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If your field is so isolated that nobody cites your work, does that make you irrelevant?
A group of researchers work in a problem that no one else works on, hence these researchers are cited only by themselves. They cite other papers, too.
How does the academia consider these cases?
Important update:
From the answers received, I noticed that I have wrongly formulated the question. I don't care if that group of researchers cite other papers. My concern is what if they are cited only by themselves.

What is 'academia' here?  There are different researchers, different universities, different funding agencies, and they may all have different views.

By academia I mean the majority of researchers and research institutions.

I don't think that helps: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4471/academia-varies-more-than-you-think-it-does-the-movie

There are cases when a group of researchers work in a problem that no one other works on, hence they only citate each other and themselves. - I claim every researcher falls in such a group.  Proof: Addend authors of any external citations, and repeat.  This process terminates by finiteness.

Wait, is the question here about being cited only by yourself, or citing nobody but yourself? It has to be the former, the latter just seems absurd to me. As we don't live in 1066 I cannot possibly imagine how you can write a paper where there is truly no prior work that bears mention. I imagine nihil nove sub sole was itself a cliche even in 1066...

The question body suggests that the question is not really about self-citations. May I suggest a new title for this question: "If all of your citations came from the same small clique of authors, does that make you irrelevant in academia?"

You could at least give one example of a paper by such an author.

Maybe in your question title you mean 'does that make your work irrelevant' ? If I chose to work on something niche, I'd like to think I'd still be relevant as a human being even if no-one cited me

Number theory used to be exotic and idiosyncratic. Now you use it to handle huge amounts of money transactions.

A field/problem being narrow does not lead to no citations. A field being isolated from, and unrelated to anything else, will. Some would say that being unrelated to anything else is the very definition of irrelevance.

@Captain Emacs: Number theory used to be exotic and idiosyncratic. --- When was this? Certainly in the 1800s it was one of the most researched areas of mathematics, and it's hard to think of a reasonably well known mathematician then (e.g. someone who might be among the 100 best known mathematicians from the 1800s) who didn't make some kind of contribution to number theory. However, I suppose it was a bit out of fashion from the 1940s to 1970s or so (the mainstreaming of general and abstract approaches to measure theory, functional analysis, lattices, modern algebra, topology, etc.).

@DaveLRenfro You are of course right. I was thinking of the post-1900's and Hardy's famous/notorious quote. Probably I should have been more clear by saying that the community was pretty closed (not sure how large it was).

One can see this from a philosophical perspective ("If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it fall?") and one can also approach this from a perspective of "All research is useful, it may just not be useful right now (as @Buffy has in their answer).
But the reality is that if nobody cares about a certain research direction, then that is a statement about the work as well: It is, truly, irrelevant for all practical purposes. Of course, it is possible that at some point in the future someone might start to care, but the likelihood of that happening is rather small even if I am sure that we can come up with examples.
In many parts of academia, one measures the influence of researchers by their number of citations. It is certainly debatable whether that is an accurate metric, but it is a useful metric for sure and if someone's work does not receive any outside citations, that is a meaningful statement as well.

-1 for "it is a useful metric". It is a metric that is used, that doesn't make it useful.

@JackAidley I disagree. It is used and it is useful. Citations counts in a given field are a measure ( maybe not the best ) of the impact of a researcher. However, comparing researcher across different field using citation counts is dangerous since different fields have different citation habits.  See this paper ( of which I am a co-author of ) for a quantitative analysis of this : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00300

@JackAidley I'd cite Strathern's generalization of Goodhart's law here. Number of citations is a reasonable (if noisy) measure of researcher influence. It's a shitty target.

@JackAidley it is certainly over-used and, in some quarters, even abused but that doesn't make it useless. It is useful, it's just not as useful as it is made out to be.

Exactly. I didn't say "it's the best measure of a researcher". But it's useful.

@JackAidley The claim is that citations are a useful metric for the purpose of measuring the influence of researchers.  Perhaps we have a different definition of the term "influence", but citations seem like a pretty direct, obvious, objective, and defensible measure for that particular quantity.

@J... https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/151174/what-are-some-examples-of-famous-scholars-with-low-h-index

@J... If you're interested in the influence of a particular research paper at a particular moment in time, sure, but that is a pretty useless piece of information. The interesting thing isn't how influential it is now, but how influential it will be. When Yoshizumi Ishino discovered CRISPR repeats they were an obscure aspect of bacterial genetics, and so they remained for the next couple of decades. Now they're the basis of the most important advance in genetic modification of recent times.

@JackAidley Fine, but that's also a non-sequitur.  There's nothing wrong with the claim in the answer.

@DanM. Like I said, perhaps you have a different definition of the word "influence".  Fame and influence are different.

@J... so are citations and influence. But one is easier to game than the other.

@DanM. Of the thousands upon thousands of researchers who languish in irrelevant corners of academia, there may be one Peter Higgs hiding in the shadows.  You can't argue that buying lottery tickets is a generally useful way of making money.  Yes, there are exceptions, but OP is asking a pretty clear question and this is a pretty useful answer.  Note the difference in meaning between useful and perfect here.

@J... An answer must be understood in the context of the question, and the question is about someone currently doing research. The metric is not useful in any context but historical interest, and even then the highly cited papers are not necessarily the ones that actually contain the most important work, only the ones that synthesized it.

@JackAidley The question is "How does the academia consider these cases?" - not "Does this mean my research is useful/useless", etc.  Academia - the sphere of activity where researchers are employed and promoted - does care about influence and citations and it does affect one's career prospects.  How you feel about that reality is a different matter altogether.

Can we stop the discussion here? Surely everyone here pointing at individual papers (CRISPR or Higgs' paper) understands that the exception does not imply that all papers garnering zero citations will at one point become important. Furthermore, what's the point of looking at history: hiring and promotion decisions need to be made now, and pay raises have to be decided now as well. We don't make these decisions 50 years from now retroactively, and citations are useful pieces of the larger puzzle in making these decisions today.

@WolfgangBangerth you make excellent points and I am not convinced that it is not one of many "best measures".  One might be able to find a temporarily better measure, but remembering Goodheart's law if we stopped using citation count for hiring, promotion, pay raises, etc and instead used the alternative measure then after allowing some time for academics to game the alternative measure then the situation would reverse.

@emory Like everything else, one measure alone is not very useful. It's the bigger picture, and citation counts are one of many things one needs to consider in hiring/tenure/promotion. -- -- I think citations is actually quite a good one. It's quite difficult to "game" because what matters is how many other people cite you, and you don't have much control over that (if we ignore brazen "citation circles" fraud for a moment). For example, google scholar shows 6527 citations for me at the moment; that is at least an order of magnitude more than I could have possibly affected myself.

It is not unusual for some researchers to receive few or no outside citations, but it would be strange for a researcher or research team to give no outside citations.  That is because it is always possible to place one's own work in some academic context based on existing published literature.  To not give any citations outside one's own group would suggest that the group is not very good at doing a good literature review of their topic area (and it would probably lead their papers to get rejected from journals, so it is unlikely to show up in published literature).
The remainder of my answer pertains to the more common case where a researcher receives no outside citations.  One would ideally wish that the relevance of an academic paper is determined purely by the topic, substance and quality of the work.  However, as a practical matter, literature that has fewer citations (particularly fewer external citations) is harder to find/notice when searching for papers, and literature that only has self-citations does not show up in outside papers by other authors in the literature review.  This makes it less likely you will find the paper with a search engine, or using a "track-back" search where you start from existing known papers and then expand out via the citations.  Consequently, certain papers can get caught in the academic equivalent of a black-hole.
There is of course nothing inherently wrong with self-citations, and they are a natural part of what happens when researchers write multiple papers with overlapping topics.  A lack of outside citations means that a work has not generated interest from other publishing researchers, and this is unfortunate.  It can have the practical effect that a paper essentially gets forgotten, particularly if the journal is not highly visible.  Some high-quality papers do not get outside citations because people just don't notice them initially, and they end up being "forgotten" (i.e., not showing up easily in literature searches) and become more remote as the journal issue they were published in ages.
To respond to your title question, while it is possible that papers may essentially be forgotten if they fail to generate outside citations (and therefore become irrelevant in terms of influencing the profession), that does not mean that the researcher is "irrelevant".  Academics perform teaching and service duties to the profession beyond our research, which are valuable professional outputs.  We are also people with lives, families, etc., making us highly valuable and relevant to many people.  If an academic is not successful at generating outside interest in their research, they are not "irrelevant".

Actually, it depends more on the work itself than the fact that it is only self-cited. But every truly new topic could have that characteristic for a while. If others are interested in the future, that will change.
But if a small subfield over a relatively long (whatever that means) time period fails to attract interest it will just disappear. Someone may resurrect it, of course.
Thinking about mathematics in particular, if someone came up with a new idea that depended only on "common knowledge", say, as published in text books, then there would be no need for citation to early work.
If no one cites you, it is, perhaps, harder to find your work since chasing backward citation links is an important way to discover things. If you are publishing in good (highly visible) journals, that may not be an issue in the short term.
But even things that make a clean break with the past (Einstein/Relativity) tend to cite things pointing out the differences and why the new thing is correct.

