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Is obtaining Multiple PhDs in two different and barely related disciplines detrimental to the career?
My situation is like this: I have tried to obtain an MS in CS/CSE but failed. Now, I am studying an MA in Education and planning to get a Ph.D. in Education. After that, my plan is to get a Ph.D. degree in data science.
Now, why this strange plan? The answer is, STEM pays money, but STEM research is hard. So, first I need to have a guarantee that if I fail to obtain a degree in data science, I always have something to fall back on.
Suppose, you are seeing my resume, what would your first thought be? Is having PhDs in two different disciplines counterproductive to each other? If I apply for a job in academia/research, would I be seen as a pariah in both education and/or STEM?

(assuming a US perspective) Why do you need a Ph.D. in education to fall back on, rather than just an MA in education? Other than principals at large schools, or most superintendents of school districts, an MA in education is plenty for most school administrative positions. Or are you wanting to pursue actual research in education? FYI, I think most Ph.D.'s in education do not go into education research.

@DaveLRenfro, you almost certainly need an education doctorate to teach in a school of eduction, whether research is a big part of it or not. But not at the elementary or secondary level, as you note.

Have you considered doing a masters in data science when you finish the first masters, then do your PhD using data science in some education topic?

@JenB, I have an anxiety disorder. STEM education puts a lot of pressure on my emotional state. That is why I failed in MS in CS.

If STEM education may not be a good fit for you, why do a PhD in data science? If you are set on doing a PhD in Education, why not make it a computationally focused one? Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a pretty active field.

@user366312 The thing that I still don't quite understand is what it is you're really trying to accomplish. What is your primary goal? As in, why are you primarily aiming for a Ph.D. in Data Science? Is the goal you're aiming for not possible at the MS level?

@psosuna, my primary goal is to enter academia as a researcher. Discipline doesn't matter. But, I am skeptical about finding a research position in Education as social science offers far fewer job openings. Hence, data science. As I said, I failed in MSc in CS. To me, data science is easier than CS as it is a one-dimensional subject, mostly dominated by statistics.

@AnonymousPhysicist, no. I found my answer in this thread.

I didn't post that.  It's an automated comment.

@user366312 "To me, data science is easier than CS as it is a one-dimensional subject, mostly dominated by statistics." This could not be further from the truth, especially if you are interested in doing research in data science. What does a "one-dimensional subject" even mean??

@kjacks21, What does a "one-dimensional subject" even mean? => mostly statistics. My CS program had Computer Architecture, Distributed & Parallel Systems, and so on.

My initial questions would be: What is it that you're trying to do? Why are you both a doctor of Education and a doctor of Data Science? What is your end goal?
First of all, these fields aren't unrelated. It's certain enough that pedagogy and technology are not the same subject matter, but Data Science as a skill is so pliable that it really fits anywhere you put it and is supplemental to basically any other field of study. Research in general requires data. You could put both to use, for example, as an academic performing big data research on whatever level of education your studies focused on. Maybe you really care about finding trends in, say, early childhood developmental strategy success by querying methods from a large pool of pre-K and K-12 environments and evaluating their degree of success. You might care to do this to find what works and what doesn't work for the sake of publishing literature on effective teaching strategies.
I'd expect that someone with a degree in education and data science would be looking for a position that marries the two disciplines. Secondarily, attempting to fill a position where one is used and the other supplements. Most commonly, you'll find yourself applying where one fits and the other doesn't, but this isn't so out there. There are always soft skills that can be transferred from one discipline to the other. Not to mention, if you have both degrees, that speaks volumes about your dedication in general.
Once those initial questions are evaluated, the follow-up would be: Is the position you've applied for a good fit for you? If you have that wealth of knowledge and mean to use it, are you under-applying yourself by working here?
I think that, less than your resume making you look like a fool, at that level, not fully applying all your academic skills would be the thing that would make you look like a fool. If you cared enough to go to the pinnacles of study for the field, why would you not use it, or at the very least, place yourself somewhere where you can draw on the less important of the two to your work to enhance your work?
As someone looking at your resume (and assuming I have the time to review it in detail) those would be the things I'd focus on. If the questions I have can answer themselves by nature of what you've applied for and your experience in a positive way, then you wouldn't look like a fool at all.

I provided an example where Data Science complements Education in this answer, but for those wondering how Education would complement Data Science, attempt defining quantitative measures suitable for data mining WITHOUT in-depth knowledge of the field of Education and all that can be assessed and boiled down to metrics. For extra pepper on this particular topic, while never having been a PhD student for either of these two fields, all the way down in undergrad I performed some research for a PI at my university that gave me some insight that others might not have.

I think you're planning too far ahead, and are definitely overthinking this.  Most people find a PhD a pretty grueling process, generally well beyond expectations.  My feeling from having gone through it myself, and knowing many others who have, is that the odds are very high that you'll have no interest in going through it a second time.
Get a PhD in the field you actually want to work in.  Finishing a PhD is hard; finishing a PhD in a field you're not very interested in is even harder.  Put your energy into doing one field well, rather than spreading your energy out and doing two fields at a lesser level.
But to disregard that and answer your question, I think people without PhDs would probably be impressed, while people with PhDs would think it very strange, and not necessarily good.  But I suspect there would be pretty wide variance in opinions, depending on surrounding circumstances.
Edit: I should add that Master's Degrees make a pretty good supplement to PhDs.  So if you finish this MA in Education and then move to a different field that you can plausibly supplement with Education, that would be normal and probably pretty effective.  But again, plan to do your PhD in a field you're interested in.

"So if you finish this MA in Education and then move to a different field that you can plausibly supplement with Education" --- what do you mean by a different field in this sentence? I am doing my Masters thesis on Early Childhood Education.

@user366312: Why not get a Ph.D. in Early Childhood Education, with a thesis and research focused on heavy data analysis? Even in literary criticism there is this, and see the comment by kjacks21. I would imagine that there are not many education researchers who have a good command of quant methods, which will likely be increasingly important in years to come.

@user366312 I mean if you finish your current MA and then move onto a data science PhD (or any other), then it will appear much more sensible than two PhDs.  Especially if you intend to teach.  Not to mention being far, far less work.

I agree with the spirit of your answer, so sorry for nitpicking, but this is a pet peeve of mine: Odds are not probabilities. You get high odds for unlikely events, and low odds for likely events. You're essentially saying that OP is likely to have some interest in doing a second PhD.

