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Got denied authorship on paper; neither university nor publisher feel responsible
I helped another graduate student with her work. We were testing how long certain drugs lasted in mouse organs. We dosed three drugs and sent them to some collaborators for analysis.
Time passes. My PI and I have a falling out, and I leave to finish my PhD in another lab. Before I leave I have to fight to prove I deserved at least a co-authorship on the drug paper (I did a ton of work for it, the lab manager did nothing and was automatically put on). Get the authorship and am relieved, but cannot figure out why the paper only includes two drugs when we tested three, all at the same time. Oh well, I’m moving on with life and way happier in my new lab.
Cut to two years later. My old lab is publishing the third drug! And guess whose name is the only one missing from the authors list. I met with the university’s research-integrity officer, and she tells me there’s nothing anyone can do. The university considers it a publisher issue, and the publisher considers it a university issue.
What would you do?

My sympathies to you!

Presumably you first talked to the authors of the second paper.  What did they say?

Did the research-integrity officer tell you why there's nothing anyone can do?  Is there no documentation that you played a role in this third drug?

Thanks for the comments. It's already published so there's really nothing to do. It was more of a learning experience. The best advice I can give is GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING. If you start helping someone out with their stuff, no matter how awkward it is get them to acknowledge in writing that you deserve authorship.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for my former PI. I helped a TON with a couple review papers (had to, or else I would be fired). Made figures, compiled massive tables of relevant research, and even wrote an entire section. When it came time to turn it in he said "I'm not putting you as an author, because that would look like you did most of the writing, but I'll put you in the acknowledgements." I was devastated, but what can you do when your boss literally says you can do what he wants or quit and lose years of your life. Moral of the story: don't work for a jerk, even if he has money.

You probably inclined to think that "there’s nothing anyone can do" is equivalent to "I do not want to do anything". I want to provide an alternative way of thinking. Think about it as "There’s nothing anyone can do constructively, i.e. to your benefit". One can do many things here, but will they be useful to you in some way? Punishing someone gives only a temporary satisfaction. A possible course of action along this line would be that an erratum is written to this article stating:

We acknowledge J LecC for insightful comments to this paper.

But does it bring anything? Your publication list nor your h-index will not grow because of this... Therefore, cynically speaking, just be happy in your new lab.


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Does this imply that I am ineligible to apply for this grant?
Comment of grant reviewer in the field of chemistry:

order to be eligible, your study must involve an inferential statistical test, and it appears your study will instead quantify the conditions required to [chemistry term]

Why would a grant in chemistry require such statistical test? Nowhere in the announcement of the grant was this pointed out. Am I understanding chemistry wrong?

It might help to include more of the quote for context.

It might also help if you point out what the program is. We can’t guess what the requirements are.

@aeismail New trends in environmental chemistry- sustainable environmental technology fund

@Nat I wish I have more, that was reply from reviewer from grant agency

Any number of stochastic models in chemistry are appropriately analyzed using statistical tests.

@Fomite but how I can test conditions? in statistical way? it is not wide range, there are no temperature, ph, humidity, etc influences

I’m not saying your project fits, just that it’s conceivable that a chemistry research project might heavily involve stats.

@Fomite yes, you are right, but why would they ( founding body) think of grant just using that in context of env. technology?  inferential test for new technology. that sound more like applied research rather than basic.

@SSimon There are pure applications that might use stats as well. Perhaps they just want to specifically target and push projects using stats?

Maybe, but what would be purpose of it? @Fomite

@SSimon To promote research using a particular methodology

It’s hard to say for sure, but at larger granting agencies, different review panels may focus on different areas and have quite stringent guidelines for what is considered on-topic. It may be that you need to have a statistical test as part of the guidelines for the area under which you asked your proposal to be judged. The reviewer’s response may be suggesting your submission falls out of their purview.

I wonder why they didnt point out in grant call. They just pointed out about expected publishing and outcome of research, if I knew that also methodology predeterminated, I would apply

It may be posted separately from the grant call itself.

@aesismall where can I check this?

You’d have to look at the agency’s website.

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Supervisor has suprevisees do peer reviews for them – what are the ethics of this?
From Jan van Deursen’s bullying: lab members speak out:

Not everything in Jan’s lab was bad and I think it’s also important to point out that my relationship with Jan was often professionally respectful. For example, Jan repeatedly asked me to peer review manuscripts that he had received from various journals from all impact levels. The level of trust was high. Jan would give me his log-in and password. Our routine was that I’d submit reviews for manuscripts without him reading either the manuscript or the review that I wrote; it was completely hands-off. Honestly, I quite enjoyed this, although my work was always claimed in Jan’s name.

The scientist in question seems to see little wrong with that. Can you provide an ethical analysis of this behaviour?

Some discussion on this can be found here. Although somewhat controversial, people seem to agree that delegating reviews is good, but not giving credit to the subreviewers is unethical.

my work was always claimed in Jan’s name: That's because Jan is the reviewer, does the sub-reviewer get mentioned too?

It isn't inherently wrong to give younger members of a research group reviewing assignments (it's a legitimate and commonly used teaching tool when mentoring younger scientists), but there are two points that are definitely ethically questionable:

The review is in his name because the person quoted uploads it in his name. That's deception: The editor expects the review to be from him, in hopes of tapping his experience, but gets nothing of the sort. The younger scientist also doesn't get any credit.

There is no teaching element in all of this. Yes, there is trust, but if he never read these reviews, he can't give feedback to the younger scientist on what they could do better.

When letting younger scientists do these reviews, I often do take their (final) review after we talked about it in some detail, and prefix it by saying something along the lines

The following review was prepared by one of my graduate students. That said, we discussed it in detail, and while the words are those of the student, the conclusions are ones we share and that I believe appropriately reflect our views of the paper.

This way, the student gets to learn, and we together provide a review that meets the expectations.
In other words, I find the behavior exploitative and ethically questionable.

I assume you actually give the name of the graduate student.

@AlexanderWoo To the editor, but not in the review of course.

"Legitimate teaching tool" is a good reason why passing on reviews is ethical. "A lot of people do it" is not, I would suggest removing it from this otherwise good answer.

@UJM I rephrased.

It's Jan's job to teach lab members how to review. For younger lab members, Jan should read reviews before they're submitted and provide feedback. For older members, that might not be necessary. Jan should always give credit to sub-reviewers.
Passwords probably shouldn't be shared, reviewing systems should define procedures for sub-reviewing, but, many don't, so password sharing is perhaps okay. If the reviewing system doesn't allow sub-reviewers to be mentioned, then that's a fault with the system, not Jan. Nonetheless, Jan should go to the effort of ensuring credit is correctly assigned.

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How complete are academic databases?
Right now I'm using Web of Knowledge, ScienceDirect, etc. to find papers to read and get some metadata. My university has a subscription, so this is nice. As far as I know these databases simply have a selection of journals, download all of the articles from those journals, and display them for me, updating every time the journal publishes. My question is: what percentage of journals are actually represented here? Some people say there are between 10,000,000 and 100,000,000 published academic documents in the sciences. Web of Science has about 50,000,000, and it's not clear how many ScienceDirect has.
A good comparison would be: if you take everything that Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Nature have, combined, and subtract everything that Web of Knowledge has, how many things are left?
Another way to phrase it: Of the major publishers (like the ones I listed above), how many are represented in these databases?

I am not sure what your question is and I doubt there is a quantitative way to answer your question. I would say that they are quite complete in general. It is well known that Bradford's Law and Lotka's Law applies quite cleanly for most of these academic databases. Could you rephrase your question perhaps?

@JeffE Does that include the four journals I listed above?

if you take everything that Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Nature have, combined — then you're still missing everything published by ACM, IEEE, SIAM, AMS, MIT Press, USENIX, ACL, ArXiv, personal web pages, ....

google seems a good database. if the first page does not satisfy you then google scholar is better

The precise extent of scholarly publishing is unknown, difficult to estimate, and the subject of some debate. That said, there is lots of evidence that Web of Knowledge and ScienceDirect are likely only the tip of the iceberg.
That is sort of the takeaway from an article I found in from Library Journal on Online Databases-Online Scholarly Journals: How Many? (Google WebCache because the LJ copy seems gone) by Carol Tenopir and published in February 2004.
Apparently, one of the best sources online is Ulrichsweb which is a serials tracking website that is part of ProQuest. I just did a search for "Academic / Scholarly" and "Journal" and came up with more than 107,000 different results.

Your link to google's webcache seems defect, how about a link to the original article?

I've made the change. The article had not been reposted when I wrote this (AFAICT) so I used the cache version instead. This is correct. Thanks!