"If no one cites you," a lot of this is (research) cultural.  A lot of papers on "Deep Learning" fail to cite relevant works on neural networks published in the 1980s and 1990s and there is a lot of reinventing of wheels.  I suspect a lot of that is because it isn't on ArXiv.  Similarly there is a lot of "common knowledge" that has been lost because of the way research in that field is done these days.  Research can also be cyclical and things get lost between cycles.

@DikranMarsupial Not only in Deep Learning. It;s always amusing to find a paper on computational mechanics where the authors have rediscovered something that was in standard textbooks published in the 1950s.

@DikranMarsupial Perhaps someone should work on an AI to index research on AI. Although I suppose there's probably already been work done on it, I'm just not aware of it.

This isn't anything new by the way, the same thing happened in the "old days", the classic "back propagation" algorithm for neural nets was independently discovered at least half a dozen times over the space of 15-20 years before it was discovered at the right moment.  Back then it was more difficult to find papers because they were not easily searchable, these days it is difficult because there is too much to search.

I am of the opinion that no problem really exists in isolation.
For every problem, one can identify at least three areas of interaction:

The problem itself
The methods that are being used on the problem
The potential areas impacted by solving the problem (intellectual or practical)

Even if only a small community cares about the problem per se, the tools available to address the problem are changing, as is the context of the environment in which the problem is being solved.
Even for highly theoretical mathematics, the problem does not exist in a vacuum: something caused the researchers to become interested, they are working on it in a world full of evolving potentially relevant methods, and something is causing them to stay interested despite the fact that they haven't solved it yet.
As such, I would be highly suspicious of a group of researchers who only engage in self-citation. They may have come to that point honestly, but it would still indicate a severe level of intellectual detachment from the rest of the scientific community.
Bottom line: even if nobody else cares about their work, they should care about other people's work enough to cite them.

Thank you for this answer. You have no idea how important this answer is to me. I have been working on a problem for decades. I have partial solution, not a full one yet. I want to get to the bottom of it, but my health is degrading (I am getting old). I kind of deciding to give up my research altogether. After reading this answer, I changed my mind. I'll take my doctor's advice and wait until I can recover to a point so I can continue my research. Thanks again.

To reiterate an important point already made in other answers, but, I think, deserving emphasis: it's not so bad to cite oneself, considering that (duh!) one's prior work could easily be background for one's current work, but to not cite anyone else is crazy... probably wildly inaccurate, etc. At the very least, setting the context by mention of prior art is a significant part of the interest of a new idea for me. To implicitly claim that there was no prior art is implausible, doubt-generating, and, at least, unhelpful.
I do confess that I did not understand any necessity of acknowledging prior art in my earlier years... Somehow the idea I'd gotten was to pretend to have the least indebtedness possible to other people. Well, this turns out to be ridiculous, in many ways.
So, again, the most silly/stupid aspect of only self-references is that it's surely just not accurate at all. Then, beyond that, ...
(So if I see a paper/preprint with all references to the authors or a limited circle of buddies, I am immediately suspicious...)

These days, when people judge researchers (especially hiring/grant committees, tenure boards, etc.) it is common to place much emphasis on impact. Impact is measured in a couple different ways, but all of them share the common idea that more people citing you is better.
If you only ever cite yourself, your citation count is 1. That is only one step up from the worst possible count, 0. So the debate of you citing your papers vs. the one other guy in the world who cares, is kind of dwarfed by the elephant in the room - namely that you're at the bottom. What difference does it make if you finish 99th or 100th, when only top 3 get a medal?
But given the obvious perverse incentive, usually self citations are not even counted as a full citation. Obviously you citing yourself is less interesting than a stranger citing you. In most modern citation metrics, self-citations are either scaled back with a factor, or disregarded entirely. When humans calculate an "informal impact factor" by Googling your papers, their brain will naturally apply such a factor as well. So it's like not only did you finish 99th, but you're tied for it as well.
In sum, I don't think anyone will care about whether you were cited by yourself or not, they will have already stopped caring when there is only 1 person citing you.
Incidentally, if you are the only one talking about your work, then you truly are irrelevant in the literal sense - nobody is finding you relevant to what they do. But I feel like that's putting it a bit harshly. Just because nobody has found your research relevant yet, doesn't necessarily imply that your research is inherently worthless and cannot possibly have bearing on anything else. It's just a heuristic after all. But that said, the academic community appears to be invested heavily in citation metrics for the time being, and as a result, having only self-citations will not impress many strangers.
There are some exceptional cases where I think a situation like you describe might be understandable:

A very junior researcher for whom just publishing a paper at all is an accomplishment
The self-cited paper is in a very prestigious journal (although such journals tend to try very hard to eliminate papers that aren't likely to get cited)
The paper itself has extraordinarily impressive content, despite the few citations
The person evaluating you is himself in such a "thin" field, himself has few cites that are non-self, and himself appreciates the difficulty of having a high citation count in your field
The paper is very recent (<a few months) so it is plausible people are planning to cite it, but are just taking a while

But in my opinion, the effective solution here is not to split hairs, but instead to either broaden your work to have more relevance to people outside your narrow field, or start thinking about moving on to an allied field with broader appeal. That, or just accept that the world is not yet ready for your ideas, I suppose... Such is life.

In our tech-enabled, Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass Red Queen running faster and faster world, we keep on focusing on "impact" within a shorter and shorter timeframe. How many downloads did my paper have last week? How many citations did we get in the year since our last annual evaluation?
It's easy for genuine knowledge accomplishments to take their own sweet time, to sit on the shelf for quite a while before someone else integrates them or applies them to something else. Conversely, other ideas may flash in the pan, have tons of citations straight away, and then decades later be passé or just obviated since some other train of thought is more useful or broader in applicability. My dissertation in the 1990s made integral use of a result from the 1950s that had only one other citation, of the throwaway dead-end form "Somewhat similarly, X has shown that ..." (that nevertheless led me to it). And then my dissertation result was obviated by a more general approach by someone else a decade later.
So I would make no value judgment on a body of research that is ping-ponging in a very small enclosed room, even among its authors only, for even a number of years. I would make a value judgment on researchers who can't articulate why it could/should be of any interest to anyone at some yet-unknown point in the future -- even though I respect some purists would argue academic independence should allow "but I [researcher] find it interesting" should be reason enough.

This answer cuts to the heart of the matter. In mathematics, it is not uncommon for theorems to go unused and uncited for generations, till practical uses are found for them after the fact. I know of several occasions where physicists have developed new hypotheses that were validated by the discovery of old, obscure math theorems (I believe Yang-Mills theory was one, but don't quote me, that's not my field).  Having ready-made bodies of research waiting on a shelf before the uses come along is not entirely wasteful, by any means.

Also, entire subfields are sometimes consciously ignored by because they throw monkey wrenches into dominant paradigms; scholars are people too and sometimes their shortsightedness (or even outright prejudices) retard academic research. A recent case in point was the initial suppression of immunotherapy research; there have been plenty of other instances in scientific history, in keeping with the pattern defined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Nihilist Take
Your question seems to imply that relevance is absolute. It's meaningless to ask whether something is relevant without asking to whom it's relevant.
To answer your question directly, an isolated group of researchers whose work is never cited by anyone outside their circle is irrelevant to the rest of academia. But this is just a microcosm of academia as a whole. To non-academics, academia is irrelevant until their research has some practical application. On a cosmic scale, the endeavors of the entire human species are irrelevant. Ultimately, nothing matters. Look inward for justification and meaning, not outward.

Definitely not. The fact remains that, as long as you cite yourself and the citations are all relevant, you are not just ok, but you are progressing.
And it also happens that you may be doing research on a topic where not many people are active, except of course you yourself. In that case, it is but natural that your work will be full of self-citations.

Citation counts and origins are a poor measure of relevance.
If you are the only academic working on the history of basket weaving in northern elvish communities, you’re unlikely to be cited by academics working on dwarvish basketweaving, and unlikely to get lots of citation for that work, even if it’s highly relevant to northern elvish communities.
Contrarywise, if you publish a controversial theory - say old elvish basketweaving resulted in basket of greater strengths than dwarvish or hobbit baskets - you might get cited quite a bit, even if your work is irrelevant and possibly even wrong.
There is also the problem of timescale.  The work of John Bell (of the inequality fame) was treated as “irrelevant” for a long while before it’s importance was recongnized.

It actually took quite a while for Einstein's work on relativity to be recognized, since the luminaries of the day dominated the scene with (eventually) failed ideas.


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What is a 'yield rate'? Do graduate department seats go unfilled?
This link states that the university has a yield rate (acceptance rate) of 40%. Does that mean 60% of seats are not filled at the end of cycle?
Or does it mean university makes more offers than seats present and 40% corresponds to seats the university has?

Welcome to Academia.SE! I edited your title to include term "yield rate" to help others that might be wondering about it find your question.

