one has ever stated or proved them in the same form.
Some, on the other hand, will be very general observations which have almost certainly appeared in the work of others. Still, if it is merely a stepping stone towards the main result, you have independently formulated and proved it, and the proof is reasonably simple, then there is no harm in stating it as a proposition and moving on. Some caveats:

With a proposition of this kind, you should definitely avoid making it sound like it is some significant contribution of yours. If a reader or referee sees you claiming to have proven some significant fact, only to see something that is obvious and/or well-known, it will make you look real bad. (This does not mean that you should not stress its importance in the paper itself --- it is not unusual for simple observations to be very important.)
By extension, if the main result is described by the last paragraph (or trivially follows from a proposition like this), then most likely the paper is not sufficiently original for a research paper.
If you know the result is folklore (you have heard other people mention it, for instance), you should say it (and maybe state it as a fact, not a proposition). If you do not know, but are almost sure it is folklore, then you can say that the result is likely folklore. In both cases, if you have not found a proof in the literature, you should at least include a sketch.
If you know a very similar, but not completely trivially folklore result, then even if you have a citation, you should at least briefly indicate how the proof should be adapted or how your statement can be derived from the original (just as when citing known non-folklore results with modifications).
If the lemma has a reasonably simple statement, but the proof is either complicated or uses many preceding propositions, then you should make sure to check standard textbooks and, failing at that, perhaps ask on mathoverflow or math.se for a citation. If you spend half of the paper on proving a lemma which turns out to be a trivial variation of a well-known classical theorem, this will make you look bad.

I am basing my answer on some assumptions:

Those results are really well-known;
Those results can be found in a standard literature on the topic;
You need those results, as you (as a decent mathematical thesis would) begin from the definitions and need to lay some ground work, but your actual contribution is later and definitely not here.

I would bring the lemmas from some standard book, adjusted to your notation, of course. I would cite the book in the lemma, e.g.,

Lemma 17.34 (Einstein and Feynman, 1892, Lemma 1.2). Each smooth n-dimensional hedgehog can be brushed over if n is even.

Then I would not state the full proof, but the proof idea:

Idea of the proof: If n is odd, the tail cannot be brushed. However, 2k-dimensional hedgehogs can be shown not to have a tail.

You want to advance the knowledge, not gurgle-up decades-old proofs. Of course, you should be able to reproduce the proof, if asked, e.g., during a thesis defence.

Where does the assumption come from that they are in some book? The question gives the opposite impression to me.

I am afraid that the first two assumptions do not hold. I believe that the confusion might have been caused by my use of a slightly ambiguous term 'folklore'. "Those results are really well-known": this is not the case, they are reasonably obscure technical lemmas. "Those results can be found in a standard literature on the topic": this is not the case (it is very likely that they have been mentioned somewhere before, but they are not available in what I would consider to be 'standard literature', i.e. canonical textbooks and main papers, to the best of my knowledge).

Also, with regard to "You need those results ... as a decent mathematical thesis would", as I mentioned, the results are for an engineering/CS paper, not mathematics.

Well, a research paper is very much more condensed than a thesis. Even in eng./CS you might pull out enough math, but for a reason. For a paper, my suggestion would be: put the proofs in an appendix.

Why not update the answer in light of the new information?


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Does a post doc at a prestigious university make up for doing a PhD at a lesser ranked university for Mathematics?
I think I understand that someone should do a Ph.D. under a strong advisor and have a solid publication record, and I know going to a more prestigious university helps. Now, this is where I get confused. Let's say person A goes to Princeton and person B goes to Iowa State, for example. Let's say person A gets a post-doc at Michigan and person B also gets a post-doc at Michigan. Do people A and B both have an equal chance of getting a tenure track position at for example the University of Oklahoma? I guess what I'm asking is that if someone gets a post-doc at a prestigious university, does it make up for the prestige of where they got their Ph.D.?
The university I'm going to do my Ph.D. in has a nontrivial amount of people that get postdocs at prestigious universities but none of them end up as tenure track professors at universities with a graduate program.
A very small number of people ended up at R1 universities past 1990, perhaps several people at my university.
Some famous counterexamples to this are Igor Rodnianski, Aaron Brown, and Ernest S. Croot.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not interested in going on to be a tenure track professor, just curious.

I'm not sure that "going to a more prestigious university" actually helps at all. The advisor is important. The work of the student is important, but the prestige of the university is marginal. There is no one so dangerous as a C student from Yale. (often said, sometimes in jest)

At the research level, the prestige of the university does not matter at all. only the resources available, the research done and the PI.

Seems similar : https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/147741/72855

@onurcanbektas : does not matter or should not matter? Life is not always fair.

@vsz It has nothing to do with fairness. Let say you are applying for your second post-doc. If the PI cares where you did your first post-doc, then I advise you not to choose with that that PI. It does not make business sense (in the sense of research).

@vsz However, doing a post-doc / PhD / Master etc. in a "prestigious" university might help you to "sell" yourself in certain situations. Therefore, in such situations, I always think about why I want to do post-doc / PhD etc.: is it because I want to have a "good" career, or I want to do "good" research. There is a line between doing a career out of research and doing actual research.