Previous research has shown strong evidence that there is a language bias in academic databases in the social sciences and humanities[1]. However, evidence for the sciences is mixed: Some cannot find an US bias using the Science Citation Index (SCI)[2], others actually identify also a strong language bias in the SCI[3].
Furthermore, you have to consider differences in publication cultures between disciplines: The humanities and social sciences still approve monographs and edited books as publications which are seldom listed in theses databases.[4]
 References:
[1] Bookstein, A./Yitzhaki,  M. (1999): Own-language preference: A new measure of “relative language self-citation”, in: Scientometrics, 46 (2), 337-348.
Hicks, D. (1999): The difficulty of achieving full coverage of international social science literature and the bibliometric consequences, in: Scientometrics (1999), 44 (2), 193-215.
Hicks, D./Wang, J. (2011): Coverage and overlap of the new social sciences and humanities journal lists, in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62 (2), 284–294
Yitzhaki,  M. (1998): The ‘language preference’ in sociology: Measures of ‘language self-citation’, ‘relative own-language preference indicator’, and ‘mutual use of languages’, in: Scientometrics, 41 (1-2), 243-254.
[2] Van Leeuwen, T. N. et al. (2001): Language biases in the coverage of the Science Citation Index and its consequencesfor international comparisons of national research performance, in: Scientometrics, 51 (1), 335-346.
[3] Luwel, M. (1999): Is the science citation index US-biased? in: Scientometrics, 46 (3), 549-562.
King, D. A. (2004): The scientific impact of nations, in: Nature, 430, 311-316.
[4] Nederhof, A. J. (2006): Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review, in: Scientometrics, 66 (1), 81-100.

Not very. For example, Elsevier is a large publisher, but only still publishes a fraction of the total number of journals and articles in the world. By my count, they publish at least 2,797 journals. They also market Scopus as

the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed
  literature and quality web sources

By my count again, and you may need a subscription to access this information, there are 3230 journals indexed by Scopus. So unless Elsevier publishes 87% of all the journals in the world, Scopus is missing some. In fact we know they are since Pubmed indexes 5,064 journals.
That said, most "reputable" publishers spend the money and/or produce quality products that they get included in the major indices.

An answer for you depends on your purposes and standards.
If you're hoping to rule out the possibility that any published prior art is relevant to a patent claim, no database will be anywhere near the degree of completeness that you would prefer.
On the other hand, every database is complete for some purpose. For example, my understanding is that Web of Knowledge has at least a mere mention (a journal title, volume number, and page number) for every item that has been cited in the core literature since the end of the nineteenth century.
That presumes a definition of core literature that is decided by Thomson Reuters editors in the form of the product's "master journal list" on the basis of Bradford's law. Those seeking an introduction to Bradford's law could start with Sturgeon's law, which apologized for the low quality of much science fiction by observing that "90% of everything is crap." Bradford's law is the more specific, better studied converse in regard to scientific journals, that if we can examine a small but highly valuable fraction of them all, then for many purposes we can ignore the rest.

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Suggestions for writing short papers?
I came out recently with a publishable idea. I analysed it theoretically, and now I need to simulate it - which will take huge amount of time apparently.  I wanted to publish the idea, but I can't wait until the simulation is over. My professor suggested to go for a letter journal (each paper has a limit of 4 pages). This is the first time I write a letter paper, and it does not seem easy at all.
Any suggestions or advices to keep the content within the limit of 4 pages without overcomplicating the paper?
I wish this is not a vague question, or too specific.
EDIT: my field is computer science, but the journal is managed by electrical engineers (IEEE Communications Letters - if it is Ok to name it).

Have you read some papers from such a journal? I expect that doing so would probably give you some helpful ideas.  I have written such a short paper myself, but in my case the idea was very small and so it wasn't a problem to stick within the limit.

Adding which field might help get more specific answers.

You can try starting writing it as a letter (i.e. an e-mail) to your advisor, explaining the idea.

First, follow Tara Bs advice of reading such journals (this will help in choosing the appropriate one as well).
Second, try to describe your idea on a level of complexity, you would explain it to your grandparents in max 10 sentences (assuming they are no experts in your field). This gives you a nice outline of the most important concepts and context of the idea.
Now dig into the topics which are really relevant, and explain them in more detail. Keep the state of the art as short as possible (but demonstrate that you know the relevant literature).
Since you have no simulation results yet, your simulation system is the result of your paper. Therefore "methods" are the way you built your system and design considerations. In the results, you can show some data from pre-tests if available.
You should keep your major paper in mind, especially make sure, the full paper will not be regarded as self-plagiarism of the short paper. But if everything goes well, you can cite your short paper in the methods section of the long one.
In my field (computer science / informatics), one would often choose a conference paper instead of a short paper, but this really depends on your scientific discipline and strategy of your institute.


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Is it ethical to merge a set of relative publications in a single journal without additional content?
I have been working on a particular topic for some years and I have 6-7 publications on different aspects of the same topic.
My supervisor wants me to write a summary journal paper that would incorporate the work of all these publications. Indeed, such a publication would highlight the contributions of the work and make it easier for an interested reader to be guided through my work. Yet, I am wondering that if such a publication would be ethical, considering that would be no extra unpublished content.

Does your supervisor want just a summary of your earlier work, or would you also describe other people's work to produce a broader overview of the subject?  There's nothing wrong with the former (as long as you don't give a false impression that your work is the entire field), but the latter would be more useful for the community.

What you are describing is one form of review article.  Although review articles more typically describe a more general state of the art on a problem, they can also be used to tie together and summarize a collection of linked papers into one coherent entry point.
Doing this well will require creating quite a lot of new content---it just won't be new technical results.  Rather, the content created in such a paper is the distillation of a much larger body of work into a single coherent picture.  This can be quite valuable for readers, because trying to reconstruct the picture of a body of work that is evolving over time and scattered across papers can be painful and difficult; additional detail about particular points can then be obtained by following the citations to the source articles. Note also that if you write this article well there will be little risk of self-plagiarism, because you'll need to rewrite everything pretty much from scratch to fit into the new and more compressed arrangement of ideas.
So, in summary: it's not only ethical, it is legitimate new work and can be highly valuable, just so long as you make the nature of the article extremely clear and include all of the relevant citations.

If you cite the earlier papers and the specific contribution of this summary paper is clearly stated (so that it is not implied that it contributes new research), there's nothing unethical about this.
Furthermore, you're adding value with this new paper, not just trying to rack up publications without added value.
Dishonesty is unethical. If you are truthful in your claims of novelty and contribution, there's nothing dishonest about this.


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My department has changed its favorite fields of research. What are the consequences?
When I was hired to a math department (in the US) my field was among the favorite directions in the department. Few years later the department decided to put more attention on some other areas of math.
I am wondering what might be the practical consequences of this decision for me. E.g. whether my research will be considered to be less important for the department from some point of view? Will I get more administrative duties? Will it be harder to get grants for my research? Any other consequences?
I have a tenure position.

Are you a tenure-track faculty member? adjunct? postdoc? The "more administrative duties" point makes it unlikely you're a graduate student, but I'm guessing the answer might be a bit different depending on which of those three options you fall into.

I have tenure position.

Where does your funding come from? Department? Your own grants?

I don't think anyone can give an authoritative answer, so with regrets I voted to close.

@RoboKaren: I know the question doesn't specifically ask this, but it seems to be in the vein of "my research direction was in vogue but no longer is. What do I do?" Is there a duplicate somewhere that might then be helpful?

@RoboKaren: The answers below are quite helpful. Perhaps  there is no single answer which would work for all departments, it is interesting to learn about experiences of different people from different places. So why to close?

I'm afraid I find the question rather vague.  You write

When I was hired to a math department (in the US) my field was among the favorite directions in the department.

I have spent my entire professional life in math departments in the US, and I was not aware that they (we?) have "favorite directions."  Even the smallest departments I know have at least four different research areas represented, and the general attitude / expectation is that everyone should be collegial and helpful with each other while feeling that their own area is the "favorite" and promoting accordingly.
It is true that often different research groups have different sizes or different profiles.  In my department for instance the number theory group has been larger than the analysis group (and had more students, offered more courses, organized more conferences and so forth...) in the time I've been there.  But there is no explicit, systemic way in which number theory is promoted over analysis in my department: in fact we have hired in both groups in recent years.

Few years later the department decided to put more attention on some other areas of math.

Again, what does that mean?  Do you mean in terms of hiring initiatives?  If so, maybe you have nothing to worry about: hiring initiatives are very often cyclic: departments target areas where the ranks have shrunk in recent years.  I have never in my life heard of a hiring initiative whose express purpose is to deemphasize or somehow lessen in any way the stature of faculty who are already there.  Why in the world would a department agree to that?  Even if a "lessening" of a current research area was in the best interest of the majority of the current members, faculty have more solidarity and longsighted worries than that: first they came for the analysts...

E.g. whether my research will be considered to be less important for the department from some point of view? Will I get more administrative duties? Will it be harder to get grants for my research? Any other consequences?