Graduate program seats do sometimes go unfilled, but as mentioned below, that isn't what "yield" measures.

I had a look at the link you shared. The yield rate is defined as the number of applicants who accepted offers of admission divided by the number of offers of admission. Yes, it is indeed true that graduate departments send out more offers of admission than "available seats" and forecast a number of enrollees that is approximately the capacity of the program.
This creates some challenges when admitted students receive offers of graduate financial aid like teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or fellowships. But it is the job of the graduate programs director in any particular department to develop an admissions strategy that meets program goals while remaining financially feasible. For this reason, you often see active waiting lists for graduate programs admission.

Thanks Alan, this is very helpful for my graduate admission prep!

Usually universities make more offers than they have space available.  Admissions makes an estimate of the yield using historical data.  They make enough offers to fill most of their spaces based on that estimate.  Then they wait.  If yield is too low to fill the spots, they make more offers of admission.
If too many people accept and there are more students than funding, the next year very few offers will be made.  Occasionally, admissions will be closed the next year in a small department.

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Can I decline a PhD program I have already accepted?
Can I accept a PhD offer and later withdraw from the program before it even starts? Is there an etiquette for that?
I really want to do a PhD but they have put a deadline in accepting and I am currently interviewing with companies. Please advise.

Is a PhD program effectively your backup plan? That's probably the worst reason to do a PhD and I wouldn't recommend it.

If you have an offer for a PhD but are still waiting to interview with companies then it sounds like you don't really want to do a PhD.

@BryanKrause Good point but PhD is not my backup plan, but neither my first plan. I want to do research and work with novel ideas and producing results in a collaborative environment. Sadly most jobs in my field do not involve that and the entry barrier to actually get a job that involves that requires a PhD MOST of the times. PhD is just a way to get there to me either if I can't do it with my master's degree.

Can I accept a PhD offer and later withdraw from the program before it even starts?

Yes, of course you can. They won't force you to enroll and they won't come after you legally. It's certainly not worth anyone's time. However, it does harm the department's planning because they might not be able to fill your spot. For more discussion, see the comments on this answer.

Is there an etiquette for that?

Yes, the etiquette is to not do that. It's rude and you will burn bridges. A spot that could have been offered to another student may be lost. But if you're quitting to move to industry, you probably don't care anyway.

Actually, if you don't wait too long, they probably will be able to fill the slot. There is likely to be a waiting list.

@Buffy Language softened, although I was considering if the OP is still interviewing, they might not be done with interviews for another month or so, which might make it more challenging.

If they had no problem filling the slot with someone else they found just as acceptable, they wouldn't have put the deadline. The later it gets the more people will commit elsewhere.

@ASimpleAlgorithm I don't think what you are saying makes any sense.

@ASimpleAlgorithm I also don't understand your comment.

My statement was largely a counter to Buffy's comment, perhaps that was the source of confusion?

I get what @ASimpleAlgorithm is trying to say: If you make 20 offers and one quickly declines, you can get #21 on your list. But if someone you've made an offer waits for a long time, #21...40 of your list have likely made commitments to another university somewhere because they were still good enough to get in somewhere. You may only get #41 on your list to accept the now open spot -- or maybe no-one at all who you thought was acceptable to your program. In other words, it does put the department in a bad spot, and it's justified to consider the behavior rude.

@WolfgangBangerth Except what you just said I think agrees with Buffy's comment: an earlier decline means they are likely to be able to offer to someone on the waitlist, and ASimpleAlgorithm says their comment was meant to counter Buffy's. A late decline, especially one after the normal acceptance deadline, all but ensures the spot cannot be filled by someone else (except if it becomes an 'extra' slot available in the next year).

Then I think we are all in agreement :-)

It's a little snaky, but not the end of the world.  If you can give them notice before SEP class starts, they will appreciate that.  Maybe they can't fill the slot but there is a chance they can.  Also it's better than just not showing up on day 1.
I did that personally and will share the story:
Accepted at one, local, school while interviewing.  The timing is difficult to 100% do this in parallel and I was torn. So I explored both options and wanted to have 1 grad school lined up if it was hard to get a job (was during a recession).
A couple years later, I ended up leaving industry and going to a Ph.D. (at a different school).  But even the one, I had jerked around before, was still willing to have me, again.
Of the 6 schools, I had earlier been accepted to, 5 of the 6 were willing to take me again 2 years later.  It wasn't a big deal and I just portrayed it positively (had been productive for 2 years, but still had a yearning to do more than basic engineering, blabla).  Anyhow 5 of the 6 bought that (true, but positive spin) characterization.  I guess 1 of the 6 didn't.  Also, I did end up finishing the Ph.D. later, doing well, yadayada.  IOW I ended up being a good risk.
Note:  I'm not justifying this (can anticipate the scolding).  Just want to share the practical experiential datum on having actually done it and how it worked out.

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Do reviewers usually ask for data? (Computer Science/ Data Science / Data Mining)
I know it's a free process and it depends on reviewer if they want the data and for author if they want to submit it.
Questions:

What are the chances of a reviewer asking for data?
Why might reviewers ask for data?

What do you mean by 'data'? Are you referring to the authors' raw data?

Yes the data they worked on.

Why not just provide the data, and make it easier for others to reproduce your results? It will get you more citations.

Note that in some fields you are required to submit the data to a public repository, otherwise your manuscript will not be published.

"I know it’s a free process…”. Not necessarily. For instance, “AGU reserves the right to refuse publication when authors are unwilling to make the underlying data available or otherwise refuse to comply with this Data Policy”. I really think you should edit your question to specify the field(s) you're asking about. As the answers so far make clear, there is huge variability between fields.

Related: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/missing-data-hinder-replication-artificial-intelligence-studies

You ask two different questions in a single post. Is there any way that you can omit one, or combine them into one?

I have asked, or been asked, for data a vanishingly small but non-zero number of times. But I'm pretty secure in asserting that it's rare.
As for why - I would hope they would specify this when they requested it. Among the reasons would be to see if your results are genuinely obtainable from your methods. This is not necessarily just looking for fraud, etc. but checking to see if your writing is clear enough that by "following the recipe" they get the same answer.
Another possibility is they want to try an alternative analysis. For example, in my field, there is a variable selection method that is commonly used and also wrong. Generally, I ask authors to re-do their analysis with a more appropriate method as a reviewer, but it's entirely possible this won't change the answer. Having the data would let me check for myself.

@DSVA Clearly you'd be surprised at how these things work in some fields.  Sometimes the data is a controlled, owned resource, which may be monetizable.  Sometimes there are legal barricades (you can't just arbitrarily disseminate people's medical information, for example).  In exceptional cases, the size of the data may just be so humongous the only reasonable way to transfer it is to physically ship it.

@DSVA No, I’m not placing medical records on the public domain

@DSVA Indeed - and my field tends to emphasize replication over "I ran your code on your data and got the same answer"-style reproducibility. It's just good to bear in mind that different fields have different standards, needs and restrictions.

What are the chances of a reviewer asking for data?
It would be different from one field to another. For example, there is a small chance to be asked for more data (and very tiny chance of being asked for raw data in the fields such data analysis/science and machine learning, and optimization.
The odds will increase when the claims are very surprising (too good to be true!) or not clearly backed by theoretical proofs and discussions.
Why might reviewers ask for data?
To investigate the correctness of the presented conclusions and claimed achievements based on the obtained data. The reviewer/editor usually provide enough details on why such deep investigation is necessary and how it can affect their final decision.
How to decrease the chance?
To decrease the likelihood of such requests, that may make the review process even longer, one can:

provide as much supplementary data as possible right at the time of submission,
share codes (if applicable) via Git repositories to give the reviewers the confidence that the results are genuine and correct, and
provide sound and clear theoretical proofs (when applicable) that support the claims regardless of the quality of the data.

In general, it is really appreciated to make the researchers and their outcomes reproducible. That's why many researchers publically share their valuable datasets/outcomes.
Further Readings:

How to share a scientific dataset with the research community?
How to share to mention/publish large datasets?

In my field (structural biology), we have repositories where we are required to deposit data and models prior to publication. The deposition date establishes precedence, and the data and models are only made public once the associated publication comes out. The repositories will grant the editor and reviewers of the article access to not yet released data and models if they request it during the review process. I don't know how often they actually ask, but I like the fact that the repositories make this possible in a formal and non-awkward way.

You are asking the wrong question. Do not care about whether the reviewers might ask for your data. Ask yourself if there are any real reasons why you should not just provide the data!
Personally, I never had the case that a reviewer asked for my data if I did not include it. But when I included it, I had several reviewers who pointed out that my paper comes with data. This was a huge bonus in the review and, as far as I can estimate this, was one of the reasons my paper got accepted.
Despite from getting your paper accepted, publishing data is a great contribution to science. Other researchers are able to reproduce your results, discuss it in more detail, and may advance faster.