Actually, what is better is what you do in whatever circumstances you end up in. If you are productive and publish good research, the institution at which you do it is of little importance. But any institution at which you can find good collaboration resources, such as weekly seminars in field, are valuable. Larger places which larger faculties tend to have these. But even quite small institutions manage it.
One of the reasons that few people are winding up with tenure track positions at R1 universities is that the number of total positions offered in a given year is small compared to the number of potential candidates. So, the competition is fierce, but it doesn't consist of ranking the candidates in the order of the prestige of their institutions.
Go where you will find people with similar interests and who are willing to work with you. Write a lot of good papers. Build an expanding circle of collaboration. The very best faculties are not, in fact, concentrated at only the very most prestigious universities.
Note also that doing mathematics alone without any feedback or synergy is very difficult. So, a group of like minds is very valuable. It is possible to wind up at a prestigious place where there is actually no one to give you any support. It will be difficult to advance from such a situation.

"but it doesn't consist of ranking the candidates in the order of the prestige of their institutions"....I doubt its a 100% true.

@RajeshDachiraju, note that an institution prominent in one (or many) fields won't be equally well endowed in all. Even worse, in some subfields of even mathematics, the top institution in a country may be lacking in interested and competent faculty. Would you accept 98% true?


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Why physics (science) articles and journals differ pedagogically with books?
During the undergraduate, students are introduced to new materials through reading books and lectures. They go through all the semester struggling with solving exercises of different levels. However, when they become new researchers, they face disturbance to familiarize themselves with the journals in concern, i.e., everybody agrees that the researcher should take enough background, even though, the traditional proceedings may not work to dive into a large topic of research that comes up with updates for almost every day. Particularly, reading such articles keeps it fuzzy from what's happening on the ground. In addition, lots of proofs (if we speak in terms of physics) are not clear if not missing. I wonder how this could be solved?

What do you think the reasons could be? Some of them seem very obvious. What is your thinking so far?

That's part of my question.

@FedericoPoloni Indeed. I'll correct it.

Isn't this part of what the student's Ph.D. supervisor ordinarily does, namely slowly introduce the student to some selected (based on various criteria) papers in the field and to some of the standard journals in the field? Probably those in primarily experimental-based areas (and in some non-science fields also, such as philosophy) have been looking at papers since undergraduate, but for something highly theoretical, I think it's usually the case that the first step is that the student is asked to read through a paper or two and present the results in a seminar.

@DaveLRenfro Good sight. But some supervisors let students discover by themselves without much guidance.

The textbooks that students use are written for novices. Scientific papers reporting research results are written for experts. And not just any experts but domain experts, or even sub-sub-sub-domain experts. So the current situation is probably about as good as it can be. Why?
Not everyone needs to be an expert in a field, but many people need some knowledge of it. So, in schools, students study the basics of things without any attempt to teach them everything. Students get a working knowledge of a lot of things which lets them be successful either in putting those ideas together to solve problems (application) or to go deeper and use further study to become experts (theory).
But you note that the step from novice to expert is a big one.
Think about closing the gap. Should we make school much much harder? Should we make scientists try to explain everything to novices whenever they write? Both of those would be steps backward, I think. The first would mean more failures, the second would slow down the march of science and make scientific papers repetitive so that the beauty of new results gets lost in the chaff.
There are papers (and books) at the intersection, however. Some people prefer to write survey papers in a given field, attempting to bring the general understanding of a sub field more accessible to a general audience. Carl Sagan was good at that sort of thing in astronomy, for example.
However, surveys of a field are only written fairly late, after the discoveries of a field have had time to settle in the minds of the experts, proving their worth. The most important discoveries can take quite a long time to become integrated into the general thinking of experts. Only then do the survey papers make much sense.
But if a novice wants to become an expert it can be a long and hard journey. University education, especially graduate education, is supposed to put a student on a path to expertise. Working on research with an expert advisor is the most common way. But the first few (hundred) scientific papers will be difficult. It becomes easier with practice. But so does riding a bicycle.

Note: Even graduate level textbooks are written for novices, but in a sub-field rather than the overall field. My first look as measure theory was in grad school and, while I had a lot of mathematics experience, I was a novice in that particular subject.


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Distribution of in-class and online activities during hybrid teaching after COVID-19
Here in Brazil we are slowly returning to face-to-face activities, and this includes university classes. Most proposal suggest that we do this gradually, by first implementing a hybrid teaching system (e.g. with 40% in-class and 60% online activities), and only going back to fully in-person activities after the situation is safer for everyone.
One big problem we are facing during these discussions is how to properly distribute online and in-person acitivites in a way that:

avoids agglomerations (e.g. at any given time at most 30% of the usual number of students is at the university, when compared to pre-COVID era)
avoids situations where a students never goes to the university.
avoids students having in-person classes right after an online one (or vice-versa).
avoids packed classrooms.

The current best solution seems to be returning labs and final-year courses in the first semester of 2022, then labs and last and next-to-final-year courses in the second semester of 2022, etc., however this does not address the last point.
I am looking for specific guidelines, experiences and results from other countries and universities, when implementing a partial return to in-person activities.
The university I work at, UFSC, has 5 campi and ~40,000 students.
(I also appreciate descriptions of other experiences, not involving hybrid learning, although those will probably not be adopted here.)
Thank you very much in advance.

I'll guess you just need to experiment. For a multi-campus university with over 35,000 students it is a hard problem in the best case and not many people have much experience with it yet.


