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References in speculative applications
This is so far only a theoretical question, but at some point this year I will have to enter the academic job market and probably finally find a job "the normal way". Not that I never tried finding a job, I successfully found different jobs before. Still, I got all of these jobs in a rather informal way where if I had presented the formalities they did not seem to play an important role for the person hiring me. So basically I got my jobs by being curious enough in an interview, informal recommendation and previously working with the same person.
Somehow I suppose finding a post doc will finally throw me off this streak of luck. As now I am not yet as stressed out and busy as I will be when finally finishing to write up I am planning to prepare for the job hunt as early as possible.
Some institutes offer the possibility to upload a CV as a speculative application even though they currently do not have matching vacancies. I would like to do that, as I feel it makes me turn up on the radar and might even lead to some networking opportunities.
But one part of a good post doc application are the reference letters or at least mentioning people who would be references for me.
How is the etiquette for this? I do not want to use someone as a reference without them knowing about it and knowing where I will apply. But I also can't really tell them exactly, and don't want to bother them if I just upload it to a large institutes collection of CVs from potentially interested people.
Should/can I mention potential references, should I just not mention any and hope reference letters will be requested or should I ask everyone beforehand if they would be fine writing a letter for an yet unknown recipient in case I need it?
And, while we are at it, any other tips about informal speculative applications that I missed?
The field is STEM, I am currently in Europe but might apply outside Europe as well.

You need to mention your field and geographic area.  For mathematics in North America, applicants usually apply to a few dozen postdocs or over a hundred permanent positions (some of which may get a thousand applicants) at a time; reference letter writers usually write a generic reference letter and rarely even check where it's sent to - because it would be impractical to do so.  Other fields or geographic locations may differ.

@AlexanderWoo I edited it in, although I have not restricted myself yet to which geographic region I am going to apply.

'STEM' is too broad to be useful - biomedical fields, engineering, and mathematics behave very differently.

Why the downvote?

The usual format is to state 'References available on request' at the bottom of your CV. Then, if an insitituion is interested in your application, they can contact you to supply them with your referee details.
This approach will also give you notice so that you can inform your chosen referees beforehand that they may be contacted by a hiring institution.


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Will rejecting more papers than I accept reflect negatively on me as a reviewer?
I made a little statistics about my review decisions. I found out that I reject way more papers than I accept. I honestly try to accept the reviewed papers, I read them carefully and my review are always long. But most papers I review are low quality (in my opinion). Some colleagues told me that I should be more gentle in my review, as this will affect my profile somehow (negatively of course). Is that true ?
Also: should I adapt the toughness of my review to the quality of the journal/conference I am reviewing for?

Do you happen to also have a statistics how many of the papers you had rejected have been published eventually?

@Wrzlprmft .. I didnt keep track. I know a very poor one got accepted though.

It is of course impossible to say if you are overly critical. But, some statistics might help. With prestigious journals the rejection rate might be 90% (very high in any case). I am Editor in Chief of a smaller journal and we have a steady 50% rejection rate. The extremely high rejection rates in some journals come from limited space, in my case we simply impose strict guidelines and the rejections come from reviewers assigned by associate editors. So the rate in our case is fairly certainly upheld by what the community sees as acceptable or not.
So if you end up finding you reject large numbers (at least around 50%) I would not say that it is out of the ordinary. I do not of course know what typical rejection rates are in the journals for which you do reviews, so the number may of course vary.
So getting to the question of how this affects you. I very much doubt that you get a negative effect by being a fair reviewer. If you do many reviewes over time and you are not considered fair, I am sure you would notice the numbers of appointments dropping. If you get re-invited by the same journals/editors, I think they appreciate your work and I would take that as a sign that you do fine.
Should you try to adapt to the journal? In general, no. You should apply your knowledge and understanding to provide a critical review of the submitted work. An editor should take your comments along with comments from one or more additional reviewers and provide a recommendation to the authors. You are not solely responsible in this process! If the journal is such that it publishes material with which you are familiar but where its audience is in a  different field, you may consider handling the paper differently, but obviously not ignoring errors and misconceptions.

An important thing to be aware of, is that (as far as I can judge) editors tend not to send papers on which they have a bad first impression to experienced people. It follows that junior researchers tend to receive a relatively large proportion of demands to review papers that are below average. That might explain your feeling.

Thanks, this explains a lot in fact (I cant consider myself senior). I wonder though if professors still review papers. I feel most of them send it to their students.

Many more papers are submitted than accepted at top venues/journals, so statistically speaking, you should reject more than you accept.
Harsh reviews are ultimately good for science, so long as they filter the crap and help improve papers with potential but are not there yet. If your review is able to help the PC/editors decide whether or not to accept the paper and help the authors improve their paper, then you are doing your job correctly. If you are harsh but unhelpful, then you need to change your approach.
I think your reviews can change a bit depending on the venue. If you are reviewing for a workshop, your goal would be to help choose papers that are likely to generate interesting discussion. This is especially the case if there is no associated official publication.

"Many more papers are submitted than accepted at top venues/journals, so statistically speaking, you should reject more than you accept."  Yes, but at many journals editors have the discretion to reject papers without refereeing them.  So your statistical conclusion does not necessarily follow.

Some journals allow you to see the reviews provided by the other reviewers of the paper, which is often a good way of monitoring your own performance as a reviewer.  If you are harsh to an unreasonable degree, I suspect that editors will stop sending you papers to review, so if they are still sending them, that is an indication of sorts that there is not a fundamental problem.
As long as you are happy that you are applying a standard that you feel is reasonable, I'd stick with it.  You probably review too few papers to know whether you are being unduly harsh or that you have just been sent a series of bad papers by random chance.
When I get a rejection, I am generally fine provided that the reviewer does a good job of explaining what they (incorrectly ;o) feel the problem is and what needs to be done to the paper for them to be happy with it, in sufficient detail for me to be able to do so if it is actually possible.  The problem I have with negative reviews is when they make vague criticisms that can't be addressed as there is not enough information to actually act on, or where reviewers raise additional issues on the second review to reject your paper that could have been raised on the first review.  So if your reviews are detailed and constructive, they are probably good reviews.
At the end of the day, it is ultimately in the author's best interests not to publish poor work, and if it can be usefully improved, then the reviewer is doing them a favour in not accepting it.

In addition to points made in other answers, and strengthening Dave Clarke's first sentence: not only the best, but even "medium-good" journals receive far more good submissions than they could possibly publish ... at least within the traditional "page limit" constraints, and possibly within some tacit constraint about appearing sufficiently selective. (That is, even if all the papers were quite good, a journal that publishes 10,000 pages a year will be suspect...)
Thus, the job of "editor" tends to degenerate into trying to find reasons to reject.
There simply are not enough "prestigious" journals to publish all the (good!) work done by all the good young people... who now can typeset things much faster and get them submitted. (In contrast, pre-TeX, pre-internet, getting something sufficiently presentable to send to a journal was much more of a hassle... Also, the number of researchers has grown much faster than the number of good journals, at least in my field, mathematics.)
Returning to the literal question: as others have said, indeed, try to be constructive and helpful, rather than merely a gatekeeper. At the same time, you cannot count on corrective feedback from editors if you are "too harsh", because they may not realize this, and in fact have incentive not to worry about that exigency, because you are making their job easier.
Also, one should note that in recent times many respectable journals explicitly declare to referees that they, the referees, are not responsible for correctness of an article. It is supposedly the author's responsibility. This is obviously strange, but can be understood when we realize that the gatekeeper function of journals, editors, and referees is at least as important as the scientific function... as disillusioning as that might be. But it does explain situations that are otherwise baffling and counter-intuitive.

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Is it typical for a medical researcher to attend an industry conference?
An industry conference in my field of research (medical) is being held soon. I am wondering is it typical for academics to attend non-academic conferences?
Several academics have been invited as keynote speakers but it is predominantly aimed at industry professionals. The talks sound interesting and relevant to my work and it would be a useful networking event.
There are no similar academic conferences being held that I am aware of. This is an area of research that is more active in industry.
However, the fees are very high compared to an academic conference. Is it normal for travel funds etc. to be spent on non-academic conferences? If I cannot attend are they other ways to make connections to industry? I am a postdoc currently.

