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Understanding Desk Rejection
I recently submitted a paper on which I worked on for quite a long time to a social sciences journal. It’s a data science paper based on quantitative analysis.
Within a couple days, I received an immediate desk rejection saying that the paper is not developed enough, nothing else.
Has anyone had this before? What can lead to this kind of rejection?

What does your advisor think of the paper?

If I received such a desk rejection, I would ask for clarification: which particular aspects are not developed enough? What is missing?

@lighthousekeeper You could ask the editor for clarification, but there should be no expectation to get it. The editor might elaborate as a courtesy to you, but that's not required of them - they have already (more than) fulfilled their end of the exchange. If you don't approach it with the attitude that it's an unnecessary generosity on their part, there's a chance you annoy the editor and sour future interactions.

@R.M. If an editor does not explain their decisions in a comprehensible way, that hints at a lack of either trying or ability, and comes off as an indicator of a poor quality of the journal. In that case, one could even complain to the editor-in-chief and give them the chance to reconcile that impression. If they don't see a need to reconcile things, I wouldn't be that interested in future interaction with that journal.

@R.M. Wouldn't really call that "more than" - perhaps barely sufficient.

For a desk rejection, my recommendation is: try another journal.  You are only wasting your time and the editor's time if you pester the editor about this.

I have not been given this exact feedback, but I have received my fair share of desk rejects. I am also a new editor myself, so I have a bit of insight here.
There are usually a few reasons why an editor might reject a paper prior to review.

The paper is not within the scope of the journal.
The paper is not impactful enough for the journal.
The paper may be decent but is lacking in one area or another and the editor just isn't interested i.e., they have better submissions.
The paper is just generally below the quality generally expected at the journal.
The paper is so poorly written or so obviously flawed that it does not need to be sent for expert review to spot the issues

There is nothing to do about 1, other than be more diligent when picking journals to submit to. 2 is also difficult to directly address and is somewhat subjective, usually the solution is to just move on to the next journal. Option 5 is unusual for a decent academic. It takes laziness or a lack of experience/knowledge to churn out a legitimately bad paper. Think of the type of paper that ends up in a predatory journal.
Options 3 and 4 are probably where most desk rejections fall. These are also the two possibilities that really leave room for improvement.
Often you will receive no feedback from the editor. In your case, you have a clue. They told you the paper was "not developed enough" - that probably puts you in those middle categories (3 or 4). I would take that literally.
So what do you do? Well the best thing you can do is try to fix the "problem". A paper being undeveloped could mean a lot of things. It could be that you introduced some interesting ideas but you never expanded on them. Or it could be that you have a strong foundation but never really introduce anything new, even though there was the potential to. It could be that the paper needs editing for structure, clarity, flow, etc. It can be hard to identify these issues yourself, so you should find a fresh set of eyes (preferably more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself) to help you revise the paper.
A final thought, I would not recommend resubmitting anywhere without at least trying to revise the paper and "develop" it more. It could be that the editor was just not interested and made up an excuse but considering that editors generally don't need to give you a reason for rejection, you should treat their feedback as true for now.

+1 for ... I would not recommend resubmitting anywhere without at least trying to revise the paper and "develop" it more

Take it literally. You are missing something, possibly something essential. This editor needs more before they will consider taking it further. It might just be a poor match for the journal, but it probably indicates you have more work to do.
Make sure your paper is in accord with what a journal generally publishes before you submit.

Take it literally, and not personally (better to clarify for first-time authors soon to be first-time rejected authors :) ).

Welcome to Academia and to the world of rejection: a fabric we all wear with pride.

submitted a paper ... to a social sciences journal. It’s a data science paper based on quantitative analysis.
What can lead to this kind of rejection?

Some considerations.
Being a social science journal and your manuscript being quantitative

have you checked the scope of the journal
check other papers published in the journal
addressed what is 'social' in your manuscript
is your manuscript simply dump of data sciences metrics or bunch of data analytics

Other than those, which call for you to revise accordingly, @sErISaNo has given an insightful response.

In addition to other comments, other reasons include:

The editor has not read the scope of the journal.
The editor wants to reduce his/her workload.  Hence, a desk reject is a convenient excuse.

Have a look at other papers in the journal, does it 'look' like your paper belongs in that journal?
EDIT: Do not make the assumptions that editors are 'saints'.  Are priests saints? we know the answer to that!

The editor of the journal doesn't know the scope of their own journal?

@CGCampbell You will be surprised how many editors do not know their job.  I am an editor of a few journals, and I see many incompetent editors.

@CGCampbell I have once been rejected for "not in the scope of the journal" (with no further explanation). I then wrote to the editor asking for clarification and cited the scope given on the journal website, into which the paper quite obviously fell. The editor responded: "Yes, but internally we have some more criteria". Aha. Thank you very much.

Maybe @VitaminE implies ... >Editor is not in full knowledge of the scope! ... >Author has not read the scope of the journal ... > Editor wants to reduce his/her workload.

@VitaminE It sounds like you think the answer to your question is no, but actually the answer is that some are and some are not.


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Can I submit research with my surname being modified for English readers?
Is it acceptable in cases when your last name changes based on your gender, to change the name to make it simpler for English language readers? This is common in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc.
So for example, I might be called Ellen Bartowska (even though my husband's name is Charles Bartowski). I don't want to let my surname be aligned to my gender as female. So I want to submit my paper just as Ellen Bartowski. Is it acceptable? Are there some formal requirements about this?

Can you clarify in what sense you think it’d be “simpler” for English language readers to be told your last name is Bartowski and not Bartowska? I know of many female authors from eastern and central Europe who publish under their “gendered” last name and have never seen anyone who found this confusing in any way.

Why would your husband's name spelling matter for publishing your research?

I heard it may be simpler to have the male surname when you live in the West and institutions or people you deal with assume the surname of your husband is the same as your surname. But for publishing there is hardly a difference in reading i vs. a at the end of a name. In Czechia using a male surname seams to often be a statement (with various flavours).

Use whatever name any time, but also, just an ORC-ID: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/78507/how-to-prove-that-a-paper-published-with-a-particular-english-transliteration-of/78516#78516

Westerners are very familiar with women who don't take their husband's surname when they get married, and there are even some couples where the husband takes the wife's surname, or they both take a hyphenate. I don't think anyone would really notice or care.

IMO, "to make it simpler for English language readers" and "I don't want to let my surname be aligned to my gender as female" are completely different reasons to want to publish with one name or another. I don't think changing an "a" for an "i" would mean any significant difference for english readers (some of them might be familiar with this custom and could find it weird or uncommon, but nothing else), so maybe your second reason actually has more weight to your decision.

Many “western” readers will actually be familiar with slavic names changing with the gender,

As a Czech, when I see a name like "Ellen Bartowska", my first impression is "a Polish woman". When I see "Ellen Bartowski", my impression is "probably an American with Polish roots".

To clarify, why you're getting comments about "why would it be confusing for English speakers" is because English speakers unfamiliar with this convention will not read your last name as Bartowski, except changed to -a, like you do. They will simply read Bartowska.

Yes, you can submit under a name you choose, even a pseudonym in many cases. But you should probably choose a name early that you will stick with throughout your career to make it easier to find your work as a whole. Some people, often women, will choose their birth name.
In particular, you don't need to choose your legal name (as on a passport) for purposes of publishing.
There have been cases in which a prominent person chooses a name that is purely fictitious, sometimes to make it possible to publish in several different fields or in both a scientific and popular or political field.

Related question: Why write papers anonymously?.

It is acceptable but careful what you wish for.  I know a person twice married who insisted on attaching her husband’s name to her maiden name in early publications, but life can get in the way and now it’s a bit of a mess to search for her papers.  (Thankfully she has always used her maiden name in all publications and she does have a distinctive name.)
It’s hard enough to get proper recognition in most academic fields so simplicity and uniformity is the key.

Based on the answer at another similar question, it seems like a good idea to use your real name as that's useful for proving your authorship in the future. Here's the full quote:

First of all, always be consistent. Whatever you decide, that is what you will always have to use.
Considering the first point, might be better to strive and use your real name as it is with the non-english characters. You will have less problems in the future to prove your authorship in case questions rise. Complain to systems who do not accept your non-english characters...

It's a little bit more difficult when you have non-ascii characters in your name as systems can be limited and not support them even.

Short answer:

If the venue at which you submit your work supports digital identifiers, such as those managed by https://orcid.org, creating and associating such an identifier with your work might prevent any future issue with whichever name you wish to use in your publications.
In any case, yours is a completely reasonable question to ask to the chairs of a conference or to the editor of a journal before submitting your work: even if they have no issue with your choice of identification, they should be aware of the situation in case there are some complications later (e.g. from the referees).

Longer Answer:

There should be no legal problem in using whichever identification you wish for your work, but you should check with the chair or editor of the media to which you are sending your work, in case they have their own specific rules.