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Questions about transcript and PhD admission
I recently received an email from a school that I applied to . They told me to resend the transcript since they could not see the grades. The problem is that my transcripts are long and it is easy to get lost. For example, grade in year 1 is in page 1, grade in year 2 is in page 5, grade in year 3 is in page 7. I have explained this to them but for other schools should I anticipate this and send them an email for explanation in advance? Or should I wait until they ask me to do so?
I have another question. On my transcript, there are some pages that are irrelevant and do not give a lot of information. However, I still decided to keep the transcript as it is when submitting the application because the document that contains the transcript says "any alteration to this certificate renders it invalid". Furthermore I do not want to omit any information because it is dishonest according to me. Do you think it is a good choice? As a result of this, the adcom might have trouble understanding the transcript because it is too long and they do not have a lot of time in general.

(1) I think you were right to submit the whole transcript; a partial transcript can look suspicious even if it contains all the "real" information. (2)  I don't think the problem is that "they do not have a lot of time"; that seems unlikely to produce a request to explain "in detail". (3) I wouldn't send the explanation to other schools now. If I suspected this problem beforehand, I might have sent the explanation along with the transcript, but now I'd just wait until someone asks for it. (But, having written the explanation for one school, I'd keep it on my computer, ready to send.)

Sorry, I was not clear in the original post. They did not tell me to explain in detail. They told me to resend the transcript because they could not see the grade. The problem is that my transcript is really long and it is easy to get lost. For example, grade in year 1 is in page 1, grade in year 2 and 3 are in page 5, grade in year 4 are in year 7. Should I anticipate this and send an explanation to other schools as well?  Thank you so much!

I think that you should provide your own summary in form of a list, where each entry gives reference to the original translated document page.
And to do so independently of what you have wrote in a CV or other parts of your application. I mean make the summary a kind of cover letter for the official document.


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Timing etiquette of asking for update on book manuscript review
I submitted a book manuscript to Springer. The editor told me that it looked great and that they would send it for peer review and would contact me in due course. But I haven’t heard of the project for 7 months. I don’t even know if it’s under peer review, since it’s not an article and therefore I don’t have the journal’s progress bar to check on. A month ago, 3 days before the six-month mark, I sent an email asking about status (because when I’ve been given a deadline to review a full book, it’s been 6 months). I received no answer. Question: is it OK if I insist with another polite email on the 7-month mark?

Yes, you can ask. Ask if it is under review. Ask when you can get some feedback. Ask if there is anything you can or should do at this time.
You could even ask why it is taking so long. You should have heard something in seven months even if the review is taking longer than expected.

Thanks, Buffy. These things take so long that one can be at a completely different stage in their personal or work life when they get back to you. The manuscript has already changed a bit even, but I will wait to make the changes when and if they ask for edits.

I disagree with the premise that this is a long time. Six months seems to be the normal amount of time given to a referee to review a book in OP's field.

But seven is 16% more.

@FedericoPoloni, no, it isn't a long time for completion, but it is a long time with no feedback at all. The editor should have better communication with an author they are considering publishing. Should and author just shut up and take it no matter what? They might have other publishing options. The author has offered something of value to the publisher. No communication is insulting.

@all Ok. I’ll write and get back to you!


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Is an employee of a US state university a "united states government" employee for publication license agreement purposes?
I have a paper accepted in a Springer Nature journal. Now I have to sign a publishing agreement. I am currently a postdoc in the USA at a state university. When I submitted the paper I was in a different University, in another country.
The journal requires me to answer if I am:

An employee of the United States Government

An employee of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada or Australia

Neither of the above

Should I tick the first or the last one?

You should know if you are an employee of the US, no? If at a university (unless something like the Naval Academy) you are not an employee of the US Government.

Are you a post-doc at a US National Lab, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, or the National Institutes of Health? If not, you're not an employee of the US Government. If you are currently and employee of the US government, you have to choose the first option.

Thank you for the answers. I am at a State University, so I thought that counted as US government.

@matrp Articles are important. A state government is a government in the US, but is not the US government.

It is common for employees of public universities operated by their state to be considered state employees. It is not common for them to be federal (US government) employees, even if they are paid by federal funds. If you are working at a US federal institution you may be a US government employee, but you may also be working for a contractor and are not actually a government employee. If you work in the US for someone who is not the US government, you are not a US government employee.
If you are a federal employee of the US government, you should check that box. If you're not, you shouldn't.

DOE National Laboratory employees are not US government employees, but the funding is (generally) US government funding and as such we do not convey copyright to publishers since the US government retains that right.

Wow, I'm surprised to learn that DoE National Lab employees are not US Government employees.

@Ian I don't know about the DoE labs specifically, but a surprising amount of US government jobs have been privatized, stripping the salaries and benefits of those employees to turn into profits for companies that really only specialize in contract bidding, in the name of some sort of magical capitalistic efficiency. Why pay someone $100k a year incl. benefits when you can pay a private company $120k to pay them $70k? Actual federal jobs are really sought after.

@JonCuster for trivia sake, one (but I cannot quickly find which one) of the DOE labs is run by the feds and not contractors  https://www.energy.gov/labcommission/articles/department-energys-national-laboratory-complex

@RichardErickson I believe it's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), which has three geographically distinct locations.