To be honest, your internal reasoning would be invisible to me. Why you did what you did can be speculated about, but you don't need to reveal it.
Many people change fields. The difference between Education and data science is wide enough that most of us would just assume you had a change of plan. Nothing wrong with that.
But, of course, your plan may fall through, and your plans may change. But for the main question here, don't worry about it. Worry about doing a good job in moving toward and evaluating your goals.
I might worry more about someone who had don't degrees in two very closely related fields. In such a case, the first degree gives you the skills to be productive in that field and in the related one. I might worry that you just wanted to be a perpetual student. But Education and STEM use different research methods and require very different insights. Having two degrees, either for changing fields or for wanting to work at the cusp, seems much more natural to me.


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What is the average cost-per-paper of funded projects?
A senior professor once said to me,

you expect one (top-ranked) journal paper for every $120,000 in funding.

I’ve always assumed it was an unverifiable figure but I’m interested to find out if work has been done.
Obviously this figure will differ for fields, funders, and your definition of top-ranked. My question is: Are there any meta studies that have looked at this funding versus quality issue?
Caveat: I’m aware that ‘quality’ of science is something that we all agree can’t be measured.  But people do measure it. And I’d like to know if those people have produced any work looking at quality per unit funding and the circumstances that improve the ratio.

"The circumstances that improve the ratio". Are you sure that you want that? As your question states for 120k$ you are expected to produce one high quality paper to make the funding agency happy. Why would YOU want to produce more papers for the same money? 120k (minus the institution's overhead 20% or more) should be a good (but not extravagant) paycheck for about a year for one researcher. One very high quality paper per year, seems like a nice ratio to me.

@Alexandros I understand the question as "how can the funding agency distribute the money so that they can get more papers for the same cash".

If you wanted to try producing something yourself, you could try looking at the UK's Gateway to Research data - it would require a bit of manual aggregation and deduplication, as grants are presented idiosyncratically (each institution's share of a joint grant is presented individually, & outputs may be duplicated), but the core question of "how many papers came out of a grant in relation to funding" is probably answerable with a bit of work.

This isn't directly an answer, but thought it might be relevant to your question. Measuring the quality of science is very difficult, but one ongoing project which attempts to do something close to this for the US is the STARMETRICS. I saw the founder of this program (Julia Lane) give a short talk about what they are trying to do. They have massive amounts of data on who gets what funds and are trying to use it to identify the benefits. Looks similar to the program @Andrew mentioned (which I hadn't seen before -- looks cool).

That depends too much on the field. Lots of math papers get written on the basis of a tenured salary position with no additional funding at all. High Energy Physics, though, ....

I think any figures will be moot. Let's take a Nature paper that is signed by people from US, Chile, Sweden, France, Israel, India, and Japan. Whose's funding would it correspond to? All of them? That is a lot of people, so a lot of money, we'll get a terrible ratio. Only the main author? In big collaborations is difficult to pinpoint who that would be. It is easy for a particular manuscript, but not a good representation of the whole.
Let's assume you can trace it down to a specific group. Typically, they have multiple sources of funding, which one should get the cake? Say I publish the paper "On self frying potatoes", whose experiments were funded by the grant "Development of self frying potatoes", it seems obvious. But I could only do it because I attended a workshop on "Tuber theory" paid by my other grant "Theoretical agriculture". We could make the counting at a research group level. How much money they get, how many publications get out, regardless of the source and purpose. That would still have the problem of how to count collaboration papers.

Why not just count the grants acknowledged in the paper itself? Many (most? just NSF?) agencies require acknowledgement, so it might be a decent measure.

@BillBarth That gives you a list of the grants, but not how to partition it.

@Davidmh, this seems like an internal measure to me. I.e., a senior professor says to a new postdoc or junior prof, "Hey, kid, you know you need to win about $120k per paper you can publish in a top journal, right? You should keep that in mind on your way to tenure." I don't think it needs to be made precise. Certainly each set of authors could pull their own numbers together.

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Should glossary links be used as much as possible?
There are two terms in my thesis that I'm using throughout the entire work. They have been added to the glossary for that reason. However, by the time I got to chapter 4 or so I've stopped writing them as PDF hyperlinks (so that they can jump to the corresponding entry in the glossary) because I got really tired of it.
My assumption was that by this point the reader should know what the glossary terms mean.
Is this okay or should I use glossary hyperlinks as much as possible?

I did an index for one of my projects, and just used the edit / replace function... It raced through the text replacing that word with what was needed - I used tricks like having "ii" at the start of the word to identify them etc... Saved a huge amount of time compared to doing each one as they were being typed...

Why don't you write a macro for the term with the hyperlink so that you don't have to rewrite the whole stuff every time?

If your university has some thesis style guide / requirements, obviously follow them.
Your current approach does sound a little arbitrary, or even sloppy - like you ran out of time to make things uniform. If you had only linked the occurrence in the chapter defining the concept, that'd make more sense than linking every occurrence in chapters 1, 2, and 3. Linking every occurrence for a common word throughout the entire thesis seems ok, but maybe a little overzealous. After all, if I'm reading the PDF, presumably I can search myself. Another possibility would be to link the first occurrence in each chapter. This is useful for readers who don't follow your thesis from cover to cover.

Actually, I question the value of hyperlinks at all. You are assuming that the reader will be using a specific technology to read, rather than just a printout.
It is really enough, in my opinion, to refer to the glossary at the first use of a term and forgo it thereafter. If the reader is aware that there is a glossary, they can go there in any case if they are puzzled.
The links will interrupt the flow of reading in any case. There is value in making the work beautiful, not just informative.

This is especially true for terms that are used "throughout the entire work".

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Postdoc Proposal: Can I quote from viva examiners' report?
Can I quote from a viva examiner's report some positive feedback in a postdoc application? If yes, how do I cite the report?

Can the quote be verified? E.g. is the report public? If not, it's probably a bad idea. If yes, I still feel weird about it... Would it be possible to have said examiner write a letter of recommendation mentioning some of this feedback?

@Anyon I think you could format that comment into a brief answer.