I've seen hundreds of reviews as an editor, and don't remember ever seeing a request for raw data. So the answer to your first question is "almost zero". If it does happen, I imagine the reviewer will have to explain to the editor why (s)he needs the raw data, and if the editor is convinced (s)he'll pass the request on to the authors.
EDIT: The reviews I saw were in physics. Things might be different in other fields.

It depends on the scope of the article, as well as the scope of the journal/conference.
A paper which can be very acceptable at a conference, without any experimental results or data sets, might get "strong rejection" from reviewers of another conference.
One of my manuscripts was rejected because

The paper just provides some theoretical results, without demonstrating the
  practical effects on real-world scenarios.

The previous version of the same manuscript was rejected by another set of reviewers of another conference because

Although the work has good empirical data and clear experimental
  results, the lack of theoretical work leaves me no choice but recommending a
  rejection.

The best way to understand this is to check other accepted papers in that conference/journal. Do those papers mention the experimental results as a crucial part, or do they rely on their theoretical results and provide some basic experiments? The answer to this question might help you to decide whether the editors will ask for your data set.

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Do you agree that cheating on exams provides an unfair advantage? Do you think it is “okay” to tell on your peers?
This is inspired by another persons question regarding weather or not it is okay to tell on your peers for cheating during exams.
Since I am new to the site, I am having difficulty responding to the question, so I’m making a question instead.
Some people commented to this question and said that you are not giving a cheater an unfair advantage because students are “not competing against one another.”
My question is how do you think this is true?
Students are responsible for their own learning, and as a result of that, are not directly affected by another persons cheating.
I beg to differ.
Other students cheating does affect other students, or we wouldn’t have to ask questions like this.
It IS an unfair advantage, in many ways, here is an example of just one:
Student A studied hard for his/her midterm. She/he arrived prepared with only 4 hours of sleep.
Student B hardly studied, with plans on passing by cheating off his/her friend that was sat next to them.
Student B and his/her helpful friend, let’s call him/her student C, are seated directly behind student A.
This is the way this plays out:
During the exam, student B and student C begin to whisper every time the prof makes his rounds to the other side of the room. It is a big lecture hall, and the professor can not hear them on the other side of the room.
But, all the other students around B and C sure can.
Student A is becoming frustrated.
The whispering is quite distracting to him/her, and dispite his/her delicate “shhh” every time B and C begin their routine, the whispering continues.
At one point, A even turns to B and C and asks “can you please stop talking. This is an exam- you shouldn’t be talking.”
B ans C continue to talk.
Student A, although successful with her studies and a good student in general, has a common problem: test anxiety. Now, she has become distracted.
She has a moral discontent as she does not want to “rat out” her fellow students during the exam.
However, she is now struggling with her answers, as her anxiety has been activated, and she is having a hard time concentrating.
As a result of this, Student A gets a much lower mark than she would have had she not been distracted during the exam. Student B gets a much higher mark due to Student C helping him/her during the test.
So, my question is this. How is this NOT an unfair advantage?
In fact, regardless of how a student may cheat (distracting or not distracting) HOW is this not an unfair advantage?
Students who study for their tests, and do not cheat, show up to the exam fully prepared. Often they are tired from the preparation, as studying for exams is 100% exhausting.
Students who cheat don’t have to commit so much time or resources to exams (or anything). They can get more sleep, enjoy their out of school activities, and still pass the exam due to cheating.
In some cases, the cheater may even score higher than someone who actually studied.
How is that fair?
Also, considering GPA and the advantages of having a high one for scholarship application, and job competition down the road, I fail to see how cheaters do not affect other students.
Another point worth mentioning, is the moral dilemma that the cheating student places on their peers.
To tell or not to tell?
If anyone has any other points regarding this, please feel free to share... and if you are a cheater- you should seriously consider applying yourself in a way that reflects your true intelligence.
Why put yourself at risk?
In answer to the original posting, and just to be clear, I do not think there is anything wrong with reporting your peers for cheating. Especially when it affects your own grade that you studied hard for.

Welcome to AC.SE. Please take a look at our [help]. Your two scenarios are very different. Distracting behavior during an exam, whether it is cheating or not, has a definite affect on other students. You may want to ask them as separate questions.

Agree with @StrongBad, conflating cheating with distracting behavior only muddies the water around your actual question about the competitive advantage afforded by cheating. There's plenty of ways to cheat without anyone else ever knowing, and classmates can be distracting without being cheaters.

I know of a case in the 80's where a workstudy was assigned to run off physics exams.  She was keeping copies for herself and selling them to students in the class.  On the day of the final exam, a student went up to the professor and handed him a copy of his final.  "Where did you get this?"  The student explained that copies of all his exams had been readily available for $50 all semester.
So the prof made up a new exam on the spot, wrote it on the blackboard and announced to the class that because of this cheating, the final exam would now be 80% (rather than 30%) of the grade for the course.
A certain student named Mike, who had not cheated all semester and was doing well in the class ended up kind of bombing the final.  If the final had counted only 30% of the grade, he'd have been fine.  But he ended up with a C because of the new weighting.  Mike had a "Regent's Scholarship" at this school, which was worth thousands of dollars (tuition, fees, dorm, meals all paid) and which was re-newable every year.  Because of this C, Mike lost his Regent's Scholarship.  The young lady selling exams for $50 a piece cost Mike $1000's of dollars plus a nasty hit of a C in physics for an engineering major.
This is a stark example of cheating affecting others.  But in general, when there is a "culture" of cheating, then this undermines academic standards.  In most cases, some student cheats, passes Calc I and then goes on to Calc II.  It seems like a victimless crime, but now the Calc II prof has a class that's just a bit less prepared for Calc II than it should have been.  It drags down the class a bit and everyone in the room ends up being just a bit less prepared for Calc III.
As to your question about whether you should rat out the cheaters:  Yes and no.  Yes, tell the prof that there is an unreasonable amount of blatant cheating going on and that you don't think you're being treated fairly when you study so hard and they bypass learning.  But naming names is another issue.  If you say, "Jimmy copies off Jenny on every test", there's nothing the prof can do, because he didn't see it.  You've alerted him to the problem and hopefully he'll keep a sharper eye out or make multiple versions of the exams or something else to squelch the cheating.
(The workstudy was, of course, found out and expelled.  IMO, she should have been prosecuted for fraud.)

Wow that's bad. Because of the sudden re-weight, Mike should have been allowed to apply for "Credit" instead of a letter grade.

@Joshua  I knew Mike from childhood.  He was a straight-laced, holy-roller type and my brother's roommate.  He would have slit his own wrists rather than cheat.  But in this situation, he did well on the midterms and then bombed the final. He looked like one of the cheaters.  So there was no mercy shown.

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How to get more info pre–job-interview
I've applied for a position in the library of the local campus of the state university, and they've asked to set up a phone interview. I'm not a naturally outgoing person, and I'm even worse on the phone, so I'm going to be preparing for this as heavily as I can. I would love as much information as I can get on the interview itself. I'm comfortable speaking about the job & its responsibilities, since I exceed their list of necessary & desired qualifications. But if I know whom I will be speaking to and what, specifically, we will be talking about, it would help me be more comfortable during the conversation.
So what I'm wondering is whether it's kosher to ask for any info as we're emailing to set up the interview — who's on the search committee, what issues they will want to focus on, that kind of thing? I don't want to look like I'm trying to game the system or anything (much less actually do so). Is there any way for me to get more info without that appearance?

"I'm not a naturally outgoing person, and I'm even worse on the phone" Depending on how much interaction with others is involved in the job, this could be a negative attribute or a positive attribute. For example (using student part-time jobs), this would probably be a negative attribute if you were going to work the check-out desk or the information booth, and it would probably be a positive attribute if you were going to spend all your time deep in the stacks shelving books.

I know what the job is, and I'm confident in my communication skills surrounding it. I'm not asking whether the phone interview is a good idea on their part. I'm asking for concrete advice on one specific aspect of preparing for it. The description of the process is just for context.

So what I'm wondering is whether it's kosher to ask for any info as we're emailing to set up the interview — who's on the search committee, what issues they will want to focus on, that kind of thing? I don't want to look like I'm trying to game the system or anything (much less actually do so). Is there any way for me to get more info without that appearance?

This question would be a better fit for The Workplace Stack Exchange, so you might want to ask it there. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that it would be a very bad idea to ask those questions.  Preparing for the interview is fine and certainly advisable, but you should not ask for this sort of information.
Specifically, asking who’s on the search committee definitely sounds like you’re trying to game the system. I’m not seeing how this could possibly be relevant for any legitimate interview-preparation you want to do, or what reason you could have for asking this other than wanting to do research on those people (or possibly even doing slightly creepy things like scouring the internet and social media for info about them) to gain an unfair advantage in the interview. Definitely not kosher.
As for the other question, it’s maybe less unreasonable, but in my opinion simply makes you sound inexperienced and insecure. The “issues they will want to focus on” obviously pertain to the position you’re being interviewed for and to you, your skills and qualifications. What more of an answer could you reasonably expect to get, and, particularly, what more of an answer could you expect that isn’t perceived as giving you an unfair advantage over other candidates being interviewed? Again, this is just my opinion, but it seems to me that any benefit you might get out of the answer you’re given would be outweighed by the bad impression you would be leaving by asking the question in the first place.
Sorry the answer isn’t more positive... Good luck at the interview in any case.