As for the consequences in the long term, you should be aware that being consistent in which identification you use (whether official or fictional) in all of your publications used to be critically important for recognition in general, and when applying for academic positions in particular. For instance, many divorced scientist women from cultures where the wife adopts her husband's last name endured some complications later.

Such problems were in great part addressed by the introduction of codes to uniquely identify authors and contributors of academic communications, such as ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). Dixit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCID,

This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions
to the scientific literature or publications can be hard to recognize
as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with
marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain
inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different
writing systems. It provides a persistent identity for humans, similar
to tax ID numbers, that are created for content-related entities on
digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).

Insuring that your name does not make too explicit your gender might be a good idea if the venue to which you submit your work does not implement a double masked reviewing process (where the referees are unaware of the identity of the authors of the work they review), in order to avoid any suspicion of gender bias in the referees (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534702025454 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34237278/ for a longer discussion).

Good luck with the reviewing process of your work!
May referee number two be gentle upon you!

As other answers have said, yes you can generally publish under whatever pen-name you like.
However, at some point you may find your self applying for jobs and therefore providing at least a CV and a publications list, so you should expect to be able to explain why you are listed under different names in different places.

source: Stack Exchange

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

authors: Vladimir F Героям слава

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Is losing raw data regarded as data fabrication? (Unpublished undergraduate thesis)
The worst thing I am worried about is losing my legitimate data and then maybe being accused of falsifying it.
how does the university differentiate the data fabrication and honest error? (I have lost all the data used for my deep learning training, and I cannot use the raw data to defend myself). Did the reproducibility problems of deep learning contribute to academic misconduct?
The dataset collected and made by myself has been lost. However, I can repeat the experiment based on my code (I have backed up all my code but lost the private dataset, the method in the thesis is feasible). The experimental results will be different from my thesis results if I repeat the experiment (because I have to collect the dataset again from websites, and the image dataset will change). In addition, the reproducibility flaw of deep learning will impede the reproduction of the previous results (there are many random parameters in GPU or other settings).
I did my thesis by myself without any data fabrication thoughts. But the lost dataset and the reproducibility flaw of deep learning made me worried about my thesis if someone accused me of data fabrication. Readers can get similar results and conclusions by repeating my experiment (they can use their own dataset to get something). But readers cannot get the same results in my thesis again. Can I defend myself by the similar results and replacing the previous experimental results in the thesis?

There is no requirement for the undergraduate students to back up the final year report data after graduation. But I am worried about this now.
I would be happy if you could answer my worries!!!
Best regards!!

To answer your title question, no, fabrication of data is not the same as losing data.  The latter is certainly still undesirable, but nowhere near as bad as the former.  As you point out, losing data means that analysis is not reproducible, which damages the scientific basis for conclusions.
As far as how a university might differentiate between data loss and fabrication, one thing they would do is to look for corroboration from others that the data existed at some point.  This might include asking your supervisor or other relevant people whether or not they can corroborate your sourcing of the data at any point.  Another thing they might do is to look to see if repetitions of your experiment get results that are anywhere near your previous results.  Fabricated data generally differs systematically from reality, which means that when others repeat an experiment that used fabricated data they may get wildly different results.  Contrarily, when data is merely lost, the underlying analysis is still reality-based, so when people repeat the experiment they will generally get results that are somewhere near the previous results.  Finally, fabricated data sometimes has some telltale statistical properties that are used in fraud detection, and these can be used to differentiate data fabrication from data loss.
In the present case, the data has been lost to you due to an overwrite by the owner(s) on the external source.  In such a case the best thing to do would be to write to the owner(s) of the data and ask if they have a copy of the previous overwritten version that you used, and get them to send this to you if they have it.  Lastly, take this experience as a lesson about reproducible data practices in the future.  In future, when you work from data on an external website, first download and keep a local copy of that data in its raw form, with appropriate metadata specifying when and where you downloaded it.  (If you want to be able to demonstrate that the external data was in that form at the time, you can also use the wayback machine to archive the data, though this is also not foolproof.)

I cited the data source website in the thesis but did not show the specific data (3000 images).
I found that the website has updated the data this year, but most data are the same. I cannot recover all the raw data, but I can find most of them (these data still exist on this website, I only forget which image I downloaded). However, the results will not be identical to the previous ones (one different image will lead to slightly different results) if I cannot recover all the raw data.
I have demo photos and videos showing how I process some images.
It is very kind of you! Thank you so much

I got my thesis Code deposited in the Github repository during the thesis writing-up. Moreover, I can easily repeat similar results from a similar dataset. I can use the evidence above to prove that the experiments exist, and I have everything except the identical dataset. Can the evidence above prove that there is no data fabrication?

If I get it from your comment: you did not lose the data but the data set that you used was updated at some point in time, and you cannot reconstruct the original data set as it stood when you did your experiment. You would thus have two items indicating absence of any data frabrication: you cited the original data source, and their could be traces that it has since been updated, furthermore, as Ben states in his answer, the underlying basis has merely been updated and repeating the processing on the updated dataset should lead to similar conclusions.

@PLD You are right. The data exists on the data source website. I only lost the dataset constructed by myself (I labelled and classified the dataset), and the website shuffled the orders of images. Therefore, I cannot reconstruct the identical dataset for machine learning training. Thank you so much!

Dear Ben, the owner(s) have no copies of the previous version. But I think a similar result and conclusion by running a similar dataset is enough to prove that my data is not fabricated. Thank you so much!

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


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Can a Master graduated student be a participant in a scientific conference?
I am a master graduate in the field of material science. I didn't continue my PhD, however, my supervisor involved me as a co-author of a paper (due to my work during my master thesis), and I received so many invitations to be a speaker in conferences all over the world. Can I accept and go abroad to learn from the experience or is there no chance that they will accept me because I'm not a PhD student?

Many such invitations are scams. They want your money. Why would they ask you to be a speaker with so little experience. Choose reputable conferences and submit a paper - which is fine.

As @Buffy says, do beware of the existing of a large number of scam conferences. It's possible that you are receiving genuine invitations, but it seems unlikely that a Masters graduate would receive many invitations to conferences from around the world from genuine conferences.

I know people who are invited to speak at reputable conferences. They tend to be the luminaries in the field, certainly better known than I am. If you are already fantastically well known in your field for some accomplishment, then an invitation might be valid. Otherwise, beware.

Agreed with the others that it is very very likely these are scams. Those tend to pop up after your first publication (congrats on the paper!). You're likely to get similar invitations to submit to journals soon enough (and those are also scams).

Especially if the email uses a title you don't have, like "dear doctor X" or even "dear professor X", it's most likely a scam. They've just scoured new articles for author names and put them in a template.

As part of my Computer Science Master, I published my thesis at a conference and was invited to speak there, which I did and it was great. At no point was there ever any mention of any difference between Master's and PhD students, not from within my university and not from the conferences I tried to publish at. I personally don't really care for the distinction and will never perpetuate it as something that should be taken seriously. I'm a bit surprised to see that it's actually a thing to "not have a PhD but still speak at conferences."

You can of course publish at conferences and journals without a formal degree. There are still some rather famous people in CS who never got a doctorate, though the number gets smaller and smaller, in part because some do get one while they are closing in on retirement. Your MS thesis is not the first one that has been made into a publication.
Be careful however about these invitations to be a speaker. There are many low-level and outright scam conferences and journals, who will not give your work a platform but are solely or mainly after your money. A common strategy of predatory journals and conferences is to go through respectable contributions and send you an email telling you how impressed they are with your work. You need to be careful. One of the disadvantages of not having a terminal degree is the apprenticeship into academia that comes with the Ph.D. Another disadvantage is the lack of colleagues, friends, and advisors that you can ask for feed-back. At least you have your MS advisor, who you can ask before you spend time, money, and effort on fake conferences.

More on the topic of how to identify predatory conference can be found in this very usefull question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9362/how-can-i-determine-whether-a-conference-is-reputable

Sure: you don’t need a PhD and you can go there but who will pay?
You should not assume that because you are invited your expenses will be paid or reimbursed.  In fact most of the time (but not always) the invitation will get you a discount on registration but you still have to travel to the venue, pay for your hotel and meals.
In my experience, it would be rare for a graduate student (PhD or otherwise) to have lots of invitations for which expenses are paid.  It does happen to superstar students, but - in all modesty - conference organizers more are likely to spend their budget on well known researchers with star power who will in turn attract other participants.

Unsolicited invitations to conferences are almost always scams, especially when you receive a lot of them. Ask your supervisor if the invitation looks legitimate, and if so, just be bold and go for it :-)
From first-hand experience, there are usually no requirements for any type of degree. Back in the day, I submitted work from my Bachelor's thesis to a CS conference and got accepted and presented even before I had my B.S. degree. The top 15% of contributions got invited for an extended IEEE publication, and my work was among those selected (I was first author). My advisers were coauthors and did have PhDs of course, but in general all that matters is the quality of your work.
Often, conferences give out travel grants, and as someone who would not be supposed to have any grant money of their own like professors do, your chances of getting support that way might actually be good.

