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How to correspond with academics as a young researcher in high school?
I just started my freshman year of high school, and one of the electives I'm taking is a year long research project where we can choose any topic, do an experiment, and write a paper about it. I chose to do a research project with mathematics, specifically a really cool subject called class field theory.
I understand the topic, most of the current papers and literature I've read on it, and I have done an experiment on a certain cause/effect. The problem now is to analyze the data I've gotten and write a paper. It looks really promising, but I will occasionally have questions on certain topics that are really hard to research online. For this, I usually try to contact a researcher who is knowledgeable in the subject I'm researching and just ask if they would be interested in giving some of their time to answer some of my questions.
For example, the way I structured my last email (that spurred this question):

Hello Dr. *****,
My name is *****. I'm 14, and I live in South Carolina. Recently, we were assigned a year-long research project, which I chose to do on Hilbert class fields of global function fields. In one area of my research, I encountered a problem with [short, general topic of problem].
I see that you have taught a lecture on class field theory (including Hilbert and ray class fields). I have studied the lecture notes and it has given me a lot of clarification, but I still have a few questions that I feel most of the resources out there do not address.
I've also read some of your work and it seems right up my alley.
  I appreciate your concise yet poignant and very understandable way of explaining things. I was wondering if perhaps we could start a short correspondence to help me understand what I'm writing about, and to gain more knowledge of class field theory.
With gratitude, ****

The response I got to this, and unfortunately to the majority of responses I get to similar emails, is condescending in tone and treated me as a child. Of course, I understand this, as I am a child, but in this specific area I would not like to be treated as one. I tried to just not tell my age, and I got much more enthusiastic reactions, but what was suggested to me was to "talk to my advisor" or cited other resources that are not available to me as a highschool student.
Is there something I'm doing wrong in my emails? I've never been part of the whole "academia culture", so this is just me trying my best to sound professional. In any case, what can I include in my correspondence or generally do to be respected as a young researcher?

Do you have an advisor? The people you contact seem to help you very well, but it sounds as if your questions can be answered with the material available/published, or they are of 'common knowledge' to people experienced in the field (such as an advisor in normal cases).

@Mark I have frequent contact with a professor at my local university, who has taught a class on this subject but has not published any papers or done any research in this area. He and I worked on a few of my questions and were able to solve them, but he couldn't figure out any of my other ones. Although that doesn't preclude "common knowledge to any expert", I am pretty sure it isn't.

Can't he get you some of the papers you need? You might find out which ones you need from reading abstracts which should be freely accessible.

Too many embellishments and irrelevant information, go straight to the point of your real questions.

My advice as an outsider who has had overall pretty good results from cold-emailing researchers: first of all, only email them if they are the best person in the world to answer your question (or nearly the best), for example if you're asking about some new idea in one of their research papers. Otherwise ask on math stackexchange or math overflow depending on how advanced the question is.

Second of all, if you do end up emailing them, be specific, concise, and to the point. In your case, I would just ask one of the questions, and include a brief explanation of why I think it relates specifically to their research, and give no introduction of myself. Ask a question that can be stated briefly, is closely related to their research, and is most likely to demonstrate sophistication on your part, so that you will build credibility with them and they will be more likely to want to continue the discussion. Then in future emails you can ask more of your questions.

Just to clarify what I mean by "the best person in the world to answer your question": I mean whoever has the most comparative advantage, not whoever is most able. For example, if you had some moderately advanced (but not research level) combinatorics question, maybe Terence Tao would be the most likely person in the world to be able to answer it, but it would probably be more appropriate to ask a grad student, who could still probably do a fine job of answering, maybe with probability epsilon less than Terence Tao.

I’m curious, how does one do an experiment on class field theory? Does it have applications to physics?

It's not one of the communities I'm involved in so there may be some obvious reason this wouldn't work, but but if you have specific, objective questions and you can show you've made an attempt to research the answers yourself... why not just post them on Mathematics.SE? (I know the equivalent would be fine on Biology.SE, for example.)

Why not try reaching out to a grad student instead? In my experience they can be flattered by the attention and are (marginally) less busy than your average professor.

@TomPrice: Someday I dream that people will learn to spell my last name correctly...

"what can I include in my correspondence or generally do to be respected as a young researcher" => Publish papers, or "prove" that you understand the topic you say you are working on. Professors receive tons of mails of cranks, so receiving a mail from a 14 years old who claims to have questions on a specific field of math will immediatly pass as cranky. If you want to be taken seriously, state the specific question, with the specific vocabulary of the field, that you want an answer to. This will show to the professor whether you are a crank, a beginner, or neither.

There are a number of great math summer programs for high schoolers, many of which include a research component. (These frequently offer some sort of financial aid, so don't let that be a reason not to apply). This would be an ideal way to meet mentors who are interested in helping high school students. Two particular wonderful programs, The Ross Program and PROMYS, are both number theory focused. Also, I'm a graduate student interested in number theory. Send me an email (look at my profile) and I can recommend some resources to learn more about CFT.

Have you tried asking on http://mathematics.stackexchange.com ? Always better to ask people who want to answer.

@Paul Yours is the best answer.

I believe you are not yet a young researcher. To be one you need to have nearly completed your PhD. You are simply a gifted, curious, and motivated high-school student. However, you might explain briefly what you have read and understood

This may just be my personal experience, but when I was your age in high school, I emailed a few highly-regarded computer science professors whose research fell much in line with my own research. Both professors responded, and I was able to speak to one of the professors for about half an hour, and keep up a steady correspondence over email with the other. My emails laid on the flattery much more than yours did, yet both professors were able to answer all my questions. I really think the biggest factor in play is the character of the professor you're emailing.

Minor point: I doubt if "poignant" is really the word you're looking for.

Researchers tend to be very busy advising their own students, and often don't have much free time to commit to supervising others. Recognize that you are asking someone who is very busy to spend some of their limited time on something that (1) may or may not be interesting to them, (2) is not part of their "official" professional responsibilities, and (3) is likely to take time away from their "official" professional responsibilities. (That is why "talk to your advisor" is a common response; they aren't brushing you off, so much as they are redirecting you to someone who is personally responsible for helping you, and has committed to investing that time in you.)
For this reason, emails to researchers asking questions that they don't feel personally responsible for answering, often go unanswered.
You also wrote that you believe the answers to your questions are not going to be immediately obvious, even to an expert:

I have frequent contact with a professor at my local university, who has taught a class on this subject but has not published any papers or done any research in this area. He and I worked on a few of my questions and were able to solve them, but he couldn't figure out any of my other ones. Although that doesn't preclude "common knowledge to any expert", I am pretty sure it isn't.

which suggests that you are asking for a fairly substantial time investment.
And you are asking for an open-ended commitment in your email:

I was wondering if perhaps we could start a short correspondence to help me understand what I'm writing about, and to gain more knowledge of class field theory.

I would be extremely reluctant to say "Yes" to this without any clue of how advanced you are in the topic, what you are expecting from me, and whether it would be an interesting or useful correspondence for me.
It would, however, be appropriate to send a short, actionable email, on a question that is directly related to the researcher's published papers. For example:

Hello Dr. *****,
My name is *****. I'm 14, and I live in South Carolina. I am working on a research project related to Hilbert class fields of global function fields.
I was wondering if you could answer a question about your paper, [name of paper]. [Specific question that you are looking for an answer to.]
With gratitude, ****
P.S. Would it be OK if I asked some further follow-up questions on this subject?

See

When asking research-based questions, what are some good practices to maximize the rates at which people reply to emails?
Increase chance of reply when e-mailing an eminent researcher?

for additional suggestions
For questions that are not related to a specific paper, but are more general questions about the field or your own work (that you and your advisor are unable to answer), I suggest Mathematics Stack Exchange.  People are more likely to invest time in answering a stranger's questions for no professional benefit on a platform where that's what they do.

Yes, researchers are very busy. In physics, some researchers have been known to ignore emails from graduate students (vs. professors) as a matter of course.

I'd also leave out the part about the age. (I'm 14..). It does not seem relevant to the rest of the email and could provoke some of the 'condesending' reactions that OP spoke about.

+1 for suggesting Mathematics Stack Exchange as a better place to ask than a random researcher

@Obie2.0 the shock implicit in your use of italics is unwarranted. Some professors have been known to ignore emails from other professors as well, and even from their department chair. But that's simply a sign that they're overworked (and that they're human and sometimes have human flaws just like everyone else).

@DanRomik - My point was rather that if some professors consider email from graduate students to be a distraction from their research,  that will likely go double for high school students. Yes, I am talking about professors who don't consider questions from graduate students worth their time, not professors who are so overworked they also don't respond to anyone else. And yes, I've known professors like this.

Yes, don't waste an email to ask if you can ask a question!  That introduces all kinds of uncertainty.  Just ask.