Honestly, that's kind of in line with my thinking. I do disagree with you about the unfairness of learning (in non-creepy ways) about the people on the committee. I was given that advice a long time ago when preparing for one of my first serious job interviews; it helped a lot then and I've remembered it since. I doubt that it has ever made any specific difference, but it's always helped with my general comfort level in the interview, and I think that's a significant factor. That said,I do prefer to tread really lightly and not create a poor impression by asking the question. Thus this post.

A remark: in my country a selection is a public process and the names of the selection committee members are public. I don't know if this is true for other countries as well. It can definitely help if you know the idiosyncrasies of certain members.

@spoko to clarify, if the information about who’s on the search committee is offered to you, definitely it makes sense to use it - I agree it may be helpful and don’t think it would be unfair of you to do a bit of research on those people. However, by asking about it when it wasn’t offered, I’m reading this as a sign that you are trying to get an edge over the other candidates being interviewed, and that does seem unfair. As an employer I would feel uncomfortable volunteering this information to only some candidates (and I might have good reasons to not want to give it to all candidates).

I actually differ significantly with the currently posted answer (although I agree with the suggestion to ask on Workplace Stack Exchange).
I would certainly feel comfortable asking who I would be speaking to during the interview. I think it is basic professional courtesy to give applicants this information in advance, and, as a PhD student, I was advised to always ask this information before an interview.
The second part of the request is a bit more odd to me. I think finding out interview questions and topics in advance might strike some red flags. An interviewer might assume that a good candidate would already know the types of questions that are relevant to the position. I suppose you might be able to get away with asking something like "Are there any special topics that you would like me to prepare my thoughts on in preparation for the interview? Or are there any special materials from my portfolio that you would like me to bring to campus?" (I am not sure if you have a portfolio, but that might make sense if you do.)


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Should I take advice from an AI CV checker when preparing a postdoc application?
I am near the end of my PhD and intending to apply for academic jobs, especially post-doc research positions.
One of the services offered by our university to its postgraduate researchers (PhD students) is an "AI"-driven CV checking tool.  In fact, they ask that you get your CV up to at least a 70% rating from the automated tool before booking an appointment with them to discuss your CV/application.
The issue I have is that it feels like cv-by-numbers and also a bit silly or limited, e.g. telling me off for being inconsistent with dates, but the only offending date is part of a sentence rather than a table heading.
Is there not a danger that following these rules leads to boring CVs; or even CVs that are obviously edited using this kind of rigid tool?  Am I being naive, are academic recruiters really taken in by me "re-phrasing a responsibility as an action"?  As an imposter-syndrome-affected postgrad (I know I'm not alone) I'm obviously not great at self-promotion.
This tool is (according to the company's web site) used by other good universities too, and I can see some moderate benefit from achieving consistency and checking for some obvious no-nos.  I wonder if this sort of stuff is more applicable to applying for jobs in industry where there may be 1000s of applicants and automated screening.
Of course I want my CV to put me in the best possible light and to give an accurate account of my experiences and competencies - should I follow the "advice" given by this tool?  I'm asking especially as it seems to be a pre-requisite to accessing actual human help.

I’m voting to close this question because it is a complaint presented as a question.

I think you've already figured out the answer:  "No."  That said, CVs should be boring and they do not use pronouns.

@AnonymousPhysicist I can't really argue with you there, I was quite complainy.  I think I do have a genuine question, which is ... "is this sort of advice applicable to academic applications, or is it more suited to students who are looking to apply in industry where they may face 1000s of applicants per post". I'll try to rephrase.

CVs are, and should be, formulaic - they are meant to convey certain information in a concise and consistent way that is easy for the recipient to parse. Will an automated checker provide 100% accurate warnings? No, but neither does a compiler - you use your intelligence to figure out the right thing to do.

Keep in mind that a similar AI might be used in screening your application...

Here’s some advice from a human: your question is long and difficult to read, and it’s not clear what you’re asking exactly. Extrapolating from this to your CV, I’d speculate that it also needs to be made clearer and less verbose. But if I had to guess whether it’s likely that an AI assistant will help you, my guess would be “no”. Stick with the humans (who are familiar with the academic job market) is my recommendation.

My suggestion is that you "consider" the generated advice pretty much as you would any advice, but with an extra dose of skepticism. Some things suggested by an AI are probably valid, more or less, but you get bone-headed (silicon-headed?) advice in many cases.
So, make a judgement. If it seems reasonable, then try it. Otherwise not. But your sense that it might seem "stilted" if taken too far is probably correct. A machine generated CV is unlikely to stand out from the crowd, though the content should be more important than the form.
You might also have a faculty member at the institution take a look and give some more human (humane?) advice.

If the question asks for an answer that makes a judgement, recommending making a judgement is not a helpful answer.

@MichaelSeifert, yes, thanks. Fixed. Words escape me. Literally.


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How big of a deal for seeking a PhD is it, if one is not allowed to disclose details of his master thesis?
My masters program is in physics. I already have quite some research experience, but almost exclusively in the R&D department of two well known companies. Therefore neither my bachelor thesis nor my internship reports are publicly available.
I have one research paper I published with one of the companies during my internship that I can openly talk about and one related patent, but everything else is off limits. And this publication is not really just my work but the work of an entire department and has multiple authors.
I'm now thinking about doing my master thesis also at a company, but my (new) supervising professor warned me, that it might be bad for me not to be able to talk about the contents of my master/bachelor thesis when applying for a phd. He suggested to ask the company to allow me to split my thesis in a non-confidential and a confidential part, but that is not really feasible.
How serious of a concern is this? Do phd advisors really read the master theses of their applicants?

Your advisor is giving good advice and is likely positioned to know. Take the advice.
I doubt that all advisors read the masters theses of their students, but they will be curious enough about the quality to have questions. They need assurance that you are capable of taking on doctoral level research and so it is difficult if you can't discuss it with them.
I doubt that it is an absolute block, but think your advisor has it right in your case.
In the US it might be less of an issue than some other places since less is expected of newly entering doctoral students in most cases (not all).
It may even be that your masters thesis isn't especially relevant (or helpful) if it is overly focused on product development. Doctoral research isn't likely to have similar focus or methodology.

I'm not in the US but central Europe. Thanks for the advice.

Germany, in particular, but others as well, expect quite a lot of an entering doctoral student.

I have one research paper I published with one of the companies during my internship that I can openly talk about and one related patent, but everything else is off limits.

That is sufficient.

this publication is not really just my work but the work of an entire department

That is normal.

my (new) supervising professor warned me, that it might be bad for me not to be able to talk about the contents of my master/bachelor thesis when applying for a phd.

He is right.

How serious of a concern is this?

A PhD is an apprenticeship in academic research, and proper academic research is public.  If you do research and you want academic recognition for it, you need to plan for it to be disclosed.  If you plan on applying for a PhD, I would recommend not doing confidential work.

Do phd advisors really read the master theses of their applicants?

They are likely to at least verify that it exists.


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Is there any problem with giving lots of extra credit?
In the past term, my teaching evaluations were full of complaints that I assign too much homework. To solve this, I've scaled back the assigned workload and threw several assignments into extra credit. This seems to make many student happy:

Students just passing through complete the basic coursework and meeting the course objectives, without feeling the course is harder than other courses.
Students who enter the course finding the material is too difficult can complete the extra work to offset their poor mid-term exam grade while getting additional practice for the final.
Students eager to learn the material are happy with the extra work and feel they can get more out of the course.

In the next term, I hope to offer much more extra credit, equal to 20-30 hours of work, to meet the needs of those top 20% eager learners.

All of the work aligns with the course objectives.
The point values are kept low, to discourage students from skipping regular work.

I have never seen a course instructor ever give more than a little amount of extra credit. Is there any reason why it would be a poor choice to offer a great deal?

We had a slightly different method for a lot of our courses at my undergrad. Let's say there were 12 assignments, one per week. The professor would take the top 10 scores and either drop the last two or add them as extra credit. So theoretically, you could get 120/100. This allowed people who crushed homework to basically skip the last two if they wished, or pad a weaker exam score, without presenting the extra credit work as "not important."

you will make them even happier if you make your grading scheme flexible enough to emphasize the students' strengths, e.g. (to illustrate) break down grades into "effort" and "results" component with the larger of the two grades receiving a weight of 0.6 and the lower 0.4. Give extra credit to students who turned in more assignments (irrespective of quality) and put that under "effort", keep only the best 8 of 12 grades (say), in exams always give 3 questions to choose from, etc. The students who put in neither effort nor talent will fail your course, which is what you want.