(Expanding my comment into an answer, as suggested by Bryan Krause.)
I think it'd be unusual, and I honestly feel a little weird about it. Perhaps it can be done well, but consider how it would look before doing so. If you're using the quote in support of claims in your research statement, I'd wonder a) is there no support in the literature for that claim (why?), or b) if you're not confident in your own claims. If you instead hope to use the quote in support of your abilities or talent, I think it'd be better to ask the report writer to also write one of your recommendation letters. After all, if they wrote so in the viva report, chances are that they highly enough of you and your work to write a good letter. (It'd also look a lot better on paper than "X said I'm awesome!")
The second aspect to consider is if the quotes can be verified. In the systems I'm somewhat familiar with, these reports are usually not publicly available - at least not easily so. This means that those reading your application would likely be unable to confirm that the quotes are valid, making the value of including them kind of dubious. What's more, the report writers might have an expectation that the report isn't made public, and might disapprove of you using their words this way. (Now, you could of course solve that by asking them, but again, if it's central to your application, a recommendation letter would make the point more convincingly.)
Finally, to address your second question: If you choose to do this, you could probably just cite it as company report or internal report, ideally adding a link if it's available online. If your university do make these reports public in a more official manner, it might also be classified as a technical report, but I sort of doubt it. Generally, however, exactly how you cite something in your application probably matters a lot less than what you cite.


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If you're black, how do you answer "Oh you're a professor? So you teach African Studies?"
In a comment to How do you answer "Oh, you're a professor? What do you teach?", @JohnSmith wrote

I'm black so it generally goes "Oh you're a professor? So you teach African Studies?" I generally storm off.

John's reaction is understandable.  But I'd like to explore some alternatives.  Note that John's experience is not isolated to black professors.  For example, another comment on that thread pointed out that some stupid people tend to assume a female professor teaches gender studies.
How do you answer "Oh you're a professor? So you teach African Studies?"
I'm looking for a lot in an answer.  It should:

be short
open the thoughtless person's eyes
allow for a graceful exit by both parties

Here is an example of the kind of answer I'm looking for:

Question posed by a white person to a transracial black adoptee: "What country were you born in?"
Answer: "Long Island."

Edit: Please assume there was no hidden agenda.  Just some combination of garden variety cluelessness and stereotyped thinking.
Typical scenarios: neighborhood picnic... parent meeting at your child's school... standing in line at the grocery store....
Edit 9/18: This question closely mirrors the other, in which the questioner is not an academic, and the academic feels socially isolated and uncomfortable, and unsure how to respond.
What's different here is that there is an additional layer of discomfort related to being an obvious member of an under-represented group.  Think of a Venn diagram.  The set of people interested in "So you teach African Studies" question is a subset of those interested in the original "What do you teach?" question.
I would ask enthusiasts of this site who have no personal interest in this question to allow those of us who do, to explore this very real problem -- even if you yourself have never experienced it and do not anticipate experiencing it.
But who knows, you might encounter a similar problem some day on a trip to an overseas conference, or in an unfamiliar corner of your own country.
Permitting an exploration of this question can potentially be useful to white, male, straight, in short, hegemonic, academics in another way.  If your department is one of the many that are striving to diversify, this question is an example of things that matter to the diverse candidates you are trying to recruit.
Edit 9/22: Reading the answers and comments led me to an idea.  (If the question gets re-opened again(!) I can post it as an actual answer.)

Well, no, but if you're trying to choose an African Studies course for next semester, you're welcome to bounce some ideas off me.

(I have a feeling this is the kind of answer I'd get in a lot of trouble with from my children.  They'd say it's too annoying....)

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Please see this meta question about the suitability of this queston

What's wrong with a sensible answer:  "No, I teach Chemistry."

The sensible answer is ok if the question does not carry some hidden agenda. If it does, you may want a response with a - ever so slight - sharper edge, but enough of a retreat route for the questioner to save face, with a mini-slap on the wrist.

If the question does carry a hidden agenda, this carries a very sharp edge. If not, it is harmless.

This would hit the hardest in my opinion, and best combined with a strong disapproving look in the eyes in case you sense a hidden agenda.
Of course not if the question is asked in a sarcastic way by someone you know well, but that's obviously not the situation the original tweet was describing.

@PatriciaShanahan I must say, I do not see any edge in the response, not even hidden - perhaps you can enlighten me? It may work in combination with the disapproving look, but that presupposes you have a good guess of the speakers' intention. Anyway, a nonconfrontative OP may be satisfied with remaining on this level. It is a perfectly valid solution, though may not carry the additional slap on the wrist that the OP may be looking for.

@CaptainEmacs It treats the assumption that a professor with black skin must teach African Studies as being too obviously silly to be worthy of the professor's notice. It slaps the asker in the face with the fact that the professor can and does teach a different subject.

@PatriciaShanahan If the asker had been so intelligent as to get this hint, they wouldn't have asked the question in the first place (or would have put a clearer edge in the question if it was intentional). Or, if indeed the asker were in to needle the OP, they have now got much too graceful a way out. I thus interpret this response as distinctly neutral, nonconfrontative and most certainly not a hard response. Which is, of course, perfectly fine if that's what the OP wishes.

I guess one can say "no i dont teach african studies, i am working on philospher stone, that can turn any white into black"

I agree with this answer, don't put effort into something it is not relevant.

The good thing about this answer is that it can lead into any of the other answers given - rather than assuming you know the context of the person's comment.  Plus, it's consistent with the answer provided by the parent question.

Seems like a lot of people are focussing solely on verbal answers. This, combined with a look of contempt would be fairly sharp. In fact, with any of the answers to this question, the facial expression would be a, if not the, major determinant of how the answer is received.

I would suggest:

No, I teach X. But I wonder what makes you think that I would teach African Studies?

This answers the question and turns things back on the questioner.  Note that, at least logically speaking, it is too soon to jump to conclusions, as there are innocent answers to this question, e.g.:

Oh, Karen told me about a friend of hers who teaches African Studies.  His name is also Eric.  I guess that's not you!

I also think that there is a good chance that when the question is reflected back, the questioner will just realize that it's a stupid question and apologize.  If they actually say

Because you're African American.

then I think it might be worth a brief public service announcement:

Actually, most African American faculty members don't teach African studies.  You really can't tell what someone teaches by looking at them, and it might be better not to try.

The idea underlying all of this is that you just got asked what is probably a pretty stupid question. If it turns out the person really does believe that African Americans are only cut out to teach African Studies, then that's terrible and probably unsolvable, but that is certainly not a standard racist stereotype.  There is a good chance that the question is at least somewhat motivated by ignorance -- this is not someone who has spoken to a lot of African American professors, and probably not many professors at all -- and that is in your power to try to fix.  I also think there's something to be said for "not sinking to the person's level": ideally the questions and answers are delivered in a polite, neutral tone, not angrily or sarcastically.