By default, you are not an employee of the US Gov't so check "No" on the authorship form.  Your answer is really hinged to the question: where does your paycheck come from?  Answer: the university.
The reason this question is asked by publishers is because authors who are US Gov't employees have different legal rights when it comes to copyright ownership and intellectual property.
The issue becomes tricky if the research you performed was funded by a grant/contract from a US agency for which you need approval/review to publish.  Thus, check with your supervisor on any grant/contract constraints, since they usually exist.
Based on my experience, the US Dept of Energy (DoE) has a lot of constraints on publications/IP for anyone funded by contracts from e.g. LBL or LLNL.  As a rule-of-thumb, you can change a university contract, but can't change boilerplate contracts at DOE.


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How can I find which US graduate programs in math require the GRE General Subject Test and which require the Mathematics Subject Test?
Is there a resource online that can tell me about which schools require the GRE general test versus which schools require GRE Mathematics Subject Test, and which require both?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hmdO7af3-lLvtJQO-szayG6blTvAYBQ1JcYXFZ_6apE/edit?gid=0#gid=0

@user176372 Thanks!

I'm not big on link-only answers, but since this was reopened I'll put this in as an answer.
At time of answering, this resource is fairly current.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hmdO7af3-lLvtJQO-szayG6blTvAYBQ1JcYXFZ_6apE/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Wow, this is helpful. Is there a similar resource for physics?

In case of future link-rot, I've archived this web page at the Internet Archive. At least, I might have. The page shows up and a note indicates that page has "1 capture" (presumably what I just did), but then I'm asked to reload the page, after which it says the page is not saved.


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Data as a research contribution
I have noticed several polisci or economics papers in the past few years such as this or this that address important research questions on political behavior
but in political environments where data on public opinions have been historically scarce or unreliable (e.g. China, Russia, etc).
However, my question here is that I noticed that the authors emphasize the data used in the paper as a major contribution to the literature (e.g. because it was collected from online textual data and the effort it takes to clean and prepare the data for the analysis).
As a junior social science researcher, I was wondering if it makes sense to write a paper where one emphasizes that a main contribution to the literature is the originality and uniqueness of the data used?
Specifically, I have been trained in my PhD program that it is the questions and results that make a paper 'good', rather than the uniqueness of the data, but then I am noticing more and more political science papers that may study a question already addressed in democratic countries, but the contribution is that it's currently studied in an autocratic country like China.

If there is no data available, how would one address questions and come up with results? And if getting that data takes years and years of effort, well, how long can one delay a student's graduation?

I will disagree with @buffy's answer that data itself is "boring" (I'm paraphrasing her answer here :-) ).
There are many cases where the data itself is the main product of research. For example, you find a well-preserved tree trunk from thousands of years ago and you do an isotope analysis to infer the climate year-by-year in that tree. The methodology for this is well-established, there is nothing new about this. But you get data that was simply not available before and that others cannot easily get either without finding their own well-preserved tree. So the data is the important part.
Or you have access to a unique resource that allows you to do an experiment that is not easily repeatable by others. Say, a large telescope. Or a big computer. In principle, everyone can take pictures with a telescope, and there is nothing about the data that needs to be described regarding how exactly you used the telescope. But if you come up with pictures of 100 black holes at centers of galaxies and can do some simple statistics about them, then the data is the important part, not the methodology.
In other words, data can absolutely be the important part of a publication. The key piece is whether it is data that is easily generated by others, or whether you have a unique resource that makes it difficult for others to reproduce things.
(I will note that this is no different from software. Traditionally, specific software you wrote was not a topic you could publish on. But over time, people have realized that software that consists of 100,000s or millions of lines of source code is a resource that can not easily be reproduced: Nobody has the time to re-write such packages even if the underlying algorithms are well documented. As a consequence people have started writing papers that describe the implementation of these algorithms in software, and I tend to think that these are worth-while publications to write.)

The question OP actually wrote seems to be about about something slightly different - they seem to be asking about applying a previously used analysis to a new dataset, rather than publishing a paper about new data itself. That said, I think this answer likely addresses the question OP meant to ask...

@BryanKrause I took my cue from the following sentence: "I was wondering if it makes sense to write a paper where one emphasizes that a main contribution to the literature is the originality and uniqueness of the data used?"

Yes, though the examples they give do not seem to actually be about the type of unique/original data that you're talking about where someone might actually write the paper principally about the interesting data. Instead, they seem to be just basic incremental steps in their field, less about a "well-preserved tree trunk from thousands of years ago" and more about "Eken et al did this study of oak tree growth, but if we want to know more about tree growth more generally I'm going to use their methodology to study maples". I think OP is incorrectly labeling this "data as research contribution".

I'm chemist and would like to point to another type of useful data: Evaluating whether a given substance can be used as calibration standard and giving reference values for the measurements. Such a substance would preferrably not even be rare - so other labs can easily acquire such a substance/sample and then calibrate their equipment against the provided literature values.