Again, it seems really impossible for us to answer these questions.  The first one is excruciatingly vague. Everyone's research may be considered to be less important for the department from some point of view: if it's too theoretical then how is it contributing to the world really, and if it's overly applied then it's, you know, not as cool to pure mathematicians.  Will you get more administrative duties is certainly a question to ask the other members of your department.  I don't really understand why this would affect your ability to get external grants, but then I don't really understand what you're talking about.
In general this is something that as a tenured professor you absolutely need to discuss with your colleagues.  Honestly, you sound like you don't understand the whole thing very well.  I urge you to get a clue by talking to your colleagues, repeatedly and protractedly if necessary.  Being tenured means your colleagues need to listen and address all your questions and concerns.  It's time for you to use that power.

Thanks for your answer. First when I am asking about consequences, I do not mean that they should always be explicitly stated. Say, on my department it was stated explicitly by some important professor that field A is important and we will keep hiring experts in this field. And this is what actually happens for the last few years. At the same time, the number of colloquium talks related to this field has increased. Of course  nobody stated explicitly that other fields are less important. However my impression is that they became less visible just because preference was given to other fields.

Thus naturally I am wondering what might be the other possible consequences. (In fact you are right, for some reasons I do not understand very well how the system works.)

@user65203 What do you mean by "some important professor"? What sort of additional power does this person have in decisions related to hiring new faculty and arranging colloquia compared to an ordinary professor?

I agree with @Tobias's question (if that makes sense).  If it's just a matter of individual faculty members trying to push the center of mass of the department in a certain direction: well yes, that is very common and I alluded to it in my answer.  Just because someone says "we will keep hiring experts in this field" doesn't make it true; other people say the same thing about their field...including you.  The bottom line is: you're in the department, so it's your responsibility to steer it in the direction you think is best.

@TobiasKildetoft: Well, as far as I heard on some departments there is a small group of leaders which, among other things, is more involved in identifying hiring directions. This is what I mean by 'important professor'. Is my understanding wrong?


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Presenting a talk on two parallel sessions of the AMS meetings
On the meetings of the American Mathematical Society there are many parallel sessions subjects of some of them overlap sometimes.
My question is whether it is OK to present the same talk on two parallel sessions if I believe that the subject of my talk is close to both of them.
I was independently invited to two different sessions by the organizers. Should I choose only one session? Or it is OK to accept both invitations?

The American Mathematical Society may or may not have a rule against it, but even if they don't I think this is a prohibitively bad idea.
At a conference, especially a big one like an AMS or AMS/MAA conference, time is the most valuable commodity: there are so many people there who would like to interact with each other and hear about each other's work, but so little time that many of the events take place on top of each other and the time given to each is very little.  Notice that the standard length of the talks is 20 minutes.  Virtually everyone who gives a 20 minute talk would rather give a longer talk (in particular, has much more to say).  Most of the talks are kept
that short so as to involve the largest number of people in the very limited time available.
With this in mind, taking up two slots for the same talk may be viewed as remarkably selfish behavior.  Many if not most people at these conferences are interested in more of the talks than they are able to attend: sometimes tough choices have to be made to see one talk versus another (some of us who attend these meetings remember "who we went up against" and marvel that anyone made it to our talk).  To give the same talk twice really looks unfair and ungracious to the other participants.  It would be hard for any session organizer to justify a "repeat performance" as a better intellectual outcome than a new talk.
I should say that at the JMM sometimes people give multiple talks.  At a meeting a few years ago, I noticed that a certain hot job market candidate was giving three talks (of different kinds; maybe not more than one in a special session).  If you're planning to give more than one talk in a special session I would definitely mention this to both session organizers: to have someone turned away while someone else speaks twice looks harsh and should be avoided most of the time, I think.  This is a different thing though than giving the same talk twice: in fact, since giving two different talks is not unheard of in these meetings, giving the same talk twice looks perhaps even weirder: in particular, it may look like you very much want to talk but don't have very much to say.

Added: My colleague Brian Boe is the Associate Secretary for the Southeastern Section of the AMS.  I consulted him, and he replied with the following information:

An individual may not give two talks on the same paper. (At JMM, this implies: not even in an AMS special session and an MAA invited paper session, for example).
An individual may not give more than one (10-minute) contributed paper talk.
An individual is allowed to speak in multiple special sessions (and up to one contributed paper session), as long as the talks are on different topics.

Thanks for your answer.  Actually I was in a situation when I was independently invited to two different sessions by the organizers. Should I choose only one session? Or it is ok to accept both invitations?

As I mentioned, I think you should not give the same talk in both sessions.  If you want to give two different talks (meaning, talks on different mathematical works) in the two sessions, as I mentioned I recommend apprising the organizers of the situation.  If it's okay with them and the talks are different, I see no problem.

This is admittedly off-topic, but (after a recent annoying experience) I'd like to point out another corollary of the first three paragraphs of Pete's answer: it is also extremely rude for session organizers to allow their sessions to deviate significantly from the published schedule.

I agree with Pete Clark's answer, and will put a somewhat different spin on it. If you have two different talks to give, then it looks very good if you give both of them. This is especially true if any prospective employers might be watching your talk, and it's a great opportunity to showcase the diversity of your research interests.
I agree with Pete that it's polite to check with the organizers. In my estimation, they will probably not mind. Indeed, I am actually organizing a session at this year's JMM, and some of our speakers are also speaking in a different session. This is totally fine with me, and I am looking forward to their talks in the other session too.
In short, I would look at two invitations as a fantastic opportunity to give two different talks. If you have multiple papers you can speak on, seize it!


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How do good students in medical school distinguish themselves?
I'm an undergrad in biology, long story short, I was looking a professor's CV (not in medicine) and he had indicated his GPA in his grad school (apparently he had the highest in his program).  But what about medical school? I read somewhere that courses in med school are pass/fail and not graded.  Not sure if that's true but if it is, how do good students distinguish themselves?
Secondly, same question in terms of getting into top specialties as indication of how good of a student someone is.  On a medical school site I saw what seems to be labeled as "competitiveness" of various programs, with dermatology and plastic surgery being highly competitive and family practice and psychiatry being the least.  I assumed this means that only most successful students get into these programs, and so this can be used to indicate how good someone is.  But apparently not so.  I'm not sure exactly how this works, but it seems med students, though they take the same exam (USMLE), they self-select into various specialties.
So how can you tell how good a student is in medical school if there is no GPA and if getting into a specialty also don't indicate that?

I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.
What I mean is, I have zero personal experience with studying or teaching medicine.  But I've read books about people going through medical training.  So my answer will only be as good as those books (and my ability to imagine that world).

How do good students distinguish themselves?

Judging by the context you gave, of reading a professor's CV, I think you're asking how one can tell who the rock stars are.
In academia: the length and the quality of the publications list, getting on the cover of an important journal, winning a prize, getting a prestigious fellowship, being an invited speaker, etc.
In medicine: here I'm less sure of my answer, but I think the items I mentioned for academia would apply as well.  Also, when I hear one mental health professional speak of another one's credentials, they seem to know which are the really good training programs, so if someone has listed one of those on their CV, then that's a feather in their cap.
Perhaps you are asking, how do selection committees figure out which are the strongest candidates for a position.  I imagine the reputation of the training program, and the recommendation letters, must be extremely important.  Blue-blue-blue's answer gives an insider view of what a supervisor thinks about when preparing to give a reference (compassion, creativity, problem solving, communication, collaboration).
From my reading (which I will say once more, may have given me a totally wrong impression), here is what one has to do to be a successful medical student:

learn to do practical things like drawing blood, not necessarily with the benefit of step by step training in how to do it efficiently (in other words, this part of the job can be pretty sink or swim)
be respectful of nurses
respect the medical hierarchy
stay on top of an enormous amount of reading, so as to be able to answer impromptu verbal quizzes in front of fellow students, and also so as to be able to care for patients and do the creative problem solving mentioned by blue-blue
work incredibly long shifts, catching naps as catch can
navigate electronic records comfortably
be efficient
manage one's anxiety about appearing stupid, or about making a mistake
learn enormous amounts of material and figure out a way to catalog it all in one's brain

I saw what seems to be labeled as "competitiveness" of various programs, with dermatology and plastic surgery being highly competitive and family practice and psychiatry being the least.

I think what you saw was a rating system indicating the relative ratios of #slots divided by #applicants.  If that ratio is much higher in one specialty than another, then it is called "highly competitive."
If you are wondering how a student should use this information when choosing a specialty, my personal opinion is that one should be primarily guided by one's natural affinity for an area of medicine.  (I can tell you that I was not very encouraged when I was in the hospital with a serious fracture, and the attending specialist who was overseeing my care, and checking on me from time to time, heard that my spouse is a physicist, and confided in me, "I always wanted to study physics, but my father said the only way he'd pay for my college was if I studied medicine.")

So how can you tell how good a student is in medical school if there is no GPA and if getting into a specialty also don't indicate that?