Freeman Dyson never had a PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
So it can be done, and one can climb up the ladder quite far.
For average people getting a PhD might be the easier road to such goals though.

It may depend on the conference, but in 2009 I submitted a paper to a well-respected computing science conference, the ACM International Conference on Functional Programming, which passed through peer review, was accepted, and I presented it, despite my having no degree at all (I have only a high-school diploma from a high school of no special distinction). So it's certainly possible.
ICFP is clearly a legitimate (i.e., not predatory) conference and I was not invited to submit. I paid all the normal conference fees that any attendee would pay (ICFP waives fees only for invited speakers) as well as my own travel costs.
Since then I have of course received many "invitations" to predatory conferences, and even invitations to become the editor of predatory journals; this is normal these days whenever you publish a paper. You'll obviously want to avoid participating in those; they exist not to move the field forward but simply to take your money.


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Advice to coordinate a long-term research project
I have been granted a five-year project to conduct my own research. The project not only covers the salary but also offers a budget to hire personal assistance and purchase lab equipment. It is an exciting opportunity for me because I will acquire new skills in project management, mentoring, and supervision of PhD, master or undergraduate students. After defending my PhD thesis several years ago, I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher at four different institutions and I have reached a point in my career where I would like to take more responsibility in terms of supervising and coordination. I am currently working on previous scientific articles from my last postdoctoral positions, but I hope they will be published soon.
Overall, the new position is a dream job for any researcher, but I could not hide my worries about this new challenge since it is the first time that I have been awarded with such a long-term and ambitious project. I am obviously thrilled about this recognition but at the same time I am concerned about whether I will be able to achieve the objectives and deliver the results in each of the project’s working packages in the proposal.

For this reason, I would like to hear some of your thoughts or any recommendations to manage the fundings well, select the most qualified people, deal with administrative tasks, and overall promote a work-life balance in a research group.

Rinot, I'm afraid I flagged your post. I wavered between "needs more focus" and "opinion-based" but went with "needs more focus." At a minimum, the areas of concern should be divided up into different questions. Everyone has different styles of management, etc so the separate questions may still be closed as opinion-based.

And perhaps serendipitously, Ask a Manager has a roundup post today of past posts focusing on new managers.

I think this is a good question, but it needs more focus, so I voted to close your post, but you can always upload a new (better) one.


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Will subject GRE scores in the 75th percentile be helpful for phd applications at top schools? Or is it better not to send scores?
I am an international (Asian) applying this December applying for grad school.
My pGRE score is 870 (75%).
I am applying to some ivy league schools and top tier schools. Should I report the scores?

Related question about math GRE with similar score: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/176596/17254


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Does it make sense to reward the entire class with better grades if (and only if) no cheating is detected?
In online classes, I've seen academic integrity cases skyrocket, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  It got me wondering if it is possible to create a grading scheme based around reward instead of punishment.
I acknowledge that ending cheating is probably unlikely, but I am not interested in that.  I'm interested in reducing the temptation to cheat, or at least providing an incentive to not cheat.  My idea is:
If I fail to detect cheating on tests and assignments, then the assessment's denominator is reduced by 5% or so.  For instance, if my exam is worth 50 marks, and no cheating is detected, then the exam is marked out of 47 or something but still has 50 marks possible.  This would apply to the whole class, and one detection of cheating would nullify it.
I have one major question: Is it ethical to peg the entire class's bonus on the potential bad actions of one person? (a sub question might be: do you imagine this would work?)
Note, I am obligated by department policy to hold a midterm and a final.
Update: I think "back to the drawing board" is appropriate here :p Thanks everyone!

Comments are not for extended discussion. Clarifications have been edited into the post, the rest of this conversation has been moved to chat. Please see this FAQ before posting another comment.

The problem with your proposal is that, despite you framing it as a reward rather than a punishment, it is trivially easy to reframe it as a punishment instead of a reward:
"The exam is graded out of 47 points with three bonus points, unless someone tries to cheat."
is just as valid as:
"The exam is graded out of 50 points but will only be graded out of 47 with three bonus points if no one cheats."
And I am entirely certain that many disappointed students who aren't the ones involved in cheating will reframe it as negatively as possible.  And no one likes collective punishment, because it isn't fair.
I've certainly noticed an uptick in cheating, as has my department.  I've tried to be proactive, and it seems to have helped.  Rather than just putting my academic integrity policy in the syllabus and talking about it on day 1, I involve it more directly.  For example, my first homework always comes with a quiz on my classroom management portal, that they get full credit for just for completing.  It asks questions in a way that I designed to make it more personal.  Things like:
"One of my friends is struggling due to real-life reasons, and can't keep up with their work.  Out of a desire to help, I share my work with them, and they copy it.  What will happen?"
I've only completed one class with these sorts of warnings, and my sample size was small, but that class did better than my previous class.

They did better at the material, or cheated less?

@AzorAhai-him- Ah, less cheating.

hmm I'm not sure collective punishment is not fair is objectively true. It depends on perspective, if it's declared upfront and one considers the student class a team, it seems perfectly fair to me. Fair meaning, consequences are predictable and everyone is treated equally. Both holds up. The problem typically is more that there is no team spirit and thus a different view on the individualist vs. team/group based effort and evaluation perception. Simple improvement suggestion "because it typically is not perceived as fair in this context"?

One could count "direct control over evaluated actions" into the fairness definition, then it is also "unfair" from that perspective.

@FrankHopkins Except they're not a team.  Everyone gets an individual grade.

@Jeff which is fine as an argument for this specific case, just that the statement in the answer is general.

@FrankHopkins Collective punishment is only ‘fair’ if it’s for a collective failure. Most of the cases where it might be invoked are not, in fact, collective failures, hence the commonality of stating that it’s not fair (and this case is only a collective failure if the goal of the class is to convince everyone not to cheat). In this case in particular though, it will probably be counterproductive for the reasons outlined in fredq’s answer.

@AustinHemmelgarn my point is that what is a collective failure is pretty much a question of perspective. It's totally fair to make compliance with standards a goal of the collective. The right argument here is that students typically are not considered a collective in that sense with that expectation, but answer makes a general statement that collective punishment is universally disliked because it is universally unfair. My point was a more precise argument can improve the answer. There are settings and societies where collective punishment is normal,accepted and "effective".

From a game theory standpoint, it makes little sense. If the cheater gets caught, they get 0 anyways. If they do not, they get a (presumably) better grade from cheating, plus potentially the "no cheater" bonus. The only incentive not to cheat is peer pressure, but it is not likely that other students will know who cheated, so this incentive is not very strong.
In addition, the incentive may be meaningless if the class is graded on a curve.

also a non-cheater is now affected too, If he doesn't cheat and no one gets detected, everything is fine; but if someone gets found out they have a harder time for a good grade without having the cheating benefit. So cheating can be incentivized to counter the expected punishment for a random person being found out cheating. Combine that with psychology that one "will only cheat a little" and "therefore will unlikely be the one found out compared to the regular heavy cheaters" and you increase the cheating numbers.

@FrankHopkins, Now non-cheaters will help cheaters get undetected? :D

@akostadinov: Now non-cheaters have added motivation NOT to report cheaters.

I have one major question: Is it ethical to peg the entire class's bonus on the potential bad actions of one person? (a sub question might be: do you imagine this would work?)

It is exactly as ethical as allowing a student’s grade to be influenced by the price of tea in China.
Which is to say, obviously not.

+1: I would be furious if my mark would depend on what random people choose to do or not to do, and especially on their integrity. Maybe it works in military settings where a company is punished for the misdeeds of few whom everybody knows and therefore everybody is going to take to task for. It's not ethical or fair, but at least effective - still, modern military does not permit that anymore, for good reason. In the class it's neither fair, ethical and, since cheating is not necessarily public, not even effective.

@CaptainEmacs It's pretty common, explicit or implicit, in companies. Departments and teams will get boni and other benefits if they deliver outstanding results and will be dissolved if they don't or don't satisfy the standards. Sure, there is always a line towards individual punishment when it's crossing into illegal territory and clear malpractice. But the concept is there and well enough accepted. The core issue is typical whether  a group is perceiving themselves as a team/single unit or a set of individuals thrown together by chance. I agree with the effectiveness "problem" in this case,

but felt that the generalized assessment is a bit one-sided. Personally I find that quite a few problems we have are based on the assumption that there is a single guilty one that needs punishing to fix the issue. If a company does systematic malpractice, identifying an individual engineer who implemented some piece of technology to support that malpractice is (alone) not very effective, you need to generate an influence on the whole "group"/company/system.  If consequences are known beforehand and people have insight and/or influence in the group I also don't think it's inherently unfair.

To come back to the answer, I feel it makes a poor argument for it's conclusion (with which I somewhat agree in the sense that even if you feel that the general concept is worthwhile to consider in some cases, it isn't helpful in this case unless you change the whole societal perspective into something that is fine with a lot more peer-to-peer insight, peer oversight and peer pressure.)