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I am an engineer and female, and foreign, so have heard lots of useless comments:

Whose secretary are you?
Me: I'm an engineer, whose secretary are you?
What are you studying?
Me: Engineering.
You mean English?
Me: Eng-in-eer-ing.
But girls don't do that!
Me: Watch me. This is me studying Engineering.
You must be the translator.
Me: No, I'm the engineer. Though I do indeed speak 4 languages.

I try not to get annoyed, and just stick to the facts. Now if they start arguing about it, that's a different story. After 40 years of this job there isn't an insult I haven't heard and I have an answer for all of them.

This does not answer the question and is exactly the kind of content that I fear this question will attract further motivating my vote to close it.

Well, I disagree. People make the same kind of silly remarks to me, and I have a way of dealing with it without being rude or getting angry. Which I think is what the OP is looking for.

Okay, @RedSonja, your answer was entertaining and inspiring.  Now could you please apply your imagination and sharp wit to propose a creative retort for the specific situation in which the uncomfortable professor is black, and the stupid person is assuming he teaches African Studies?  (Not even African American History, or Africana Studies, etc., mind you.)

@aparente001 depends a lot on the situation. OP can say "no, I teach Chemistry. And do you teach European Studies?" But accompanied by a big grin. Vary the adjective as appropriate.

Doesn't work, because the stupid person isn't remotely in Academia.  You have more creativity for these things than I do.  I hope you can come up with some more ideas.

@RedSonja - Sorry I didn't notice your comment earlier.  I apologize if something I wrote came across unfriendly, it was not my intention.  I found the quips in your answer entertaining and inspiring, and I am hoping you can use your creativity and imagination to propose one (or several) for this case.  When I mentioned the stupid person, I meant the person who asked, “You teach African Studies?”  If there was something specific I said that seemed unfriendly or sarcastic, please let me know what it was.

+1 This is better than most of the other answers listed because a) it's based on real experience of something similar to the actual scenario, and b) therefore, it understands that the professor wants to make the person rethink their assumptions, but doesn't want to get in to a long, tedious, awkward discussion every single time this happens (the problem with "Why did you assume that..." type responses)

@aparente001 I think it works even better if the asker obviously isn't remotely interested in academia - because there's equally no reason to assume the chemistry professor was interested in african studies. Saying "And do you teach European Studies?" with a good-humoured smile to, for example, a taxi driver, would get the point across very clearly!

How about a zeugma?

"I teach chemistry and people not to stereotype."

Too glib? I'm not sure, having never been in that position. Perhaps it provides just enough humor to allow a slight saving of face, but little enough humor to be clear that it is also intended as a reprimand.

Yes, I like this response. You may increase the impression by saying something like: "My research is about hyperextrinsic excitations in beta-gamma-pseudochiral dextrorganic compounds and the question whether they always decompose into stereotyped forms or rather into free radicals. [the last part is obviously just a joke] - I found highly technical, specialised, specific statements which are unlikely to be general knowledge an excellent riposte to possibly condescending comments/attitudes, at the same time without precluding a potential real interest in your work if that exists.

I understand the point but I think it's a point that genuinely doesn't need to be made in the usual context of polite small talk.

I think this would work better with a sentence format that's easier to understand.  We're already asking them to drop their stereotyped thinking, let's not also tax their brain at the same time with a challenging sentence structure.

@aparente001 Actually get people to think about what was said is a good way to wrongfoot (or, in this case, "rightfoot") them.

@CaptainEmacs - sorry, these words are new to me.  Wrongfoot?  Rightfoot?

@aparente001 To wrongfoot somebody means to catch them out of step, in other words, surprising them, and, in the present context, making them think again about what was said. To "rightfoot" was a word invented by me in analogy to "wrongfoot", as the purpose of the response is to make them walk in the right path instead of giving in to stereotypes - it was a play of words.

@CaptainEmacs - Is wrongfoot a Britishism?

@aparente001 My dictionary says so. I do not know, I heard that many times and wasn't aware it was local.

To better meet OP's bulleted criteria, I would expand on the bare-bones answer:

No, I teach Chemistry, to African-American students as well as everyone else.

It gives the asker a chance to gracefully exit by acknowledging the mistake, instead of having to back-pedal in response to the shorter version.

The roller coaster of this question's fate continues.  At four close votes (on the second round of close voting), I think this is the magic moment to accept an answer.  This is the one that fits the best for me so far.  Thank you for your contribution.  I think it is a good starting point but if we had more time, those of us interested in this issue might be able to make some refinements.  For example, one idea that occurs to me is "No, I teach Chemistry.  My students come from all walks of life and all races. And you?  What do you do?"

@NajibIdrissi, to comply with the bulleted stipulations of OP's question.

The question was re-opened.and I am therefore undoing the acceptance of this answer to allow more answers to be proposed.  (However, the end result may be a re-acceptance.)  It will be interesting to see if any new ideas or variants are proposed.  I do hope new answers will be based on a careful reading of the question and the previous one this is based on.

What about:
"No, I teach chemistry. African chemistry, obviously."
or just:
"African chemistry actually."
I like these ... they are typical of the kind of thing I would say in such a situation (then again, I don't always do that well in my interactions with humans ;-)

Careful - as funny as that may work with the right person, this may permit in an unlucky combination of circumstances, end up putting the person in question into the informal category of "witch doctor" - generally, I discourage self-deprecating jokes that may end up becoming ones epithet, unless the person at the receiving end has very thick skin and a very healthy sense of humour - but then, they would not ask this question here. As charming as the answer is, I suggest to handle with care and close understanding of the situation.

Good point, Captain !

If someone said that to me (a non-chemist) I would be very intrigued and need to know more, because I never heard of it and it sounds interesting.

It would suffice to reply "No; I'm a chemistry professor".
If you want to reinforce the lesson, let the silence hang after your reply.
There's no need to do anything more than that. In fact, anything more explicit, would only make the person more defensive and thus less likely to revise his or her beliefs about black professors.

"No, White Studies."
Instant mental derailment that might prompt a dialog.

This is more of a comment than a real answer.

No, it's a real answer.  It contains (a) what to say and (b) why it should be said:  there is no program called "White Studies" (that I've ever heard of) because everything is implicitly "White Studies".