See above.  Also, when I was choosing a pediatrician for my first child, here are the qualities I valued in the one I chose:

She was able to connect with the child and with me
She listened to my point of view
She explained things clearly
She sometimes mentioned recent research results as they related to the issue the child was having, and sometimes on a subsequent visit I was able to see that she had done some reading in the interim (that really distinguished her from most doctors I had seen; maybe they all do that, but just don't talk about it....)
She gave us useful advice (sorry to have put that at the end, it's of course just as important as the other things)

And here are the reason I switched to someone different after some time:

We were having trouble getting child #2 diagnosed; I found an article I thought could give us some clues (it turned out, in fact, to provide the key to what was wrong), but when I mailed it to her and asked her to read it, and made an appointment for one month later, when we got there, she still hadn't read it.
She refused to use email or a patient portal or fax to communicate with me.  It was very frustrating always to have to go through a semi-literate receptionist.

The current doctor of child #2 has some modern tech-related qualities that I really appreciate:

She checks frequently for messages that come in from patients through the receptionist and the patient portal.
She responds promptly through the patient portal, writes helpful letters explaining to the school what the child needs, and gets the letters to me directly through the patient portal.  That gives me a chance to preview the letter and let her know if there's something the school is liable to misunderstand -- before the letter gets sent to the school.


text:
Advice/guidance when interviewing for a faculty or postdoc job via Skype or phone?
Plenty of advice is available for standard interviews, should phone/Skype interviews be approached any differently?
(This was asked on twitter by @emilyandthelime, I have my own, partial answer that I'll post)

Put on a pair of pants, in case you need to stand up with the camera still running.

A major difference from an in-person interview is that interpersonal visual cues such as eye contact are absent or impoverished (even in Skype, because of poorer resolution / latency / smoothness than actual reality) and a rapid verbal back-and-forth is usually impossible.  So it's more difficult to assess the interviewers' reaction and when they've had enough of your answer.
Typically the interviewer(s) want to hear you talk about your research for several minutes and will ask a few rather open-ended questions that are mainly designed to get you talking. You should run with that and just keep talking and let the interviewer(s) say something when they want you to stop- it's too difficult to try to monitor their nonverbal reactions. Some candidates make the mistake of not saying much, in an attempt to not over-sell themselves or in an attempt to act suitably subordinate. The interviewer(s) really want to hear you describe your work in your own words and feel your enthusiasm and general attitude.
The interviewers themselves will realize that it's difficult to have a normal conversation rapport so don't let any awkward moments or technical difficulties stress you out, the main risk is that you won't say enough.
To show you aren't off in your own world, you can't use the normal nonverbal skills very much, therefore be paticularly sensitive to the exact questions they ask, but once you answer the specific question feel free to answer more broadly, a broad perspective tends to impress.

For data supporting talking a lot in interviews generally, see http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7394-407b?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20120419

When I'm preparing for a phone interview, I often:

Write out extensive notes.  Partly, this helps me to organize my thoughts (which is good preparation for any interview), but in the case of a phone call, I actively consult them during the interview.
For example, I write out answers to questions that I think I may be asked.  When I'm asked one of these questions, I quickly skim my written answer to remind me of what I want to say.
If possible, beforehand I also write out the names of the committee that will be interviewing me, as well as a few comments on each committee member if possible.  This can help me to keep track of my interviewers, even when I can't see their faces.
Finally, I will sometimes print out or take notes on information about the school that I'm interviewing with.  Then, when they ask me question for which I don't have notes, I consult my notes on the school and try to work some of that information into my answer.


text:
What would be a good strategy to avoid being scooped?
A few classmates and I are worried about the time lag between submitting a research paper to a conference or journal and the further time lag between rejections and re-submissions during which someone else has the chance of scooping our idea.
Based on the pointers to using the Dataverse network to prove that a research idea was created by a certain author at a certain point of time, I wrote to few conference organizers if they would accept the Dataverse network as a reliable reference. I received no reply.
Given that a paper like this with spelling and grammar errors did not get rejected, I conclude that lower tier journals are more eager to publish anything that comes their way. For higher tier journals/conferences, I read the rejection rate is 98%.
So one strategy I can think of is:
1. Publish an initial idea/approach in a lower tier journal, where revealing details are not presented, but the overview and results are mentioned like in this paper.
2. Once the paper is accepted and published, cite the published paper in a newly written paper where all details are revealed, and the concepts/results are expanded/improved on a bit more and send for publication to a top tier journal.
Is this a reasonable strategy that would work or would you suggest a better approach?
UPDATE: I wrote to a number of conference organizers and journals. So far KDD and IEEE responded saying that putting up a document on arXiv is ok, before submitting it to an IEEE or KDD conference. Officially, IEEE mentions it here and there's also their code of peer review ethics here. Another update: As of 2019, KDD is no longer allowing publishing on ArXiv, due to their double-blind process.

In CS/HCI the best approach to "stake" the idea would be to publish a poster paper. You only write one-two pages describing the general idea, but it doesn't count as a publication.

Given that a paper like this with spelling and grammar errors did not get rejected --- Given that the journal's name includes all three of the words "international", "advanced", and "research", I'm not particularly surprised.

By scooping, do you mean that they listen in on your group discussions and steal your idea, or that they coincidentally and independently come up with similar work?

I know scooping encompasses coincidence too, but I'm addressing situations when a paper is rejected and someone who knows of the idea presented in the paper steals the idea to publish their own paper. I also remember reading a case here about a student whose professor created a delay for him via an internal review and published the paper under his own name. By the student was ready to publish, he found that the professor had already gotten it published independently. user153812 says in a comment that some conferences don't accept arXiv published papers. So I'm still searching for a solution.

Submitting the manuscript to institutional repositories, and if the field permits it, publishing at arXiv, before sending to a journal are the most common ways to guard against scooping. Another line of defence is storing all communication with the journal you submitted to, so that if any malpractice is found later, you can bring it to the editor's notice and get justice.
The strategy you suggest is flawed based on two reasons:
(1) Many high-ranking journals will not touch a fluffed up version of something published in a low-ranking journal. It is possible that it may not even go to review. There is a high premium on brand-new, original research now; I have come across cases where high-ranking journals reject papers that even use data from previously published work.
(2) This doesn't really prevent someone from scooping your work. As you said,the first publication will not have all the details. Someone could still use your work and claim that they independently expanded/improved upon that initial version.

Good to know arXiv is a preprint storage point. I thought it was a journal. Teachers were discouraging us from putting our papers there saying even low quality papers get accepted there. But if after submitting to arXiv if I can submit the same to a journal or conference, that solves the problem!

@Nav arXiv accepts everything (that constitutes research -- there's probably a more precise definition on arXiv). I cannot understand your teachers' rationale.

@Nav - arXiv isn't peer reviewed, so it doesn't distinguish based on quality. It is moderated, so very dubious or off-topic submissions would get excluded. Barring that, everything goes. If you choose the arXiv route, just check the policy of the target journal - see if it permits prior submission to arXiv. Many journals explicitly state this on their webpage.

Ok. Will check journal rules. I guess even conferences would have such rules? If both journals and conferences accept arXiv as a repository where authors can timestamp their work/idea, then it'd be a great help when needing proof during disputes and could potentially reduce deliberate scooping.

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


text:
How to cite one volume of a book which has been published in different volumes (APA 7)?
How to cite one volume of book which has been published in different volumes, following the APA 7 guidelines?
Imagine the 3 volumes of the book Quantum Theory of Fields by Steven Weinberg were published, by Cambridge University Press, the same year, say 1995.
How are we suppose to write the in-text citation?
How are we suppose to write the citation in the bibliography section?
I have consulted many website and other documents in multiple languages and I am not able to find the recommendation for this situation.
https://elementary.oslis.org/secondary/cite-sources/apa/apa-citation-examples/other-visual-works-citation-examples-for-apa-7
https://libguides.umgc.edu/apa-examples
https://libguides.usc.edu/APA7th/intextcitations
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_author_authors.html
https://bibliotheque.hesav.ch/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GuideAPA7_Sante-Travail_social_HES-SO_2020.pdf
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/doc/APA%20Style%20Guide%20(7th%20ed.).pdf

The APA Style blog entry on How to Cite Edition, Volume, and Page Numbers for Books provides

In a reference to a whole book, cite the edition and volume numbers—separated by a comma—but do not cite a page range.
Here are some templates for citing print versions of books that include edition and volume numbers:
Authored Book
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book (xx ed., Vol. xx). Location: Publisher.
Edited Book
Editor, E. E. (Ed.). (Year). Title of book (xx ed., Vol. xx). Location: Publisher.

Note that the blog post linked above was posted in 2018 and makes reference to the sixth edition of the APA Publication Manual. As of APA 7 the location is no longer required to be included, so we can simplify the format to

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book (xx ed., Vol. xx). Publisher.