I occasionally attend non-academic medical conferences, or attend the industry-focused sessions at mixed conferences. In my experience, these conferences are excellent for generating a couple things:

Contacts. Even if you want to stay in academia, knowing people in industry is occasionally useful - for example, if you want to be a PI, someday you will have students. Presumably those students willl need jobs.
Ideas. I actively refer to one conference I go to as a "hypothesis generating conference" - I leave it with a notebook full of ideas, and some followup emails to send.
Funding. Following from 1 and 2, industry contacts are a decent way to drum up industry funding.

That being said, they are more expensive to go to, and in my experience using travel funds for conferences where you're not presenting is a very hard sell.

I'm not in the medical field (my field is Engineering related), but my advisers have always encouraged me to attend conferences (both academic and industry). I believe that one of the many benefits of attending a conference (other than learning and getting up to date knowledge) is to network and make new connections. Keep in mind that even in industry conferences, one can always brainstorm or come up with ideas/solutions/problems that can help you as a student or even an adviser (maybe even get some funding!).

In several fields (for instance exploration geophysics), "conferences and exhibitions" (e.g. SEG or EAGE) may have a mixed audience, industry and academy. Such situations are not uncommon for scholars (to spend travel funds). So during sessions of little interest to you, you can meet industrials at their booths. You can also meet speakers that take some time off, and may be more prone for discussion.
As you are a post-doc, you should bring your resume (even if you want to stay in academia), this gives you an opportunity to discuss about their needs, and what you have to offer, and sometimes there is a match, that could spark collaborations, topics of research.
Plus, in conferences with industry, you can get goodies or corporate gifts quite easily.

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Should I attend a job interview after I've already accepted another offer?
I applied for several postdoc positions recently. One made an offer which I accepted. Since then I've been invited for an interview for one of the other positions. Is there any benefit to attending? Is it an opportunity to make potentially useful contacts (in a relatively small field)? I should add that I have no experience with academic interviews (the position I secured was through contacts). Expenses will be paid.

Your mistake was accepting a position without taking some time to "think about it." Usually they won't force you to decide right away, and you needn't accept immediately. Ideally you'd have waited long enough to have interviewed several positions before selecting the one that best fits you.

@AdamDavis isn't this an ideal case? to wait long enough to be interviewed by others? Who knows whether they will interview you in 1 week/month

Upvote: I appreciate that you asked this question. This happens often. Usually for a long time there is nothing, and then all of a sudden, several interviews come in at the same time. And despite they took long to call you in for an interview, and/or make a decision to offer you the job, usually they want an immediate answer from you, or max. three days. Then, what to do with the other interviews, which may be better career, better conditions, but are more then a week or two away?!

Once you've accepted a job offer, you are supposed to inform other places that you've applied that you would like to withdraw from consideration.
If they still want to invite you over to give a talk knowing that you can not be considered for the position, go ahead. But, you must tell them.
To do otherwise would be a serious breach of ethics. You do not want to gain a reputation as someone who engages in unethical behavior (don't assume they won't find out).

I don't buy that one should always formally withdraw their application after accepting an offer. My rationale is this: I applied to 40-ish positions, most of whom had obviously moved on from me by the time I accepted an offer (based on months of no contact). I wasn't going to contact them. I had one position for which I had done a Skype interview a couple weeks prior, so I reached out to them to withdraw from consideration, although I suspected they had already moved on as well. I would be embarrassed to withdraw my name from consideration for a position it was clear I was not considered for

Let me emphasize a point made in other answers.
As soon as you accepted one offer, you should have withdrawn your application from the other employers immediately.  If you had done so, this situation would not have arisen.
You should immediately write an email to the school offering this interview, saying you have accepted another offer, and apologizing for not letting them know sooner.  They have a right to be a little annoyed with you; you've wasted some of their time, and if they'd known you were off the market, they could have moved on to pursue other candidates.
So you made a mistake; well, people are human and these things happen, but you should act quickly to put it right.
In a comment on another answer, you consider the possibility of not telling them, and attending the interview anyway for the experience (and the free trip).  Don't do that.  In academia, attending an interview for a job you know you won't take would be considered extremely unprofessional and possibly unethical.  Interviewing a candidate is expensive, in terms of time, money, and opportunity cost (time they spend interviewing you is time they don't spend interviewing candiates who might actually come; the longer they take to get to those candidates, the greater the chance they will take another job first).  Don't think they won't find out; academia is a small world, people talk, and you can easily make enemies doing something like this.  Moreover, the people at your chosen instituion can find out too (the other institution's colloquium schedule is probably public) and it won't make them think well of you.
In principle they could ask you to come anyway just to give the talk, but it's unlikely.  They will probably want to use that time and money right now to speak with another candidate.  It's quite possible they are still interested in hearing about your work, but they'd be more likely to invite you to visit sometime in the future, after job season.

In my school, when they have the budget (and they usually do), every year they invite some top job candidates with whom they don't have a shot, just so they can hear a good seminar and also to advertise the school for future interactions and for potential co-authoring opportunities.

Nate Eldredge this is my first time going through this process and I hadn't considered some of the points you raised. I appreciate the advice.

@Amatya candidates with whom they don't have a shot.  Then how did they become candidates?

@gerrit  Say you are graduating for Harvard. We interview with you at the meetings. We are your safety school and with 99% probability  you won't join us. We invite you for a flyout anyway, just to hear a good paper and you might come visit us because you will get great feedback from an A grade faculty and make contacts. On paper you are a candidate and 3 sigma events do happen in real life.

"As soon as you accepted one offer, you should have withdrawn your application from the other employers immediately."  I agree with this for employers who have shown interest in the candidate. I'm not sure that it is very common practice, in mathematics, to contact employers who have not expressed any interest in you to tell them you have a job. People often apply to many schools, and schools often expect that some candidates will decline interviews because they already have positions. Exactly as you say, someone who already has a position should turn down additional requests for interviews.

@OswaldVeblen I regard it as basic looking after one's own interest to contact anywhere you'd prefer the moment you get an offer.  Of course, it's far from a guarantee, but I know lots of people who've gotten a position at a place they preferred by using an earlier offer to apply a little time pressure.

< But why not take advantage of those benefits by not telling them I've already accepted a position?
The fact that you are asking that question after seeing the answers here, and acknowledging that it is "unfair" (actually it is dishonest), raises serious questions in my mind about your integrity and character.  To be fair, you are possibly a young man who haven't quite made up your mind whether you are also going to be an honest one.
If you feel that you have something to gain by dishonesty, you're in a great deal of company (see Nick's answer, for example).  You will always find those who applaud your dishonesty as willingness to make "tough decisions", "take on the grey areas", "get the job done" and so on, who all the while find ways to manipulate you in dishonest ways for their own perceived gain, and to your perceived loss.  If you wish to be that sort of person, then you may expect to draw persons of like mind into your circle of acquaintances.
You will also find that honest people do not respect and trust you; you will furthermore find that dishonest people pretend to respect and trust everyone and actually respect and trust noone.
We are in a phase of existence where we as a society are deciding whether to base our actions on "survival of the fittest" or "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."  To not decide is to decide for the former.  Cast your lot and reap as you sow.

Of course you may do that.  However, it isn't the same thing to point out consequences of dishonesty as it is to pass judgment on a person for being dishonest.  It isn't my place to judge a person who appears to lack integrity and character (we all do in one way or another), but it IS my place (and anyone else's) to observe such and share the observation.  Now, it seems to me that the one making the judgment here is you, for it is you who have attempted to punish for perceived shortcomings, not I.  If so, then perhaps the easiest way to see fewer moral judgments is to make fewer of your own.