The sentence "I understand the topic, most of the current papers and literature I've read on it, and I have done an experiment on a certain cause/effect." does not inspire confidence.  How on earth would one do an "experiment" on a "cause/effect" in class field theory?  I'm a professional mathematician who knows something about that subject, and I'm scratching my head right now.
I think you're focused too hard on "respect".  I personally don't deal with undergraduate students as equals, and I almost never interact with kids who are younger than that.  I think you should dial back on your expectations.
The suggestion that you speak to your mentor (which you've admitted you have) is a good one.  While sometimes faculty are willing to answer technical questions from strangers (if they have time and the questions are sufficiently interesting), it is unrealistic to expect them to devote a lot of time to mentoring you.  If you've really exhausted the resources available at your school, I would talk to your teachers and the professor who is already mentoring you and ask for introductions to people who could help you.  Approaching strangers by email is rarely a useful strategy.

"Cause/Effect" is a bad word. I use that term because that's what the project specifications make me frame it as, but it's really just studying maximal unramified extensions of global function fields and how it "affects" a certain space associated with it (because each extension of a function field corresponds to subgroups of the function field that form a cool space with some interesting properties),

@TreFox: OK, that sounds more reasonable.  I suggest describing it like that in the future; you are more likely to be taken seriously.

And you're right, I'm setting my expectations way too high. Due to my inexperience in academia, I never really considered the pressure and lack of time researchers have. Sadly, I live in a relatively small town where no one in our universitiy's math department can really help me past the basics.

@TreFox: What I suggest then is that you make more of an attempt to learn the kinds of things that your local mathematicians are willing to teach you rather than focus on learning advanced topics.  I can't imagine that they are really incapable of teaching you new things (though they may not be the specific things you want to learn).  At your age, it is more important for you to develop your mathematical maturity and problem-solving skills than to learn any particular topic (and certainly becoming active in research can wait; that's just not a good use of time at your level).

@TreFox There's nothing wrong with setting your expectations high, as long as you accept that high expectations are hard to fulfill. Though this answer is certainly correct in saying that most of the time emailing strangers doesn't work, that's not to say it can't work. I've done it in the past and gotten a ton of "no"s, but also every once in a while a "yes" comes along.

Good luck with your research project, it sounds really cool. I'm a math professor and occasionally get emails from people asking me for help, and in fact recently entered a brief email correspondence with a high school student who asked me some questions. So I think I may be able to offer some useful insights in connection with your question.

Is there something I'm doing wrong in my emails?

No, I think the email is very well written. I can't think of any way it can be improved (except maybe tone down the flattery a bit, but who knows, that might appeal to some recipients). Certainly, as you may already realize, lying about your age or misrepresenting your circumstances to try to get people to give you a more helpful answer than they would be inclined to give otherwise is a very bad idea, and is likely to backfire in some unpleasant and potentially damaging way.

In any case, what can I include in my correspondence or generally do to be respected as a young researcher?

As I said, I can't think of anything else you can do in your correspondence that you're not already doing. But if I'm reading between the lines of your question, I get the sense that you have an expectation that your doing the right thing should somehow guarantee the positive outcome you are wishing for. That is not the case.
Let me explain: the reason professors aren't taking you up on your offer to enter a correspondence has nothing to do with you doing something wrong, and everything to do with the fact that professors are very busy people, who aside from having almost all their professional time occupied with their teaching, research, and other duties that simply cannot be ignored, are also constantly getting bombarded with unsolicited emails from complete strangers asking for advice, help, or trying to interest them in various projects. No matter how exciting or interesting each individual offer is (and trust me, most of them aren't), there simply isn't enough time in the day to give each one the amount of attention it is asking for.
In addition to time being a very scarce resource for a professor -- much more scarce than my 14-year old self could have ever imagined, so I will assume you will find it difficult to imagine as well and hope that you will not find this assumption condescending on my part -- there is also eye strain and physical fatigue to consider. Myself and most of the professors I know spend much too much of our days typing on a keyboard and staring at screens. It is unhealthy and leads to physical discomfort and sometimes pain or even injury, and yet we continue to do it, because (a) much of our work duties that we simply have to do involve those activities; (b) we really enjoy our work and are passionate about it; and (c) after finishing our work we also enjoy doing other things that normal people do on a computer (like facebook, chatting with friends, posting on StackExchange etc).
Now let's go back to your situation. When viewed in the context of what the life of a professor looks like as I described above, do you see how an offer to enter an email correspondence with a 14-year old to help him or her understand an advanced area of mathematics, which is something that would be very difficult to explain even in person to an adult with plenty of background, simply isn't appealing, and is not something that the typical math professor would consider an efficient use of his/her time and other limited resources? It's really not your fault, it's just the way things are.
Let me conclude with some positive advice to offset the somewhat pessimistic opinion above. I think there are in fact plenty of people who would be happy to talk to you in person, at least for a limited time, if you could find an opportunity where you are both physically present in the same place. And moreover in many parts of the U.S. there are all kinds of programs catering to talented youth who are interested in mathematics. I'm not very knowledgeable about this subject (and specifically about South Carolina) so I'll leave it to others to comment about, but generally speaking I think you are on the right track, and in particular the idea of talking to professors at a local university near you, as you seem to already be doing, should be a very good way to help you and connect you with useful resources. Good luck!

I think the main problem is this line:

I was wondering if perhaps we could start a short correspondence to help me understand what I'm writing about, and to gain more knowledge of class field theory.

Despite the word "short", this sounds like a huge endeavor -- I'm happy to send a few one-off answers, but I don't really have time or interest in committing to a lengthy correspondence. It may be better to just put your top 1-2 questions right in the initial letter; this may lead to a correspondence, or he might just answer the initial questions; either way, it's a better outcome.
This line also rubs me the wrong way:

I've also read some of your work and it seems right up my alley. I appreciate your concise yet poignant and very understandable way of explaining things.

This is a bit vague (why is it right up your alley?) -- try citing a particular reason why you chose this professor -- they are very unlikely to reply unless they think that you really need to talk to them in particular, rather than just any math professor (the concise/poignant is a good start, but a technical reason would work better).
Finally, I would be a bit more concise -- in the sciences, brevity is an art form. Maybe something like this:

Dear Dr. *****,
My name is *****. I'm working on a project involving Hilbert class fields of global function fields. In one area of my research, I encountered a problem with [short, general topic of problem].
I read your paper about **** and found it very helpful. I was hoping I could ask you for a few clarifications -- I'm still in high school, so no one at my school really knows anything about this. My main questions are:
(1) ****
(2) ****
I'd really appreciate any insight or advice. With gratitude, ****

Finally, you will likely have much better luck at local or less well known schools than at "famous" top-10 schools.

Your draft dwells on your motivations. Try to appeal to the other person's interests. This is general advice from Dale Cargenie's How to win friends and influence people, a book that helped me.
We assume the professor is proud of their teaching and wants to help students into their field, but is a busy person who can't commit to a ongoing correspondence.
Perhaps

Dear Professor X,
Your lecture notes in super theory were a great help to me—I'd love to take a course of yours in person one day. After re-reading, there's a couple of intricacies that still elude me. No doubt you could explain them clearly.
Can you help?
...
Thank you for reading.

That gives the professor opportunity to confirm their reputation by answering your questions, without committing to an ongoing correspondence. If they don't reply, it must simply be that they are busy.
If you respond gratefully and sincerely "Thank you so much. This helps with my work on Z [now you can mention it]. I appreciate your time", you've built rapport so that you can write to them again in future (perhaps for advice on admissions?). If you bother them too much, they will stop replying.
Best sleep on the message before sending it. In my experience, at the point I finish writing an email to a professor—or just after I send it—I realise my error in understanding!

The x-men are real?!

It is somewhat surprising that this is occurring in mathematics, where there are a lot of prodigies running around!
There might be a few things you could do differently in your emails to people working in the field:

If you are attending a well-known "magnet" school in math and science, this could be mentioned.
You could explain in a bit more detail why you chose your topic.
Alternatively, you could explain the problem in a bit more detail.

All of these would be to get the reader to realize that you aren't wasting their time with a "crank" email, but are seriously asking them for assistance.

Make your enquiries specific, clear, relevant (to the academic's academic research, or to a past publication), and concise. In the subject line of your message, ensure that the nature of your enquiry is clear (e.g.: "[research enquiry] clarification on X in your article '[name of article]'").
Ensure your message addresses the academic with appropriate formality: a salutation such as "Hi" or "Hello" is inappropriate; you should use "Dear Prof. [surname]," and close "Yours sincerely".
Show the academic that you have already "done your homework" (e.g.: "I have already read A, searched online resource B, but could not find clarification on point X"), and ask him/her whether he/she can point you to any relevant literature you have not already read (explain that you do not JSTOR access &c., but that you are willing to buy a few relevant texts if they are highly recommended).
Show the academic that you are genuinely knowledgable and interested in the subject (your credentials, or lack thereof, are less important than tangible engagement in the field: if, for example, you find a mistake in someone's paper, people will take you seriously no matter what your age).
It is probably better not to mention that you are minor, although you should acknowledge any limitations in your knowledge of a topic.