@FrankHopkins I do not think the comparison with the company makes any sense. Per definition, assessments are about  individual achievements, not some woolly and possibly hard to track credit allocation mechanisms. If you want unfair - cough - workplace-realistic assessments, give group work, and you'll get all the niceties of imbalanced work, credit arrogation, etc. But one should not run an individual assessment and treat it like a group one, and based on honesty rather than achievement, to boot. There may be not a singly guilty party, but there are honest individuals. And...

@FrankHopkins ...as an educator, I simply can not support inculcating the wrong set of values. Students' values will be messed up soon enough. At least they should have seen them in their proper form in the protected space that academia should be.

@Frank, I agree with CaptainEmacs. A class of students is not a team in the sense of a workplace team, so any comparison of the situation in companies with an academic setting isn’t really relevant. Moreover, the goal of higher education isn’t to provide a realistic simulation of workplaces, so even when assigning group projects for a class, that project will be graded based on a very different set of considerations from what a workplace might use for the incentive structure they set up for their employees.

@DanRomik my point is not to argue for OP's approach in the given context, but your and Captain Emacs arguments would improve the answer as to explain why the approach in this setting has no benefits, even if one would attribute them in other settings.

@FrankHopkins the question was about whether OP’s approach is ethical, not whether it has benefits. My position is that it is not ethical.

@DanRomik oh gosh, that's fine as a personal opinion statement and obviously people with the same ethical background and cultural norms will agree, but it lacks any argument. I would have hoped answers in such an academic setting would come either with an argumentative reduction to ethical core axioms or another form of insight into the ethical framework that makes the technique (in)advisable. That's what the part of my comments directed at the answer was, an improvement suggestion to add a bit of argument. Anyway, can't do more than suggest, so have a nice day/night.

@FrankHopkins It is poor policy even in industry where one can justify the existence of "teams", because in reality it rewards the poorest performance teams who can easily make big "improvements". Real world example: if team A is already performing at 90% "effectiveness" and team B at 20%, Team B can makes a "50% improvement" by achieving 30% and there is no way team A can beat that (nonsensical) measure even though it is performing three times more effectively.

@alephzero that's a problem with measuring exactly the same problem can be mirrored for individual performance metrics. From my perspectives if you treat a team like a unit it can much better self-organize, because you don't need to fight as much with individual egoism and competition, but that also means from the outside you don't see individual contribution as strong and you shouldn't. So from the outside a team based evaluation makes sense. Obviously there can be an additional per-member feedback loop from inside the team if that is needed.

@alephzero but again, my point is not that the policy is good here (I agree, it isn't in this context), but that the answer lacks argumentation.

@FrankHopkins The correct solution in those corporate settings is to place the blame for such failures where it belongs: on the manager. The fact that this does not happen is purely because said managers are the ones who generally create the system for assigning blame, and is a pure disadvantage of such organisational structures.

This is a form of collective punishment.
All forms of collective punishment are deeply unethical. In fact, they've made it into a class of behaviours so unethical that they are banned by international treaty, and while the Geneva Convention does not apply to your classroom it should surely be a guide to you that your idea is massively awful and you should not do it.
I realise that you are framing this is a collective reward, but that is mere sophistry: the fact is that students that did not cheat are getting a lower mark because other students did. That is collective punishment.

+1 This is a great, clarifying answer. Hope it gets more upvotes.

I'm not gonna lie, having an idea that is so poorly received that it violates the Geneva Convention has to be a badge on stack exchange...

All forms of collective punishment are deeply unethical. This fifth grader agrees with you.

It got me wondering if it is possible to create a grading scheme based around reward instead of punishment.
Yes. The way to do that is to stop grades being seen as the goal of education, and teach that the purpose of education is to learn new skills, not to get good grades. Tests are diagnostic only - getting a low score on a test only indicates a learning problem that gets you more attention and tuition to correct it, not adverse consequences. Getting a high score only lets you pass on to new material faster, learning more. The reward for honesty is to receive a better education tailored to your individual learning needs. The punishment for dishonesty is to be left in ignorance.
If you want honesty and accuracy, then you must reward accurate scores, not high scores.
The general phenomenon of cheating in tests, thus degrading student educational outcomes by motivating them to hide their difficulties rather than seek help, is an easily predictable consequence of Strathern's generalisation of Goodhart's Law: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. And also, similarly, Campbell's law: 'The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.' Or as Campbell put it in an educational context: 'Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.'. It's wired in to the system. That setting targets on grades on learning assignments does this has thus been known since the 1970s, and today there ought to be no excuse for academics involved in pedagogy not to know it. As such, ethically the collective blame and punishment for the predictable consequences should rather fall on the people who designed the system rather than the students.
It never does though.

Interesting, but unrealistic. Students individually set their own goals. How would you systematically implement something like this?

If students really did set their own goals for test scores, there would be no motivation to cheat or need for punishment, and thus no problem. It's not unrealistic - just more difficult. Saying it's 'unrealistic' or 'too hard to implement' is just making excuses. At the very least, we can stop blaming the wrong people for it.

This might be good advice for a person thinking of starting their own university. It says nothing useful in connection with OP’s actual situation and question.

@Buffy, well isn't it basically a framing challenge? OP's assumptions of what they want to achieve might simply be wrong and this answer suggests a different point of view. So in that regard a helpful answer to reconsider one's goals.

@Areopagitica Saying something is "unrealisic" isn't (necessarily) an excuse, it can be a nice hint that there may be other requirements that you might have overlooked and that collide with your approach. Perhaps the perception that there are such requirements is wrong or the whole framing can be changed, but if they are there, they are important to address. Otherwise your new system will never get approval or will then surprise the people involved when it fails to satisfy those requirements. Example: it might be a requirement to certify a skill level with economic consequences for students.

This is nice thinking, but you may be overlooking some aspects. I'd like to first address the 'will it work' bit more than the ethical consideration, because unfortunately, I think it won't.
A cheating student is an individual actor, and the incentive is for a group. The group cannot prevail upon the individual not to cheat any more than you can; they have the same constraints as you. That eliminates them from the picture. (If it's a percentile grading system, the incentive is even lesser for the group). Now consider the individual cheater. Faced between the possibility of getting more marks by cheating and by availing your incentive, which one are they likely to choose? The incentive will be chosen only if it is significantly larger than the additional marks got by cheating. It's unlikely that you can offer such a large bonus. So there's little incentive for the offender as well.
Finally, for the ethics, the Blackstone formulation (better let ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer) would suggest that it's not advisable.

Thanks, that's good to know! I was using it more as an ethical consideration than a practical precedent, but the context is helpful.

Your suggestion has a bit of merit, but not as is. It makes it less likely that cheating would be reported. It makes it more likely that cheaters will have an incentive to get more creative.
In general, rewarding students for their good work is a good idea, but make sure that you think about all of the ramifications of a policy change.
As I said in a comment here, the problem is really that the world has changed rather dramatically and small changes at the margins are unlikely to provide proper adaptations. Rather the entire concept of evaluation and assessment should be reconsidered by the entire academic community. Assessment that either provides direct observation or doesn't depend on it at all is what is needed. We are on the cusp. Think deeper.

I worry that any scheme that makes the grade of one person dependent on the actions of another will have issues that need to be considered. Some would be unethical, others not. But some of the issues are subtle. Many of us use paired and group work to assess students. We realize that problems can then occur and need to be addressed in the overall policy.

No.
Grades are about the extent to which individual students have demonstrated attainment of the learning outcomes.
If student X's grade is dependent on whether students Y and Z colluded or cheated on their work, then you are not following that principle.

Please do not do that.
When I was in school, I had several instructors devise schemes where students were incentivized to keep each-other in line.
The general idea was that if at least one student stole from a cookie jar, then all students in the class would be punished. Thus, the students would pressure each-other to not steal cookies.
The reality is that a student does not recognize the authority of another student.
Also, students have no incentive to allow other students to push them around.
Suppose that someone named Sarah and I are both students.
The teacher has decided that if Sarah does not do her homework, then I will receive a failing grade too!
Problem, there is nothing I can do to incentivize Sarah to work.
Sarah has decided she is not going to do the homework.
Sarah does not care about her grade.
If Sarah does not care about her own grade, then she really does not care about my grade.
Students who cheat on exams and/or don't do their share of the work on a group project tend to be selfish. That is, they care about their own grade, more than other people's grades (relatively speaking).
If Sarah is willing to get an F as her own grade, then she really does not care if I get an F on the assignment.
What on earth could I do to persuade Sarah to do her homework? The teacher has decided that I will get an F if Sarah does not turn in her homework?
About the worst I could do is yell at her; in which case, she would simply yell back.
Most students are not made of money. They cannot pay the other student $100 to do their homework.
Schemes in which teachers reward/punish student A based on student B's behavior always result in the same thing: students lie about their peers performance in order to save their own a$$.
For example, when I was in college, I took a course in software engineering. There was a group project. Our group was supposed to pretend that we were government contractors. For example, maybe the government wanted us to design and build a new cafeteria for soldiers, the project management plan states all kinds of things, like:

how much money building the new cafeteria will require
how much time building the new cafeteria will require
how many soldiers can sit in the cafeteria simultaneously (maybe their is seating for 200 soldiers)
a requirement that vegan options must be available
expected throughput (soldiers served per minute)
amount of refrigerator space required
number of kitchen knives required. Initial number + number of new knives per year.
amount of concrete required, amount of lumber required, etc...
estimated air-conditioning bill for the cafeteria in the summertime.
estimated heating costs for the cafeteria in the wintertime.
etc....