For some kind of completeness, it's worth noting that the first link also states

Some publishers title each volume of a multivolume work. In this case, include the volume number within the title when constructing your reference instead of citing it parenthetically.

but this appears irrelevant in your case, as Weinberg's QFT books have subtitles for the volumes, but do not have individual top-level titles.

Now, turning to your specific example:

Imagine the 3 volumes of the book Quantum Theory of Fields by Steven Weinberg were published, by Cambridge University Press, the same year, say 1995.

OK... Officially, they were published 1995, 1996 and 2000, respectively, but we can make this assumption if you want. (And my copy of vol. 2 actually does say it was first published in 1995.)

How are we suppose to write the in-text citation? How are we suppose to write the citation in the bibliography section?

In case you're citing a single volume, the in-text citation would be like any other: "(Weinberg, 1995)" or "Weinberg (1995)", depending on whether you use the parenthetical or narrative form. The bibliography would have, for example
Weinberg, S. (1995). The Quantum Theory of Fields (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

If you want to cite two of the volumes and assume they were published the same year, use the usual format with letters, i.e. "Weinberg (1995a)", "Weinberg (1995b)", etc.
If you want to cite specific pages in all three volumes it's best to provide three separate references. However, if a more compact citation is desired, there is the option of a "whole anthology citation", e.g., "(Weinberg, 1995-2005)" in-text, and with bibliography item:
Weinberg, S. (1995-2000). The Quantum Theory of Fields (Vols. 1-3). Cambridge University Press.


text:
What is the APA7 style for a translated quotation?
My field is in the humanities, and I need to quote a long passage (around 40 words) written in French inside of a paper I write in English.
Naturally, I would like to quote a (personally) translated-into-English version of French-written this passage.
How should I do that?
I did not find this situation in APA7 documentation.
https://libguides.usc.edu/APA7th/intextcitations
https://library.unimelb.edu.au/recite/referencing-styles/apa7
https://bibliotheque.hesav.ch/normes-apa7/
NB: A similar question exists in SE Academia, but concerns IEEE's style.

The stance of APA is that your own translation (as opposed to quoting one previously published) of a foreign-language passage is considered a paraphrase:

If you translate a passage from one language into another language on your own in your paper, your translation is considered a paraphrase, not a direct quotation. Thus, to cite your translated material, all you need to do is include the author and date of the material in the in-text citation. It is also recommended that you include the page number (if available) in the citation to help readers who do speak the language of the original passage find the material in the original work.
Because your translation of the material is a paraphrase, do not use quotation marks around the material you translated. In creating your translated paraphrase, keep in mind that APA Style does not promote patchwriting, which is considered a form of plagiarism, when a few words in a passage have been changed but content is largely the same.
Rather than translate word-for-word, strive to create paraphrased translations. Let’s say you read an article in one language and then write about it in another language; for example, you read an article in French and then paraphrased it in English. In this case, you are both translating and paraphrasing the information. Such a situation requires no special treatment—treat it as any other paragraph by providing an in-text citation.

Further, because it is not possible to codify how exact any given translation is, it would be inappropriate to put quotation marks around the translated words; again, your translation is a paraphrase. There are many ways to paraphrase a text.

The APA style blog shows the same rules applied to APA Style 6.


text:
Why is ASU asking for my wife's high school transcripts when she is already in college?
I know I graduated from the university many moons ago, but my wife has been attending community college for awhile and wants to transfer to an online program with Arizona State University (ASU).
My understanding is when you transfer from one institution of higher learning to another you transfer your transcripts. I am not sure how did conversation asking my wife for her high school transcripts from her country of origin, where she has to get them notarized and translated and what not ended up as part of the conversation.
It's a given she did this once already as that is how you get into a US accredited local community college already.
So can anyone help me out here because otherwise I am thinking they are hearing an accent and asking her what they shouldn't and just going down a road of treating her like she is some international student who is trying to apply to school here.

Every US institution has its own rules. You need to ask them for clarification. It might have been different had she completed the community college program. But rules at one place mean nothing at any other.

Having been doing college tours for my son lately, when the overview gets to transfers they usually ask for transcripts from your current institution and from your high school. Not sure why, perhaps just to see if they might have admitted you originally. So, it likely is a real, albeit bureaucratic, policy.

@JonCuster, wow, times have changed then. It wasn't that way when I was in college. Feel free to post that as an answer. I always understood that once you are admitted to college and then transfer they just ask for your transcripts from your current college, not sure what your high school from way back has to do with it.

I agree it is different these days. I think more people transfer, and transfer more broadly, so they may have had more attempted fraud? Does your community college have an agreement with a four year college to transfer more seamlessly?

@JonCuster, the community college is in a different state so I doubt they have an agreement in place.

Yeah, usually they are quite local...

I saw this on affordablecolleges.com: "Transfer applicants may still be required to submit their high school transcripts and standardized test scores and should check with their new school’s admissions office. Students who have completed an associate’s degree or those who have been out of high school for a specified length of time can usually skip these requirements." I guess ASU is not making allowances.

Can the current community college supply certified copies of the translated high school transcripts?

@BobBrown, great question, I will ask my wife. Thank you for that suggestion.

The latest degree matters
She's joining a new institution from scratch. If she hasn't graduated anything else, the new college is admitting a high school graduate, and they want to see these transcripts to verify that she is a high school graduate. They have no reason to assume that some other organization did the verification in the way they require. They may have some process to transfer (partial) credits for courses completed in the previous college, but that happens after she's been admitted.

You may be suspecting racism where there is none (just lack of common sense and/or inflexible procedures). I have in the past had to submit transcripts and diplomas in the most non-sensical circumstances, independently of whether I applied in a foreign country or where I am a natural born citizen.
Examples include having to provide high school diplomas in addition to undergraduate and graduate degrees, having to provide diplomas and transcripts to the same university that originally issued them, and being asked for diplomas that were not required for the position and that I never claimed to have.
All in all, asking for a specific, and not necessarily well-maintained, checklist of documents is part of the normal procedure for admission and hiring processes. Unless it is particularly annoying or expensive to deliver these documents I would just comply and think no further of it. If it is very cumbersome to acquire the documents you can see if they can make a "common-sense" exception.

Agree. In particular asking for an exception. Policies are made to cover 98%+ of students, but exceptions can and are made when reasonable

All these answers are great, not sure which to pick and I did not know what to suspect but only had my past college life as reference and I do not remember my fellow students being asked for high school transcripts when they were leaving to another university or those that transferred in. Never heard mention of being asked for high school transcripts just the transcripts where you are coming from, but again that was over a decade ago.

I can add some weight to what Peteris has mentioned but from a Canadian perspective. My highschool chemistry teacher initially did his degree in pharmacy, opened his own business, and lived a life as a fairly successful pharmacist. Once he got bored with that, he went back to university as a teacher (at the same school he got his pharmacy degree in) and they were admitting him based on his highschool qualifications. It seems silly, but the system needs to be easily applied to every applicant to handle the volume that a university does.


text:
How to remove citations from Google Scholar profile?
As the number of citations to some of my articles recently increased, I took a look to see who cites me among the articles listed on Google Scholar. To my surprise I found that I was cited in a document describing talks in a conference and in a curriculum vitae. These two citations are not "real" so I would like to remove them.
Do you know how can we remove some of the citations from the Google Scholar profile?

Since this is a common (and known) problem with Google Scholar (next to some others), people who care will know about it. You could use a variety of sources for a more correct citation count of your work (you will never get the exact number for sure)

You can't.
Google Scholar, like everything Google, does not curate the data. It only indexes them and makes them easy to search through. If the citing document is online it'll be counted as a citation.
Google Scholar citations count, h-index and i-10 index are not accurate if you have quality criteria for what constitute a citation (an most reasonable academics do) and should be interpreted with caution.
There are commercial products that give more meaningful citations count per article or researcher. They are generally available via your institution's library.

I was afraid that's the case. I searched a bit and didn't find an option to delete citations... I am aware that there are other things which give meaningful citations, like MathSciNet, but I was thinking I could manage my Google Scholar page to reflect the reality. In current state it is quite useless. I mean, counting citations from a CV? What if Google finds my CV? Will it update all citation numbers by 1?

Google seems to understand when there are multiple copies of the same document. Thus if you have multiple CVs it won't increment the citation count.

It's not about multiple documents. That can be fixed with "Merge". It's about false citations from documents not owned by me, that I cannot delete...

@BeniBogosel: really the problem is that Google Scholar mis-names these things "citations". It should call them "search results", i.e. mentions online of your article title...

I would not call it a problem that Google calls such things a citation. It really is one, just not a scientific one. This is commonly known so there is nothing wrong with it. And this is also one of the reasons that you should always give a source when giving e.g. your h-index.

Log into Google on your scholar page, then select the article. Clicking on the offending article, to go onto it's page. Once on the page for the article there should be a delete option.