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How to cite online-first published articles? Should you include link to earlier ArXiV version?
When one cites an article which appeared online-first in a journal of mathematics, but which is not in print and has no volume number yet, I have read that one can just use the DOI instead. But do you think that in this situation it is appropriate to add the link to the arXiv version anyway?

Here is an article about citing "advance online publication" in APA style.
Once an article is in the form of advanced online access at the publisher, you should generally cite this version, and not the ArXiv version. The online access is the final version of record. Page and volume numbers are cosmetic.
The exact form of the reference will depend on your citation style. But I agree that including the doi in the reference is helpful as this will not change. In contrast, the year of the reference may change.
Here is an example from the post above:

Muldoon, K., Towse, J., Simms, V., Perra, O., & Menzies, V. (2012). A
           longitudinal analysis of estimation, counting skills, and
           mathematical ability across the first school year. Developmental
           Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/a0028240

So in general the reference really shows almost no difference to a standard reference. It's just that the volume and page numbers are missing. You might append some text to indicate that it is "advance online publication", but this is optional in many cases. And you should probably include the doi (either in doi:10.. form, or in http://dx.doi.org/10... form). The doi will be helpful especially where the paginated version comes out in a subsequent year.
Obviously, depending on your citation style, you'd need to adapt the above. But the basic concept is the same: Authors, year, title, journal, doi, optionally some indication that it is an advance online publication. Basically, follow your normal citation strategy but omit the volume and page details and include a doi.

By the way (if here is a German native-speaker): How to translate "Advance online publication" into German?

In the citation that you use for your preprints you may use any citation style (the only criterion I follow there is that it should be as easy as possible to track down the references for anybody who reads the paper). For published versions, often the publisher decides how the references should look like. Sometimes they add dois (or other identifiers) themselves. Some may strip the link to the arXiv version and in that case you still may add the arXiv version as another entry and references it separately. Anyhow, if people search the paper by title, several search engines will bring up the arXiv version anyway.

All the journals I browse have a notice on the online-first PDF stating how they want them cited. After all, that is the main reason they put them online first - to get them cited more quickly.

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What time of the year do government agencies in the United States typically hand out funding?
Are there any specific seasons, months, weeks which have shown to be the time at which the majority of funding is handed out by Government agencies in the US? Are there any reliable studies that have answered questions around this topic in the past?

@BrianBack - that's still probably too vague to answer; some agencies have year-to-year funding (and so don't know how much they have until Congress passes some form of spending bill) while others have guaranteed amounts every year, regardless of Congress's (in)ability to pass such bills. If you could narrow it down even a bit further it would likely help.

Fellowships and summer activities certainly have typical yearly deadlines, but do you just want to know about specific research grants of thy kind that professors and lab groups/institutions apply for? The NSF, DoD, and NIH are just a small selection of government agencies in the US, as such a huge amount of funding is federal. The NSF for instance lists year round.

Many programs at the NSF have application deadlines on a specific yearly (or twice yearly) schedule, with awards coming out about 6 months later.  However, these are spread around the year, so there's no one time of year that's applicable to all areas of research.

I'm curious why you want to know? Most people only care about proposal deadlines for their particular field, which as others have already pointed out, can be spread out over the entire year.

The agencies I'm familiar with (NIH) have published review cycles, and list not only the submission dates, but the approximate dates of first disbursement. Failing this, an email to a program coordinator will probably get you the info you need.  Also, many institutions have grants coordinators whose job it is to know exactly this information (since it accounts for a large proportion of a departments' income). See if you have access to one

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Lab tech had research project that is now being developed by honours student: Who deserves to be first author?
I worked in a lab as a lab tech and developed my own research project that I've been working on for over a year. I'm currently only working part time as I have a full time job. My supervisor recently got a new honours student who's been working on collecting data for the same project and has expanded the project for her thesis. My question is, when our research gets published who should get first author? I developed the project, collected data, created a poster for a conference, and will most likely be involved in the writing process. However, the new student has expanded the research project, is collecting data (more consistently than I am, because I'm only there part time, and will be writing a thesis for her honours. Who should get first author if the project gets published?

I think the first thing you can do is discuss this with your supervisor. There might be a long way from now until the publication, so who deserves to be first author might change. But discussing it now can put the things straight and make you feel better. There is always the option of sharing the first authorship.

I wasn't aware that you could share first authorship. How does that work?

If you're an academic and want to stay in academics, you could be the corresponding author. If not, why do you want to be first author? You might deserve it, but then it doesn't bring you any profit, does it?

@Karl Good point. It's true that if you don't plan to become an academic, first authorship would not give you any gain. But then again, if you have contributed enough to deserve it, why not...

@Krista You add an asterisk and you add a footnote "These authors have contributed equally". If it's the first two authors, then it's shared first authorship. It will still be Author1 et al, though.

@Karl I do plan on staying in academia and my field is quite competitive. Being published as an undergrad would better my chances of getting my dream job in the future.

There is no general rule on how you determine the order of authors. In some areas (like Mathematics, for example), the order of authors does not imply the relative size of their contributions --- it is typically alphabetical. This strategy has its benefits: for example, we are less likely to include "star" and "virtual" co-authors, because there is no way of distinguishing them from real ones. And of course it simply saves time and helps to maintain good relationships.
In some areas, the contributions of each author are explained at the end of the paper (e.g. "data collection: Dr A, Dr C; statistics: Dr B, Dr C; visualisation of results: Dr A; writing the manuscript: all authors").
If neither of the above helps, the best way to handle author ordering is to discuss it before you start working together. Definitely, by the stage you have your first draft everyone has to agree on this, and no last-minute changes can be done without full and active consensus.

I don't think it's the OP's obsession about the order of the authors. Plus, I don't think it's a question about which system works better (alphabetical or not). It's obviously field related and although there is a general rule, the lines are sometimes unclear.

In many fields, a first author paper counts a lot more on your CV than a second or subsequent author paper. So I think it is a sensible concern.


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How to deal with journal requirements to share data when data comes from industry and industry partner would not permit sharing?
Many authors, especially in manufacturing, use data from real manufacturing companies (not from a lab experiment) for their research. They are asked to report only the results from their analysis on those datasets in journal papers without publishing the underlying data due to confidentiality agreements with the companies. However, I see that the journals are increasingly asking the authors to deposit the raw data so that the research is reproducible. On the other hand, the companies are not ready to make their internal data go public but they are ok with publishing the summary statistics on the datasets. As a result, authors face difficulty in publishing their research results in journal papers.
Any strategies to handle this situation effectively and convince editors about the non-availability of the datasets to other researchers?

Related: Can you publish studies based on confidential customer data that comes from private companies?

The recommendation I always give is to clearly state where the data was obtained from and what strategy was used to select it. If it’s data owned by a commercial partner who is not willing to allow open sharing of the data, you’re unlikely to get them to change their mind, but for the end goal of supporting the reproducibility of the research, clearly stating your sources is a good second best. That will give other researchers the opportunity to approach the company directly and sign their own NDA to get access to the data.

This is a good answer and a reasonable solution. The decision to share data should rest with the company/institute/individual author, not the journal.

I am going to question the premise:
You ask: Any strategies to handle this situation effectively and convince editors about the non-availability of the datasets to other researchers?
I'm going to say: You can't and you shouldn't.
It isn't that the journal editors don't believe you when you say "This data is not able to be released for other researchers."
They don't really care why it isn't available,
but they do believe that without that data, it is not the kind of article they want to publish.
Some options which may be valid depending on circumanstances:

Find a journal that is Ok publishing without data. (For understandable reasons these might not be as good as the more stringent ones)
Create a new synthetic dataset, that has similar properties to your real data, and present your primary results on that. (And mention as a secondary point your results on the real data)
Work out what it would take to make the company happy to release the data:

Perhaps removing identifiers (E.g. for personal identifying data k-anonymity is a common technique)

See also the related question:
Can you publish studies based on confidential customer data that comes from private companies?

Finding the proper journal, or other medium, is the critical thing here. But I've had journals that ask for data welcome submissions with a statement that data are restricted due to prior agreements.

+1 for "You can't and you shouldn't". It's important that data's available to other researchers so that they can reproduce your results, and so that they can compare their method with yours. Publishing results based on private data is unhelpful - how is anyone supposed to evaluate/trust them? If anything, working to convince the company of this is far more useful than working to convince the journal that they should accept unreproducible work.

@Stuart Golodetz- While I'm not disputing the importance and desirability of reproducible data,  the 'how is anyone supposed to trust' question seems a little odd to me. I'd like to think that in academia we operate on a certain level of trust, that people are generally being honest with their research. We maintain this by keeping a steep deterrent- loss of credibility if exposed. It would otherwise be quite impossible to check every aspect of research work and evaluate it's accuracy. There are potentially so many ways something could be misrepresented, we couldn't proceed without trust.

@user153812: It's probably too strongly worded - I wasn't intending to imply that I automatically assume research based on closed data to be untrustworthy (99% of the time that's not the case). That said, data openness is one of the things that would encourage me to trust a piece of research more, all other things being equal.