You must inform them that you've accepted a position.
If they still invite you for a talk, you  should go because presenting to new people will give you more visibility, more feedback on your work, and if you make a good impression then a potential place of employment in the future.
They might still invite you for a talk because it is fun for them to attend good talks and learn about interesting papers. Even if you don't work for them, by spending a day there you might meet someone interesting and you might wind up co-authoring with someone there on something in the future. Only good things can come out of spending a day with other researchers who are excited about stuff similar to yours.

Thank you that's very helpful. I agree that there are several benefits. But why not take advantage of those benefits by not telling them I've already accepted a position? Although it's unfair to mislead them they won't know otherwise and I would gain valuable interview experience.

@SeamusO'Bairead You may gain interview experience, but you will also gain a reputation for engaging in extremely unethical behavior (don't assume they won't find out)

@SeamusO'Bairead what ff524 said. It is unethical to waste the time and resources of a department and it will not be good for your career if you get found out. Academia is a small place and reputation is very important.

I accept your points. Thank you your guidance.

@SeamusO'Bairead Even if they don't find out, personally I wouldn't really want that on my conscience. Besides, if you start going down a path of doing things like that, eventually it becomes easier, until one day you do something you truly wish you hadn't done. Best start down a good path now!

For reasons everyone has mentioned, you must let the second place know that you've accepted another offer. In addition once you have accepted that offer, you really must commit to it.
However, if this second place is truly amazing, you can inform them that (1) you've already accepted another offer and (2) would still be interested in giving a talk (as people  have mentioned) and (3) would be interested in taking this position if it were deferred for a year, in the chance that they don't find a good candidate this year (this is rare for post docs but does happen on occasion, depending on the funding source). This assumes that your current job only has a 1 year commitment (many jobs these days are 1 year with a possible extra year of support). This is a huge long shot. They most likely will say no, unless they have no other qualified candidate. This is the only situation I could imagine it being ethical for you do do the interview (with their knowledge).

Going to the second interview:

Gain: insight about the other position, experience, networking.
Lose: time, energy, your reputation, especially if it is a small field.

Declining the second interview:

Gain: energy, integrity, "you play nice".
Lose: you don't know what you miss, experience, networking.

People usually recommend to "not to lose reputation", and therefore decline the second job interview, after you accepted a job offer already. This what I would do, too.
However: you only really got the job on the first day after the probation period.
Until then, anything can happen. They can cancel your application before you sign the contract (happens many times) for many reasons: budget cuts, change in management, change in priorities, etc. Or they decide during the probation period that they don't want you (happens also).
Therefore, I recommend not burning  all your bridges! There are different ways of saying no - how about doing it in a way that shows professionalism, and keeps some doors open for you for the future.
I recommend the following:
Write a letter to the other employer saying that

You have already accepted a job offer that fits your expertise.
However, you truly appreciate that they considered you for an interview, seriously like their organization, could have imagined working for them, and would like to be in touch.
If for whatever reason your current offering doesn't realize, you will contact them again.

You can also offer to keep in touch for professional reasons, and/or offer to forward their job announcement in your network. If it's a small field, and people are hard to get with the right expertise, they will appreciate it.
It happened to a friend of mine that during the probation period, it turned out that the position was not as advertised, and he quit. He re-contacted the previous parallel interview offering. The company was happy to call him in again - the original position was not available, but they offered him a similar one.
If you just simply say "No", they won't know that you would have been interested.

I personally don't see the harm.  However, if that interview went well and you were to be offered the job, accepting it would obviously be a crappy thing to do.
But I don't see any issue in going for an interview, even with no intentions of accepting the role.  Experience in interviews is really important.  And on the plus side, you don't have to go in completely nervous because you've already got a job, so it'd be easy for you to sit back and relax!

My answer applies to you as well, and to anyone upvoting your answer.

I'm not sure if you realize that the institution in question is paying the OP's expenses for the interview (and also expending their time and effort on the interview), on the premise that he is a candidate for the job.

In addition to what's in my answer, I'd add that experience in postdoc interviews is not really that valuable, once you have a postdoc position.  It depends on your field, but there's a good chance you won't do a second postdoc, or if you do, that you won't have to interview for it.  You certainly might want to have experience with tenure-track interviews, since there's a good chance you'll be doing some of those in a couple years, but that's a very different event from a postdoc interview.

The second interview: Of course you can't tell ahead of time if they will make you an offer, or if their offer would be one you would accept, but the question is, if the second interview resulted in a job offer, would you consider accepting their offer?
Perhaps for you, the second place is the place you'd rather work. Maybe it's the place you've always dreamed of working. If this is the case, you should go to the second interview, without telling them about the other position you have accepted, and see what comes of it.
In regards to the "second place", there is nothing wrong with that. In light of their offer to interview you, you are reconsidering your acceptance of the previous job offer. It is not a "wasted effort" on their part.
In regards to the "first place": If the second place offers you a position, and you accept  it, you will have to tell the people at the first place that you have reconsidered their offer and have decided to accept another position. I can tell you that this should not shake them up too badly. I'm sure it's happened to them before.
They are free, and many places often do, continue interviews in spite of making an offer to you that you have accepted. You may not work out for them, or they might find someone "better" that they would rather have working for them. Unless there is some sort of "contractual obligation" that you have not described, if you were to go and work for them, they could replace you, and you could move on to another position, at any time.
On the other hand, if you really want to work at the first position, or if you feel you have some "social obligation" to proceed with the position at the "first place" due to your relationship with your "contacts" there, and wouldn't consider any offer the second place might make, you should tell the second place you have accepted another offer before the second interview so they could decide if they want to proceed. And they might... If for some reason, they really want you, they might feel they could woo you away from the other position with a great offer.

What you describe is how things work in some industries, but not academia.

@AnonymousMathematician What is academia afraid of? Healthy competition?

@GeorgeReith: However you think academia ought to work, the relevant issue here is how it actually does work.  Relying on theories based on other industries (e.g., that nobody will be too upset if you continue to seek other jobs after having accepted an offer) is a terrible career move.

@AnonymousMathematician And will continue to work that way as long as nobody challenges it.

@GeorgeReith It's more a practical matter than a fear of competition matter. You leave, they have to cancel your classes because they can't find someone at the last minute to prepare and teach your classes, students who need your class don't get to take it and have to possibly take longer to graduate. So, you get the professional reputation of being willing to leave people in the lurch for selfish reasons.

@BobRodes That's a good explanation. I am not from an academic background so would not know that classes are scheduled before a new employee is in the door. Goes a good way to answering my question. Although really that is a bad system, there should be a contingency plan in place.

@GeorgeReith The other explanation is that academic jobs run on an annual cycle where everyone is making offers around the same time.  Thus, if you make a job offer, it's accepted and then the person changes their mind and accepts a job offer somewhere else, all your other candidates are gone.  So, changing your mind often means that the original position goes unfilled; thus you're doing damage to the original school, and all the people who actually wanted that job.

The ethical rule is: if you accept a position you're supposed to be there for a year.  After a year you can move without it being considered a breach of ethics.

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Is getting a second masters frowned upon?
I recently read on stack overflow that getting two PhDs just shows that you're unfocused and you don't know what you want to do. However, I'm at a small school with a 5 year Computer Engineering bachelors/masters program I feel like I should take advantage of, but I'd also like to go on to do another part time grad degree in the same field or Computer Science at a larger, better established school, while I work.
If I went to a larger school like University of Illnois or MIT or similar, will having a masters and going back for another be frowned upon, or is this a non-issue?

I don't think it is going to help your career much, so I would only recommend to do it if you enjoy the classes.

I have never seen a job asking for two Masters. If any employer would be impressed by two Masters, it would be because they are in different disciplines. (e.g., a Masters in CS and a Masters in Finance might look good if you are trying to get a particular position at a financial company)
Two CS Masters is redundant. The only time I have seen this is when a PhD program gives a MS en route to a PhD and the student already had a MS.
Industry is going to value experience over multiple Masters

If you do just enjoy the classes, you might think about a different field that still interests you and is relevant to your day job (e.g., HCI or math).
Or you may just want to look into a PhD program :)
EDIT: According to the responses to this very similar qeustion, Can a masters student apply for a second masters in the same field at another university?, it appears that a lot of schools may not even accept a Masters student that already has a Masters in the same field.