I think the answer to your question is "No one knows, but you are about to find out."  The only thing that can be guaranteed is that there will be some unexpected consequences, because the nature of human interaction--and the diversity of things like motivation and preparation--is such that it's too complex a system for us to know what the introduction of a novel approach is going to do.
You are attempting to transfer power to the students which is traditionally vested almost exclusively in the instructor.  I feel that this is a good thing, but that it is difficult to predict what people will do when given power that they previously did not have.
To give you an example (which I don't think will happen in your case, but there could be some analogous effect), I know of an instructor that tried dispensing with grade pressure altogether by announcing on the first day that everyone in the class had an A for the course [the highest rating possible, for those not familiar with common practice in the US].  The consequence that surprised him was that at the end of (or perhaps during as well, I don't remember) the course, students expressed resentment toward the policy.  The realities of time pressures put on them by other courses meant that they ended up spending little to no time on the gradeless class, because they knew ultimately that it would not affect their record.  The resentment came from the fact that they wanted to learn the material, but with nothing to force them to spend time on it, they ended up not giving it any time but instead allowing the other demands on their time to crowd it out completely.
In my opinion, I think you've covered your bases as well as you can (in particular, it's not a wild shot in the dark, but a further change to a previous, successful modification), and all there is for you to do is observe the effects and see what student feedback is.  The most interesting question in my mind is whether the most talented students will do as well (in terms of "total learning outcome") under this system as they did under your original one.  For similar reasons as the example I gave, they may just make a decision not to put as much effort in because of time pressures from other classes.

I can't speak for your institution, students, or department, so take this with the usual grain of salt.
At a highly competitive and stressful institution like Columbia, many courses are graded on curves based on the final overall grade. Particularly as a result, anything offered as extra credit becomes de facto mandatory. When the extra credit simply gets added into the numerator of the grade it's pretty irrelevant whether those 15 extra points came from a "midterm" or "extra credit."
I suppose there MIGHT be ways of constructing a syllabus such that the extra credit was less distortionary, but I can't come up with one.

anything offered as extra credit becomes de facto mandatory — That depends on how extra credit is rewarded. I always use overall scores without extra credit to set the curve, and then compare scores with extra credit to that curve to determine letter grades. That way, your extra credit can only help you, and it doesn't affect anyone else's course grade at all.

There are a couple of points in your question that I don't quite understand:

You're proposing to offer "much more extra credit" but "keep the point values low": don't those two things work against each other?  In my experience, students don't do much extra credit when they do not in fact feel that it will lead to a higher course grade.
You speak of using extra credit to offset poor midterm grades and also speak of meeting the needs of the "top 20% eager learners".  Those are different pools of students.

In my own experience, the second bullet point is a major point of tension for extra credit.  Students would like extra credit to be routine work that they can do to improve their grade, possibly even to offset more challenging or time-consuming course tasks at which they didn't excel.  But instructors usually see extra credit as a way to reach the "eager learners" at the top of the class and end up giving extra credit that is harder than the normal material.  For instance, when I teach freshman calculus if I assign extra credit it's usually the less routine and more theoretical problems.  Most students (correctly!) perceive that just doing the standard work would be a more efficient route to a good grade.

I have never seen a course instructor ever give more than a little amount of extra credit. Is there any reason why it would be a poor choice to offer a great deal?

I think that most instructors feel that students who get bad grades on exams and then make it up with ancillary work should not get similar final grades to students who do well on exams.  In other words, since many (most, maybe; certainly not all) courses have "mastering the material, as shown in exam performance" as the primary goal, giving too much extra credit works against this goal.  Most extra credit is a kind of "homework": I hope that people know that in 2014 it is all but prohibitively difficult to ensure that homework is being done by the student.  In an earlier question you asked about assigning Amazon Mechanical Turk-type questions to the students as extra credit.  That very terminology raises the objection: maybe the students will use the MTurk website to get others to do their work for them!
But there is no absolute right or wrong answer here: you do get to decide what works best for you.  Honestly, I think you're essentially proposing "rebranding" some of the course work as extra credit in an attempt to make the students more excited about it.  Could that work?  Yes, it could!  You are certainly entitled to give it a try.  However, since most students do substantial amounts of extra credit only when they are trying to increase their grade, if you repackage too much "normal credit" into "extra credit", then you risk decreasing the amount of work done by the typical student in your course.  So you should analyze the incentives carefully.
Finally, speaking of the mind games that get played out in a classroom:

In the past term, my teaching evaluations were full of complaints that I assign too much homework.

This need not imply that you are assigning too much homework!

+1 for "This need not imply that you are assigning too much homework!"  I tell my students, "two hours outside class for every classroom hour."  Every several terms, I have a class keep a homework journal, for credit, to check on how I'm doing.

Extra credit work is good for telling you how much ground a student has covered.
That's usually to the advantage of the learning process.
The one advantage that "tests" have over extra credit is that tests measure proficiency. That is how fast a student can produce the work within a short period of time. Some employers prefer to judge their employees on this basis. If the students can earn extra credit just by putting in time, the extra knowledge could come at the expense of proficiency.


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Could publishing a book on a subject prior to a PhD reflect negatively on me later if it has errors?
I noticed that some scholars in my field are best known for their earliest writing, even if their ideas were later found incorrect.
I am writing a book in my area of interest and hope to publish within a year. The target audience is not academics, but practitioners, although I suspect academics would be the first to seek out a book of this kind.
Year by year, my understanding of the subject matter grows, through reading and experience. It is highly likely that in a few years time I will realize I made many mistakes in the book. Perhaps, for example, I was not aware that some of my described solutions to problems in the field did not actually work as well as I thought they did.
If I later started a PhD in the same area, would such a past publication create problems for an academic career?

What is your field?  The answer may well depend on that.

Do not publish anything, if you do not know (to the best of your knowledge), that is 100% correct. Especially this "some of my described solutions to problems in the field did not actually work as well as I thought they did" sounds worrisome. Why suggest something that you have not tested yet?

@Alexandros: Because outside of the academic world not everybody has the luxury to wait for certainty when they need to make a choice now. Crappy psychological treatments were given for decades and decades before science finally caught up with psychology for example. Either way +1@the notion that it's field dependent.

@DavidMulder Note, that also nobody has the luxury to test unverified methods on patients (since you mention medicine) or waste time and money for methods, based on the "insights" of one person, who will most likely be wrong.

@Alexandros: I find your comment a bit unfair.  First, David mentioned psychology, which is not medicine (that would be psychiatry) but a subject which is somewhere between science and social science.  You do know that psychotherapy was largely founded by the insights of a single person, who was most influential through his many books?  Not all academic theories are verifiable, let alone verified: economists mostly write books rather than run experiments, for instance.  In some academic fields, "I have a theory; I'm not sure it's correct, but I wrote a book about it" is very common.

My field is second-language acquisition/foreign language teaching.

I'll have to agree with Pete and David here - expecting that one needs to be 100% sure (for many fields I am not even sure what that means) before one is allowed to write about a subject seems like ivory tower thinking to me.

What do you mean "IF it has errors"?  Of course it will have errors!

I have a friend who has published a paper in Phys. Rev. C and has written a book at Springer based on this paper before graduating in the final year of PhD. So, it is possible, but IMHO some papers in a prestigious journal worth more than a book at the beginning of a career.

Anything you write places you at risk of being wrong somehow. Certainly a book of this kind is asking for a wider audience that then might be aware of those mistakes. Alexandros points out in a comment that you certainly need to do your due diligence now to assure that what you write is as correct as it can be. No one is going to blame you if you suggest a response to a certain legal framework which is overhauled in three years but if you describe a chemical solution that could never react in the way you claim that one is on you. So how certain you can be that your work will remain correct/useful is somewhat field dependent.
The big question is about this hurting your ability to start and pursue a PhD after writing such a book. I don't think it would. Except in the rather extreme case of your book becoming well enough known and wrong/controversial enough to annoy members of a PhD admissions committee. For the most part I would suggest that already being an active member of a practical field (read: has published work discussing the field) would be a very helpful piece of an application for a PhD program.

I agree with everything you say but wonder if perhaps you haven't looked far enough into the future.  Sure, having a book will almost surely not be a negative in applying for a PhD: for instance because the admissions committee will probably not have read it.  But books have a way of attracting more attention than articles over time, and I think most fellow academics / potential colleagues and employers who learn about the OP's book will not immediately know that it was written before the beginning of his formal academic career.  I think he is being prudent to be concerned about this...

@PeteL.Clark I didn't look much farther into the possible future because I didn't feel I could really speak to it. Perhaps that concern goes towards doing the due diligence to make the book as good as possible now. The likelihood of repercussions might be field dependent in this regard.

Yes, publishing a book full of inaccuracies will make people consider you as a person that publishes inaccuracies.
If  you read a book by someone that wasn't even a PhD yet and their book was full of errors, wouldn't you think less of them?


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What to do about students who ask for help too often?
For my writing courses, about 5% of students will come to me prior to deadlines asking for help with their paper. I see no problem advising students, as I often similarly came for help when I was an undergraduate. Recently, though, I found an increase in students who apparently just want to abuse this:

Students will bring me some plagiarized work, showing it to me early, as a sort of test if I will notice. It seems difficult to punish plagiarism when the paper is not yet submitted.
Students will bring in papers again and again, with little changes put in at each stage, hoping their minimal effort each time will be sufficient to reach their goal of a "D".