@StuartGolodetz I think simulating a synthetic data-set and providing your source code to run with that data-set and then producing a few extra figures using real-world data too goes a long way if you can't publish the data

@WetlabStudent True, it's much better than nothing!

@Lyndon White makes a good point about the journal reserving the right to decide what kind of articles they would like to publish. Though I'm in agreement, I would like to raise one point of caution.
Publishing is a commercial enterprise, and is driven by economic considerations and profit margins more than increasing reproducibility. The fact that these aspects are actively discussed on ASE is a sign that gradually researchers are becoming aware of how skewed the market is.
In this scenario, a journal could demand data on the grounds of scientific reproducibility, and make this data available to subscribers only. This feature could increase subcriptions from rival industries as well as research labs. In effect, the journal would then be selling data from one source to another. The authors would be willing to turn a blind eye because the journal is prestigious, while the source of data (eg. industry) would grow increasingly distrustful of this journal, widening the industry-academia gap. I find it difficult to see this as a good sign.
The only solution that comes to mind is the erection of mutual non-disclosure agreements between the journal and the author, that permit the author to decide (atleast in part) who gets to see/use the data. This has its own flaws, but it could be a start.

That said, most journals which do demand data availability expect it to be open, not behind a paywall, whether or not that paywall belongs to the publisher in question. Most publishers are unwilling to accept stewardship of data, instead expecting authors to use existing public archives to make the data available. Where publishers do facilitate data sharing themselves its through a separate product they’ve invested in, like figshare (Springer Nature) or Mendeley Data (Elsevier).

@Jez- thanks, I'm glad you brought up this point. I'm also glad someone down-voted my answer, because it shows that people hurt by this viewpoint are reading this. At present, publishers 'facilitate' data-sharing by shepherding authors to a separate, free service. They may (hence the 'could' in my answer) at any point, choose to charge for this. Since you mentioned Mendeley (now owned, not 'invested in' by Elsevier), I quote from their FAQs: (1/2)

(1) "In future, we plan to offer paid-for versions of our repository service to academic institutions." (2)"The terms which you accept by creating a Mendeley user account and posting data, grant our service permission to 'publish, extract, reformat, adapt, build upon, index, re-distribute, link to and otherwise use [published data]'". These two points pretty much allow the potential misuse I am talking about in my answer. (2/2)

I downvoted this answer not because I would be hurt by this viewpoint (I'm not), but because your "scenario" (1) is speculative at best and (2) does not help in answering the original question.

@silvado - Thanks for clarifying. A downvote is constructive only when you comment about the reason for downvoting, as seems to be the general practice on ASE. Hence my impression that it was either a vested or a 'troll' downvote. Anyway, I respect your opinion, but (1) my comment to Jez contains a statement from one such publisher that describes a very similar scenario ("in future we plan to..."). So while it may not have happened yet, it may be shortsighted to dismiss it as "speculative at best".

@silvado - (contd.) (2) As is evident from the beginning of my answer, it is a caution to be taken with Lyndon White's answer, not standalone. Ideally it should have been a comment, but considering the length and readability, I chose to put it as an answer instead.

"Publishing is a commercial enterprise, and is driven by economic considerations and profit margins more than increasing reproducibility" That may be true higher up, But data availability is often decided by editors who are professors and have a vested interest in data reproducibility. When a big publishing company makes a profit-driven move, sometimes the editorial board and editor and chief immediately resign, which can really hurt the journal. https://retractionwatch.com/2018/11/28/majority-of-journals-editorial-board-resigns-after-publishers-handling-of-letter-about-move-to-open-access/

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If asked to provide separate list of publications in addition to CV, should CV still include list of publications?
I am applying for an assisstant professor position, and asked to provide a CV, as well as a separate list of publications. Should I still keep a "publications" section in the CV, or refer to the separate list by writing something like "see enclosed list of publications"?

Even when asked for a separate list, I still keep the list in my CV whenever I apply.

Yes, I would say so.  A CV always should list publications.
It may be that for some reason to do with their search process, they find it convenient to have a separate document that only lists publications, rather than digging through the CV to find it.  But that doesn't mean you should remove this list from the CV.

When we put ads on mathjobs, sometimes we ask for a separate publication list, but I think this is mostly a function of whoever put the ad on mathjobs, rather than what people looking at files want.  Personally, I prefer to look at everything on the CV, and am annoyed when I have to look at the publication list separately.

Might be worth mentioning, that for certain grants, it does seem to be expected that the CV will not contain any publications (judging from length requirements that would make this basically impossible).

I think this depends on whether they put page limits on the documents. If they do, I would not waste pages on duplicating the publications but only list them in the separate publication document.
A reasonable compromise could be to list a short selection of your most recent or most important publications in the CV and then provide the full publication list in the separate document.


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What to do when you plan to submit a paper and a senior colleague is independently pursuing the same research idea?
I am an assistant professor in a business discipline. A couple of months ago, I came across (through casual chat) that a senior colleague of mine plans to pursue a research idea that I myself was also planning to pursue. I asked whether I could join her and her co-author on the project and she declined. But she said I could work on it myself. We didn't share any details of our thoughts afterwards. So we don't know what exactly each other's research question and progress on the project.
I went ahead and explored the project with the research question I had in mind. Now I have a finished draft of my work. I don't know the status of my colleague's project.
Now I would like to submit my paper to a journal. But I am not sure whether I should publicize it by e.g. posting it online/on my website. I am afraid that my senior colleague (she will be on my tenure committee) will be pissed off if I do so. She may think that I am scooping her. On the other hand, without publicizing it, people in my field (or potential referees of my paper) will not know that this work is mine and the paper may not get exposure/comments (which may not be critical).
What should I do? I don't think I have done anything unethical, but somehow I feel that I am stuck in a dilemma.

How about approaching her with :" Hey, how's everything going? I just would like to get your thought over my draft paper that I'm planning to submit soon ".

Thanks. She is very aggressive personally and I do not want to piss her off or invoke any actions from her now before I see a more clear prospect of my paper being published well (our field is very competitive). I am also worried that she may forcefully add her and her co-author onto my paper or allege that I steal her idea and ask me to kill my paper. Honestly speaking, in the very beginning I am very happy to collaborate to share my thoughts. But now I have pursued it in a long way based on my own thoughts. Adding them onto my paper/killing my paper seems a bit unfair to me. @seteropere

How about privately send the paper to a few people who are most likely to be interested?

The fact that the colleague in question will be on your tenure committee seems to, on the surface, complicate matters. However, it's not like you had a conversation with her, made no mention of a possible collaboration, and took the idea and ran with it:
You reached out to her by proposing a collaboration on the research topic, which she declined.
Thus you should do with your manuscript whatever is normal in your field to disseminate the ideas contained in your paper; e.g., submit your paper for peer review, post the manuscript on your webpage/upload the manuscript to a preprint server (if this is normal in your field/OK with where you plan on submitting your manuscript), etc.
Also, if your conversation with your colleague was key in your research progress on the topic, then I think an acknowledgment in your manuscript stating that fact would be appropriate.

I'd like to clarify that you should only put this on your website or upload to a preprint server if that fits within the norms of your academic community and the requirements for submission of the journal in question (which is in the answer but somewhat indirectly). In some communities this is normal and allowed, and in some it is not.

Yes, indeed. This is what I had in mind when I wrote "you should do with your manuscript whatever is normal in your field to disseminate the ideas contained in your paper" @BillBarth

Right, but the stuff after the colon appears, to me, to be more imperative. I.e. that those are the norms of some community and that OP should do it that way. I think it's more subtle than that.

Thanks! The initial conversation was very brief and not very informative. I believe that my research question is more interesting and fundamental to our field. I don't know how exactly she'll position her paper and whether she has done anything yet. We didn't talk about it at all after she declined my proposal of collaboration. In my field, people usually post their working paper to a preprint server but it is not mandatory. It is a bit subtle given that she is on my tenure committee. Maybe I will simply submit it to a journal and see how it goes and not post it online yet? @BillBarth

The politics of this are lost on me as I'm not in a tenure-track position. If you have someone in your department who was supposed to advise you through your tenure process, you might talk to them, off the record, unless it's her. Lacking that, you might just skip the online posting and go straight to journal submission unless people expect a preprint to be on SSRN or the like to have the opportunity to workshop the paper with you before it goes to a journal. She knows she declined to work with you, so she would be completely unethical to hold that against your tenure case.