It's not about having 2 masters, really, its more about getting a Masters from a larger school that is better known and more competitive. I've read that the salary increase for a PhD is not worth the time you spend there, but maybe it is if you already are starting with a Masters.

@JFA The goal of a PhD isn't to get a salary increase, it is getting a job that would be not possible with a Masters (i.e., faculty and research positions).

@JFA According to that link, those larger or more competitive schools may not accept you since you will already have a Masters.

In particular, Illinois will not admit you to a Masters program in X if you already have a Masters degree in X.

Ok I understand, so if I go and get a degree in Y, this is a non-issue. The real underlying question here is, if I got a Masters from two different schools, are people going to look at this and say this candidate is unfocused? That's really the crux of the question.

@JFA Going to multiple schools for different degrees is generally encouraged. No one would ever call you unfocused for that.

I guess you answered the question in that getting a masters in two complementary fields is helpful, like CompE and CS

@JFA No, I would say that is not helpful and is almost always unnecessary.

I don't see how getting a masters from a better known school wouldn't be helpful I guess.

+1 for "Industry is going to value experience over multiple Masters".


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Are there any researcher digital identification services or directories, similar to ORCID and ResearcherID?
Are there any general (not field-specific) researcher digital identification services or directories, similar to ORCID and ResearcherID?

ORCiD is a general purpose author identifier.  I'm not sure I understand the question.

@tom: You indeed don't understand the question, as it implies that I'm aware what the two above-mentioned ID types are :-). I was interested whether there exist other ID types (schemes/services) like those, hence my use of the word "similar". I hope that I clarified the question.

Some of the obvious ones:

The ISNI initiative wants to assign unique identifiers to all "creators". (They take authors in the broad sense of individuals generating copyrightable content or something like that, since they include musicians and others.) That is about as "general" as you can want.
If you want to restrict to Academia, the arXiv author identifier is not specifically field-specific, though it is limited to fields which have an arXiv presence.
Since you didn't specify what is required of a "researcher digital identification service", social networks such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate which you mentioned in your other question can also serve the purpose of disambiguation of publishing records.
Certain countries maintain their own databases of researchers residing there. The most comprehensive and successful seems to be that of Netherlands.
The American Mathematical Society has recently starting maintaining author profiles as part of their MathSciNet service (I know that the question asked for "not field-specific"; I'll weasel and say that the AMS profiles include also those working in related sciences to mathematics, such as physicists and computer scientists, and some engineers.)

For a list of some of the other services, the International Repositories Infrastructure Wiki has a slightly out-dated list of such services. Note however some of the items listed there have stalled and shutdown since the last edit.

A few more creator/author/researcher identifiers:

Scopus Author Identifier - automatically generated from author name and affiliation appearing in publications in the Scopus database
Loop
Microsoft Research Academic Search for authors
Google Scholar author profile aka. "My Citations"

Please note that ORCID lives within a reserved section of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) namespace, see "ORCID and ISNI Issue Joint Statement on Interoperation", and works associated with an ORCID can be more than just publications but can include performances and presentations too, see "Supported Work Types" for a list.

Thank you for your answer - it certainly adds value to the discussion (+1).


text:
Is it advisable to take trivial classes to better focus on independent study?
I am considering taking what should be considered a remedial math class, though is actually credit bearing at my university, so I can spend more time solving monthly problems/ studying graduate level theory on my own. Would subverting the curriculum, and reducing the problem of acquiring credit hours to a problem solved in or before middle school, be looked down upon by graduate schools? I have always heard that graduate schools only care about your math grades, only care about how much math you have studied.

Taking easy courses to focus on one's major is a time honoured tradition --- if you get the credits, it doesn't matter if you think it's a 'remedial class'. I can't comment however, as to how this will look for admissions if you don't plan to also take graduate courses for credit.

Are you a math major? My answer (and aeismail's) assumed so. If not, then please make it clear in your question.

I should have transferred to Orono. USM is not strong in math.

I assume that you are talking about applying to graduate programs in mathematics, rather than in other disciplines.
To take remedial courses so that you can focus on "graduate level theory" on your own seems like a spectacularly bad idea. Why would a grad school take someone whose transcript shows remedial courses instead of accomplishments in upper-level undergraduate and graduate coursework? It also weakens your overall transcript in the process, since the remedial course will stick out like a sore thumb. Moreover, without some mechanism for documenting the work that you've done on your own, you won't easily be able to convince an admissions committee that you've actually done the work!
If you want to do graduate-level work, just take the graduate-level courses corresponding to what you want to do.

I go to a small school and took all of the upper divisions in my first 1.5 years.

Then you take advanced-level work, petition for independent study supervised by a faculty member, ask to take classes at a nearby larger school, or find another solution that allows you to continue doing upper-level work. You do not take remedial courses.

I should have transferrred. Orono has graduate level sequences.

Taking remedial or lower-level classes in your own discipline/major sounds like a recipe for disaster. At best you'll be seen as lazy, at worst your own competence in your chosen discipline will be suspect.
There is a time-honored tradition of taking easier courses outside of your major/discipline in order to gain some more balance in your life and still earn enough credits for graduation. Ask your peers (or advisor) for the names of these courses -- the time-honored fictional one is called "UWB100: Underwater Basketweaving for Beginners."
While these will still be listed on your transcript, at least they won't cast suspicion on your disciplinary competence.


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Should I give a symbolic "thank you, and goodbye" gift to an abusive supervisor?
Within one week I shall leave my present institution, where I felt severely mistreated around salary payment and work conditions for 2 years, as a postdoctoral fellow.
The PI who signed my contract (theoretically my supervisor) has played passive-aggressive "not-here" all my stay while consistently demanding honorary, corresponding authorship status in any piece I happen to publish, from any source. In fact I had never heard of this person prior to signing my contract from abroad, over which I was dealing with another local professor. They had made some kind of agreement.
Soon I will leave, at the official end of my contract. I am wondering whether I should give this person a symbolic departure gift, especially in front of the other lab mates. I am not culturally hierarchy-oriented but displaying respect to hierarchy is seen as a strong moral virtue, where I am, in China.
Relevant: I am not staying in China, but I might keep in touch with one or two current lab mates after I leave. I am afraid that an act of offering him a gift will communicate a wish to continue "guanxi" which is his understanding probably means I will forever offer him credit over my work, favors.
Please, what do others suggest?
* UPDATE * 02/04/2018
I have finally departed and left a bottle of fairly good French wine behind, sitting on my desk among the student's office, with a note clearly stating it was for the Professor. With a "Thank You for the opportunity, and provided unforgettable experience to share".
As mentioned, my main objective was to displaying respect for other labmates by thanking the professor in the local hierarchy and presenting a gift.
I had, however, no direct dialogue with this person upon my departure. The final days were particularly tense, where finally the supervisor openly failed to pay for a long-delayed amount of 1k USD of salary agreement. The details of this conflict are described in another question in SE Academia.
Thanks to all for suggestions; I believe this was the best I could do.

Is it common in the target culture to give departure gifts? Will those few people, with whom you want to maintain contact, think less of you if you don't give the departure gift to your bad boss? Would it make sense to give departure gifts to them instead? I am at loss at all the cultural differences.

I think you are overthinking it, what's the worst that can happen if you don't give him a gift? Even if not giving a gift is a minor violation of normal social customs what does it matter? Also remember as presumably a non-Chinese person, quite frankly there are not the same expectations for following such social norms, since one can always interpret your failure to follow them as a cultural difference.

@OlegLobachev Actually it is common here that people give gifts to "bosses" at any suitable occasion. I think they already find me disrespectful because clearly I don't abide to any local hierarchy. Hierarchy is highly esteemed in Asia as a pilar of social harmony.