Okay... so the project management plan was long document we had to turn in. One Chinese girl did nothing until less than 3 days before the due date. Our group had months, almost the entire semester, to work on the project.
I gave her a list of industry vocabulary words and asked if she could google each industry term and add a dictionary of terms to the project management plan. She did make one (sort of). I included definitions of the first 2 or 3 industry terms I sent to her. I did this to make it easy (reminiscent of seeing something like "the first row of the table is done for you. Please complete the rest of the table"). Her dictionary of specialized terms was less than 2 pages long when complete. She failed to conceive of any vocabulary words beyond those I had thought of off the top of my head and sent to her.
My college professor told us that each group in the class would be failed for this project if there was someone who did not do their fair share of the work. As such, we all decided Ms. do-nothing "was a very helpful person, and we were glad to have her on our team."
When you punish student A* for student B's negligence, then student A suddenly has an incentive to "carry" student B.
As such, the amount cheating done by students goes up.
Normally, I have no incentive to do Sarah's homework for her. However, if my teacher tells me that I will receive an F if Sarah does badly on the homework, then I end up doing Sarah's homework. It's not difficult for me to solve the same problem many different ways. I can easily make "her" work look radically different than mine. My forgeries are undetectable.
Suppose I take the high road and refuse to do Sarah's work for her.
If Sarah is not inclined to do anything, then how would I persuade her work?
There is nothing I am allowed to do. I am given no leverage.

I can't tweak her grades.
I can't pay her money.
I am not going to creepily follow her home at night while carrying in a baseball bat in a menacing way.

Students have no power over other students. I have no capacity to reward or punish her.
Suppose the government told me that I would go to prison if my neighbor cheated on their income taxes. Well... What authority do I have over my neighbor? Does the government let me impose fines? No. Does the government let me create tax incentives? No.
Am I allowed to arrest a person, like a police officer? No.
The only thing I really could do is do my neighbor's taxes for them.
Student A has nothing they can use to reward or punish student B if student B does not want to do their homework.
If student A's grades are based on student B's performance, then student B will usually  fudge the results rather than go down with the sinking ship.

I am astonished that you would think this might be a good idea. But I am totally gobsmacked by the failure of the commenters (except one, so far) to condemn this in unequivocal terms. You can't punish me for what my classmate might have done! It doesn't matter whether your stupid idea is effective or not, what matters is that it is completely unfair.

I think that you do not know what the word "unfair" means. "Unfair" means a classroom policy is applied to some students, but not to others. Sally is required to do her homework, but William is not required to do his homework. If I were to randomly behead half of the students in a class, that would be perfectly fair as long as I draw lots randomly, and do not exhibit any kind of favoritism.

@SamuelMuldoon: I can't believe you're serious. "Unfair" can mean "unfair relative to all the students at the university", or even "unfair relative to all students everywhere". (But perhaps you would be happier with "unjust".)

You do realize that once one answer condemns this, other readers are likely to simply upvote it or ignore it even though they feel the same...

@einpoklum: I think I understand your point. But my point is that so many responders treat it as a reasonable suggestion.

@TonyK Some children try to avoid using the phrase "I don't like [X]." Instead of saying, "I don't want to take a bath" they say that "it's unfair that I have to take a bath." Likewise, instead of saying, "I don't want to go to bed" some children claim that going to bed is "unfair." Many human children continue this behavior into adulthood. The former child says things like, "[X] is socialism" instead of "I don't like the idea of [X]." Everything is now racist, sexist, or [insert the pejorative of your choice]. "X is unfair" = "I personally don't like X." Adults don't say "unfair"

@SamuelMuldoon: I don' t know where that little rant came from! I am an adult, and I say "unfair". So does the Houston Chronicle. So does Pope Francis. So does Forbes. It's actually children who don't say "unfair" -- they say "it's not fair", at least where I come from.

@TonyK A couple of days after I wrote my initial comment about the word "unfair" I was watching a TV show called "Home Improvement". One of the characters is a teenage boy who complains that it is "unfair" that he is not allowed to drive one of the family cars at night. I suddenly remembered your Stack Overflow post. Use of the word "unfair" is considered petulant in the United States. Nobody who says, "that is unfair!" or "it is unfair" is ever taken seriously. It is essentially a phrase use by children who don't like the rules but can't offer a justification for their position.

Beware unintended consequences.
For simplicity, let us start out assuming a class size N = 100, with an even grade distribution from 1% to 100%, so each student gets a different likely test score. An unusual class, but we'll cover a more normal distribution later.
Let's also assume a passing grade G = 50%, and a penalty P of 10% for the whole class if anyone is caught cheating.
In our N students, M will cheat, and of those, C will be caught, so we can say:
100 = N >= M >= C >= 0

The M "dishonest" students are those who feel that their grade is likely to be below 50% unless they cheat. There is no loss to them if they cheat: they will fail either if they don't cheat, or if they are caught cheating. They will pass only if they cheat successfully.
So, around M = 50 students in a no-penalty setup will cheat. The chances of M = 0 are small enough that everyone must assume there is cheating going on.
Nobody who cheats believes they will be caught, so no M expects to be in C, even though, false-positives aside, all C are members of M. However, they all believe other cheaters are dumb enough to get caught, so none will have faith in C = 0. So students will have to plan assuming that the P = 10% penalty is applied.
But if you add in the P = 10% penalty, students now need to score G+P = 50+10 = 60%, which means M = 60 students will cheat.
A class-wide cheating penalty means more students must cheat.
This doesn't apply only to those close to the passing grade: it applies to anyone who feels there is a specific "boundary grade" they need to hit, but do not feel confident they can hit without cheating. So those at the top of the class, used to getting A- at worst, may fear getting a B+ with the penalty, and might find that unacceptable, and will cheat to avoid it.
It also applies to anyone who has a friend near a such boundary-grade, that they are willing to help out: helpers are considered cheaters just as copiers are.

There are less game-theory reasons this is likely to be true, too.

By punishing them for something they didn't do, you'll make them ask "if I'm being punished for the crime, why don't I do the crime?"

By drawing attention to it, and the fact that people in their class are doing it, you normalize it, making it seem "socially okay" and accepted, even expected.

You're giving students power over the well-being of other students. But if 2020 taught us anything, it's that some people just want to see the world burn. They want to screw other people over. It only takes one student to deliberately be caught cheating, to screw the whole class over. Why would you give the class troll that much power? Or that jilted ex who knows how much their ex really needed this grade to keep their scholarship. Or the kid who extorts money or favors from other students to not obviously cheat.

For the worst student, 1%-10% is still 0%, but the top score just dropped from 100% to 90%. Mr "bottom 1% of the class" just moved up to "bottom 10% of the class", and from 99% away from the best grade, to 90% away. His percentage may have got worse, but the position of his grade on the curve has improved.

I like this answer the best, so here's where I want to throw my 2 cents: At best, the effect of this policy is that more students will get even better at cheating. That's learning, but I have to assume it's not among the learning objectives of the course.

I think nobody has said this so far, so here it is:
I find it astonishing that you find it necessary to reward the minima moralia.4
Before anything can be learned by the students, any assessment can be made, any grades handed out, this is the minimal, first and indispensable requirement: That the students, honestly,  perform the work themselves that will determine pass or failure.1
Everything else comes after that.
This cannot be discussed, it is not open to debate and negotiation.2 It is the rock on which we stand.3

1 Of course, this work can take on arbitrary shapes including group work, internet research, street art or impromptu performances.
2 This does not imply that cheating students should in every case be harshly punished or expelled etc. Being caught cheating is another opportunity to learn in an educational setting. But it cannot be tolerated.
3 Part of the scientific trouble we find ourselves in seems caused by an erosion of this foundation.
4 It actually gives me the creeps.

got me wondering if it is possible to create a grading scheme based around reward instead of punishment.

IMNSHO, grades are overrated. Why not just consider a Pass/Fail scheme, or a Pass/Fail/Excellent scheme?
Also, this behavioristic approach is unbecoming; and as a former student I'd tell you it's kind of demeaning, even ignoring the morally problematic collective-punishment aspect of your specific scheme.
I doubt that, with the attitude you're describing - again, even without your collective punishment scheme - you are fostering an atmosphere conducive to learning for its own sake (or for the sake of utilizing the acquired knowledge and skills), as oppose to grade-chasing.