From your comments, it seems that this is not specifically relevant here, but if you are on reasonably good terms with your colleague who you know is working on a related paper you could offer to try to arrange simultaneous publication.  In this situation you both submit your papers at the same time to the same journal and include this information in your cover letters.  In my experience (having done this a few times) journal editors are very open to this and are willing to work with you, and it can be good for your relationship with your colleagues -- showing that you're eager to be cooperative while still not being scooped.
Of course, there are many potential problems with this. In one case we'd agreed to co-submit with some colleagues, but had overestimated our progress and were a few weeks behind them.  They held on to theirs for a little while but we told them not to worry about it, and they ended up beating us into publication by a month or so; but we remained on good terms and I think we all appreciated the others good will and cooperation.  Similarly, one paper may need more rounds of review than another, or one may be accepted while the other is rejected.  But the main point is the initial presumption of good will, and the rest is more or less out of your hands.
However, this really is only a real consideration when (1) you know the other group is at a very similar state, (2) you're both on good terms, and (3) want to remain that way.  In the specific case here, even if (3) is true, (1) doesn't seem to be and (2) seems dubious.  In this case, following your field's normal publication-type process seems very reasonable.

Thanks, and I also appreciate your great suggestion. In my case, I am not sure whether the other group has done anything or whether they are still pursuing it (they may have tried something and then dropped, which I don't know either). Basically no information about (1) at all for me. I obviously wanted to keep good terms... @iayork

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What are the pros and cons of submitting same paper to more than one open repository?
What if I submit a same preprint to several open access repositories, e.g. arxiv, vixra, philica etc.?
I guess doing so would give to a paper more visibility. But would it be a bad practice? Would it be unethical? Scientific community would complain or blacklist me? Is there any copyright issues, or other notes that I should know? What do you advice?
I know it's unethical to submit a paper to more than a journal (or maybe conferences), but here I want to know about preprints and open repositories.

From the viewpoint of the repository (although, I am speaking primarily from the viewpoint of a university institutional repository), it would not be considered unethical or undesirable for authors to submit their work to more than one repository. Open repositories are built to increase access to the products of research and creativity, by making works publicly and freely available online. Submitting work to more than one repository is another way for an author to increase accessibility to his/her work.
The only copyright issue present would lie in the relationship between the author and the publisher that published the author's article. Most journals allow authors to deposit preprints of their work, that do not contain any edits or revisions from the publication process, in open repositories. Others allow authors to deposit preprints of their work that have been revised to show the revisions made in the publication process, and a few journals will allow authors to deposit the final publisher's version of the article. Some publishers will want their authors to wait a few months after publication before making their works accessible through open repositories.
Journals rely on the quality and originality of the articles they publish to build a reputation. As most journals charge subscription fees, the originality of their articles is important. Open repositories do not operate on this model, so the ethics of publishing in the journal do not translate to depositing your work in an open repository. Most repositories require their authors to sign a non-exclusive distribution license to deposit their work, which allows the repository to make the work accessible online. As a non-exclusive license, authors retain the right to submit their work to journals, other publications and other repositories.
Different open repositories have different functions. Institutional repositories capture the research and creative outputs of their host institutions. Subject-based repositories capture the work being done in a specific field. Because repositories exist for different reasons, I would see no problem in submitting your work to multiple repositories.

Preprints also generate a DOI for the paper. I hope that won't be an issue?

In addition to the great answers by hnltraveler and user102 on the moral aspects of the question let me add some more technical points:
Duplicates in scholar search services
If you are searching for publications with Google Schoolar or similar you will find that these systems already aggregate multiple sources for the same publication.
Examples

Google Scholar
Microsoft Academic Search
Web of Science

So you wont confuse your audience with multiple identical versions (just be sure to update all of them if you change something).
Licences
Preprint services let you choose the license of your work (for example Creative Commons) and with many of these even other people could re-upload your work onto other services. As long as you hold the copyright to your work (or remain the right to publish a preprint version) you can upload your paper to as many repositories as you like.
References/Persistent Identifier
Some preprint services like Zenodo allow you to set a relation to another source (via Identifier like DOI): Zenodo Example*

Related identifiers:
Identical to:
10.17605/OSF.IO/FN5ST

You can also add multiple references to the same work in your ORCID profile: ORCID Example*

References to my own work as I didn't find other examples really quickly enough.


text:
Question about reference letters on mathjobs
I have a mechanical question about the mathjobs interface (I believe this is not off -topic since there is a correct answer and this answer would remove uncertainty for other mathematicians in future job cycles). If I list a reference letter in my application to a position, but the reference letter is submitted after the formal deadline (or at least after I submit the application), will that reference letter be automatically added to my dossier at the university in question or do I have to re-submit all of my materials?

The reference letter is automatically added to your applications by mathjobs when it is uploaded by your letter-writers, and there is no need to resubmit.
However, I recommend sending gentle reminders to your letter-writers!

The reference letter is automatically added to the file at mathjobs.org.  However, if someone has downloaded an earlier version of the application, they may not see the new/updated letter of recommendation.

Thanks Brian and Aru. @Brian Borchers, do you have any tip about what I could do to deal with this potential problem? I've already put in my cover letter who my recommenders are.

I'm afraid that there's nothing you can do about this if someone has downloaded an application from the mathjobs.org site.


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Copyright and ownership for rejected papers that are edited based on peer review
I submitted a paper to a journal and I got extensive reviews, and the paper was rejected, but they encouraged resubmission if I successfully did a bit more science and made other drastic revisions. Note this is not the same as being conditionally accepted; I had to resubmit the paper. Well I did this and the paper was accepted the second go around with minor revisions.
The Journal has the policy that you may post a copy of the preprint, the draft prior to review, on your personal website with a link to the final article which is behind a paywall.
My question is, since they rejected the first draft of the paper, can I ethically call the second draft, the one with major revisions and extra science, the pre-peer review paper. It was the raw draft submitted prior to the second set of reviews after which they accepted the paper. Or because that paper did benefit from the first set of peer reviews, I should post the original first draft? My guess is that I am allowed to post the second draft; what do you think?

Have you asked the publisher?

Are you sure this is the policy? I thought it was more normal that you could use the final version you sent the publisher after peer review but before the journals editing and typesetting.

Not Wiley Blackwell: "After publication of the published final version, the right to self-archive on the Contributor’s personal website, or in the Contributor’s institution/employer's institutional repository or archive. This right extends to both intranets and the Internet. The Contributor may not update the submitted version or replace it with the published Contribution. The version posted must contain a legend as follows: This is the pre-peer-reviewed version of the following article: FULL CITE, which has been published in final form at [Link to final article].

It seems clear to me that the answer is post what you call your second draft. The first "round" is a closed chapter because of the reject decision. You should consider your new round as the round of relevance for the final publication; it is a new paper, the old is "dead". The first round draft will be so different from the final that it cannot represent the final version. If you receive a major/minor revision, it means that the submission has intrinsic values that are clear to the reviewers and editor and in such cases the early drafts carry with them enough to mirror the final product. So from this perspective the reject decision is a clear line of separation.

I am sorry if my answer comes across as stating that reviewers work "belong" to the publisher. I do not think they do. One has to check the copyright of each journal to find out but most journals includes copy editing and type setting into what they copyright. Since reviewing is a voluntary exercise, I think they need to contract reviewers in order to get them into their realm. Maybe that would be a good question to pose here?

@dgraziotin: If you go there, you end up asking why do journals get any copyright at all, and that's a separate discussion... which is unproductive in these comments, and hopefully will be sorted out soon anyway.

Just to add to  Peters excellent answer (+1), one of the purposes of publication is to establish priority on discoveries and inventions, and this is established by the "submitted" date that appears on the final published paper.
If the journal is suggesting that you could submit a revised version as a new paper, then the submission date will be the date of the revised version, so it is only fair to treat the second version of the manuscript as the first draft of that paper.
Some journals have decided to get rid of the "revise and resubmit" option following review so that papers are either accepted or rejected (with the possibility of resubmission).  This is done so that the journal appears to have a rapid processing time from submission to final publication.  I think this is deeply unfair to authors as it is misleading and also could prevent them from getting fair priority on their discoveries.  Generally it is also not actually treated as a new paper as it is sent to the same set of reviewers.  The journal shouldn't be allowed to have their cake and eat it as well, either it is a new paper, or it isn't - if they reject a paper, they should have no rights over it whatsoever.

I really like the "The journal shouldn't be allowed to have their cake and eat it as well, either it is a new paper, or it isn't" point. If they wanted that "first draft" to be the one posted they should have conditionally accepted the paper.


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PhD student where TA work leaves little time for PhD. Is it even worth it to finish this PhD?
Background: I started a PhD in a CS-oriented field about 8 months ago, after completing my masters. At the very start, I was given a lot of duties besides my PhD project, such as responsibility for several of our servers, various software and hardware, user accounts, etc. I also serve as a TA to different courses every semester. After all that, I estimate that in terms of time, 15% of the working week is maybe left for research work. In my project I work alone (this is nice), but my project as well is more ambitious than that of other people, as already confirmed by my advisor and colleagues.
Problem: I started a PhD with the hopes to research an issue at depth and gain expertise in that field, now I find I don't actually have time to seriously devote myself to research activity. I was apparently hired to be some kind of an "assistant", but not one that should be called "research assistant". On top of all, I'm paid much lower than what I could earn out in the open, or what I should be paid given the amount of hours extra I put in. I am really demotivated because I entered the PhD with different intentions. FYI, I have no desire to continue in academia as a career, neither do I need the "Dr." title to be more marketable or for ego purposes or whatever - the only reason was fun of the kind I get very little.
Question: I can't decide if it's worth it to stay, I also don't want to be spoiled and foolish. I won't take your word as command, but would be nice to just get honest 3rd party opinions, or sharing if you're dealing with the same situation.
EDIT: thanks all for sharing thoughts and giving some advice. I marked as "answer" the comment with the most subcomments. I already talked to other PhD students and it seems most don't have it as tough as me. I guess with all these tasks eventually the quality of my research will suffer, and I will talk to my advisor about this particular point, as I believe this should be a concern for him as well.