Perhaps you could ask them directly: https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general?authuser=1 the following link was found via this page: http://blog.impactstory.org/make-google-scholar-better/

I couldn't verify this. I can delete one of my articles but I cannot delete one of the citations to it.

Yes, these instructions only go so far as deleting an article. Perhaps a Google scholar support request could be used to delete an citing article/document.

@user251242 Because it doesn't answer the question asked.


text:
Editor asks for π to be written in roman
My paper is accepted at MNRAS and in the stage of editing.
There is a section where I wrote an equation using the Greek letter π as to indicate the mathematical constant π.
The editor wrote:

Author: When used to mean the numerical value 3.14, the Greek letter pi must always be written in roman. Please check all the notations throughout the text carefully

I think this request is canned, so I doubt there is any typo or similar here.
What  exactly is π in roman? Shouldn't it be written in Greek? Is it a mistake of the editor or a misunderstanding from my side?

The discussion about the motivations of this convention, and whether it's good or bad, has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

Anyone stating that pi "means 3.14" should not be taken too seriously.

They are referring to the upright version of pi. In the picture below, you can find on the left an italics version and on the right an upright one.

If you're using LaTeX, you can obtain the upright pi with the upgreek package and the command \uppi, see this Q&A on TeX SE.
More details on this convention can be found in the IUPAC Green book, which follows the ISO/IEC 80000 standard. From p. 7 of the linked document:

The overall rule is that symbols representing physical quantities or variables are italic, but symbols representing units, mathematical constants, or labels, are roman.

And from p. 8:

The symbols π (3.141 592. . .), e (2.718 281. . . , base of natural logarithms), i (square root of minus one), etc. are always roman [...]

Also in many LaTeX fonts, while the roman (upright) and and italic letters are distinct from each other, the upright pi can still look rather italic. Compare the right hand illustration, upright but with a sloping left stroke and a hook on the top, to the last paragraph of the answer in which (sans serif) pi looks like a table.  This means it's common not to bother if pi only means what we're used to from school. In physics we're normally good about getting our "e"s upright, but lazy enough to just use \pi even if it should really be upright

@ChrisH Yes, in fact I'm quite fussy about having i and e upright in my papers, but less so when it comes to pi, also because certain journal LaTeX classes are not easily compatible with upgreek.

Apparently upgreek not only changes the style of π, but also changes the typeface from Computer Modern Math Italic to Euler Math.  Unless all your math is in Euler, this looks ugly.  The documentation for the isomath package has several suggestions that retain consistency, the simplest of which is to use the mathdesign package, which defines the macro \piup with a consistent math+text typeface.

@JeffE Interesting, didn't know that. Probably, every journal class would need a specific solution, and the publisher will likely use proprietary fonts anyway.

They mean that it shouldn't be written in italics.
Basically, they weren't referring to the Roman and Greek civilizations, but to typefaces.
Quoting from the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

Roman, in printing, one of the three major typefaces in the history of Western typography (the others being italic and black letter, or Gothic) and, of those three, the face that is of the greatest importance and the widest use.

So, basically, by specifying that pi should be roman, they were specifying that it should be written using a particular sort of typeface, without using italics. Some of the other answers have talked about how to do so using LaTeX, but since none of them have explicitly stated what "roman" means in this context, I figured I'd write an answer explaining it.

And, when referring to the Roman alphabet, one can rather speak of the Latin script, so adding another measure of distinction from the Roman typeface.

Specifically at MNRAS, they actually provide an upright (i.e., not italic) version of π in their LaTeX class. To cite the manual:

There are several options which can be added to the document class line like this:
\documentclass[option1,option2]{mnras}
The available options are:

...
useAMS– adds support for upright Greek characters \upi,\umuand, \upartial (π,μ and ∂). Only these three are included, if you re-quire other symbols you will need to include the amsmath or amsymb packages

I believe the request for the upright π can be inferred from their General Instructions:

Mathematics
(...) Differential d, complex i, exponential e, (...) are roman (not italic).


text:
Which e-mail address should I give for a recommender in an application?
For an application, I have to fill in the contact information of somebody who wrote me a recommendation letter. The person owns three e-mail accounts: permanent (on Gmail), my university’s e-mail service and another university’s e-mail service (where he is the chairman).
So, I feel a little bit confused which e-mail address would be best to give? Does it matter at all?

I think that the best course of action would be to ask your reference(s) which e-mail address they prefer to be contacted through for such purposes. As for whether it matters, it indeed might matter (for both parties), for example, one might check e-mail much more frequently via a particular e-mail account, etc.

How is a gmail address permanent? Google could decide to turn Gmail off without your input.

@Édouard Gmail is more permanent than an university email adress because the university deletes your email adress as soon as you're no longer a member of that university. You xan keep your gmail adress forever in most cases

@JonasDralle Not all universities cancel email addresses as soon as people leave. And, while one might expect that GMail will keep going indefinitely (and longer than, say, a postdoc might be employed at a particular institution), there is no contractual relationship between Google and most gmail users. Google could turn off most GMail accounts tomorrow, if it wanted to. Web services, even popular ones, don't last forever (see GeoCities for a prominent example).

Why are people using the term referee for reference here (title and @Drecate's answer)?  There's a full 2 letter difference.

@JonasDralle Owning a domain is a cheap and simple way to have a more permanent address. You can use Gmail in the back if you want to, but when Gmail decides you’re not worth it any longer, you can change the back end without switching address. And it will work true until there’s a major change on the internet’s model.

I know some universities that prefer email addresses that demonstrate the university affiliations of your referees, so that they know the letters will actually come from the listed referees rather than the student pretending to be the referees with a free gmail account. If the referee has multiple university affiliations, then I would recommend the one associated with the university in which you and the referee became acquainted with each other. For example, if you did an internship with a professor at university B, even though the professor holds a tenure position at university A as well, it is better to use the email address of university B in such a situation.
Of course, some professors do not use the mail account provided by the universities, and thus you should consult with your referee first to make sure that you give the email address that the referee actually checks.

Ask them which address they want these to arrive on.


text:
How to reply to unprofessional negative review from a journal?
Some time ago I submitted a paper to a preeminent journal, and yesterday I received the review letter from the editor.
The email contained reviews from two reviewers.
Reviewer 1 has been very professional, and wrote a detailed, constructive, useful report of the main aspects of the paper to improve.
Reviewer 2, on the contrary, did the opposite: he/she just wrote five superficial sentences. Some of his/her comments are just false, some of them don't make any sense, and some of them are even incorrect in English!
In fact, this reviewer wrote: "The data of the manuscript are NOT available", when the truth is that our data file is publicly available online! It has always been available before submission, during the submission, and now; we the authors wrote this in the manuscript and in the cover letter. I wonder how it is possible that he/she wrote that!
Regarding the English grammar, I'm very surprised to see such poor usage of the language in this review.
This is one of his/her original comments, for example:

How did you use the data to contruct and evaluate the models? I didn't see any mechnism for these purposes

Can you believe it? This sentence is very scarce and ambiguous, and even contains two English mistakes.
Reviewer 2 did not suggest a decision but just wrote:

This research is interesting, but I have a few concerns

I cannot explain in detail the comments of Reviewer 2 right now, but I can tell you that most of them make no scientific sense.
I am very surprised and sorry to see that my paper, that my collaborator and I wrote in months of energy and effort, has been treated so unprofessionally, both by Reviewer 2 and by the editor who selected him/her.
The editor’s current decision is "major revision". The editor wrote that we should address the flaws of both the reviewers.
Question: What should I do now?

How can I communicate politely the issues of Reviewer 2's report to the editor?
Should I address these non-sense comments in the new version of the manuscript or not?
I strongly believe this person does not have the skills and knowledge to judge my paper. Can I ask to remove him from the reviewer list?

Comments are not for extended discussion; comments about how bad the review actually is and spotting all instances of wrong English have been moved to chat.