The concept doesn't work because it's not enough to build the peer pressure you want. If you failed everyone, it could work, but that's obviously not ok.
The theory is that everyone will accept the syllabus as a given frame and act influence their peers to provide benefits for themselves. However, cheating is a bigger and easier benefit using the same incentive. This creates a feeling of unfairness that can turn against you.
You are trying to create an everyone vs the cheaters mentality, but risking an everyone vs the instructor result. Gaming social dynamics isn't easy and prone to fail.
Consider alternatively something like removing the final exam out of 3 exams if no cheater has been caught in the first two exams. This hurts more while at the same time not creating unfair grading. You would need to have three exams in the past of course so that it doesn't sound like a punishment-exam. That's subject to the above problems, but still feels better somehow.


text:
can repeated submission of papers omitting main contributor considered as plagiarism?will the journals retract such articles?
I have completed my MTech in an elite institute in India. During my tenure, my professor forced me to collaborate with a Part-time Phd student, hence the work had to be shared data, analysis & drafts though this person had no contribution other than proofreading. We had published the article in conference proceedings with my name as the first author. Later the article was published by the Phd student & supervisor without my consent & omitted my name. On contacting they refused to accept the request to add my name as the first author even though the work was based on my thesis. I contacted the editor & the paper was withdrawn. later I managed to publish a book based on my thesis. After 2 years I noticed the same team had published the exact same article in two other journals which was again a copy from the thesis. This time one article was in press & other article published. The article in the press is now withdrawn other under investigation.
Update: I want to know what I can do to prevent them doing again? I don't want to collaborate with them anymore. So should i publish papers without them? PhD student had no role but my supervisor guided me. So it will be ethically wrong not to include my supervisor . Should I still proceed without them since they had been unfair ?what is the best solution? The current papers they published were based on my thesis which was published as a book by me. Thanks for the answers.

There is no question. What would you like us to help you with?

Publishing a paper omitting the main contributor is plagiarism, as well as an ethical violation. Publishing an already-published paper isn't plagiarism (assuming the original authors haven't changed), but it almost surely violates a journal's originality policies. Both will likely lead to retraction. The first will require hard proof, but the second shouldn't take more than mailing the publisher/journal with the already-published article.

Re-publishing a paper will also likely violate copyright agreements made with the original publisher.


text:
How to approach being accepted into PhD lab group verbally while explaining grades
I was recently offered a verbal offer to join a PhD lab group with a professor that I had taken classes with during my Master of Science program. I did well in the said professor's classes, and I was asked if I would be willing to do a PhD. I was also verbally offered that the professor would be willing to admit me to the lab group.
I sent my transcripts and other information as requested, and explained my grades which are not good during undergrad. However, the professor has also taught my classes during the Master's and I did fairly well in those classes, and demonstrated my research experience during those classes as well.
However, since the professor wants people with exceptional GPAs, I am not sure if my verbal offer (via email) would be rescinded. I have not heard back anything since my email explaining that I did mess up in undergrad, but I have improved and I am committed to tackling the PhD in the lab group.
I am very interested in joining the PhD, but I also don't want to get my hopes up (since a willingness to admit me which the professor mentioned via email is not a written, official offer for admission to the PhD lab group). However, I am not sure what to do, as I don't want to keep prodding on the subject matter and forcing the professor to give me a response when the professor may be busy/thinking about about me to the lab group.
What is a way I can approach this, in order to demonstrate a) I am very interested in joining the group to pursue my PhD and b) I am confident that I will have the capability and willingness to learn and improve?

(I see you are from New York) In the US, in most fields, it isn't typically possible for a professor to "admit" a student to a doctoral program and you must go through a process of application and evaluation. It is unlikely that such a process can be entirely bypassed, though having a sponsor can be helpful. You can ask them what your next steps should be.
Unless your field is an exception, you need to write a good application, including letters of recommendation that assure any evaluator of your potential for success.
Don't spend a lot of time apologizing for poor grades, but emphasize the positive. What is it that makes you a good candidate? Make sure you have letters that attest to that. Depending on possible regulations, this professor might be a letter writer.

Yes, "emphasize the positive" is always key when applying to any position.

I have emphasized my ability to overcome obstacles and persevere, but I understand the professor wants a) very competent people and b) people who have a history of high achievement. The professor did say initially (and very strongly) to join the lab group. The professor has said this after I took a couple courses during my Master's, and I demonstrated some capabilities of my own ideas/research as well as performance in the class.  However, when I explained my undergrad grades (we were supposed to chat), I did not get any response back since when I sent it (it has been a few weeks).

I'm afraid that the ship has sailed, and perhaps based on my undergrad grades, the professor does not want to re-neg on the previous offer of joining the research lab, and perhaps thinks I may not be cut out for a PhD based on my bad grades in undergrad. I can understand that point-of-view, but I also think the professor extending me an offer to join the lab shows the professor's belief in me (for whatever reason). I'm not sure how to respond (to this lack of response to my email explaining my undergrad grades).


text:
Creating Google Scholar Account with professional email
When I was trying to create google scholar profile, it requires an institutional email. As I no longer have any access to my academic email , I would like to use my professional email , which is provided by my company I am currently working for.
Will it create any problem in future for receiving citations?

First, I don't think you need institutional email to create google scholar profile. you can use your gmail to create one. You may need institutional email to verify your profile to show you are affiliated with the verified institution.
It may not create problem receiving future citation because citation receiving depends upon people citing your research work. You can still list all of your published article under one account and google scholar will gradually accumulate your citation under your profile once it starts recognizing the article. So, it should not be a problem.


text:
MSc paper accepted in highest impact journal in my field - what next?
As part of my MSc I wrote a dissertation on a topic that interested me (clinical medicine - focused) and I got a good grade for it - my supervisor suggested sending it off to a journal for publication and I thought "why not"?
We started with the highest impact journal in our field (>100 IF) , expecting to be rejected and move on to a lower impact journal, but to my surprise it was accepted
Now my department, which did not give me any funding or support throughout this process (this is a uni that receives billions in funding every year btw), is urging me to continue my studies with a funded PhD and work with more established researchers within the same field
I am not sure what to do about all of this - I have a good non-academic job in the same field that I like and did the MSc part-time not expecting to go any further into academia, but now everyone is telling me that with my publication record I can be very competitive for grants, scholarships, and a PhD position in most institutions
Is all of this true? Would a single 1st author publication in a high impact journal help me that much if I choose to follow an academic career? And is there any way I could continue contributing to research without abandoning my job?

Is your MSc / potential PhD in medicine, pure science, or something else? Medicine is a bit different than other fields.

Do you actually want "grants, scholarships, and a PhD position"?

Seconding @cag51's comment: if you are in medicine, it may also help to specify what country you are in.

A single paper? It really depends on the paper. If it is a Nobel Prize winning paper sure. But you won't get your prize until you are in your 80s. So if you come back down to reality, the odds are not in your favor.

If you're happy with your current non-academic job, then there's no reason to give it up. Some academics around you may think that academia is "better", but that's certainly not objectively true. If you choose academia, you may have a good start, but the rest of the journey will still be though. I wouldn't recommend to go there if one doesn't absolutely want to.

Allow me to comment on this from the perspective of a clinician who does a lot of research. I assume you are a prospective clinician, as well.
It seems you published a paper in the Lancet or in NEJM. This is a huge achievement, something others would not achieve despite submitting high-quality work. An original article in these journals can open many doors but also sets high expectations. I have seen brilliant colleagues submitting highest-quality work to these journals and receive desk rejections. They are extremely competitive and your publication will be well regarded in the medical community.
That said, do not expect to repeat this the second time you submit a manuscript. Yes, it requires a strong paper to publish there but it also requires luck. Based on your post, I understand you are a medical student about to start residency in the near future. Beware, this alone is a full-time job that requires sacrifices and heavy commitment. Doing research "on the side" will leave you with little to no time for other things. While your professors are right that you have in fact all chances for a very successful career, allow me one subjective advice: in medicine, it is essential to have physical and mental resilience to survive the first painful years. Yes, this publication will open many doors but also implies that something follows, something that requires your full commitment. What this means in practice: yes, this publication will open doors in clinical research but it does not end here, you will have to continuously invest more work in the future.
Also mind that in many countries publications do not matter after all for residency matching, it is all about grades. You may add a country tag so that we could give additional advice.
Again, congratulations!

The question talks about an MSc and a potential future PhD, so I doubt that OP is a medical doctor. I have asked them to clarify.

@cag51 - Sorry, I misunderstood this. Since the post was upvoted by some users, I may not delete it at this stage?

@Dr.M I'd recommend editing to phrase your answer along the lines of "if you are/were a clinician..." so it's clear however OP ends up responding (if they do). Your answer is still likely to be useful to other people who find this post even if their situation does not actually perfectly match the one that OP describes.

Would a single 1st author publication in a high impact journal help me that much if I choose to follow an academic career?