My view is that the data itself wouldn't be a research contribution, but the "research methodology", would be if it is an advance over standard practice. That methodology is (a) subject to analysis and (b) potentially reusable in other studies.
The data itself is interesting in so far as it is used to answer the initial question(s), but of more limited value otherwise. It is, in particular, difficult to validate without reference to the methodology that gathered and processed it. There might be tidbits of information that might be tweaked out of it, but, IMO, that would be anecdotal evidence of whatever is found without an analysis of the methodology.
So, other things than the research question and conclusions might be considered a "novel" contribution to research, but the data, not so much per se.
And note that the methodology in such situations must be analyzed lest it introduce biases that affect claimed outcomes. That goes doubly for reuse of the data.


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Is it possible to submit a paper to a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal without a PhD and get it accepted?
Is it possible to submit a paper to a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal while not holding a PhD? More specifically, what would be the bare minimum qualifications that would grant one the possibility of a paper being published in a peer-reviewed academic medium?

See also http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34202/who-can-submit-papers-to-peer-reviewed-journals/ (which doesn't focus on degrees, but rather employment/affiliations).

Yes; I have done this four times.

Many PhD students (at least in Europe) publish a few first-author papers before graduation. Granted, there's almost always at least the student's professor on the paper as a co-author, often more collaborators.

I used to work for somebody who had published several papers in top-ranked international engineering journals. One of the concepts which he discovered is commonly named after him (close to 10 million hits on Google). He left school at age 16 and never had any formal academic education after that. He was greatly amused when he received correspondence addressed to "Dr X Y Z" instead of plain "Mr". But that was back in the 1970s, so he doesn't make a good role model to copy nowadays.

It is even possible to be a mathematical superstar without a Ph.D. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_M._Gleason .

Does it count if one is on one's way to a PhD? A fellow graduate student and I co-published a number of papers, including some in the very highest tier journals, prior to being awarded our degrees. I never felt that there was any bias against us for not having PhDs, and very little if any for being unknown in the field. (What we did have was a university affiliation--perhaps the response would have been different if we had submitted as independent researchers from our home addresses--but if so, I think an unknown PhD recipient would fare no better.)

Yes. Ever heard of Jack Edmonds?

holding any degree is not a formal requirement. blind peer-review is even designed precisely do exclude any factors other than the quality of the paper from consideration. however, holding a PhD is probably a good predictor of your success rate, because PhDs should have learned how to produce a publishable paper that the reviewers like.

@henning You mean that double-blind is. Just blind usually refers to the author not knowing the reviewers, rather than the other way around.

@TobiasKildetoft yes!

My comment above, about Andrew Gleason, was originally an answer but was converted to a comment because it "doesn't directly address the question." To make the connection to the question clearer, I should add that Gleason published papers in scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

Submitting an academic paper for publication (and potentially getting it accepted) does not require any qualifications whatsoever.  You don't need a PhD; you don't even need to have gone to college.  There are no educational, employment, or membership requirements at all.
That's not to say it's easy to get a paper accepted with no formal training in the field.  Learning how to write a compelling paper is much easier if you have a mentor to offer guidance.  However, if you can figure out how to do it without a PhD, then your lack of a PhD will not be held against you.

Disregarding knowledge, the main obstacles for people who do not work at a university are a lack of facilities (i.e. labs, library access, funding for conferences), and the lack of an academic environment (department talks, collaborators, students). It's a lot easier to succeed without these things in some fields than in others!

This is only true for paper journals: arxiv requires endorsement which will be automatically granted if you are a member of an university or research center or you are endorsed by another member, otherwise you cannot publish.

@Thorsten: The arxiv is not any kind of journal.  Do you know of any electronic journals which require academic qualifications in order for the submission to be considered?

@PeteL.Clark While arxiv is technically only a preprint server, it had the function to publish own papers and was essential if you wanted to publish something in electronic format (There were electronic journals, but they were quite uninfluential). "Was" because now the field has changed and there are now influential open-access electronic journals like PLOS ONE. Was not aware of the change, my error, mea culpa.

I've heard a different opinion. Theoretically you can publish, but in fact, without leading professor (usually last author), without lab, or university, just by your own, you most probably will get rejected even without reading the contents of the paper. Am I right? Also I know how reviewers respond with reject-resubmit with such a mean comments/questions, just because they seem to be rivals (working at same field / work), or just rejecting the paper, but waiting for lets say 2 weeks to do reject it.

Of course, this is true in an ideal world; if you don't have a PhD, or you are not in the track of obtaining one, revivers and editors will have a negative bias, hence it will be very difficult to publish (this is true at least in STEM fields).

Yes, it's possible to get a paper published without having a PhD: PhD students do it all the time. Submitted papers are supposed to be evaluated according to what they say, not who said it.

As an extreme example, here are some groundbreaking pre- or no-PhD discoveries:

Henri Lebesgue developed his famous integration theory as a young high school teacher in 1902.
Space–time block
coding, a theoretical concept that is now essential to wireless communications, was invented in 1997 by Siavash Alamouti as a practicing engineer with a master's degree.
The AKS primality test was the result of 2002 undergraduate research at the Indian Institute of Technology.

It's clear that such contributions warrant a publication irrespective of the author's status.

+1 For the examples you gave. They are certainly encouraging.

I think the recent examples are particularly important, as they show that this is still true, despite the degree to which the world has changed in the last hundred years and the increasing professionalization of science.

Emily Rosa was published in JAMA at age 9.

I don't at all disagree with the thesis that you can have a publication in a top journal without a terminal (or even any) academic degree.  I think though that examples are a little less convincing when the paper is coauthored with someone else that does have these credentials, as is the case in your last example and in the example of the previous comment.