It sounds as if the editor asked for a revise-and resubmit. In that case, your best move is to simply respond to Reviewer 2 as professionally as you can.
For outright false claims ("The data of the manuscript are NOT available"), reply something like "The data for the manuscript are available. We have revised p. X line Y to make this more clear."  Don't be sarcastic or exasperated or angry, simply make the statement.
For sentences that don't make sense, try to find a nugget of sense in there and address that. It's generally safe (and often a good idea anyway) to response with something like "We have clarified the manuscript on this point" (and of course, try to clarify).  If you simply can't understand the point no matter how you try, say something like "We are unclear on this reviewer's suggestion here. If the editor feels this is an important point, please clarify this and we will attempt to address this."  (This is a last choice option and shouldn't be used more than once.) The message you are trying to give here is that you are trying to be cooperative, and again, the overall aim is to be professional even if a reviewer was not.
What if the editor rejected the manuscript on the basis of this bad review? (It doesn't sound like this happened, but it's worth discussing.)  You have two choices: Accepting the decision and sending the manuscript elsewhere, or contacting the editor and asking for a re-consideration.
The first choice -- sending elsewhere -- is almost always the right one. It's rarely worth arguing with editors. Keep in mind that the editor has probably already recognized that the review is unprofessional and has taken that into account in their decision, so your argument is unlikely to change their mind.
But sometimes there are reasons to focus on the original journal -- the article might be a poor fit anywhere else, for example (perhaps a focused review written for a specific special issue). In that case, contacting the editor and politely and professionally explaining why the review is so bad is a possibility.
Will the editor agree? Maybe, maybe not. If they say the rejection stands, thank them and move on.
I've done this once, with a very unprofessional review, and the editor agreed with me that I could ignore Reviewer 2. I didn't completely ignore it, responding as best I could to the understandable points, and made an extra effort to be very cooperative with Reviewer 1. The paper was accepted after review. So it can work, but I would only do it under very specific conditions.

Edit to add one more point for the general case, not necessarily this particular situation: Before you talk to the editor, be very, very sure that the review in question really is that bad. It has to be utterly unprofessional, without a shred of redeeming value. We're not talking about someone who missed the point in a couple of comments, or who prefers a different model, or who has bad grammar.  We're talking about a reviewer who doesn't believe in germ theory. They didn't even read past the title. They're critiquing a completely different paper. It's written in crayon.
And don't decide this immediately, because every review looks like it was written by an idiot when you first read it. Set it aside until you calm down and look at it again after a few days; you may be surprised how much more sense it makes when you aren't filled with adrenaline. Show it to someone not involved, to be sure you're judging it properly.

Thanks @iawork! I am particularly interested in the "contacting the editor and politely and professionally explaining why the review is so bad is a possibility" part. Did you contact the editor privately via email explaining all the issues of the review you received? And did you ask explicitly for the possibility to ignore it?

I contacted the editor via email and went through the issues. I don't think I asked specifically for permission to ignore the reviewer; the manuscript had been rejected, and I think I said something like "Please take this opportunity to reconsider your decision; we will be happy to revise in accordance with Reviewer 1's comments".  If the decision had been for revision rather than rejection (or if there was another journal I could have sent the article to -- the article was in response to a specific request for a special topic) I would not have contacted the editor at all.

Thanks @iayork for your reply and comments. I've cooled down and thought about the whole situation. The core problem is that I am worried that, after resubmission, the editors might decide "reject" for my paper, based upon the non-sense comments of Reviewer #2. That would be terrible to me. I am considering to write an email to the editor and ask him politely to ignore the unprofessional indications of Reviewer #2, and why. What do you think? Would it work?

@larry I don't think it's a good idea, and I wouldn't be very worried about the editor here. Editors see far more reviews than you do, and generally have a pretty good idea what good and bad reviews look like. Your editor already knows there's a bad review, pointing it out is unnecessary.  The best answer to an unprofessional review is a professional response.

Hi @iayork, I am in the same situation as your last statement. For a research funding, the scientific manager told me to ignore one reviewer in my resubmission. However, I don't understand if it is wise to inform the future reviewers about this, or if adding the same observations given to the scientific manager in the revision report. Have you got any advice about that?

In my own experience with getting papers published, I've also had instances of referees being less than fully up to the task of providing a usable review. Naturally, "usable" doesn't imply "positive". A negative referee report can be very useful if it provides pointers for how the paper might be improved. What's exasperating (and, often, infuriating) is when a referee report doesn't say much about the paper at hand and instead conveys the referee's sloppiness and lack of diligence.
Given that you've received (in essence) a revise-and-resubmit decision, by all means address all usable comments by revising the paper in the ways suggested by the referees. As part of the resubmission process, you should provide a detailed companion document in which you (a) list each and every point made by the referees and (b) explain how you and your coathors (if any) decided to modify the paper in response. For points that clearly betray nothing but a referee's sloppiness and lack of understanding, just write a soothing sentence or two to explain that the point is, well, beside the point. E.g., if the claim is that the data weren't available, write something like "We have added passages in the introduction to stress that the data are, in fact, available. This piece of information was provided earlier in [state the passage, or passages], but apparently this wasn't flagged sufficiently forcefully. The new version strives to avoid creating such an incorrect impression."
Separately, if and when the paper is either accepted or rejected (hopefully the former...), you may choose to write a letter to the editor to note that while the comments by Referee A were both useful and written professionally, the same cannot be said about Referee B's comments. In such a letter, you should give specific examples of how Referee B basically didn't rise to the challenge. Editors are not omniscient; in my experience they are generally actually grateful for receiving feedback on which referees do a good job and, conversely, which persons should not be asked to provide referee reports going forward.

There was once that I had "strange" revision. The manuscript has six reviewers (yes, six) and remarks from reviewers take almost 20 pages. One reviewer wrote very strange remarks and suggestions. Our first reaction was as yours - we were angry. But we took a deep breath, and after a few days decided (I and coauthors) to address every remark from every reviewer very carefully. But in no way we did not know what to do with this strange one. It looks that reviewer did understand nothing - because he/she wrote about something poles apart from our topic. We supposed that maybe happens that reviewer just make a mistake and post review for the other manuscript. (Personally I usually prepare review in txt file and after reading and improving it a few times - paste into reviewer form. So mistakes may happen). Finally we addressed precisely all we can, and just wrote to the editor why we did not address remarks from one of the reviewers, with explanation why we suppose that this certain review does not suite to our manuscript. Article after revision has been published. So, keep calm and do the best you can. Good luck!


text:
Is it acceptable to ask a professor to write a reccomendation letter now to save for later?
Through the last three years of my undergrad, I have worked closely with a professor in my university and we published several papers together. Once I graduate this spring, I plan on working for two years before going back and applying for graduate school.
I am wondering if it would be “weird” if I ask my professor to write me a reccommendation letter now and save it for two years when I apply. He has previously told me he’d love to write me a very strong reccomendation letter for grad school. However, he is a bit old and he tends to forget some details in a few months so I am worried that in two years he would forget many details he would have otherwise included in the letter.

It's certainly acceptable to ask. But:

In the US, at least, most universities require the professors to electronically upload their letters directly. So, having him write a letter and hand it to you might not be all that helpful -- you'll still need him to upload it when you apply to grad school. If you're worried about him dying, you might be able to get another professor to upload his letter on his behalf...but that gets a little tricky.
A lot of students have plans to go to grad school N years after graduation -- but at least anecdotally, it seems like the vast majority of those students change their plans and never end up in grad school. So, he may be reluctant to write a letter that has a good chance (at least statistically) of never being used.

I would just discuss this openly with him -- tell him that you plan to ask for a letter in 2 years, and want to make sure that all the details aren't forgotten before then (it is not necessary to suggest that he is senile or at risk of dying).

He may write some notes to help himself write it, or he may agree to write the entire letter now.
If not, this conversation gives you an opening to write your notes and e-mail them to him -- including some bullets that summarize your work and others that record any subjective evaluations he's shared with you. Then, two years from now, all you have to do is reply to this message and tell him you need the letter.

Actually, there is a reason to ask for the letter now and to send you an informal copy. In the future, when you want to ask for a formal LOR, you can attach the one you got as a reminder of what the professor thought of you back then. Something for your files. And you know before you ask, what the letter will likely say. But +1.

Agree - if the professor is willing to write the letter now and upload it in 2 years, that's great news for OP. Even better if they share it with OP. The professor may not be willing to do this, especially at such an early stage, however (I would usually not).

One college I know of has, in essence, an escrow service. The professor writes a letter, deposits it with the office, and the office can then forward it in the future to grad schools. Check with your institution.


text:
Changing research field as PhD applicant
I am a CS undergrad currently thinking about my post grad application. I have a couple of questions.
So far, I published 2 first author papers, one in SODA, and one in VLDB. However, they're on two totally different topics (One on compression algorithms [theory], one on graphs [DB related])
I recently (last year) started getting interested in Machine Learning and specifically reinforcement learning, and have been spending a whole lot of time on it. I decided I want to apply to a PhD in that field.
Would my unrelated previous research papers add any positive thing to my application, or would it just be better to apply to a PhD that relates to my my published papers?

Would my unrelated previous research papers add any positive thing to
  my application [...]?

Your past research will certainly strengthen your application, even if it's not in the subfield you aspire to study in graduate school. Grad schools look for students interested in and able to carry out research, and a lot of those skills are transferable across disciplines and certainly subfields. It's also perfectly normal to change your research interests during undergrad (or be constrained in topic choice by what faculty in your department are working on or any other number of factors).

[...] would it just be better to apply to a PhD that relates to my my
  published papers?