For graduate school admissions, the only way to know is to apply. Your professors seem to feel that you're a strong candidate, and they should know. But you will be judged holistically; it's impossible to judge the effect of a single paper without knowing the rest of your profile (and "chancing" applicants is not what we do here).

with my publication record I can be very competitive for grants, scholarships, and a PhD position in most institutions

Note that they are suggesting you would be competitive for PhD candidature, not necessarily for an "academic career." So, you should carefully consider whether a PhD would help your career goals or not. If by "academic career" you mean 'professorship at an R1," you should be aware that there are usually hundreds of applicants for every opening. On the other hand, and contrary to popular belief, interesting things do go on outside of universities, and many of the most interesting jobs require, or at least reward, a PhD. At the same time, there are many career paths where a PhD is not really necessary, and it can be very expensive (in both time in money) to earn an unnecessary PhD.

And is there any way I could continue contributing to research without abandoning my job?

If you mean doing "research on the side," that is unlikely to be viable long-term (unless included as part of your job responsibilities).

having talked to medicine majors, it appears to be relatively common in medicine to do "research on the side" in that field, although medicine also always comes with inhumane work hours it seems (in Germany)

Good point, updated. I was thinking more of "Can I be a bookbinder full-time and also collaborate with a professor as a hobby?", which is a common question here but rarely viable in real life.

@FelixB. It's not clear what role or degree OP has; "research on the side" is a thing for medical providers but I don't think there are a lot of other research on the side opportunities. There are, of course, a lot of explicitly research-focused roles in clinical trials, whether in academia, government, or industry.

@BryanKrause I mean in the first sentence OP states the MSc was in the field of clinical medicine

@FelixB. No, they said the dissertation was on a topic that interested them and said that topic was clinical medicine-focused; I think that makes it more likely that their MSc was not in clinical medicine overall but it could just be an odd choice of wording.

good point - I haven't read it that way, but I see where you are coming from. But I guess you probably can't do a MSc in clinical medicine without at least some proximity to it.

@FelixB. Sure, but your MS could be in anything from CS, any field of engineering (mechanical, electrical, biomedical), any field of biology (molecular, micro, biochem, etc), statistics or data science, epidemiology/public health, pharmacology, medical physics, etc and be based in clinical medicine. It doesn't mean you're necessarily an actual clinician: physician, nurse, etc.

Felix B. I doubt one gets a new contract in German university medicine without doing at least some research ;)

You have a choice to make and need advice on how to make it. If your university thinks that "all of this is true" then it would seem to be a fact, since you describe them as highly reputable.
But, to make the decision, you need to talk to a lot of people about the likely outcomes of a choice. You might have a future in academia, but only if you would consider that a good life choice. It has positive (life of the mind) and negative (lower lifetime pay) aspects. Stress comes with both options. Think about the lives of professors you've had. Think about the lives of people at your job who are above and beyond you. Talk to some of them about your future if you choose each option. Talk to family also.
You can continue doing research at your job only in some circumstances. But those are rare, even in large companies. And companies define "research" differently than universities do in most cases (rare exceptions). Most industrial research is product based, not idea based.
I can't claim "most", but many academics are there because they were driven to be there by an internal longing. That, for us, makes the negatives acceptable, and for some, trivial.

Also, family. If you (OP) don't already have children and/or partner, but plan/wish to have, then consider that both sides will "compete" for your time. Raising children without neglecting them takes time and effort.

Whether they think you would be competitive for grants or not is largely irrelevant here.
The deciding factor should be do you want a career in acadaemia?
If the answer is yes, go for it! I'm sure you'll be very successful. That being said, you could have just got lucky with your first paper, so there are no guarantees. It's definitely a strong first step though.
If the answer is no, then don't go into acadaemia. You could be as smart as Steven Hawking but if your heart isn't in it, you won't be able to research sustainably and succeed in the long term.
Everything else is secondary.

+1, I think it is essential to consider "what do I want to do" and not "what opportunities could I utilize" as baseline for these kind of situations.


text:
Does publication importance diminish over time?
Thinking of applying for a PhD in a 2-3 years as I want to focus on my industry job at the moment, and I was wondering how publications are evaluated by grad admissions over time?
Will a very good publication not be evaluated as highly if it happened 2-3 years prior to the candidate's application (given they have not been in academia during these last 2-3 years)? Is there an expectation that your most recent pub will be the best?

Well, it depends on each single comitee. I any case, you should frame your publication as "when I was a student, I was able to publish" rather than thinking "my best publication is 2 years old". Think about what the publication tells about you, not about what the pubblication contains...

"Is there an expectation that your most recent pub will be the best?" No.

I did my PhD as a "Mature Student" many years after I completed a masters by coursework and thesis. I also published a couple of papers at the time. The admission criteria was based on the ability to do research, hence they required either a masters by thesis or equivalent and/or evidence of publication. They didn't care how old the publications were. (In Australia PhD candidates usually have to complete an MRes/MPhill before entering a PhD program to "prepare them" and this is waived if you have previous research experience)

No one can predict how an individual will judge something like this, but I would find it highly unusual that a small number of years would even be noticed. Twenty or so years might be, however.
But, peripherally related to this is a sense that one might well favor someone who is active in research, though more for a faculty position than doctoral admissions.
One way to mitigate any effect, however, is to have a "Work in Progress" section on your CV. This indicates that you haven't given up the research "mindset". If you are currently active in research I suggest that you keep a notebook of "ideas" that occur as you go along. Ideas about extensions or variations on the current theme or just things that pop into your head and that might be worth pursuing later. Mining such a notebook for research is a valuable thing to do and can lead to that "Work in Progress" section.

As for the headline question, an incited work probably diminishes in importance over the years as no one currently finds much value in it. But a highly cited paper probably increases in "value" for such things.

If you write your essays correctly, your application will be evaluated in the context of your career path.  If your career path carried you outside of areas where you are expected to publish, your evaluators should pick up on that, and a 2-3 year gap in your publication record should not impact your application negatively (Keep in mind that a good number of candidates who get accepted to PhD programs will have zero or one publication of any real merit).
I would think that an important part of your application package would be conveying a feel for why you want back in to academia after going to work in industry.  You want your evaluators to think of you as an applicant with real direction, and not one simply wandering from gig to gig.  This isn't as critical for your current situation as for, say, somebody in industry for 10 years, as you haven't been in the working world for that long, but paying some attention to this will make your applications stronger.


text:
Does Australia and New Zealand have year round application system for PhD program in Mathematics?
I have completed my masters in mathematics from a institute in Asia. I will apply to Australia and New Zealand for PhD program in mathematics.

I wanted to know if Australia and New Zealand has a year round application system where I can write to professors year round or is there some specific months( Like November, December of each year) where I should write to them?

Please let me know

What do the policies at the school's you're looking at say? You could improve your question by doing some legwork before positing a question.


text:
Does Germany have year round application system for PhD program in Mathematics?
I have completed my masters in mathematics from a institute in Asia. I will apply to Germany for PhD program in mathematics.

I wanted to know if Germany has a year round application system where I can write to professors year round or is there some specific months where I should write to them?

Kindly guide.

Take a look at the proposed duplicate. Regarding your core question, no, there is no specific date. Positions open year round. It's a bit more common for positions to start in October and April, corresponding to academic semesters, but it really depends on when financing starts, and when someone moves on from their position.

Actually you are partially true and the explanation could be given based on the type of PhD you are looking for. There are three types of PhD one can commonly find in Germany.

Structured Programs: Many universities in Germany offer structured PhD programs with specific application deadlines. These programs often have set start dates and application periods, which are typically announced on the program's website.

Individual Doctoral Positions: If you are seeking an individual PhD position (where you work directly under the supervision of a professor), there is more flexibility. Professors may accept inquiries and applications year-round, depending on their funding situation and current projects. It's advisable to check the professor's research group webpage or contact them directly to inquire about open positions, if there is any. BUT remember to get accepted, you need to come with really solid research plan.

Industrial Doctoral Positions: This often has a couple of partners including both universities and industries. Therefore, there is no set timeframe to apply. You need to be actively search on both university and industry's career portal/page to find the announcements.

"Actually you are partially true and the explanation could be given based on the type of PhD you are looking for." What does this refer to? The question seems not to include a statement that could be true/false.

From the OP statements, it seems he is not aware about the education system in Germany. This is why I tried to explain a bit as he might be considering option 2. But he should know that that is not the only option available.

Two notes: Putting the structured research programs first is weird because ~90% of the PhD positions are not in such programs, but of type 2 and 3. Type 3 is typically pursued by candidates already working in industry. Second, the sentence "BUT remember to get accepted, you need to come with really solid research plan." is problematic, because it's quite the opposite. If there is an open position available for "cold-calling" applicants, that will typically be in a third-party funded project, and then the research work has to fit to that project.