Yes.  In practice, graduate study is one of the main ways people attain the skills to write such a paper, but a Ph.D. is not a requirement.  Qualifications would be a choice of the individual journal, but I don't know of any that have a policy of requiring degree credentials from submitters.  For example, quite often graduate or undergraduate students write such papers.

It's not only possible but it is a requirement at many universities that your Ph.D thesis be completely based on peer reviewed papers.
Another issue here is the fact that in science only the research results should matter, not who is presenting those results. If Prof. Dr. X has submitted a paper that is found to be wanting, then it should be rejected. if John Doe Y who dropped out of primary school, submits a paper containing ground breaking results, then that paper should be accepted. If this were not (in principle) true, then that would mean that science is not conducted in an independent way. Arguments from authority, rather than those based on the merits would to some degree corrupt the scientific process.

Even when this is not a formal requirement, from my perspective, a PhD student has to publish to get any decent funding (like a travel award or a scholarship), just like any other (academic) scientist.

Yes you can. I still was a MA's student when my paper draft was first accepted. I even attended conferences. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise

I am a bit more skeptical than the majority of the answers.
The first reason is more profane:
There are journals with more reputation and some with less reputation. The journals with more reputation have more readers and if you are published in this paper, it will foster your reputation. The direct effect is that everyone tries to get published in the most prestigous journals. So the editors get swamped with papers and must choose by priority. If two results are equally impressive, the probability that the more experienced and reputable scientist will be published is very high.
So the standard approach is to contact the journals in descending order of reputation and ask for publication. So, yes, you can be published, but it is likely that you must choose a journal with less reputation and that means that your results are likely to be ignored.
That get us to the second problem:
If you have an impressive result, then the editors will scan your paper more closely. Unusual language (there is a specific lingo you use in papers), strange format (Word instead Latex) and an impressive result from someone who is not known before raises a red alarm. If Anonymous Mathematica claims that "your lack of a PhD will not be held against you", then I say, nope, this is not remotely true. It is very likely that you and your paper are not scrutinized anymore and rejected. If you try to battle the decision, the label crackpot is attached to you faster than you can breathe. So you must be extremely careful to publish a paper as amateur. Especially because there are journals which are so...problematic that publishing there will harm your reputation.
The arXiv uses an endorsement system to guarantee that only people from universities and research centers can submit papers; other people are locked out.
If you really have an impressive result: In both cases, arXiv and respectable journal it is unfortunately necessary to contact someone from a university etc. which helps you to get through the barrier.
So, principially yes, but there are barriers. Do not underestimate the problem.
UPDATE: Some information beforehand. The reputation of a journal is measured by the impact factor and since 2005 also by the h-index. For 2013 Nature has rank 7 in the impact factor with 38.6 and leads the h-index with 829. Science has rank 20 (but is preceded by 9 (!) Nature specializations) and is second on the h-index with 801. So pretty important journals.
Nature offers an overview over the publication process and in fact the rejection rate steadily increased from 89% to 92% which I would call "swamping".
Corvus now claims that my analysis is glaringly wrong and gives the explanation that other journals except Nature and Science do not have the need to pick between papers, if I have understood him right.
Corvus, it is your claim that other high-reputable journals both by h-index and impact factor do not have the problem with picking a paper and therefore high rejection rates ? Do you stand by your claim ? If my information is outdated or simply wrong, then I will retract it, but I will research it.
Glaringly wrong, yes or no ?
JeffE, do you agree that being of member of the Computer Science Department in Illinois (which incidentally built the ORDVAC and ILLIAC and are currently responsible for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure) with a very long tradition and an own ACM chapter might give a paper some recommendation ?

Care to explain the downvote ? Is anything I claimed not true and if yes, what exactly ?

Who said something of an impressive result?

Noone ? The first part only states that journals must choose what to publish. So they select first by impressiveness and then by author reputation, so if you want to publish and have no reputation, it is more likely to be published in a lower reputation journal with the given consequences. If (!) the author wants to be published in a high reputation journal, then he must have an impressive result. My answer does not state anything about the result the author must have, only how publication works.

I'm not the original down-voter, but I can tell you one thing that is glaringly wrong with your analysis: "So the editors get swamped with papers and must choose by priority. If two results are equally impressive, the probability that the more experienced and reputable scientist will be published is very high." Having to pick one or the other of two manuscripts essentially never happens except at Nature and Science, and even there in moderation. Anywhere else, the handling editors make a decision to accept or reject independently of any other manuscripts they may be handling.

At least in my field, there is a strong trend toward completely blinded submission review (neither reviewers nor editors get to see authors' identities until after deciding what to accept) precisely to prevent author reputation from being a factor in acceptance decisions. It's not a perfect system -- if I know enough about a subfield to review papers, I can probably recognize the big names in that subfield by writing style and particular interests -- but it helps.

It is very common for students in my field (theoretical computer science) to publish in the very best journals in the field. I did. My advisor did. My grand-advisor did. My great-grand-advisor did. His advisor never even had a PhD, and he did. Many of my students did. Most of my colleagues did. Many of my colleagues had to publish in top journals to get their PhDs. On all cases, our lack of PhD was not held against us. On the other hand, even people with PhDs who don't follow the cultural norms of the field find it hard to publish in the field.