As a first step, stop performing tasks that are not explicit to your research and TA responsibilities.  You have no obligation to any IT support.  Stand firm and tell your advisor that you have to focus on your PhD.

Hobbes: "You have no obligation to any IT support." I agree that he shouldn't, but it is nevertheless possible (and at least slightly implied by the rest of the message) that he does.

That is possible, but I would simply tell the advisor that I will no longer be performing those tasks.  Worst case, the advisor pulls funding and they have to find another source.  It is definitely inappropriate for the OP to be expected to perform these tasks while in a PhD.

Does your TA list a nominal number of hours per week (for instance, 20)?  The TAs that we give have a 20 hour nominal amount, but the students really don't use 20 hours.  If you have an agreement like that, but are working more than 20 hours, you can bring that up with the Dept. head or Univ. administration.  They could be in labor law trouble if you signed up for 20 hours and are regularly working more.

There are a few things that you ought to know before you make your decision to stay our leave.
Nearly every grad student I know of have been through the thought you are thinking about now.
Actually, the fact that you're being paid at all means that you're above half the population out there.
If you really believe you got the toughest research project, then look again. There were many grad students who said exactly the same thing before they realized they are wrong (myself included).
You may request for your burden to be reduced, although there is no guarantee your request will be granted.
Make sure you hear the experience of others both in and out of your institution. Once you're rid of the "why me!?" complex, make your decision.

Ebe, thanks for the reply. As mentioned in my post, the fact that my project is difficult has been confirmed by other people, and while it may not be the toughest of all PhD projects on the planet, it certainly is challenging compared to what others in my department are doing.

The thing is the TA letter which clearly mentions your responsibilities. If your supervisor ask you to do something, it's often nice to do it for him out of respect. From my personal experience as a TA in computer science PhD.
If anyone else asks you, you can deny them or better ask them to please communicate via your supervisor. In that case they will never use that communication channel and even if they do, supervisor will not allow you to carry out the work.
TAs are paid less (as in my case) but if you compare that all your tuition fee and other fees are also waived then it's more than enough.
Refusing unrelated work will not effect your PhD, what's in your thesis is what you did. And you cannot justify that you didn't do well because you were busy in other IT works.
So finish it, give time if someone ask for work just say you have a meeting to prepare, deadlines and busy in that.


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Is it okay to add mention of a grant in the acknowledgements at the proof-stage when the grant started after the paper was submitted for publication?
Some time ago, I have send a paper for publication at a respected journal. The peer review took some time, and eventually the paper is in the production stage. The paper was submitted when we were working at a grant proposal. Some months ago,  the grant proposal was accepted and currently we receive funding from the grant. Since the paper was submitted before the grant was active, the question would be if it is fine if we add acknowledgements at the proof stage for the current grant.  I add that for dealing with the referees remarks, we have also worked at the paper, work that correspond to a time when the grant was active.

Unless I miss something, the situation is pretty clear: the research was done and the paper was written before the grant was accepted, I do not think it makes any sense to acknowledge the current grant.

@PsySp I think in general I agree with you; however, the OP's question regards the time spent working on the paper under the new grant, so the situation isn't quite as clear. Maybe one could reword the question of how much support for a paper needs to come from a particular grant to justify an acknowledgement. >0%? 1%? 10%? 30%?

@BryanKrause OP says "The paper was submitted when we were working at a grant proposal." So 0% time was spent on the paper since the new grant started. However, the only way I can see around is if some revisions were done while working under the new grant. Then they could say this work was partially supported by such-and such

@PsySp Last sentence of the OP: "I add that for dealing with the referees remarks, we have also worked at the paper, work that correspond to a time when the grant was active." In my opinion, it would depend on how substantial that work was. Responses to referees can be simple edits or sometimes require substantial new experiments.

@BryanKrause I agree with you. If the revision included just corrections of typos then no ack would be required. But if the paper was revised in a major way (whatever this means) then I think the most appropriate is to write what I mentioned above.

I think you need to look deep within yourself and do some introspection about the reason why you are thinking of adding an acknowledgement.
If the reason is that you genuinely believe the work you did on the corrections to the paper was substantial enough that the grant agency truly deserves to be acknowledged for its support in making the paper come to a successful fruition -- sure, go ahead and add the acknowledgement. No need to overthink the issue.
But if on the other hand the reason is that you are essentially looking for an excuse to add an acknowledgement so that you can later list the paper in your final or periodical report to the funding agency -- perhaps due to a feeling of insecurity about your ability to produce more substantial work later on in the life of the grant for which you can add a more sincere acknowledgment -- in that case, no, sorry to disappoint but I think such an action would be borderline unethical (and in my personal opinion falling on the wrong side of the border, though not by much), and would also look quite ridiculous should anyone (e.g. the program director at the funding agency, or a panel reviewing a future grant application) later scrutinize your report about what you did for the grant.

What if your reason is "because the grant agency requires it"?


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What are the differences between a presentation in academia and a presentation in industry?
I think that I am pretty good at presenting my work during my PhD, and I am still being invited to conferences for some papers I did 2 years ago.
Now, I am working in industry. My manager always complains about my presentations and my reports.
I tried my best to follow his guidelines, but still he does not understand my presentations.
What might be the expectations in industry different than academia in terms of presenting some work?

It would seem that you are failing to present your work effectively... Major rethinking is probably necessary. Beyond that, it seems that no one on this site could really answer your question in any precise way.

... that is, your remark that you are "excellent at presenting work I did in my PhD" has to be taken in a very qualified way: for certain_audiences, perhaps this is so. Apparently not for all. Also, statistically, many novices' notion of "excellent presentation" is fairly unrelated to more-expert, more-jaded, more-sophisticated notions of that. Different people desire different things at different times in their trajectories.

There are two problems with this question. One, you seem to ask the wrong people. Workplace SE seems to  be a better site because your problem is industry workplace related. Two, My manager always complains about my presentations and my reports.. You need to clarify what are his major complaints. Without knowing the complaints, how do you expect people to help you to address them?

You need to tell your managers what they want to know, rather than what you want to tell them.

From your pseudo I'll take that you are a physicist. Is your manager a physicist too ? Because, as paul garrett pointed out, the audience type is important. Do you present to other colleague or just your manager ? In the former case, do your colleagues share your manager opinion ? Additionally, being invited to a conference is more likely linked to your research quality than your presentation skill. I have seen terrible presentation from highly ranked scientists...

@paulgarrett I'd be happy to answer this question if it weren't on hold. I do think this is the right forum for it.

@ElizabethHenning As is, I think it would be probably a better fit for Workplace SE.

@ElizabethHenning I did vote to reopen... but/and I'd hope that the questioner can add some helpful details.

@MassimoOrtolano Workplace SE might send the OP here because the question asks how to transition from academic experience. Arguably more people here than there would be interested.

@ElizabethHenning I asked there in chat, but probably you're right that there is more people here that would be interested.I voted to reopen.

The comments above are correct--you're probably pitching to the wrong audience, and your presentation skills are probably not as good as you think they are. To put it undiplomatically, the great majority of (STEM) presentations in academia are horrible, but after a half-decade or so of grad school you become inured to this and recalibrate your expectations. You've probably noticed that a genuinely engaging and accessible academic presentation is often judged to be less deep and interesting than an incomprehensible one. This is not going to be the case in a business environment.
The key difference is that the focus in a business presentation is on utility: You're not just trying to convey information, you're trying to be useful to your team and to the company. What are the people in your audience going to do with the content of your presentation when it's over? They want usable information, and they want it quickly and efficiently. Here are some ways to do this:

Include a "30,000-foot view" and (metaphorically) keep it in sight throughout the presentation.
Keep the narrative of your information focused. That is, make sure it's clear why each piece of information is relevant to whatever point you're trying to make.
Leave detailed background explanations to follow-up questions.
Be parsimonious and efficient in your flow of information. Pictures are generally better than words.

I'm assuming you're in a role where you process and produce data, so that your reports and presentations are informative rather than persuasive. But many of the same principles would apply if you are trying to convince your audience of something.
A final remark: People who give business presentations practice them. You probably have access to tech for recording a video of yourself, or at least a screencast with audio of your presentation. Use it.

"great majority of (STEM) presentations in academia are horrible" this is so TRUE, I wonder if there is any research about this.