I've tried stopping students, but then they are angry when they see the "F" that they hoped I would help them get away from. While most of these students are probably just incredibly lazy, there is a chance that some among them are genuinely trying to improve, but just struggling a great deal, and I can't see it.
How might I go about blocking such abuses?

Related: How to deal with students asking very incremental questions?

If you're looking to develop a formal policy to mitigate this behavior, you should explicitly state as much in the post (since answers for policy-based and ad-hoc intervention) may be different. And if not, the 'policy' tag seems misplaced.

It sounds like you are already doing this, but requiring them to come in person with a hard copy of their work also helps reduce certain issues that can arise.  This also eliminates last-minute questions which you cannot reasonably answer before the deadline.

Related (via earthling): Where to draw the line when giving feedback?

Direct them to an appropriate StackExchange site.

Here is one strategy:

Specify the level of changes the student needs to make before they can come back again.
Request that the student shows you what changes have been made by comparing the old and new versions of the assignment.
If student has failed to reach the level suggested or fails to show you the differences, simply tell them to go away until they have made the requested changes. Simply state that your previous comments still apply.

Adding a time delay between when they ask and when you give feedback or when you give feedback and when they can come again might also help.

+1 for item (1) in particular.  This helps with the problem in the question, and it helps actually move the student forward as long as they keep making the requested changes.  I usually choose a few of the most pressing issues, explain those, and have the student address them for the next draft. If that is successful, I then go on to the next most pressing issues.  I don't try to specify everything that might need to be revised.

While there are some good answers here, I will just add a few thoughts from my own experiences.
I also have plenty of students who try for minimal work just to get a pass. I used to explain to them what their grade would be and why but in the end, all they heard was what their grade would be. If it was pass they stopped listening. Of course, this is quite unhealthy for their longer-term success.
I have since changed to not telling them what grade I would give them before they submit, partially because of JeffE's comment to this question. Now, I focus ONLY on showing the students how to judge their own papers. I explain that I will mark when they submit but if they want to understand how to mark their own papers, I will help them.
I do not check for plagiarism on drafts (though some students do ask me to). If I see something which looks like plagiarism, like the level of English goes from very poor to perfect, I do let the students know that this looks like plagiarism and, if it is, they should fix it with proper citation before submitting.
In short, focus on teaching them how to grade their own papers. This helps a lot if you provide a rubric. Do not tell them "I will give you a  'D' if you submit this." Instead, tell them "Tell me what you think this paper deserves and explain to me why you believe that." Then help them develop that skill.
They should become independent learners, even if they don't want to.

+1 for explicitly not checking drafts for plagiarism, which elegantly foils the "carnival booth attack" to plagiarism detection that Village notes.

Completely agree with your last point about grading own work, ask them what they have changed and how they think it improves their work.. but don't forget the follow up question... "what else do they think they can do?"

Another strategy is to provide more guidance about what sort of help you'll provide and how they should ask for it. Possibilities:

The first time you bring your paper to my office [or during specific dates], we will focus only on whether you have answered the question.
I will be happy to discuss aspects X and Y, but never Z.
Bring the rubric with you. Be prepared to explain which part of the
rubric you most need to address in your draft, and why. We'll focus on that part   of the rubric during our meeting.
Before you bring your paper to me, prepare a list of specific questions you would like me to answer. Bring two copies of the list, one for each of us.
Before you bring your paper to me, show it to someone at the writing center. Bring with you your notes from that visit and the draft you showed to them, along with the draft where you implemented those suggestions.
Always bring two copies of your draft--one for each of us. Be prepared to write  detailed notes on your copy. (Then you can keep your copy and you'll be able to bring it out the next time and say--ok, what did you change? Or you can compare it to the draft they turn in to see if they made significant changes. And if they plagiarised it, you'll have a record.)
Each time you show me your paper, I will expect you to create a checklist of things you will address. The next visit, you need to demonstrate that you have completed those things by bringing a draft with changes marked and annotated.

Another thing you can do is assign "draft" deadlines as well as final deadlines for everyone, then give the feedback you think is important on the drafts (maybe using a rubric) and not meet incessantly with a few students.
Another thing you can do--particularly with very structured papers that you have assigned before--is provide to the class a list of the common problems students have. Then when a student shows you a draft, you can initiate a discussion about which common problem the student thinks it illustrates and what can the student do to address it?
Another thing you can do is limit the number of times you will look at a draft, or the period of time during which you will look at a draft.
I have had a similar problem with students wanting me to grade work before they turn it in for a grade--not just on writing, but with all kinds of assignments. Sometimes they are so lost they are completely stuck. Other times, they seem to be trying to minimize their workload by increasing mine. ("Just tell me in exacting  detail what to do, I'll do that and no more, you'll give me an A.") But what I want is for them to learn how to assess their own writing!
Whatever strategy you use, when you meet with students, try to elicit their comments. If you give a suggestion, and they nod, then ask them how they expect to apply it. What changes will they make to a particular sentence or paragraph? Are there any other places in the text they should also make that change to--which ones, and why? If they are to provide more evidence, ask them where they intend to search and how. Then you can better assess whether they understand what you've told them and whether they can actually do it.
I often ask students about how they produced the draft. Which parts were the easiest and which parts were the hardest, and why? Which parts do they like best? Which parts do they think need the most revision? Sometimes I ask them to imagine a reader--if they were to show their paper to (mom, roommate, employer, etc.), which part would be the most controversial? What would need the most explanation? If their reader disagrees, what would that person likely argue back? The more they talk about their writing, the more opportunity you have to say, "Yes! What you just said--write that down. Now do that!"
Another benefit of getting students to talk about their draft is that it is tough to talk about something you didn't write. If they let you know they copied passages, you can remind them (or explain how) to cite them properly. If they pretend they wrote every word, you have a different problem to address.

From what I have read in your question, it appears that you are enabling the students. I have had the same issue and it happens not only in academia but in all professions.
Stick with the facts and the mechanics of writing, do not answer their questions directly, use an indirect method and point them to the source, allow the students to do the work. As an enabler you are in essence doing the work for your students(or so they hope).
When you are enabling "people" to take advantage of you, it is very difficult to see and hard to admit. Your students are adding monkeys on your back, they are smarter than you think.

Stick to the facts
Give direction of where to find answers
Do not provide answers, provide guidance

It took a few semesters for students to push you along into this trap. It will take a few more for the message to circulate that you are no longer a mark.

Having taught in similar situations, I have to agree with Dave Clarke on requiring a demonstration of significant incremental improvement.
You can't let plagiarism on the first draft pass silently, either. If you see evidence of such on the first draft, you need to report it to the proper authority as evidence that the student body needs better training on what plagiarism is and how to properly use other works.
Hold firm to standards. You should have a rubric distributed stating the qualities of a paper at each grade level. If a paper is clearly an F paper, you should be able to point to your rubric and tell them that if no clear improvement is made, an F will be the grade they receive.
You must grade them, the non-recursive definition of which, as Merriam Webster puts it:

to separate (things) into groups or classes according to a particular quality

It looks like you have two different issues, it's easiest to discuss each of these separately.

Students will bring me some plagiarized work, showing it to me early,
as a sort of test if I will notice. It seems difficult to punish
plagiarism when the paper is not yet submitted.

This one is rough. You can't punish someone due to plagiarism before they submit work. The best policy, in my opinion, is twofold.
First - if a student brings plagiarized work then you should simply say "I'm sorry, I cannot help you with work that is not your own." and point to you university's policy regarding academic dishonesty. Repeat offenders should be put on notice.
Second - If you grade the final assignments or are involved consider spending a bit more time plagiarize-checking these particular student's submissions. These students have shown that they were willing to claim other's work as their own, being a bit more stringent in checking their work for originality is, in my opinion, completely fair.

Students will bring in papers again and again, with little changes
put in at each stage, hoping their minimal effort each time will be
sufficient to reach their goal of a "D".

This sounds like a communication problem. After meeting with a student there should be no confusion about what will improve the student's work. For something like a paper it should be "In order to improve this paper you should: extend the intro, go into more detail here, etc" Students returning for additional assistance should have some sort of checklist that they should complete prior to returning for more assistance. Make this clear and obvious and, if there are multiple tutors a student could work with, something that is kept in some sort of notes system.

If you see something definitely plagiarized, you could try to get them to claim it as theirs when they consult you and fail them on the spot for making the claim whether it's in class or not.
I do agree with @DaveClarke that on this or the other issue, announcing a policy at the start of the term (no more than N consults per assignment/per term, and plagiarism is an automatic F and will also be referred to the school's academic conduct team) would help set expectations, cut down on abuse, and give you grounds to say "No, it wouldn't be fair to others if I helped you again before you turn it in."

Trying to "trick" students into turning in plagiarised work so they can get an F sounds like a terrible idea, especially when many students might not be sure exactly what constitutes plagiarism.