@ThorstenS., I was referring to the crackpot part. I understand what you are saying there, but I was thinking that the person in the question might just as well have a small result and want to publish it in an appropriately chosen journal. And I did not down vote.

I think JeffE points out the crucial factor: it's about following cultural norms.  I'd add that it's also important to appear to be part of the culture, which is what ultimately I think the OP was asking.  While JeffE and his colleagues were able to publish as students without PhDs, I wonder if it would have been harder were they unable to list academic affiliations or thank recognized authorities in their acknowledgments.

I don´t agree with the amount of criticism this answer receives. Reputation matters everywhere on this planet, and it would be plainly naive to think that the people who do peer review do not look at someone´s credentials and previous work.

I have to say that holding up Nature and Science---the two most cross-disciplinarily prestigious journal in existence---as an example of the hurdles faced in attempting to get published is simply silly. Even first-rank discipline-specific journals (say Phys Rev C in my business) are easier to get into and there are perfectly good journals that have irregular publication schedules that depend on the availability of good submissions. You might as well use a count of the leading roles in Hollywood blockbusters as an indication of how hard it is to make a living in the movies.

@dmckee How much it is "easier to get into" ? So far peple tried to suggest that my statement is simply wrong or at least grossly exaggerated without providing evidence. Please state precisely as possible what the "real deal" is so I can bring counterarguments or accept that I am indeed wrong. Reminder: Your own experience is of very limited argumentative value like the 90-year old cigar smoker.

To the extent that your analysis relies on the notion of publication slots as a rare resource this is easily quantified: that ratio of the number of article published in less prestigious but still respectable journals to the number published in Nature and Science in any particular field. Again, the question asks about getting an article published (and it would be reasonable to assume that a reputable publication is intended) but you draw your analysis from only the most competitive venues.

@dmckee Ok: I will choose 5 of the most prestigious regular journals ranked by h-index in the fields physics, biology and chemistry and ask for submission rates. If the majority of the journals shows a acceptance rate of under 50%, then you will retract your criticism, otherwise I will accept that my statement is misleading and will delete my answer. Acceptable ?

Ah, now your going to include supporting roles in blockbuster. That's going to make a difference for certain. Your focus on prestige venues is starting to look contrary to the conditions of the question.

@dmckee Reread my answer. The author of the question asked if it is possible to publish without PhD and while the others said "No problem at all" I said: Reputable journals have more submissions than room, so an article had more chance to be published in a less reputable journal. I didn't say: Impossible ! I didn't even say: Unlikely ! I said: Principially yes, but with barriers, which answers the question if someone can publish without an PhD (which can mean Master-uneducated). Make a counterproposal or I see your interjection and analogy as discussion stopper and nothing more.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

As others have said: no, a PhD is not required. Remember that Einstein didn't have a PhD when he published his paper on the photo-electric effect, yet it would win him a Nobel Prize.
A requirement for getting a PhD degree is often to publish a paper where you are the first author. So then you don't have a PhD (yet) either.
What's more important is references. Even if you have a PhD, but your list of references only is two items, chances are it will be rejected, unless of course you made a Really Great Discovery.
References are important because they show that you studied and are familiar with the work of your peers in the field.

@downvoter - Please, when you downvote, tell me why, so that I can improve my answer. If you think it's wrong, tell us what's wrong with it.

The downvote was probably because you missed that the papers are listed not in order to show what you have read, but to justify ideas in the paper/field and/or to show the place for the work done in the paper.

Another example... found in the Chronicle of Higher Education (July 19 issue)
Nora Keegan, age 13: Her paper was just published in the journal Pediatrics & Child Health
It was her 6th grade Science Fair project.  The judges suggested she write it up for publication.  She did.  It was rejected by one journal, but accepted by the second one she tried.
LINK

Here are two examples in my field, mathematics:

Vladimir Drilfeld has published 9 papers prior to 1978, the year he obtained his PhD.  His first published paper, "A certain cyclic inequality," was written when he was still in high school. All but one of his pre-PhD papers are single-authored.

John Pardon has published 8 papers prior to his PhD (2015). His first published paper, "On the unfolding of simple closed curves," was written when he  was still in high school. (Incidentally, the bibliography list of his first paper consists of 4 references.) Two of his pre-PhD papers were published in journals which are among top-5 in mathematics (Annals of Mathematics and Journal of AMS). All but one of his pre-PhD papers are single-authored.

For both, most likely, more of their published papers were accepted before PhD since publications take time.

Off the top of my head I can think of Theodore [Ted] John Kaczynski (unabomber; published 3 of his 7 papers, all single-authored, before completing his Ph.D.), Jacob Lurie (submitted this single-authored paper before the start of his last year of high school), and Arthur Leonard Rubin (submitted this paper at age 12.5 -- born Feb 1956, paper submitted Nov 1968).

Of course publications want to be read. There is no doubt that anyone who can submit work that is clear, concise, innovative and readable will be considered. But no matter what an individual's personal experience has been, or even the official policy, it comes down to the work, how it is expressed, and the integrity and professionalism of the scientist author. Somehow, nitpicking others' comments seems to be related more to the desire an individual may harbor to be published- even if it's in an online forum!