I don't know what is your employer feedback to the presentation but in general, one thing that I noticed that in academia we tend to emphasize methodology for about 10 slides, and in the industry, they only have one slide of the method and 10 slides of results and implication of results aka. discussion.
If I were in your position, I would use the narrative language of a TED talk. Why this format? because this form is most suitable for the wide audience. I assume that your boss and people in your collective are from various background.
We need more info about your current job, what industry is and who are your co-workers professionally. But if you are people from different backgrounds, you need to find a common denominator for all of you, so your ppt can be clearly understandable to the wide audience.


text:
How to get a list of researchers ranked by their h index?
One way of identifying influential researchers in a field is to rank researchers by their h-index.
I found only a list of researchers ranked by h-index for those with very high h-indices ( >40). However, I cannot see the ranking researchers that are under this number.
Is there a way to get a complete list of researchers in a field classified by their h-index (e.g., h-index > 5)?

"To know the most influent researchers in my field, I have to know the list of reaseracher ranked by their h index." - I believe many people here will strongly disagree with you on that point.

Yes you are right.

Depending on where you look, h-index at the order of magnitude of 5 can well fluctuate by some 10 points.

No problem, the goal is to find the active resarchers that made a significant contribution in my field.

I softened the first sentence, because it was worded in a way that distracts from the underlying legitimate question. i.e., how do you get a list of researchers ranked by h-index

You can get a list of researchers who have Google Scholar profiles and have identified themselves with the field, ranked in order of total citation count by searching for researchers in that field on Google Scholar. That's not quite the same thing but will give you some of the answers you are looking for.

yes, this is a great answer because my goal first to get the list of researcher who have significant contribution in my field. the h-index is just a mean and citation number id another mean for that. You can put this an answer and I will accept it.

You can get a list of researchers who have Google Scholar profiles and have identified themselves with the field, ranked in order of total citation count by searching for researchers in that field on Google Scholar, via https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_authors. That's not quite the same thing but will give you some of the answers you are looking for.

Supposing that the h-index could be used to measure researcher influence (which is debated), I would strongly suggest, in addition to @Significance, to use at least the three main sources: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. In What do bibliometric indicators measure?, 2007, Kermarrec et al. showed the high disparity in coverage and results, and the sensitivity to errors (same names, duplications).  This information can be complemented by Which h-index? – A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar, 2008, Bar-Ilan. The bias observed with Google Scholar is highly dependent on the field.
Using a measure with three different tools (after some cleansing), and plotting the profiles on a 3D axis might help to avoid "missing" influential authors who lay off the main diagonal (data from Bar-Ilan's paper):

A pending issue is the difficulty to get authors assigned to a field.  Journals can be associated to differents fields, and you could make a rule like: "an author who has published at least x papers in a journal from the field is taken into account". A drawback is that an author in that may have an high h-index mainly  because of papers published in different fields. So although "influential" in your sense, he might as well not be influential at all in your field.
A solution could be to collect DOI of papers, and then use retrieval tools as the ones described in Scientometric/bibliometric data retrieval from a list of DOI.


text:
When is it appropriate to describe research as "recent"?
I want to write: "A recent study ...",
The particular study I want to cite was published two years ago. I don't think that this is very recent in terms of journal appearances. But it is the most recent I could find compared to similar studies, which is what I want to emphasize.
But what are the general semantics of "recent" when referencing sources?

If the date of the study matters, why not "A study from 2014...."?

The date can be made out from the bibliography, so it would be redundant to add that information to the sentence.

It is an ineffective way of saying "This is important!"  As a reviewer I would probably tolerate descriptions of anything from the past ten years as "recent."

In my mind recent is anything that is new enough that it hasn't been fully absorbed (worked its way into later research, publications and into people's minds). That might depend on recent to whom -- a 20 year-old mathematical theory might well be too recent to have fully worked its way into engineering practice, so if you're writing to the engineering audience it could be appropriate to call it recent.

Redundancy is not a bad thing in academic writing.

Keep in mind that recent to you may not be recent to a future reader.  If you have something more specific to convey ("most recent at the time of writing", "unsettled", "currently the hip and trendy thing that gets grants"), you'd be best served being more specific.  Otherwise, your reader will have to look at your paper's publication date and try to work out what you meant from context.

@mdiener - The best part about your suggestion, I think, is that, 10 or 20 years from now, the wording would be as accurate as it is today.

I also think it depends on the field.  In astronomy, for example, a two-year old study could be considered recent when examining galaxy evolution, but a two-year old study on exoplanet populations is likely already quite outdated.

Good question. The semantics of the word "recent", in general, and in academic writing, in particular, is not clearly defined (that is, fuzzy), which makes its practical use quite tricky, as evidenced by your question.
While @vonbrand's answer offers some valuable insights, such as considering the fluidity of a particular scientific field or domain, I would suggest a more practical solution to this problem, as follows. Consider literature that you reference in a particular paper. What is the temporal range of the sources? I think that this aspect could guide you in to where the word "recent" is appropriate and where not so much.
For example, if you cite sources from the current century as well as 1930s, then a paper from 2010 should be considered recent, but not one from 1950. If, on the other hand, your temporal range of references is rather narrow, say, recent 20 years, then you should refer to as "recent" for sources that are from approximately last 4-5 years. You can come up with your own rule of thumb (10-20% of the total range sounds pretty reasonable). The most important aspect would be not the actual value (for the rule of thumb), but rather your consistency in applying it throughout the paper.

@thrau: My pleasure! Thank you for kind words and accepting.

It depends on the area. If you are talking about slow moving areas, "recent" could be a decade ago; for something that moves fast, what was published last year is old hat.
Perhaps the easiest way out is to be more specific, "a study three years back..." (besides, the study might be several years back, or be a decade long study, but the journal issue just came out, so the publication date isn't necessarily telling).

As previously mentioned, the meaning of 'recent' depends on the topic of study. What is considered recent in mathematics may not be considered recent enough for computer science. My computer science professors have generally stuck with anything five years old as being the 'oldest' an article can be. Two to three years is generally better, especially in the tech field as things progress at a much higher rate. A good thing to look out for is when an article might pass the 5 year mark, someone will most likely have adapted the methodology or research findings in a more recent article. Best of luck!

It depends.
If you refer to something that has a precise date, you should be precise. I see no advantage in writing "A recent study showed..." over "The study X from 2010 showed..." The latter contains more information and reads as least as good (in my opinion even better, because it's more precise). A similar case is "The problem posed by X at the meeting Y in 2010..." (better than "The recently posed problem...").
One case in which "recent" could make sense is "The field X has attracted much attention recently" because usually one can not pin down an exact date for this event. However, in most cases this reads more like a self-perpetuating empty statement (if there is a simple reason why the reader should care about the field X then give that!). I have to admit that I myself also wrote sentences like this, but looking back it reads a bit weird. Nowadays, if I read "this field has attracted much attention recently" I really read that the authors do not know a good reason why their problem is interesting but feel that they should.

On a slightly related note, how would you feel about "This field has attracted much attention recently because reasons"?

I would say, the more precise the better. Probably in such a sentence just giving the reason that you feel that make the field exciting is enough. The additional information that these exciting facts resulted in "much attention recently" seems not so important. I would find it even better if the sentence would tell that the field is relevant and not that its fancy right now.


text:
How to highlight changes made in the manuscript as part of a revise and resubmit?
We have a journal paper that got correction requests and need to be resubmitted. The changes need to be highlighted in the manuscript. How do you mark the changes? Is changing the text color enough? What if the reviewer/editor does not have a colored printer? or has color blindness?
I tried underlined text but the manuscript looked ugly and I am afraid this journal has early version that goes live after acceptance as is. Any suggestions from experience?
Edit:
Thanks for all the responses. Just for clarity: I assumed that the changes need to be highlighted in the manuscript. The editor did not specify.

Why do you think the changes need highlighting?

They are lots of changes. They may or may not have tools to show differences.

Perhaps ask the editor, if you think you will get a quick response. You could also return two versions of the corrected manuscript, one with changes in colour and one without.

Ask the editor how to mark up the resubmission.

Related older question specifically for LaTeX: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/42519 At the time it was closed as off-topic, being too specific, I now closed it as a duplicate of this one which is more general and with more answers.

And if you use LaTeX, you can have a look also at this one on TeX SE.

Does this answer your question? What changes should be notated in a journal resubmission?

@AnonymousPhysicist and other close voters: that is an entirely different question, and this one cannot be considered a duplicate of that.

@MassimoOrtolano The questions have the same correct answer (use latexdiff) so I consider them to be duplicates.

@AnonymousPhysicist Lol. Not everyone uses LaTeX

@AnonymousPhysicist It’s the question that makes a duplicate target: one asks about the what, this one about the how. Furthermore, not everyone uses LaTeX, not even every journal, and even among LaTeX users latexdiff can be overwhelming sometimes.

@MassimoOrtolano That's just not true.  "What" and "How" have the same answer as provided by Avid. If you changed both questions to specify MS Word instead of LaTeX, they would still have the same answer.