@Bobgom I in fact think at this point the gift would make little difference because I am sure this guy spreads the hell about me behind my back. Must be very creative as we have no interaction. I am just a bit worried about disrespecting my best colleagues who believe hierarchy is sacred at their work and family. Local tradition.

I have no idea what your social norms are, but giving a really terrible gift can be more insulting than none at all. Depending on your goals, that could be a good or bad thing.

I think it is useful to link this thread to the relevant thread on the issues I had with the PI. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/104541/persistent-issues-with-salary-pay-as-a-postdoc-in-china-what-can-i-do

I don't know much about Chinese culture, so take this answer with as many grains of salt as necessary, but it seems like the best thing to do here is find out what is the minimum socially acceptable gift you could give the advisor without it burning bridges with your lab and the other people you work with, and then give that. If you can get away without giving anything, so much the better.
If you do find yourself socially obligated to give some kind of gift, when you give it perhaps you could emphasize to the advisor how much you're looking forward to doing your own, independent work as a polite way to discourage any further involvement.
Even if this person demands honorary authorship over your work after you leave, it will be much easier to tell them no when you're not working in their lab. The worst they could directly do to retaliate is refuse to give you a reference or letter of recommendation to future employers, and someone who gets their authorships by abusing their students and not doing any actual work is unlikely to be able to do much damage to your reputation anyways.

Thanks, I think this is the best way of facing it. I am sure he's eager to provide me bad references, but I do agree that he'll have few opportunities outside of his biased circle in China. I haven't been in the lab since a long time now, since my final documents were delivered. I have 5 days left before departure. I am thinking of leaving him a gift to be found among stuff for the students so that everyone can see. Will think about it, thanks.

I would not give a gift - symbolic or otherwise. It seems from your response that you will not (nor value) the contact of this particular supervisor much so there is no need to do so. I would not deliberately demean him - sending a nasty email or attempting some sort of sardonic gift for him but I would not present a gift. That said, if you do decide to give something - I think your fears that this represent some sort of desire to extend the relationship is overblown.
P.S. I am familiar with the Chinese culture but, of course, that should not be taken as being somehow more authoritative than other answers.

I once had a supervisor that I didn't really see eye to eye with. Definitely nothing as serious as you are noting, I just felt like we didn't really understand each other.
So as a parting gift, I gave him some music that I very much cared for and that I knew he would not like or understand. I never explained to him why I gave him that music. It gave me some satisfaction then and it still gives me some satisfaction to this day.

Incompatibility is normal and fairly common. Abusive supervisors are unfortunately also becoming more and more common. I think you parted well and he may not remember you much which is sure for the best.

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


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How does one keep hammering on another study in preprints so forcefully that one gets temporarily banned from posting to arXiv?
The September 26, 2022 news item in Science ‘Something is seriously wrong’: Room-temperature superconductivity study retracted discusses one individual who levied substantial criticism of the study, which eventually the journal Nature retracted without the consent of its authors.

In preprints, Hirsch kept hammering on the Dias study—so forcefully that in February, he was temporarily banned from posting to arXiv. He also complained to the University of Rochester, which in two inquiries found no evidence of scientific misconduct. This month, Hirsch and another critic, Dirk van der Marel, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Geneva, published their conclusion that the susceptibility data in the Dias study are “pathological.” Van der Marel is heartened by the Nature retraction. “It is good to know you are not alone in believing something is seriously wrong,” he says.

Question: How does one keep hammering on another study in preprints so forcefully that one gets temporarily banned from posting to arXiv?
I can imagine if one posts at a kilohertz rate that could be seen as a localized DOS attack but I'm sure that's not what's happening here.
Is there an editorial board at arXiv that says "enough is enough" or "too many posts of similar nature and content" or "stop being a troublemaker", or is banning done strictly algorithmically?

I don't know the case but was rudeness and abuse part of the situation? One can get banned here for that, actually.

An earlier Science article was posted that was specifically about the "arXiv ban":
https://www.science.org/content/article/preprint-server-removes-inflammatory-papers-superconductor-controversy

But arXiv administrators argue the decision wasn’t about science. “There are no papers in this whole chain that were rejected because we did not like the scientific content,” says Ralph Wijers, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is the preprint server’s board chair. “People’s emotions became too affected. They got acrimonious.”

Papers that don’t appear to be scientifically sound or use “unprofessional” language can be rejected. Review boards then manage appeals.

Regarding one of Hirsch's submissions:

After publishing it online in September, Physica C removed the article in November because it contained data published without the original team’s permission, and arXiv took it down in December.

And about the ban:

Sigurdsson says he is unable to discuss the case but notes that bans can occur for reasons other than repeatedly publishing inflammatory content. Authors can also be banned for making repeated submissions in response to specific papers and contacting arXiv administrators and board members to complain—all infractions Hirsch appears to have committed.

From what I can tell, papers were rejected by humans at arXiv because they contained what they considered to be "unprofessional language", and later it seems the ban likely occurred because of many repeat submissions that fit this description. There is no suggestion that either the submissions or the decision were made by automated systems. It's not clear to me whether the unprofessional language was specifically the accusation of fraud, or whether the language went further than that. However, it does seem that arXiv moderators want to make sure that the site remains a site for posting scientific papers, and not for "blogging" or leveling accusations.
Presumably, that does not mean that arXiv is not an acceptable place for scientific criticism, but there's a difference in tone and scope between a paper that makes a scientific argument that a particular result is unlikely to be true (i.e., attacking a scientific theory), and one that makes an accusation, perhaps including personal attacks (i.e., attacking a person).
This distinction should be familiar to users here, because Stack Exchange follows a similar principle for moderating controversial topics, namely:

Focus on the content, not the person. This includes terms that feel personal even when they're applied to content (e.g. “lazy”).

As a bit of an aside, I assume the question was prompted by the phrasing "kept hammering" ... "so forcefully" in the quote from the article. My take is that "forcefully" does not refer to the number or submissions but to the tone of the individual submissions. That is, the individual submissions were considered as too forceful, and that they were repeated ("kept hammering") led to the ban (instead of just rejection of individual submissions), rather than the issue being "hammering forcefully" such as by submitting hundreds or thousands of criticisms.


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Response to referee after rejection
I recently had a paper rejected: both referees pointed to a unique issue with our work. One referee's criticism was fair, hence I feel the rejection decision was fair.
The other referee however, seemed to appreciate the paper and know the area extremely well (and thus, I expect to have them as a referee for any future submission). Their entire objection was based on an incorrect assumption -- if their assumption were true, I too would have suggested rejection. However, our results clearly showed this assumption is not true. Thus, their entire basis for rejection could be 1) very easily refuted in a response letter/revision and 2) may lead to future rejections if the referee is not corrected. I am wondering:
Would it be appropriate to write a "response to reviewers" document to one referee to point out this issue? Is this at all common? I would not be appealing the rejection per se, but rather hoping that the referee better understood our work (with respectful tone and appreciation for the thought they put into their review). If not, should I simply move on?
I should also mention, any future submission would explicitly state that this assumption is incorrect, but I would rather address point this directly with the referee, if it can be done so respectfully.

"I should also mention, any future submission would explicitly state that this assumption is incorrect (even though all authors agree its clearly untrue)"—what is 'it' in "its [sic] clearly untrue"?  Is it untrue that the assumption is incorrect (which is what you seem to be saying), or is the assumption itself incorrect (in which case "even though" does not seem to belong)?

I removed that part on my question since it was confusing and did not add anything useful information. I meant that my coauthors agree that it should not be necessary to explicitly state this referee's assumption is incorrect: we feel it is apparent from our main results.

Without addressing the main question, I think one of the best, though also most galling, pieces of advice I ever received from a reviewer was:  no matter how obvious you think it should be, if someone has to ask about it, it's not as obvious as you think it is.  (More pithily:  better to say more than is necessary to ensure clarity rather than less.)