Can you please try to clarify your answer a bit?  I'm having a hard time understanding how "publications want to be read," online forums, and contradiction of official policy fit together here.

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


text:
"Major Sub-projects" and "Publication Strategy" on Job Application
I am applying for a faculty position. The position is not intended for one particular project but rather part of a research group in political science.
In addition to overall ambitions for this position, the job application I am looking at wants "Major Sub-projects" and a "Publication Strategy"? It is not clear to me what project they are talking about that would have sub-projects. Unfortunately, I reall have no idea what they are asking or how to word these areas.
So, my initial instinct is that I have an overall idea, and I point towards the main areas of research to which this idea can branch and explain it in a couple of sentences.
And publication strategy? This is where I am lost, lost. I would like to continue to publish in high-ranking, relevant journals. Possibly turn everything into a book at the end? Do I need to bring a timetable and mention how many articles I can push out? Or which areas should I touch upon? For example, I would like to publish comparative works as well as case specific (in political science). I am uncertain about how to address this.

This lacks details and so is hard to answer. Is it a faculty position? Are you hired for a particular project? "Sub-project" of what exactly? The question needs more context. Even knowing the field would help a bit.

It is a faculty position, not a particular project but a part of a research group in a political science department. Sub-project of what? Well, I really don't know. What I assume is they want me to provide some overall approach and propose sub-projects. It is kind of what I am asking, because there is literally no explanation whatsoever in the add.

Consider creating a "research portfolio" touching on these issues
As a general tip, if you are going to pursue an academic career long-term, it is a good idea to create a general "research portfolio" and "teaching portfolio" to describe your approach, history, results, etc., in research and teaching.  The research portfolio would typically describe the main avenues of your research and include your research record and future plans.  It would usually also include discussion of how you aim to gain impact for your work, which might include a discussion of "publication strategy" (e.g., what types of journals will you target, will you augment academic publication with any corresponding publications on blogs, social media, etc.).  This is something you can develop and refine over time as your career progresses.  It is a useful document for planning and articulating your approach to research, research impact, etc., and it can be useful both for development during your career and for application purposes.
If I were asked to give a "publication strategy" in an application process for an academic position, I would probably just provide my research portfolio and direct the selection panel to the relevant pages where I discuss my approach to research impact.  As to "major sub-projects" (what a strange categorisation) I would again just provide my research portfolio and direct the selection panel to the relevant pages with a description of my research avenues and interests; I might accompany this by mentioning any other projects that are not listed there.  Providing a full research portfolio has the advantage of both answering their immediate query but also showing them that this is part of a broad strategic plan you have for your long-term development and academic success.  I would also accompany this with the job-application-magic-words: "If the panel feel that I may be a suitable candidate for the position, I would appreciate an opportunity to provide more detail on my major research avenues and sub-projects at an interview."


text:
What percentage of arXiv preprints fall under the CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses?
I am interested in exporting and redistributing arXiv papers and will need the source on them. It looks like this is allowed so long as they fall under CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses. However, I'm not sure how viable it is, because I don't know how many papers are typically published with those licenses.
It says on their bulk data page that "A small fraction of submissions are made with other licenses and this information is available in the OAI-PMH metadata." So the data are available there, but I'm only not sure how to harvest these data from the OAI.

Well you click the link that says OAI-PMH which tells you the protocol version and base url. Then you click the link for the protocol version which explains the protocol so I guess you need to read that and implement the client half of the protocol. Or maybe there is an existing library for it. The arXiv also suggests that one should normally just link to the arXiv for downloads.

@DanRobertson: The protocol description is quite long and complicated, and awkward to implement, so I think it's fair to ask this question and see whether someone has already got this data.

There are more than a million eprints at arXiv.
arXiv started in 1991 well before Creative Commons and Creative Commons licensing existed. The first generation of CC licenses were made public in December 2002.
Therefore, I think to answer this question, it is fair to take just a sample of the (massive!) total eprints, and a recent sample at that - little point in assessing eprints from 1991-2001.
I couldn't work out how to get this information myself from the various arXiv APIs so (full disclosure), I asked Erick Peirson on Twitter, who is currently lead software architect at arXiv, if he could get some data on this matter.
The rest of this answer is all his work tbh:
You can use the OAI-PMH endpoint provided by arXiv to query license information.
These are the totals for each submitting-author selected license that arXiv allows for eprints uploaded between 2015-01-01 through to 2018-07-30:

http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/: 406647,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/: 485,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/: 3187,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/: 857,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/: 766,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/: 6982,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/: 192,
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/: 1451

For that period, only 3.42% of eprint uploads choose a license that is not the default arxiv-license 1.0. Of the 13,920 that did not choose the default arxiv-license, 55% (7748) chose either CC BY 3.0 or CC BY 4.0, and only 6.16% (857) used CC BY-SA 3.0.
So to answer you question exactly "What percentage of arXiv preprints fall under the CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses?", of recent eprints it is just over 2% (8605/420567) licensed under those specific licenses.
Thanks for asking such an interesting question. I learned a lot from it!

Thanks! This is quite sad, but it would be nice to make a dump on archive.org with all the freely licensed works (not -NC).

My teammate and I will be sorting through these works (taken from AWS) when we have time in the next 1-2 weeks, I would be happy to provide an AWS link to works separated by license. I'm not sure how to do a dump to archive.org though.