Are 1 and 3 common in math or very rare? Do you have the background to say? My guess would be that 2 is almost universal in math in Germany.


text:
Applying for a PhD - Can't Decide on the Topic
I'm applying to a PhD programme in the UK, but feeling kind of lost. I have two ideas for potential research topics (in the humanities - literature to be specific) but don't know which to go with?
I think the first topic is more novel than the second, but will require more effort, and I am not sure of:
whether i'll easily find the resources I need as I hope to apply the chosen theory to literature in my language and i'm not sure of what I'll find.
I also intend on doing some fieldwork, but don't know if the scholarship will cover me flying to my country to do the fieldwork and back.
Quite simply, I think the first topic will have more obstacles, even though I also wonder if these challenges will help me grow or just unnecessarily stress me out.
I also have a history of tending to work hard not smart and, therefore, have mostly leaned towards and chosen the harder path towards obtaining my degrees and even in my work. I.e. one example is that my friends all chose topics which were attainable in the specified time frame whilst doing their masters. I chose a topic which required a lot of research in a very short time frame in different fields I had not studied before which added to the stress as I had a lot to teach myself in a very short time. I did that but I was also happy that I produced work which was original (even though that is not usually the requirement for a master's degree) and learnt a lot, but I also wondered whether I should have just gone with an easier route.
Back to my question on topics - the second topic kind of builds on my master's topic and won't require fieldwork as it is more theoretical based, but I am not sure if I'll be enthusiastic about it as much as the first. I'm sure i'll be able to find something novel about it and add new knowledge, but not sure if the topic is worth spending three years researching it.
Also, the first topic I can see a future for especially in my field, but maybe in other places other than the UK.
I hope my post isn't confusing, but I really don't know how to pick one. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Have you been accepted into a doctoral program or just considering how to present yourself? Also, is the application to a specific advisor/supervisor or to a "system" of department that uses a committee structure?

@Buffy in the UK one applies with a research proposal. One cannot be accepted without one and I believe the poster is asking about that proposal. There also will not be an application to a specific supervisor but also not quite the system/committee you mention. They will likely be applying for a particular funding stream (internal, the AHRC, something else) and will need to designate a supervisor for that. If it is external/research council funding (again like AHRC) the university will select finalist to go forward for it outside the Uni based on the quality of the proposal.

This seems like a question that needs specific advice from people who know the field. It could be a reasonable thing to discuss with prospective supervisors, and/or you could talk to people from your former institution(s) e.g. your Masters supervisor and whoever else you intend to use as referees. On the whole people are happy to offer advice, so don't be afraid to reach out.

Also: pick the topic that you find most exciting. You're going to spend 3+ years of your life on this, and there are going to be low points. You need to care about the question, and not just about the end result.

The biggest insight I can offer you here, because you are applying in the UK, is that you need to select the most mature and appealing of the ideas if you wish to be awarded funding for it. You need to select the most fundable topic: so the most feasible, interesting, and structurally sound. If you prefer the one that is less fundable, now is not the time to apply, you need to work on that idea more. Competition for funding is fierce and you need to present your best.
If, for example, you are applying for an AHRC studentship, your proposal will need to go through the University's internal selection round before it goes out to the AHRC for consideration, thus you have to write to appeal both to the university and to the AHRC beyond. This is something that you should be doing in partial collaboration with your prospective supervisors, although they will expect you to have a mature topic to shape.
Good luck, but also consider having a meeting with your prospective supervisor so they can go through how it all works. They can also help you consider the two ideas within the political context of the university and the funding body, and give you an assessment of your chances with each.


text:
Why can it take longer for a new journal from a prestigious publisher to receive and impact factor?
The question is motivated by the fact, that Physical Review Research still did not get its first impact factor and a date it happens given on their internet page:
"We are hopeful that Physical Review Research will be fully indexed soon and will receive its first Impact Factor in June 2021"
was changed to June 2022.

I am just guessing so not posting an answer, but an impact factor is based on the number of times papers published in the journal are cited. It takes time (many years probably) to gather enough statistics to reliably determine an impact factor.

I think the number of years one needs to give the impact factor is fixed, as only the two years before the publication counts for calculating it. Accordingly, I do not see how the date can be suspended as one knows that after I think 3 years one can calculate it. The other issue would be if one would classify the journal as predatory, then no impact factor is calculated. But I very doubt it was here the case, this is why I restrict in my question to journals from "prestigious publishers".

If the total number of "citable items" is low in the first years, the impact factor would not be very accurate.

This is true, but does it prevent inclusion in  the Journal Citation Report and calculation of the impact factor? Is there any threshold in number of publications a journal has to reach? I somehow cannot imagine that even it is so, the Physical Review Research did not reach this threshold, as for some initial time there was no publication fee for it.

Note that the first articles in PRResearch were published in August 2019, so it actually hasn't been two full years yet.

Hm, ok, so what you are saying is that it was already clear from beginning and the PRR  (accidentally?) stated a wrong date? The "accident" was highly beneficial for PRR as some authors could decide to submit the manuscript there because of a promise that the journal obtains impact factor already in 2021. However, I would not expect something like this from APS.

I don't know what discussions APS may have had with Clarivate, so no, I'm not saying that. But based on publicly available information, it's not clear to me whether the impact factor was "suspended", or if the statement was overly optimistic. According to this answer, getting a journal indexed is the tricky part, and maybe that didn't work out for some reason? In any case, "we are hopeful that..." is not a guarantee/promise, and I hope people didn't interpret it that way.

I don't think anything has been "suspended." Physical Review Research is still listed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), which is where most or all new journals start nowadays. Journals listed in ESCI don't receive an impact factor. Only when the journal is transferred to the Science Citation Index Expanded can it receive an impact factor.

This one is fairly obvious. The journal wasn't good enough to be indexed by Clarivate (the company that manages the Science Citation Index and calculates the impact factor) in 2021, hence the journal is hoping to be indexed in 2022 when Clarivate do next year's assessment.
For clarity, a lot of things are needed before one can get indexed by Clarivate. There are over 25 criteria. Some of them are not obvious, such as:

The authors must have affiliations, geographic diversity, and publication records that validate their participation in the scholarly community associated with the stated scope of the journal. The demographic of the contributing authors should be consistent with the topical and geographic characteristics of the Editorial Board.

Other criteria are practical:

Cited references, names, and affiliations must be published in Roman script to
allow rapid, accurate indexing, and easy comprehension by our global users.

And some can cause serious headaches for new publishers:

The journal must provide a readily accessible, clear statement of the commitment
to peer-review and/or editorial oversight of all published content. Primary
research articles must be subject to external peer review.

It's improbable APS will screw up the latter two of these examples because they've have done them before for other journals, but the first is not something that's within their direct control, and that could have caused the application to fail.


text:
Pay for open access publication from private money
I am working on a paper together with people from another university. In one of our meetings, after I have mentioned that I do not have any funding from the university for open access, they suggested that we can pay the publication fee from private money.
This puzzled me, as I have never heard that somebody is doing this.
Is it common to pay a publication fee in an open access journal from private money?

Do they mean out of your pocket?

It's not common, but I have paid for low-cost conferences from my pocket when the bureaucracy to have them paid officially wasn't worth the time. Sometimes I feel the bureaucracy is in place precisely to save the institutions some money this way (just kidding, but only just).

Is "private money" a translation? It could mean two very different things

Whether it’s common or not is beside the point. What matters is whether you feel comfortable doing it. If you don’t, don’t agree. The other thing that matters is whether it should be common, to which the answer is “no”: academics shouldn’t be subsidizing the academic enterprise by paying to publish their work.

Yes, I mean out of my pocket, i.e. from the money I get paid and I pay the rent, buy the food, pay for a childcare for my child, etc.

an added thought: if you do decide to pay yourself, a sliver lining might be that the money you paid may be tax-deductible.

People would rather avoid doing this, but, yes, it is possible. I can't say how common. Most academics will try to pay such fees (and other publication fees) out of grant funds. Some university departments will provide funds if asked.
But there is no prohibition about paying as a private person. Independent researchers have few options otherwise.

If you don't have funds (and in particular aren't affiliated with an academic institution), you can also try asking for a waiver.

@cheersmate, traditional publishers have been willing to waive fees (page fees) when asked if there are no institutional funds, but I don't know if open-access publishers will. Their business model doesn't have other means of funding unless they are grant funded themselves. Of course, some publishers have a dual model.

I have an affiliation from an institution in the EU, in a rather "rich" country, but nonetheless they do not have the money to spend on this.

It's possible, but it shouldn't be the responsibly of researchers to pay for their publications out of their own pocket, especially while volunteering many hours to peer-review and editorial tasks. I would refuse.

@Roland Yes, obviously, but if they say to me "We do not have money for this", I do not see, as a "simple" PostDoc, a possibility to change their mind...

Is it common to pay a publication fee in an open access journal from private money?

No.  According to Google Scholar, the majority of my publications are available open access.  As far as I know, nobody paid any publication fees for any of them, and certainly nobody paid fees with their own money.
Open access fees should be paid by taxpayers as part of grants.  If you do not have such a grant, publish in a closed journal and use the appropriate preprint repository.