This is a waste of your time, and, more importantly, a waste of the time of people who already selflessly gave away their time working to give you feedback that helps you improve your paper, and to help the peer-review system function.
The best thing you can do is not ask the editor and referees to spend any more time on your paper, unless you are contesting the rejection decision in good faith. And use their feedback to improve your paper so that other referees and readers don’t reach the same erroneous conclusion that this referee did.

+1.  If the referee reached an erroneous conclusion, then it is the fault of the paper--not explaining it clearly enough -- and other readers would likely do the same thing.

I appreciate this answer and agree this is probably the most reasonable course of action. That said, when I review a paper and raise questions or objections, I often lament that my questions are not resolved or explained when the paper is rejected. As a referee, I am constantly learning/thinking about new problems from new perspective: I think there is some (potential) value for a referee in having their questions address (and thus, helping their understanding of a new development they express genuine interested in).

@user23658 although I expressed an opinion and stand by it, I don’t feel too strongly about this issue. Nothing especially bad will happen if you send your response, and yes, there is a certain chance that the referee will appreciate it. But generally speaking, I feel it would be a small and unnecessary imposition on the editor and referee’s time.

@GEdgar While I agree your comment is often true, I think it is also common that referees begin with their own misconceptions and don't read the paper carefully, and then give incorrect feedback.

@DanRomik Agreed completely. I don't foresee any issue if I were to do this, but the time it would take to craft a response carefully is simply not worth it given the high probability that editor/referee is annoyed by me and/or disregards the response entirely.

I'll disagree with Dan Romik about this: I'd think it's totally fair to send the referee an rebuttal through the editor in charge of the manuscript. (And I say that as the Editor-in-Chief of a journal.) I also agree with the OP's comment on the other answer: "when I review a paper and raise questions or objections, I often lament that my questions are not resolved or explained when the paper is rejected. As a referee, I am constantly learning/thinking about new problems from new perspective: I think there is some (potential) value for a referee in having their questions address (and thus, helping their understanding of a new development they express genuine interested in)."
I do think, however, that the better approach is to actually think about why the reviewer might have gotten the wrong idea about the underlying assumption. What was it that didn't explain the issue clearly and allowed the reviewer to go in the wrong  direction with their review? Presumably, if a reviewer who is experienced in this field didn't get this important point, then others might as well. So the productive approach is to critically revisit your writing and , in any future manuscript on the topic, add sufficient discussion to ensure that this critical point is actually addressed and unambiguous. This way, you're not just correcting the opinion of that single reviewer, but of potentially any number of other readers who might have also wondered why you are writing a paper on an unfounded assumption.


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Being accepted then rejected to an academic conference
I submitted an abstract and received notification of acceptance to present at a conference.  The notification of acceptance asked for a short bio.  I provided the bio and was asked to provide more info in my bio relating to my academic and professional background. I provided the requested info touching on my experience in multiple disciplines in academia and industry.  I received notification today (10 days after receiving acceptance) that my submission has now been rejected.  They cited concern over the depth and breadth of the topic.
This hasn't happened with the many conferences I have submitted to.  I am not sure what to do handle this situation?  I have already devoted time and efforts to securing funding and completing the necessary studies to present.  Should I make attempts to rectify the situation and figure out why this was retroactively rejected?  Is this normal behavior for an academic conference?  Should I attempt to find out what happened in their review process?  What I can do to rectify the situation of having this submission retroactively rejected?

Is this normal behavior for an academic conference? -- Certainly not in my field, but fields differ. What field is the conference in?

@JeffE The conference is on psychology and psychiatry.

May I suggest a paper on the topic of "The Psychology of Insincere Conference Invitations", in which the dishonored acceptance is exhibited as a figure, submitted to a journal whose readership significantly overlaps with potential attendees to said conference?

Just to be sure, you submitted only one abstract?  It is entirely possible to receive legitimate acceptance and rejection notices from the same conference, if they regard different proposed presentations.

Write a polite note asking if there has been some mistake, then write a less polite note to the organisers. Although I wonder if you have disclosed the full story. This sounds too crazy, even for people in the crazy business. ;-)

I submitted a single abstract and was in contact with the organizer, having an exchange of emails sent concerning the requested bio.  I provided the organizer with my current organizational affiliation but requested that it not be published in the program as I am moving to a new position.

Do you have a degree in psychology or psychiatry? Or any professional designation/license in those fields? If you don't, I wonder if they decided you're a 'dabbler' or not qualified.

@mkennedy My degree is in philosophy and CS.  I do work currently with a company in the healthcare field working on analyzing healthcare trends and working on predictive modeling for psychiatric illnesses.  The conference was also listed as interdisciplinary and has people in the medical filed, industry leaders and philosophers listed as invited speakers.

@mkennedy Do you mean a degree would be required to publish a paper?

@scaahu I'm speculating that an organizer thinks his qualifications aren't 'good enough.' But, like a scheduling mishap, we'll never know.

I'm inclined to think the simplest answer is human error. Someone overbooked a set time slot and your acceptance was taken back.
You'd be hard-pressed to get anyone to admit that, though. ;)


text:
How can the choice of "where to publish" affect the potential number of citations?
I study petroleum engineering; however, I want everybody from different fields to express their opinion based on their personal experience.
Let's assume you have the following options: publishing in a journal that is not open access and has a high impact factor, publishing in a conference, and finally publishing in a journal that is open access and has a low impact factor. The only option that has ever been appealing to me is to publish in a reputable journal, simply because I don't think the other two are challenging enough and also the whole process of modifying your paper based on peer reviews will help improve the quality of your paper. However, I have recently stumbled upon some papers that had me rethink about the whole thing.
It seems to me as if for some reason open access publishing increases the potential number of citations. The straightforward explanation is that many more people will have the chance to see your paper and there is a huge chance that some of them cite your paper at least in their literature review. (I understand that if they don't have access to high quality journals, they might not be currently in the right setting to necessarily publish a good work, but in this context a citation is a citation even if it's by a poor quality paper)
Also, I do have a feeling that depending on the field you're working in, the number of conference publications can hugely exceed the number of journal publications. For example, petroleum engineering is extremely industrialized and  a huge number of fellows in the industry are only willing to publish in conferences. This is simply because publication in a conference is easier, it is fun to travel for free (!) and in general networking is very important to many of them. Also, I keep thinking that there a chance that some of these people, for some reason that I don't know of, have exclusive access to conference papers, but no access to journal papers or maybe they simply don't have the willingness to spend time on reading journal papers because they don't need to! What if my paper gets exposed to this huge number of people if I publish it in a conference, but only to a small number of researchers in the academia if I publish it in a journal.

As noted below, in almost all circumstances "open access publishing" is not really a separate category of publishing - it's just a particular type of journal publishing, or of conference publishing, or of monograph publishing, etc. I think you're making things a bit more confusing than it needs to be by treating it as a distinct category.

I edited the question and tried to resolve the ambiguity that was caused by the improper categorization of my options.

Some thoughts on what can lead to more or less citations on this answer of mine.

A prior question would be why you care about the number of citations. There are valid career-related reasons, and I assume that you know that citation-gathering businesses do not always include "self-publication" and conference proceedings. That applies both to the article being cited, and the citing article. So there is a difference between actual citations in the abstract sense, and enumerated citations. That could support the refereed respected journal approach, depending on your motivation. Also, there are numerous open-access respectable peer-reviewed journals, so since you are looking for non-overlapping categories, I assume you specifically mean unrefereed repositories of various kinds, in referring to "open access".
I would be surprised if there is any evidence that open-access results in an increase in citations, because in the subset of people in the world publishing academic papers, I doubt that the factor of having to pay to read an article has a significant effect on whether a researcher can actually read the paper. Via my university, I get to read articles in any arbitrary journal, and request a free copy if they don't subscribe. An opposite expected trend is that an article in a large, open repository may more easily be missed, if say they get a hundred submissions a week, and if authors are unaware of your work, they won't cite it.
In my field (linguistics), conference proceedings were traditionally just a minor notch below peer-reviewed journals in stature, due to there being few journals and a major publication lag, but now conference proceedings are in third place (behind book chapters). But in some sub-areas (computational), conference proceedings are a major publication venue. Correspondingly, CL conference proceedings go through a serious wringer.
So your basic distinction centered around peer-review is correct, it's just that peer-review standards vary considerably for journals and conference proceedings. It may be that more people will have access to your paper if it is in an open repository, but they will also have access to thousands of other papers, and to generate a citation by the subset of the public that writes scientific papers, you would need to do something extra to draw attention to your paper.
I suggest you first scrutinize the notion of "citation", to determine what citation engine(s) you care about, and whether they scoop up citations of un-reviewed works that appear in other un-reviewed works.