This is an intriguing idea and I'd like to see it in the form of a question.

@aparente001 I don't think I'm following.  If you could expand a bit, I'll try to respond intelligently.

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Can one blow the whistle on a professor who excludes students on the basis of their personal life?
This post is an attempt to reformulate this misunderstood question. I (and others) did add clarifying information, taken from the OP's comments, to the question, but I believe the whole Q&A&discussion sequence got so muddied that a fresh start would be the best way to get good answers to what the OP was actually trying to find out.

There is a professor in OP's department who only takes students who are willing to commit to spending all their waking time studying.  He manages to effectively excludes students who have families or close personal relationships.  He wants only students who will dedicate any free time left (after doing their required work) on related reading in their field.
The professor doesn't come right out and say, "Only single people who are driven to spend every waking moment on their studies are welcome in my group," but effectively, that is his policy.  Quoting from OP's comments:

One way I hear about how he "weeds" out the normal people is by telling them how much work it takes to succeed, and gives examples of previous "successful" students, and what their lifestyles were. I suppose he says something like: "this is how much you know from being an undergrad, this is how much you need to know to succeed in this field, here is a humongous list of topics you should know before you can competently do research with me, come back to me when you're ready." But I don't think that's all he does.... I think he intimidates prospective advisees with his demeanor, and so this fact along with his reputation leads to him select students who work day and night everyday.

This professor is in the United States.  He is very good in his field and manages to get students who fit his requirements; but it doesn't seem right to OP (or to me), and we would like to know:
Is there any way of blowing the whistle on such a professor?

Care needs to be taken that one can interpret the statements as selecting nolifers, rather then weeding out uncommitted students. Perhaps the method is just to scare easygoing people away? There are some people that "masquerade as monsters to discover heroes". Better have some proof, or it will backfire badly (it probably will backfire in any case - a whistleblower has to be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause, unfortunately that's the dynamics of the situation).

To quote Law Abiding Citizen: "It's not what you know. It's what you can prove in court." Unless the professor wrote it in a signed e-mail or was recorded saying such things, i'm afraid it's just hearsay. I think the only realistic solution is as Captain Emacs suggests - whistle blowers who have either no vested interest making a sacrifice, or, accept that this is the reality and that the trust-based PhD system is no longer what it used to be. If PIs want to run their labs like companies, the workers should receive overtime. We can see how long such predatory PIs last in a free market.

I think Captain Emacs' comment is very important: the way you have phrased the question, it makes it sound like what the professor is doing is unambiguously unethical, which it isn't. Honestly, the interactions of the OP in the related question signal to me that the OP was ranting about the perceived "unfairness" that other people work really hard.

Asking whether one can "whistle blow" is presuming that the answer to the question "Is this practice legally problematic?" is yes. Until that is determined, this question isn't relevant.

From what is written here I fail to see OP's problem. The advisor does not force the students to stay at work all that time. Nor does he seem exploitative (e.g., lots of menial work for no career advancement). He just expects full commitment. So why shouldn't he — after all, not everything has to be average. Students are free to either fulfill these requirements or look somewhere else. And to be honest, this question also raised thoughts like 'hearsay', 'speaking for others', and 'trying to clip wings to avoid looking bad'.

Along with several commenters, I think that first we have to understand and agree on at least one unambiguously unethical or illegal practice is being committed before we can discuss whistle-blowing.  I find myself having to stretch rather far to see such a practice here.
We are asked to consider a professor "who only takes students who are willing to commit to spending all their waking time studying." I think this could be an exaggeration, because

This professor is in the United States. He is very good in his field and manages to get students who fit his requirements;

Devoting all your waking time to studying is highly unwise and unhealthy.  Even in the short term it does not lead to increases in productivity, and it will lead to burnout in the (not so terribly) long-term.  Such an advisor would likely burn through his students faster than he can get them, and if too many students burn out, the professor's work will be affected and also other students will notice and not want to sign on with him.
However, let us assume for the sake of argument that a professor is only willing to take students who devote, say, 100 hours a week to work for him (not so far from "all their waking time").  Although thoroughly unadvisable, I don't know what rule would be broken by setting this ridiculously high bar for student workload.  A student and an advisor must both choose to work together in order for this to take place.  (For students who have not already been admitted to the program, the department and university has some role to play, at least in vetting the process.)  In this choice there are competitive aspects on both sides: given that throughout the academic world the vast majority of advisors would (sanely) require much less of their students, it is not clear why a student would choose to work with an advisor under these conditions unless they foresee an amazing long-term benefit to their career.
The only legal angle I see is that if an advisor terminates a student for failing to do more than 40 hours per week of work in a lab or other environment where specific duties are being done and can be timed: that would probably be actionable.  But it seems to me that an employer can ask an employee to complete tasks that would take that employee (or most, or all employees) more than 40 hours a week and can terminate the employee if they fail to complete those tasks.
The idea that advisors specifically require students to have no "personal life" just sounds a little silly to me: an advisor has no right to know a student's marital or relationship status, and in academic environments I'm familiar with there is no natural path for an advisor to find out this information if the student does not want to reveal it.  Hinting that a student should not or will not have time for dating, family life, other hobbies or whatever is much as above: obviously highly unadvisable on the professor's part but probably not really actionable.  If a professor saw a student's wedding ring on Monday, made a point of asking about it, responded disapprovingly and then terminated the student on Tuesday for no compelling reason, then whistle-blowing would be in order.  In the absence of such egregious behavior it's hard to see what can be done.
Graduate students often feel that "they don't have a choice" and must put up with poor behavior or poor deals on the part of their advisor.  I think the best thing that we can tell students is that they do have a choice.  Healthy academic programs should engineer and foster mechanisms for students to stand up for themselves and switch out of bad situations.  Students should not assume in advance that they are enrolling in a healthy academic program.  They should be very hesitant to work with an advisor whose current and/or former students are unsatisfied.

The Obama administration recently  (2016/5) released new overtime rules: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/18/obama-administration-releases-final-rules-overtime-pay-including-some-exemptions
If you are in the USA, please reference the Department of Labor final ruling:

• Graduate and undergraduate students: Generally, the Department views graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in research under a faculty member’s supervision in the course of obtaining a degree to be in an educational relationship and not an employment relationship with the school or with a grantor. As such, the Department will not assert such workers are entitled to overtime.