They're tricking themselves... But I did propose swatting them when they bring it in for review rather than waiting. If it looks accidental, I agree they should just be told "bad dog, NO!", but if it's deliberate after being warned up front I honestly believe they're asking for it and should learn consequenses as students rather than when their employer/publisher can get hurt. I do grant that there's the fuzzy space of "Oh, that's why that storyline felt familiar; I really didn't remember having read that but now that I see it again I agree that I paraphrased it too directly."

However, I agree that my first paragraph was probably not a good solution, and have edited to remove it.

I still find the approach advocated in the (new) first paragraph to be counterproductive. Instructors shouldn't be trying to catch students cheating so as to fail them; they should be trying to catch students cheating so as to educate them. Finding out a student is considering misconduct before they actually do it is a great opportunity to educate them without having to fail them.

@ff524 I understand your position.  And I'm not an educator, but as someone who will eventually hire those graduates I have to ask: Who teaches them that their actions have real repercussions?  They should know long before they get to college, but if they don't aren't you essentially teaching them that doing something that they must know is very bad is okay because in a worst case scenario someone will just tell them to change it?  In other words, aren't you setting them up for a far more painful failure in their job by not letting them fail at this level?

@Nicholas certainly, there should be consequences for submitting plagiarized work. But I don't see any benefit to tricking students into incriminating themselves before they submit this work, just so you can fail them!

@ff524 My concern is that in your suggested structure they have two potential outcomes: they get away with plagiarism or they get told to change their work.  One is positive while the other is neutral.  Given the potential work saved, this schema encourages them to try plagiarism as the risk/benefit profile is so weighted, which sets a bad precedent.  I think this gets students into a bad habit that will be harder to break out of once they hit the work world, especially considering the first time they do it they could lose a job and a lot of prestige.

@Nicholas I don't see those at the only two options. You could punish them for plagiarism only if they actually submit plagiarized work. You could do what earthling suggests and, when they ask for help before submission, point them towards resources to judge plagiarism for themselves (in my experience, students are shockingly uninformed about what constitutes plagiarism). You could make them take a plagiarism workshop if they come to you for help with plagiarized content. Failure is not the only way they'll learn - it's actually a pretty extreme way to learn, in an educational setting

After they graduate, deliberate plagiarism can be a shortcut to a destroyed career. I would rather see them learn about consequences while there is still time to recover. If it's a matter of not knowing where the line is, I grant that they should be educated. If it's a matter of knowing where the line is and crossing it anyway, I think they need more than a slap on the wrist. I agree that an immediate F is the "nuclear option", and I grant that distinguishing the two cases is harder than I implied... but Actions Have Consequences.

Who teaches them that their actions have real repercussions? — Their parents.  (Ha ha only serious.)

For what it's worth, I'm leaving this answer up despite the downvotes because I think this has been a useful discussion. Though it may be getting time to summarize it all into an addition to the answer, or to take it to Community, or both.


text:
Can international students study via distance without applying for a visa?
If an international student wants to study in a US degree program (AA, BA, MA, PhD, etc.), but entirely on-line while living in their home country, and without ever entering the US, can they skip all of the visa-related paperwork?

Distance learning students who will not enter the United States are not required to get a U.S. visa. In fact, by federal law, online-only students are not eligible for a student visa.


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Attending university-sponsored club events as a faculty member?
I'm a new (and hence young) faculty member, in a city where I don't really know anyone. I also really enjoy swing dancing.
The university has a swing dance club. I don't think there really is an issue necessarily, it's a public space in full view of a large group. However, because it is dancing, that means you are in contact with your dance partner (i.e., a student)...so it's giving me pause.
Looking for gut reactions, others who know their school policy, etc. Yes, I could just ask someone, but I really enjoy it, I sort of don't want to get an official school "no"...
Didn't know what to tag, ethics/policy seems the most appropriate?
EDIT: An update. On advice of one of the answers below, I did reach out to the club's admin. They said that it is open to any faculty/students who wish to learn/do some swing dancing.
Further update, HR passed me to dean, dean said they have no issue, and that he knows other faculty are part of various student clubs too.

My gut reaction is that it would also depend upon your ability level. When I first started dancing I was very shy and nervous about the whole thing. I would have felt even more uncomfortable dancing with potentially my own lecturer, and might not even have carried on. Now that I am much more experienced I've danced with all sorts of people - of all genders, ages and experience levels; I would no longer be phased dancing with my lecturer. Therefore, my gut reaction is that it would be fine for you to join the Advanced category, but inappropriate to join the Beginners. Also, any clubs in town?

It may be against the club rules for non-students (not just faculty) to attend, not because they think it's sketchy, but because the club is subsidized by student activity fees that non-students don't pay.

@MissMonicaE On advice of another poster, I did reach out to one of the club's admin on their facebook page. They said it is open for faculty as well.

@JM Just to be sure, it might be worth checking with HR anyway. If the club's leaders are students, they could easily not know about relevant university regulations that apply to faculty, if there are any.

Great news that it's all fine with everyone.  Enjoy!

From my experience in the UK, the snowsports club had a member of staff (not teaching I believe) who went along with all the students, even on the holiday.

If you are in the US, then it is typical that university clubs have formal elected leadership -- a president, and possibly other officers as well. Generally, they are quite serious about this -- indeed, in graduate school I remember a conversation with a foreign student who joined the ping pong club, and was struck by how earnest the officers were about fulfilling their roles.
I think the club president would be a good person to whom to address your questions; you can probably find out who the president is by Googling, or by seeing if the club has a Facebook page.
Incidentally, I went to university club-sponsored dance events as a graduate student myself, and I remember at least one faculty member who regularly showed up.

Good suggestion! I did reach out to one of the student admins on the facebook page, they said it's open to any students/faculty that wish to learn more about swing.

The short answer is that this really does depend on the strictness of your institution's conduct policies.
However, I would think that in such circumstances—in particular, it's a club where everybody knows physical contact is required—it would be understood that such contact would take place. Therefore, so long as the contact is limited to what is appropriate for dancing, I don't see why there would be an issue.
(You may also want to look for off-campus swing dancing opportunities—getting away from campus may be helpful for work-life balance.)

It is a rather small college town, I will certainly look into options, but I'm going to be surprised if there is something around the area. Is this an HR, faculty association president/rep, someone else question? I bug my chair with a lot of things, I'd like to avoid going to her if I can.

This would be an administrative issue, so I'd suggest starting by asking your HR department if there are any rules covering this situation.

Although you are not really looking for rules so much as norms. Therefore rather than asking HR, you might consider asking a faculty mentor, or the department chair, etc.

The club itself may or may not have their own policy as well. Worth checking out whether it mentions anything about staff getting involved.

You might go and see what the general membership consists of. In small towns, it would not be unusual to find faculty members. This activity would be completely out in the open and public, so should be above board.

@JonCuster truth be told I went last night before I put this question up :) I enjoyed it, and then felt like I might want some reassurance. I didn't interact with a ton of different people, but as far as I could tell it was primarily students.

I joined a student swing-dance society as a postdoc (in the UK).  There were a couple of other postdocs in the society, but no permanent faculty.  The swing dancers ended up being my main social group in that town.
I was doing some lecturing, and one of my dance friends was in a class I taught a couple of weeks of.  I told my boss that I was friends with that student and so would prefer not to be involved in any assessment of his work.  My boss said that was fine and if necessary I could sign a 'conflict of interest' form.  He was not all bothered about me being friends with one of my students.  I think that in small university towns it would be really unreasonable to bar university staff from joining student-led organisations, because those tend to provide most of the activities available in the town.

I attended a student swing-dance club as a postdoc, and a non-student one where students were present as a lecturer. None of the students I actually taught were present, although there were students who were friends with ones I taught, and they were able to identify me.
I asked my boss about this. The response was that it's ok. However, I did keep an eye out for my students attending. I dance both lead and follow, so if one student had come I would have switched over to avoid dancing with them. If several had started coming, I would have had another think.
As I understand it, for this level of relationship the key point is being aware of any conflict of interest. If you are in a position to affect the academic outcome of someone in the group, someone with more authority than you should be made aware of the situation and respond accordingly, so that everything is seen to be above board.

As a student leader of my college ballroom dance club for several years I'd say go for it.  You've mentioned that club is open to faculty/staff so there should be nothing stopping you, we had several faculty regularly participate.  The club would honestly probably love to have your participation and support on campus.  As for having pause about being in contact with your partner/student: I'd frankly be more concerned about you.  The modern dance community places no sexual connotations on dance so if you, your administration, or the students you dance with do there's really a bigger problem.  That being said, I'd recommend caution, it is an intimate activity and people can read too much into it.  You're always allowed to turn down a dance if you think someone is going to far and I'd keep the club leader abreast of all your concerns just in case.  At the very least, the campus club should have connections to the broader dance community in your area for you to "widen the pool."

Great points, thank you for providing your insight! I also didn't place any connotations on it, but felt the same way (it can be an intimate activity).