Questions are duplicates if they should have the same answer.

TL;DR Explain the changes in a different document
Send the new article without any marks and a separate document where you detail how you have included the changes suggested or why you have decided not to include them.
For instance:

Reviewer suggests including topic X, we have done so in Section 6.4
Reviewer suggests including topic Y. However, we disagree because of Z.

I agree with @Buffy on the need of having a publishable paper without modifications.
I don't find it necessary either to have the changes marked letter by letter.
However, I believe it is convenient to mention in which part of the paper the changes have been made. If the reviewers are the same, they will find the resubmission easier to follow. If they are different, they will still find a publishable paper to read.

This works in many cases, but some editorial workflows do want to see the changes directly indicated in the text.

A similar approach would be to send 1. a publication-ready version, 2. the same version with line numbers printed, 3. the older version with the line numbers printed, 4. a document explaining the changes by referring to the line numbers, e.g. line 20-30 in V2: clarified the blabla on lines 30-40 in V1. If the editor really cares, they'll read it.

@RLH Of course, always follow the editor guidelines, if any. I'm assuming there aren't.

@PatrickT I find a difference here between major changes and small changes or typos. In the latter case, it may be interesting to use line numbers. In the former, I would rather go with sections. Major changes are likely to imply rewriting full sections or making changes in the structure and may not be easy to follow with line numbers.

This seems like a "frame challenge" answer to me: OP has already decided that the changes "need to be highlighted"; they want to know what's the best way to format them.

@FedericoPoloni You're right in a way. However, I don't understand the question as a formatting one (Unlike the older one that has been mentioned in the comments). My impression is that OP has not considered an alternative, and their comments show that they don't like how highlighting looks.

I recently received an update that had the new paper, and a marked up version with color-coded highlights showing changes made for each reviewer’s comments, as well as a separate response to reviewers (with the same color-code). It made it really easy to see what the authors had done.

In my field a version with marked changes is always expected, and as a peer reviewer I really appreciate it.  So I consider this answer wrong.

See contradictory answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/21720/13240

@AnonymousPhysicist This is not the case in my field, I have never been requested to provide one. I have not received any as a reviewer either. I understand how it may be useful for small changes but still don't think it is always necessary.

If you are writing in Latex, I recommend Latexdiff; its default seems pretty good:

(Image shamelessly stolen from Track changes with latexdiff).
Sometimes it chokes on some equations and complicated nested environments, but in general it's a great tool that does not require you to track changes by hand.
So, what I am suggesting including in a revision:

a clean, "publishable" version of the revised document;

the output of latexdiff (between the previous and current revision), to display changes;

a separate "response to reviewers" document that addresses the major points raised by the referees (there's no point in describing minor changes such as "yes, we have corrected typos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5").

Isn't that more a tool for the reviewer than the author?

@Buffy No, the reviewer often doesn't get the Latex sources (and anyway doesn't want to spend time learning how to compile them). It's been very useful for me as an author, also for exchanging revisions with coauthors.

It is useful tool, but the changes they requested a lot (major). So I think it will look very messy in my case.

@randomname I generally include both a clean copy and a latexdiff copy (along with a response-to-reviewers list of changes) to make it readable while satisfying any requirement for a directly-marked document

A slightly simpler LaTeX package is changes

@ChrisH Good suggestion; there is a major difference though: changes requires you to mark changes manually with a special syntax; latexdiff aims to produce them automatically given the initial and final source file.

@FedericoPoloni I almost assumed as much from the name of latexdiff and the use of a makefile, but didn't check.  That means the two packages are optimised for different use-cases, and for me changes was more suitable; in a properly-organised collaboration, version control should lend itself to latexdiff.  I'm now vaguely wondering about whether latexdiff plays nicely with Overleaf without too much effort, as the last couple of papers I've been involved in have used that, with its own change-tracking for the authors.

@ChrisH With Overleaf, there is nothing automated as far as I know, so I think you'd have to (1) download manually a copy of the old .tex file before the first submission; (2) download manually a copy of the whole project before resubmission (3) run latexdiff locally on your computer.  But if that level of effort is fine for you it should work without further troubles.

This is the correct answer!  I would point out, though, that latexdiff has some bugs and complex documents often require manual correction before they will compile.

There is more than one way to do this. Often the journal editor states exactly what you should do. If not, you can always ask the editor.
The most common and most accurate method is to use the change tracking function of MS Word (under the Review tab). That way you have an exact record of everything you deleted and inserted. The big disadvantage of this is that if you delete a large section, it gets moved to the right margin and is pretty messy. An alternative is to track only your insertions, not deletions.
Some journals ask you to highlight your changes. I don't think you have to worry about color printers as the reviewers will most likely read your revised paper on the screen, not hard copy. Color blind reviewers might see your changes in gray, which is OK too.
The final important step is to submit a separate document that describes your changes persuasively. Set the document up like this:
Reviewer 1
Comment: Please clarify your argument about xx on p. 3.
Reply: I have reframed the argument as follows: "xxx"
Do this for every comment from every reviewer to show that you've done everything they asked you to do. If you disagree with a comment, explain why (diplomatically). Including this document also helps the journal editor detect unfair and incorrect criticism from reviewers, which happens a lot, including when the reviewers don't really read the paper.

One option that clearly indicates the changed parts, is colorblind-safe, and doesn't look ugly would be to highlight the changed portions with vertical black change bars along the outside edge of the page.
Example of this type of change-highlighting in the wild:

If you are using Microsoft Word, then you can use the compare documents feature. Simply use the original submission and the updated submission in the compare documents dialog. Put label changes with "Author" to ensure anonymity (i.e., blind review). This will generate a track changes version of the document showing the changes made between the original and revised documents.
You can then upload this track change version as part of your submission (perhaps in addition to the final version without track changes) to highlight the changes you have made.

Other answers have addressed the workflow and submission aspects, but regarding the actual marking up, underlining is a very useful way of showing changes
This is precisely because it's too ugly to make the final version and not routinely used for emphasis (bold and italic may appear in the final document).  It also prints well whatever your printer.  I've used it quite a bit in internal reviewing, where the reviewer, e.g. co-author, may be working on screen or paper depending on whether they're in the office or travelling when they get time to have a look (even in one case on a Kindle with B&W e-ink display).
It also pairs well with strikethrough for removed text.
LaTeX packages soul and ulem (with the [normalem] option) will allow you to do this if you're using LaTeX and don't want to use a more specific change-tracking package.

I'm assuming the editor hasn't actually required you for a marked up document. In that case, follow their instructions.
Otherwise, I would just write the new version, making the changes you feel warranted. Don't bother to mark it up. When you resubmit it, send the editor a separate communication that says something like "We addressed all of the reviewer comments except...", and detail the ones you left undone along with a bit of reasoning.
The new reviewers might or might not be the same as the old ones. What they want to see, in either case, is a good, publishable, paper, not obeisance on conformity to their earlier comments. The editor can pass this document along with the paper.
If you start to mark it up with many changes you then get faced with indexing the changes to the reviewer comments. Messy, hard to read, and, moreover, it can force the reviewer into a mind-set that isn't optimal for a good paper. Comparing the old to the new isn't the point.

This answer contradicts the question.  In my field, it's always required that the changes be marked.  And it's always a good idea.  Indexing changes is easy if you use line numbers.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/21720/13240

@AnonymousPhysicist, given my first paragraph you are incorrect to make such assumptions. What happens in your field isn't universal. And, "indexing" changes isn't easy if the changes necessitate a rewrite. Fine for trivial stuff. But the world isn't as simple as you'd like. Write a better paper.  Address the reviewers concerns. A markup can be a total mess.

I'm not incorrect that this answer contradicts the question.

@AnonymousPhysicist, see the update to the question as well as the accepted answer. If you think I haven't answered, then flag it. But I find the attempt in your (frequent) comments to influence others to be unfriendly.

I have viewed those things.  https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756/how-do-comments-work

Aside from a separate document, where you can much better and in a more focused manner reply to the requests of the reviewers, I tend to prepare a full diff, even if only for myself.
latexdiff was already mentioned, but if you use some kind of a version control for you paper (you rather should if you use it anyway for your code), there is another option. Here, I use git.
git diff --word-diff --color <old-state> HEAD file1 file2 file3

will give you a difference output, colored, on a terminal. Let's improve that with ansi2html and few tweaks:

use a script to convert terminal colors to HTML
adjust it a bit with sed
use a make rule to generate it automatically, e.g. when building a PDF:

Here is the complete rule for your Makefile (if you have one).
diff.html : content.md content.tex full.bib Makefile
    git diff --word-diff --color submission1 HEAD content.md full.bib | sh ~/bin/ansi2html.sh | sed -e 's|<style type="text/css">|<style type="text/css"> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; } |g' > diff.html

Here is how it looks like in the final diff.html:

There are many other fancy things, like letting a CI build your paper on each commit to a remote repo, but that's a story for another time.

The vast majority of reviewers don't understand diff, and therefore would prefer latexdiff to this approach.