With the caveat that you should feel sufficiently committed to your new field to not lose interest in grad school, you should definitely want to apply for the PhD that you want to do rather than the PhD you think your CV makes you look like the best candidate for. You'll be in a program that better matches your interests and you'll do work that's more meaningful to you (and hence often much better).


text:
How do the advantages of a flipped classroom overcome timing issues?
This may be an issue of me not understanding the university/college teaching approaches in other countries. It was prompted by this question about student complaints - How to adopt flipped classroom strategies without student complaints?
In Australia and UK, every mathematics, physics, statistics etc course I have ever seen or taken has two types of classroom activities - generally referred to as lectures and tutorials. Typically there are 2 hours of lectures per week with an academic presenting the theory and doing some examples. The weekly 1 hour of tutorial has a tutor (usually a graduate student) going through the homework questions and is done after the students have attempted the questions. In addition, students can ask questions during the lectures and the tutorials.
I don't understand the advantage of a flipped classroom.
Having the students watch a lecture offline would mean they have to ask questions about that lecture without context and they would not have the answer to the question before watching the rest of the lecture. I would expect this to lead to lower understanding.
Similarly, having the students work through the homework problems in the presence of the lecturer/tutor would substantially reduce the number and/or length and/or difficulty of the homework questions simply due to available time. A typical homework question set would take several hours to work through and usually have a couple of relatively simple questions that lead up to questions requiring deeper understanding. I would be concerned that running a flipped classroom would mean those deeper understanding questions would never be attempted and/or discussed.
Could someone please explain the advantage of flipped classrooms, particularly how the problems I have described are avoided. And whether the advantages are only in comparison to some specific teaching method that differs from my experience.

Have you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom or any of the references listed there or watched Mazur's video? You have a lot of misconceptions about how flipped classrooms work.

I have seen at least some of this, but the material I have seen discusses schools and tends to focus on engaging the students who are struggling. And the disadvantages tend to focus on the mechanics.

I really recommend the Mazur video for a good answer to "why use flipped classroom" for undergrad physics.

I think your criticisms are very valid and I share them, even having read extensively about "flipped classrooms" (e.g., I've run a faculty reading group on the issue for the past year, which allowed me to write the answer to the prior question you linked). It seems like the "flipped" strategies were just as feasible using textbooks outside class in the past, which fell into disuse, so personally I expect "flipping" to be a cyclical fad, and not revolutionary.

Side note: Your school's split lecture/problem sections sound very nice, and in fact I've seen that strategy held out as a more advanced form of "flipping" (more advanced because it requires scheduling and graduate student support which is not doable by individual instructors working on their own).

@DanielR.Collins I don't understand your side note at all. Having separate lectures and tutorials does not require graduate students and is no harder to schedule than anything else. It is the 'traditional' style, and is what 'flipping' is doing the flipping from.

@JessicaB: Perhaps consider the case of large introductory auditorium classes; i.e., too many students for one instructor to give feedback on in work sessions. See Kober, "Reaching Students", Ch. 4, Supplementing Instruction with Tutorials: "These tutorials do
require fairly extensive facilitation by teaching assistants."

@DanielR.Collins All you require is the lecturer. How many hours in the week they spend teaching is another question. Also, on the whole we don't really have 'large introductory auditorium classes', because students have already chosen which subject they are studying.

because students have already chosen which subject they are studying — Speaking from personal experience, "already chosen which subject they are studying" absolutely does not rule out "large introductory auditorium classes"!

First, I should note that the details of how people implement things that get called a "flipped classroom" seem to vary wildly, so my answers will be based on the version I've taught, and to a lesser extend the ones I seen my colleagues teach or heard them describe.

Having the students watch a lecture offline would mean they have to ask questions about that lecture without context and they would not have the answer to the question before watching the rest of the lecture. I would expect this to lead to lower understanding.

In my opinion, the inability to ask questions on the spot is indeed a drawback.  But there are substantial benefits that mitigate this.  Most importantly, many students don't ask questions in lectures when they should.  One of the major reasons is that they can't produce questions fast enough to keep up with the lecture; by the time they realize they're confused and formulate a question, the topic has moved on.  In that sense, for many students a video is no different from a live lecture in this respect.
And with a video, students can watch at their own pace, which can include pausing the video to formulate a question (and possibly even get it answered) before continuing, or rewatching the video after the question has been answered.
Overall, moving lectures out of face time is one of the main benefits of a flipped classroom: most lectures aren't all that interactive---few questions get asked, and only by a few students, so the value added by the interaction is low.  It's not zero, so the goal of a flipped classroom had better be to replace the lectures with a more valuable use of that time.

Similarly, having the students work through the homework problems in the presence of the lecturer/tutor would substantially reduce the number and/or length and/or difficulty of the homework questions simply due to available time. A typical homework question set would take several hours to work through and usually have a couple of relatively simple questions that lead up to questions requiring deeper understanding. I would be concerned that running a flipped classroom would mean those deeper understanding questions would never be attempted and/or discussed.

Every flipped classroom version I've seen also has out of class homework.  They have the simpler questions take place out of class, and have at least some of the deeper ones take place in class.  Furthermore, most of them try to make the deeper questions more deep than the ones that would have been asked in the corresponding lecture class, or if not, they at least demand that students engage more with the deep questions.
Indeed, this point is one of the main goals of flipped classrooms: with the instructor (and possibly TAs present), it becomes reasonable to demand more (and different) things of students because there's help available on the spot.
In my lecture classes, for instance, I usually find that there's very poor engagement on the deeper homework questions.  A non-trivial fraction of students skip them (since they're generally not that big a fraction of the homework grade), and a large number of students don't take them seriously---they either scribble nonsense for partial credit, or it's clear that they've worked in groups and essentially copied an answer they don't understand from the one person in the group who got it.
In a flipped classroom, there was much less of this: the students sat there and worked through the hard problems, thought about them, and struggled with them the way they needed to, because I was there to make sure they did.

May I ask: How would you deal with those students with introvert personality who are weak in the class subject and dare not ask questions?

@scaaahu: How to deal with that depends a lot on the specific format of the in class work.  (In most formats it's less of an issue than in a large lecture class, where such students are very unlikely to ask questions.)  Every introverted student I've had actively participated in group work once I set them up in the right group, or was strong enough to successfully work on their own.  I imagine there are students that wouldn't work for, but I haven't encountered one and I'd probably have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.

Thank you, the comment about lectures moving too quickly to formulate a question was particularly useful. One of the things I have noticed recently is that modern lectures can move much more quickly through some types of material than when I did my studies because the lecturer uses slides rather than working everything through with chalk.

This answer isn't really distinct from Henry's, but I thought a second view might be of interest.
I have been using what might be described as a flipped classroom for one of my modules recently. You might say it's 'not fully flipped', but at least it fits generally with the broader concept of 'active learning'.
One reason I did so was to get my students to practice reading the textbook. My class is currently small, but there isn't time to answer every question for every student, so they need to be able to learn from a mathematical text. The problem is that students are not automatically any good at reading these texts, which are rather different to most other forms of literature. So rather than giving the students a video to watch, I gave them a chapter of the textbook to read, with a short quiz intended to test whether they have correctly read the text.
My other primary reason was to change which part of the learning process takes place in 'lectures'. As I see it, understanding new concepts in maths takes several steps:

find out the definition
play with basic examples to understand the definition
use the definition to prove simple things
gain intuition, understand unusual examples, extremes and pathologies
prove more complex things
write out clear solutions

In my experience lectures tend to focus heavily on the first and third steps. I felt that the information-transfer of step 1 was not really the best use of lecture time - the content itself can be communicated in other ways (like the textbook), and students are often not ready to ask their questions on first sighting of the definition. Also, I'm reasonably convinced that my students generally need the second step. Because lectures typically build very quickly on definitions that have just been introduced, students will struggle to make sense of much of the lecture at the time. By moving the information-transfer out of lectures, I've gained time I can use to let students attempt practice calculations for themselves, and address the questions they are stuck on.
Of course there are also down-sides. It is harder to present as much information to the students this way, and I find it more time-consuming to prepare, because I have to think more about what the students will understand at a given point, rather than what I have already written on the board. Also, requiring prep means more work for the students (which is thought to be one big factor in why flipped teaching works well, and why students don't like it), so to compensate I've reduced the quantity of 'problem-sheet questions'.
You mention in comments being concerned about introverted students. My personal view is that uniformity is not particularly helpful. Any form of teaching is likely to benefit some students more than others, and different styles also work better for different teachers. That aside though, I'm not sure that this style is intrinsicly problematic for introverts. For example, they would have more time to formulate any questions before class rather than during a lecture, so they might feel more comfortable asking for the help they need.

The comment about introverted students was not mine - I mostly agree with your last paragraph. Thank you for your analysis. When I was a student, I always found my favourite lecturers were the ones that did all of the first four of your steps so it's interesting that you have broken down what methods are most appropriate to get the students through each step.

@JenB Oh, yes, sorry, I should have checked.