Undergrads and grad students are exempt because the relationship is seen as educational. However, this can be overruled if the tasks or relationship is no longer educational - i.e., you were washing beakers every week on week with no change. However, note that even if you were dissecting rat brains every week on week with no change, that is unfortunately the tedious part of research. So there's a lot of hair splitting.
The key word above is "generally" - and the key question is whether your taskmaster / professor is abusing the relationship. But the DOL tends to side with universities, so I think it would be hard to make a case.
It's much easier if you're a postdoc because post-docs now fall under the category of employees for whom overtime pay is required.

Postdoctoral researchers:
  o Sciences: Postdoctoral researchers in the sciences
  are not covered by the teaching exemption. These employees are generally considered professional employees and are subject to the salary threshold for exemption from overtime. DOL has been working closely with NIH and NSF regarding their mutual interest in this area.
  o Humanities: Many postdoctoral researchers in the humanities also teach. To the extent that they have a primary duty of teaching, they will be subject to the teaching exemption and not entitled to overtime compensation. If they do not teach, however, and earn less than the new threshold, they will be eligible for overtime.

tl;dr: If you're a postdoc, you have some recourse. If you're a student and the 'work' could fit under the category of bona fide research then you have little recourse - except the usual: tell everyone you know to avoid this program; talk to your department chair; talk to the university ombudsman; etc.

When facing a thorny problem, I like to start by brainstorming, listing every approach I can think of.  (The second step is to see if any of them can easily be eliminated.)  Here's what I've come up with:

Meet with a dean, with an informal concern.
Approach the press.
File a formal (internal) university grievance, based on your university's specific policies.
File a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
If your university has a graduate student union, file a grievance through the union.
Guerrilla tactics.

Did I leave anything out?
Now for a commented version of this list.
1. Meet with a dean, with an informal concern.
(a) If you're unsure how well protected you'd be in practice, it might be good to find out what other students' experience has been with this avenue.
(b) It might be helpful, in deciding whether to use this approach, to check how much grant money the professor is bringing into the department, compared to other professors.
(c) Even with an informal approach, it would be good to read your university's policies very carefully before meeting with anyone.  The Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago has published advice for the specific context of discrimination, sexual harassment, and assault, that strikes me as good advice in general: "In making a report or complaint, or even in informal advising, describe your situation with language that mirrors the language in the University policy. Using such language in email communications is particularly important."
2. Approach the press.
If you want to pursue this, it might be helpful to find a couple of similar cases, perhaps in another department, and to identify some students who might be willing to speak to the press, anonymously if necessary.  In other words, some preliminary legwork on your part would make this project easier for a journalist to tackle.
A letter to the editor could draw attention to the problem and raise awareness.  It might be possible to ask the college newspaper not to publish the author's real name.
3. File a formal (internal) university grievance, based on your university's specific policies.
See comments for #1.
I took a quick look at part of the University of Chicago policy, and saw a few sentences that started to go in a helpful direction, talking about imbalances of power, but my quick look didn't turn up any slam dunk language.  At any rate, for this approach, I think you'd have to work from your own university's specific policy language.
4. File a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
This approach is limited by OCR's mandates -- see http://www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/reg/ocr/index.html.
Here's an example of something that would fit OCR's mandates: if a female student were to notify the professor by email she is pregnant, and the professor were to kick her out, also by email, because of that.  I'm not sure if OCR would be an option for a male student who announces he's expecting a baby.  One could ask them, though.
5. If your university has a graduate student union, file a grievance through the union.
I didn't see anything in the OP's problem description related to employment as a teaching assistant or research assistant, so I feel doubtful about this approach.  Nevertheless, it couldn't hurt to talk to a union representative, to at least get their perspective.
6. Guerrilla tactics.
For example, flyers posted in public places warning people from joining the professor's group.  I think this is too risky.
Another possibility would be to post online, e.g. ratemyprofessor.com.  This seems like a safer option than flyers on bulletin boards.
General note: for all of the above, the whistleblower's position would be strengthened by numbers, i.e. by other students getting involved.

(The downvote is not mine, by the way.)  "Did I leave anything out?"  I didn't see where you advised the student to try to switch to another advisor and/or program.  I would advise any student to land on their feet before trying many of the things you list there.  You can still blow the whistle from the comfort and safety of your next academic job.  But if such a student decides that living well is a better revenge...that is also their right, certainly.

@PeteL.Clark - We don't know if the OP is in this professor's group.  Or maybe you do and I'm too obtuse to have figured that out.  At any rate, the OP wasn't asking what he should do about being in an untenable situation.  Rather, the OP asked how to blow the whistle.  So that's how I tried to frame my question.

No, I don't know that, and I find it unclear exactly what the OP of the previous question meant to ask.  (It got closed for being unclear.)  However, I don't see how it is possible to proceed without involving the students of the advisor: e.g. a formal grievance on the part of someone else is not going to go anywhere without the other party's involvement.  If we're brainstorming, I urge that some thought be given to what may or may not bring the temple crashing down on the advisor's current students.  Proceeding without consulting them has the potential to do more harm than good.

@PeteL.Clark - I believe it is possible to file an OCR complaint as a concerned bystander. ... Granted, the original original question wasn't super clear but my understanding was that the professor's attitude affected current students in that group, plus other students in the department who were effectively excluded from working in that group.  I agree that involving other students in the department would strengthen OP's efforts.  However, I do want to figure out what one student taking the initiative can do to get started. ... Please be more specific about how the temple could come ...

... crashing down.  If I imagine myself in the OP's shoes, I would want the department and the university to guide the professor in being more inclusive.  That's it.  No punishments, no loss of tenure.  So I'm not understanding what you said about the temple crashing down.

I'm afraid I have only the time for a brief explanation.  Suppose I am a faculty member and I hear from the Office of Civil Rights, or am approached by the press, or hear from my Dean that I am being investigated for illegal/unethical/exclusionary practices with regard to my students.  I will certainly believe that at least one of my students was responsible for this.  At least this will create awkwardness and tension with my students.

What else happens depends on me.  If I am stubborn, I can probably get away with doing nothing.  If I am a flighty bigshot, I may decide to move elsewhere and leave the students behind.  If I am unreasonable and/or vindictive, I may do something to make my students very upset that the "bystander" did not consult them first and act with their permission.