There are currently about 70 papers looking at whether OA publishing gives a citation advantage; about two thirds of those think it does, to some degree (http://sparceurope.org/oaca/). But that's 'conventional' OA publishing - the question here is using a very odd definition of it (OA as distinct from journals) that muddles the question immensely.

@Andrew thanks very much for the clarification. I edited the question to where it separates open access publishing from publishing in a journal that is not open access. That was what I meant but I think I didn't categorize it properly. Do you still think it's ambiguous?

@user6726 thanks for the explanation. I realized the question was not clear  so I modified it. I want to make it clear that I was not referring to "unrefereed repositories" as was implied by my question. My current understanding is that open access journals usually have lower impact factors. Correct? For example, in oil and gas industry, I am confident that none of open access journals have enough reputation. However, the mere fact that through open access publishing a paper will be exposed to a larger number of people was appealing to me. Are you saying it is not correct?

The impact factor of a journal really doesn't have much of an impact on how often your particular paper will be cited.  Many papers are published in high IF journals and seldom or never cited, while other papers that were published in low IF journals are very widely cited.  Most studies seem to show that having open access to a paper (either the official published paper or some kind of preprint) can help with citation counts.  However, it's very hard to untangle the quality of the individual papers in analyzing this.

@Ali Jamali, I don't pay much attention to IF because Thomson has been sketchy in covering my field; but I think it is currently true that IF tends to be lower in OA refereed journals compared to paid refereed journals. I was hoping you could clarify whether you are simply interested in (1) being cited by someone somewhere, or (2) being cited in a manner that results in a higher citation index score (as could be relevant for tenure or promotion). I have orders of magnitude fewer citations under criterion 1 than criterion 2 (Web of Science), because of what Thomson counts.

(This is almost entirely anecdotal and I'm not in a field where conferences are an option.)
In my experience and seeing the experience of others in lab, publishing in a low IF journal that's OA has garnered many more citations and article views than the non-OA journal with a higher IF.
But, these were new-ish, upward trending OA journals. Maybe we've gotten lucky.
Sadly, I'm not sure these are citations for the right reason:
When I google part of the title of each article + my name, the papers in OA clearly appear higher up in the results. There's possibly a correlation between where it appears on Google and the number of citations... maybe I should plot that.
Another example: Two very similar papers published in two OA access journals with similar IFs. One website is simple. The other is convoluted - hard to reach the full text. Guess which one has twice as many citations..?
Not sure if I like that, but maybe that's where we're headed: Publish papers with a Google-friendly titles in OA journals with nicely formatted websites.


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CV still not graduated
I'm doing a CV for PhD application but still I'm not graduated. How can I say that My starting mark before final dissertation are full marks?

What is a "starting mark," and what are "full marks"?

In Italy exam marks are given on a total of 30 (an exam is passed if you get at least 18/30). The final mark of your degree is given by the average of your exams rescaled in such a way that the maximum became 110. Then your dissertation can modify this mark according to different rules, and you can also get the honors thanks to that. With "starting mark" I mean the rescaled average of my exams without considering the thesis contribution, whether with "full marks" I mean maximum ones (obviously without honors). If there exist better terms for saying that, please tell me.

I'm unfamiliar with this system so I don't have any answers for you on phrasing or your CV. Good luck though

I'd put the number of credit points you already have as well as your current weighted GPA (in /30, of course. The conversion in /110 may be misleading, especially for potential employers outside Italy, who may be unaware of the fact that, in the Italian system, the thesis mark is added to the weighted GPA, and thus read the grade as "final".)

Give your current grade, clearly labelled as such. For example:

Current marks: 30/30

Or if the thesis grade can significantly alter your score, you could write:

Current marks (pending thesis grade): 30/30


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Meeting dishonest ex-supervisors at large international conference -- Should one speak out?
I have returned to my country after one negative experience as a postdoc in China.
In short, I was hired based on false salary & funding expectations supported by shady vague contracts written in Chinese. I stayed until the end as to escape a raging crisis at home.
Now I am back home, among long-date colleagues & collaborators. A large international conference in our field of study starts today. The very same PIs who lured me into their trap are coming, now in my country, actively seeking for new candidates. Surely they expect me to treat them politely, coldly at best. These people owe me a lot of money, plus stolen time and project ideas.
I think they expect me to stay nice and quiet for fear of getting bad recommendations and in the hopes of perhaps getting paid/compensated in the future. The culture here is certainly different from what they expect. In just few hours I will meet them at the conference hall, for the opening.
I am revolted. At least in my country, LoRs are not required for getting jobs, and I do not think they're too influential outside of their institutions.
Should I openly expose them? Or would that just label me as some begrudged nuthead?
There is one special roundtable about work ethics included, and I am thinking of approaching the organisation about this. Any suggestions, ideas on this, would be appreciated.
P.S. This is not in the US.
UPDATE:
Finally the event is coming to an end. I have carefully considered the views of commenters and answers here. Thanks to all for so much attention.
I have avoided the scammers as best as I could. They approached me individually, on different casual occasions, to greet and initiate some chat. I was just plain cold, cutting it short. Fortunately they got the message and have been also avoiding eye contact and interaction.
I have outlined the absurd situation to a large number of peers, yet only when asked. “How was it in China”, “I remember you complaining about some problems, how did that fare” etc. I did not mention names, except when directly asked for confirmation.
A couple of friends are part of fhe organizing comitee. They agree in that it’s best to only bring this up to the chairman in case these scammers are openly advertising positions with false information.
I did contact some local reporters I know who asked for an outline. Yet once they had the story they didn’t reply. I don’t think then this will hit the newspapers unless something new and remarkable happens.
The event ends tomorrow. They might approach me one last time. If they do I’ll comment below. Otherwise I’m leaving this at this. I’ve focused on intensively networking and getting collaborations moving, learning new ideas. Much easier without having to interact with this mess. Hopefully I’ve warned enough people to at least avoid someone else fall in this trap. Hopefully they’ll move to a different field or just stop. Thanks to all here.

Can you say what you mean by "openly expose"?  I'm imagining something like standing up in a crowded room, pointing and shouting "There sits the man who has wronged me!" like a scene from a Gothic novel.  That certainly isn't something I'd advise.

@NateEldredge Yeah, as much as I'd love living such a moment that wouldn't be a wise plan. However I might: (i) not sake hands and smile back; (ii) ask at the end of the relevant talk why isn't my contribution acknowledged; (iii) approach my other friends in the open stating they just scammed off salary, funding, data. No need to shout and wear a black mantle there. I am considering contacting a local reporter (I exposed scientific misconduct in local newspapers before).

"This is not in the US" it would be more helpful to know where it is, than where it isn't. What is acceptable one place may not be in another, even in bordering countries.

@user94036 Sorry I understand, but am keeping this general to avoid making the exposure already here, and also to support others in a similar situation elsewhere, who come across this discussion. By emphasizing "not US" I imply that a lawsuit are not the default course of action in resolving disputes locally, which I think is the case for most of the world. Also I think most active respondents are in the US and think according with local principles/standards, so I leave this as a reminder.

@Scientist ok, I definitely understand that. Thanks for the response.