@PeteL.Clark - Thank you for spelling it out.  The possibility that the professor would choose the vindictive, nuclear option is something the OP should take into account when making decisions.


text:
How rude is it for a grad student to be late to a professor's valedictory lecture?
I'm a gradate student at a UK university. Today, I faced a difficult situation and I'm not sure if my decision was right, so I'd like to hear your opinions (I'm not a native English speaker so I apologize in advance for any grammatical errors).
I was going to attend a valedictory lecture (the very last lecture by a retiring professor) in a building I'd never visited. I used Google Maps to get there and ended up in front of a facility with no entrance for students. Two other students were also there, confused.
We then spent a long time looking for the right place, until one of us noticed there were two buildings with the identical name and we were supposed to go to the other one. At that point, we were about 3 minutes late for the lecture, and I told them we might not be allowed to come in late because it seemed to be an extremely formal event (We had been told to wear formal attire).
They disagreed and headed for the right building, so I followed. However, by the time we arrived, we were more than 10 minutes late (the lecture would last for two hours), and we didn't even know which way to go in a huge building. Then I decided to give up and go back home, telling the others I personally found it rude and inappropriate to be THAT late. They went on and I don't know if they were actually allowed to join the audience.
But now I wonder if this was the right decision. One reason I decided not to go was that I had never interacted with the retiring professor (although we belonged to the same department) and she wouldn't even recognize me. How would she have felt if an unknown student (or actually, three students) had joined in the middle of her last lecture?
Could you please share your thoughts on this so I can make a better decision when I find myself in a similar situation in the future? Thank you so much for reading this.
EDIT: We were "invited" to the lecture and attendance was not compulsory.

I'd say if there's separate entrances for students and staff at your University it's them before you who have a problem with etiquette as it's the 21st century and such things should long be in the past. As for your question, I understand the feeling of worry in such a situation. It seems you would have enjoyed attending that lecture, and I think it would have been best to try and not worry and just go in quietly and perhaps give a facial expression of apology in the direction of the lecturer while sitting down. (Also note that 10 minutes is well within the so-called Academic Quarter).

Lectures are for the audience, not the speakers.  You attend a lecture because you want to hear what the speaker has to say, not so that the speaker has someone to say it to.

@Sixtyfive I can't speak to the actual situation here, but a student entrance might easily mean "unsecured entrance", whereas other entrances have whitelist access control. Given the things that these might give access to, for a city centre institution these can have a very short list, excluding both students and staff.

There's obviously a lot of cultural stuff going on here, and having been to the UK I do know why things might be like that there. It still does affect the way the students feel about themselves and the way the professors/teachers/lecturers feel about themselves and I still maintain that it also has the sideeffect of creating an intimidating amount of hierarchy.

However, by the time we arrived, we were more than 10 minutes late (the lecture would last for two hours)

I'm not British, but 10 minutes is not that late. I would not find it rude - in principle - to enter a two-hour lecture 10 minutes late.
However, what is rude when arriving late is walking all the way across the hall, finding a seat in the middle of the row, and squeezing in front of people.
It would be fine to stand in the back, or sit only if you can reach a chair without being too disruptive.
From the comments: "I am British, and slipping into the back late would seem reasonable. The problem can be lecture theatre design with the only access at the front; then you have a dilemma"
Even then, I can't tell you the name of more than one person I've seen come late to a talk. I've been that person. Don't worry about it.

I am British, and slipping into the back late would seem reasonable.  The problem can be lecture theatre design with the only access at the front; then you have a dilemma

@ChrisH I once had a class in a 400+ seat lecture hall. These types of rooms always have back entrances, but one student came in 10-15 minutes late through the front entrance. The front entrance had a heavy metal sliding door that opened via an electric motor after pressing a button. The lecture was obviously interrupted, and everybody stared at the latecomer for about a minute as the door slowly opened and closed again.

Basically, I agree with the above. As long as you do not disrupt the lecturer and others you're fine coming late. I had lectures I missed by half-time due to transport issues and could slip in at the back and still catch some information.

@JordiVermeulen in some of ours, the back door is now only a fire escape

@JordiVermeulen Were you attending class in jail?

@AzorAhai-him- the building was designed by a famous architect, so it has some... interesting choices.

Please don't worry about it. Missing the lecture was not a problem; these kinds of lectures are generally advertised to the whole university community and in particular everyone in the department. If everyone who was invited attended there might not have been enough seats for them all.
Also, having several buildings with similar names is also not uncommon. It often comes from having a generous donor who made more than one donation towards buildings and get the honour of being linked to it.
Your question asked about being late. This does not have a simple answer, as it often depends on the architecture of the venue in question. In all of the lecture theatres I have used there are entrances to the front by the stage and at the back behind the seats. I do notice that some students who are not familiar with new rooms can enter next to me when arriving late to class. The wily ones sneak in at the back and sit down inconspicuously.
So you could have made your lateness public and suffered personal embarrassment, or you could have arrived unnoticed and learned useful things at the talk. However, even in the worst case scenario, in the UK, even those who were irritated by your lateness would have been grateful that you managed to make it.

I always find it incredibly irritating when multiple buildings on a university campus have the same (donor's) name. I have ended up in the wrong place for an event a few times because of it. It seems like the height of arrogance to insist on naming multiple buildings after yourself. One is a suitable tribute. Cover each building with the donor's name in gigantic letters for all I care, but why needlessly confuse people by giving multiple buildings literally the same name???

@qdread: This is why buildings should be numbered. They can have names, too, but numbers have the advantage of being immune to vanity.

@Kevin well, until you have a donor who insists on a certain number building just to mess with people

As a British person who both gives lectures, and who is perpetually late for everything, I'd say

< 5 minutes late: Don't even think about it. The host is probably still doing the introduction, if they've even started that.

5-10 minutes late. Probably be fine, try not to make too much noise as you enter and either stand at the back/side or sit on the end of the front/back row.

10-15 minutes Starting to get a bit rude. People might tut or be briefly irritated, but not enough to take note of who you are, and will probably have forgotten it in a couple of minutes. Probably worth it if you are particularly keen on seeing the lecture or need to be seen there.

more than 15 minutes. Now you really are starting to be late. For a 1 hour lecture, you've missed more than 25%. Going in can still be worth it, it is unlikely to be held against you, but I would think carefully about it.

The above applies to a 1 hour lecture, so the times might be a bit longer for 2 hours, but not double.