This is also sound advice @Alice. Would you consider making it an answer? I’ll comment on it. Thanks

As the OP would have met the ex-PIs by now, I'm curious as to what course of action @Scientist took, and how things went.

@irene quick reply. They didn’t make it here yesterday for the opening. Long flight. I’m meeting them within 10 mins now. I’m probably keeping a low profile for now. I’m in touch with the local Ethics table peers on this. Will update this thread within the next days.

You sure sound like a "begrudged nuthead" to me. The proper venue for getting paid money you are owed is a court of law, not random forums on the internets.

@TylerDurden yes, that’s the whole point of a scam. Ever heard of the famous tea house scam in China? I won’t get paid nor do I say I’m asking anyone for money. It’s about exposing a scam to potential victims. One may indeed look like a nutto when warning tourists off a tea house in the streets.

You still haven't said what you mean by "speak out" and "expose them" at the conference. Speaking at a roundtable about differences in business ethics in China, and vaguely outlining scenarios like you experienced, is one thing; publicly naming names and institutions and making specific accusations is entirely another. Also, you need to be clear on whether you're trying to recover what they owe you (probably not going to work), or warning other students.

Have you tried reaching out to the organizers of the conference? If you have evidence that they are scamming, the organizers should (in theory) be able to bar them from recruiting at the conference.

@Salmononius2 Thanks I was at the brink of confiding this to the society president over a business lunch but I felt better to hold this back, and they’re not openly recruiting nor pushing me to provide references. Your comment here was in my mind, thanks much.

If I might propose an alternative?
Your goal here isn't necessarily to accuse the supervisors in question, but to warn potential vulnerable victims to their scam. I don't work in academia, but I do sometimes have to cover the topic of government corruption, and avoiding slander can sometimes be simply the case of not accusing anybody directly.
So instead of saying these X people did Y terrible thing to me, consider:
I experienced Y terrible thing that has A, B, C traits (EG Chinese document that contains a dodgy contract, being paid less than stated amount).
So in your case, what you're doing is giving the people sufficient information to identify the scam/trap themselves (without saying who is responsible. If anyone asks, you can simply decline to name). Anyone reading between the lines will see what X person(s) are doing fits A, B, C traits and put two and two together. If X person(s) accuse you of accusing them, you can simply point out you never even mentioned them by name.
For them to argue it's slander, they would have to prove that their actions matches the ABC traits, which would mean they would effectively be proving it is a scam.
For handling them directly, I would propose you alert the appropriate legal/goverment/police department that handles fraud (potentially as an anonymous tip-off, but more useful if you were a named source), because if they induced you into accepting a contract via deception, what they are committing in most countries is effectively a crime, and it's likely you're not the only person they've scammed, and they appear to be, as you say, hunting for more.
It's worth adding: If they've left you out of pocket, you might even be able to get a no-win-no-fee lawyer to chase the costs back. Especially if you still have all the documentation to prove what you got wasn't what they induced you to believe.
Summary:
Your goal here is to use what you've learned in order to alert people to the signs of a possible scam so they don't fall for the trap. It might not just be the people you've met that are engaged in such practices, so it's probably an excellent idea to make it a warning in general.
Any matters of dubious legal practices should be handled legally and not in the public arena.

@Magicsowon I’ve done that while in China, several times. They of course will say there will be no problems, without flimching, like before. Probably will deny any real problems took place in the first place, “the guy is weird”, etc. But yeah, I’ll do that if they announce open positions on the microphone! Thanks for the suggestion! Why not make it an answer?

There is a lot going on here. If you want to play power politics make sure that you have the power first.
You contemplate making an accusation. Depending on local law and custom this could open you to a charge of slander that you would have to defend. Far in the past a duel on the green would be seen as the appropriate response. Now it is lawyers instead of pistols, of course.
If you can make the claim fairly and can also do so anonymously you protect yourself. If the journalists you intend to speak with can really protect "their sources" (i.e. your identity) it might be possible. But they will need evidence even though they are less susceptible to a charge of slander.
But an emotional response won't help anyone and might reflect badly on yourself.
But I see your dilemma. Others may be at risk here if you don't make some attempt. I think that the conference chairs that I have worked with would listen to your complaint if you can contact them. This won't guarantee anonymity, of course, but in the best case it could put other powerful people in your camp. On the other hand, if the committee is somehow aligned with the PIs in question it would be the worst situation of all.
One rather scary possibility is that you confront them privately and tell them your complaints and that you don't like to see them recruiting others into the same situation you faced. If you know of any others who already faced the same situation and you can confront the PI as a group it would be even better. Some people have no shame at all and some are driven by forces even they can't control, but you might let them think that withdrawal is a better option than continuing. Scary, though.
Ethics don't require, in a case like this, that you put yourself at risk to save others.

Thanks for the sensible insights. I understand the theoretical danger of being accused of slander, etc, but I highly doubt that would apply in this case. The law and official procedures in my country are such a pain already for a local. As Chinese these guys are stiffly restricted on how long they can stay, and this is a small town. I'd be very hard for them to pursue this, and they're not culturally inclined. Plus, I have all proof that I was mistreated. As mentioned, the consulate was directly involved.

I understand the bad exposure from passionately spluttering things out, and I believe this is one the pillars of their confidence. I would have to be crazy to "make a scene" against a professor in public in China. However my country isn't like that. A great scene actually often makes one get quite popular (locally). I think I can control the emotional display enough, as I am not a 100% local.

Now, actually I am not scared of confronting them face to face. This is actually how we sort things out here, fights are fairly common. I'd prefer to avoid that, though, because I might snap and thus escalate, and it invites them to come up with straight-face lies, threats, accusations, etc. These guys will immediately act out any sort of story to support their "face".

Re the lawyers : it is worth remembering the lawyers mantra : « a man is innocent until proven broke... »

I advise you to talk with a lawyer ASAP.
If it were in my country the embassy/consulate was involved, as per work law, I can choose the jurisdiction as my home town...and so, being the jurisdiction local, local laws kick in, and a signature of mine in the Chinese version of contracts would be mostly nil because I do not understand Chinese.
However there might be lengths of time to do that, 1 year at most year in my case, so hurry up.
Some of the charges besides monetary might be criminal...as said, pay a consultation with a lawyer to clear out if you have any leg to stand on in a case.
I would also talk with your University body to see it is worth filling a written complaint that prevents them to deal as an accredited academic reputable entity locally. If you can find others that were also wronged, so much the better.

I don’t think suing them abroad for having scammed me in China would apply. As an ex-postdoc I have no affiliation at the moment. If you meant their university on raising a complaint, I’ve done already and it was like talking to the wind. The typical strategy is feigning dead / deaf / absent to avoid conflict as possible.

I considered suing them in China but almost everyone said it’d be a huge waste of money and time, and the court would be tempted to rule on the university side to save face.

@Scientist I do agree suing them in China is a waste of time and money. If indeed the program has no ties back home, yes, you are out of luck. As for feigning dead, the rule is put it on writing.

I do not know your local laws and I am not a lawyer, but I suggest that the appropriate way to speak out is to use your local courts.  It sounds like you have a legal issue (wage theft) not an academic one.  You can begin litigation against your former supervisor.
Presumably, if your former supervisor appears in your local court, they can win any litigation on the basis of jurisdiction.  But you are interested in speaking out and stopping your former supervisor from seeking new victims.  Unsuccessful litigation could achieve those goals.  I would expect your former supervisor to respond to litigation by avoiding your country.

I guess this is why he wrote "This is not in the US".

I appreciate the strategy of just suing for whatever to make the case public, but that’s an awfully expensive time-consuming strategy. It’s a nice strategy for publication and attracting publicity, if one does have a fortune. For now by the time I write this  pieceand get it filed, they’ll be off the country again.

@Scientist in some countries the government pays for wage theft cases.  Small claims cases can be cheap.

@pipe Most countries offer similar legal recourse. It’s by no means specific to the US. That said, given the context of this question the courts aren’t likely to help much, and at any rate won’t fix OP’s immediate dilemma.