As a non-British person who gives lectures, I'm always annoyed by anyone who comes in late regardless of the time being late. However, I would not interrupt my lecture.

@BrauerSuzuki These things are definitely going to be culturally specific.

My opinion:
You should have quietly entered the room and stayed at the back - if allowed. Do that next time. Or better, leave enough time to find an unfamiliar room.
That said, I don't think your decision not to try is significant. Since you are professionally pretty distant from the speaker, it's likely that you were never missed.

Could you please share your thoughts on this so I can make a better
decision when I find myself in a similar situation in the future?

If this is truly your question, I'd say you could make a better decision in the future by being prepared and knowing where you are going ahead of time.
While reading your account, I kept thinking two things:

Why did you not prepare beforehand to know exactly where you were going, especially since it was a place you'd never been? Which lead me to:
You truly didn't want to attend the lecture, or didn't care either way whether you attended or not.

As for your question of of "how rude" it is, I'd say it boils down to your own personal measures of dignity and respect for others. There's no objective measure.

Thank you for your answer and I appreciate your opinion.
In fact, I did look up the location beforehand and I even walked through the area where the (wrong) building was located a few days prior to the lecture so I wouldn’t get lost. Also, on the day of the lecture, I arrived there more than 20 minutes earlier than the starting time to look for the entrance and the lecture hall.
It was never the case that I "didn't want to attend the lecture" or "didn't care” about it.
Could you please refrain from making unwarranted assumptions?

@MYKD This is a Q&A format with no context other than that you provide. People have to assume a context in order to answer or comment. If you do not want answers or comments with assumptions you do not like, you can not ask questions, but it is better to just accept that people will not know everything, and even learn from the way other people read your questions.

@david Thank you for your opinion. I understand that my original post does not give the whole picture of the situation, but the question of whether I prepared in advance or was truly willing to attend the lecture is irrelevant to the discussion of how rude it is to be late for it. I don't find it necessary to make assumptions regarding that point. As someone who made efforts to get there on time and regrets not having been able to do so (which I believe can be inferred from the original post), I don’t think that these assumptions contribute to the discussion in a positive way.

You asked "Could you please share your thoughts...so I can make a better decision in the future?", and I shared my thoughts. My friend, you're going to be in situations where "how rude it is" is completely irrelevant in the face of being punctual.
You were late because you didn't know where you were going, because you were unprepared. You didn't make ABSOLUTELY SURE you knew where you were going. Blaming google maps or going to the wrong building the day before aren't going to change facts. Bottom line, be a grown up, be prepared and be on time. That's how you make a better decision.


text:
What should I call my mathematics thesis's 1st chapter that covers background concepts?
I'm preparing my masters thesis in mathematics (Stochastic Calculus).
My first chapter consists of recalling some concepts like

Hölder's inequality.

Clarke's generalized gradient.

Grönwall's inequality

Convex functions.

What is a proper name for this chapter ? I went with Useful Theorems but it felt somewhat different than what I'm used to see in books.

I think this question might be opinion-based. Personally, I think something like "mathematical preliminaries" is suitable.

@Galen Thanks ! That's a good title for it. It's about optimal control in markovian switching stochastic systems.

If you call the first chapter "Useful Theorems", what does that suggest about the theorems in the rest of the thesis?

"Chapter 1 : I am born".  OK, not original and possibly more detail than needed.  Fallback to "Introduction" which sounds like a good way to start an ...  introduction ?  Or put another way, I think you're overthinking this.

A journal for which I regularly review would probably want such a section called "Theoretical Background."

Is this after your Introduction to the problem or is that in the introduction?

Preliminaries or just Introduction.

Not an answer to the question, but maybe relevant anyway: the theorems you mention seem to be quite a mixed big of results rather than an introduction into one specific topic. It might thus be worthwhile considering to put those result in an appendix rather than in the first chapter. (But needless to say you should double-check with your advisor before doing so.)

The question is specific to your scientific discipline IMHO. I'd ask it on math.SX maybe.

How about what you used in the title of your post: "Background concepts"

Prolegomena to Any Future Convexity

"What should I call [...] chapter that covers background concepts?" → Why not call it just that: "Background concepts"?

A standard way to go is to write "Preliminaries" and give the definitions, notations, theorems, etc. which you use throughout the thesis.

Or Preliminaries or Introduction or Overview.

Another common option, along these lines, is “Background”

@JonCuster I'm in a different field (Physics/Spectroscopy/Semiconductors) but I would expect this to be the chapter after the introduction. E.g. my PhD thesis "Introduction" was 4 pages of scene-setting with no equations or figures; that was followed by "Theoretical Background" - 40 pages with plenty of maths and diagrams.  I'd expect both chapters to be shorter in a Master's thesis of course.

Preliminaries, Introduction, or Overview are all fine, depending on contents. // Establish notation. State theorems you will use, but without proof (unless method of proof is closely related the main part of the thesis). This chapter will probably not be repeated in any related papers you'll submit. // Start 2nd chapter with new material in a form that will be easy to condense for publication. (Important elements of proofs in the main part of the chapter (details in notes at end). You are not writing a textbook, but motivating, stating, proving new things.

It's not really the preliminaries of OP's work, those are very-well-established and very-widely-applicable definitions and results.

@einpoklum I always interpreted "Preliminaries" as "read the things given in this chapter to follow the rest of the manuscript flawlessly"

A somewhat standard structure would be:

Introduction - explain what are you trying to accomplish and why it is important

Background and related work - briefly explain all key concepts that the reader needs to know to understand your thesis

..followed by methods/proofs/results/analysis/discussion

It may be worthwhile to separate to some extent two sorts of "background". One sort is the background and context needed to understand what you've done, and why you'd want to do it, and why it's progress... The other sort (obviously with overlap), is the background to understand the guts/proofs/... of your work.
It is often a mistake to combine the two... somehow in the mistaken belief that perfect logical order is necessary... or something.
So one could have "context/background", as well as "technical prerequisites"... Some readers might appreciate your making the distinction.
... and my joke-analogue is that to explain to someone why an automatic transmission may be better than a manual, and what's involved, ... FIRST say "ok, so you know about the Carnot cycle?" ...


text:
Do academic libraries preserve the contents of books before selling them?
I’m a mathematician (after a fashion), working in industry, and I find great value in older books about geometry, written between around 1850 and 1920. I notice that my favorite books are often offered for sale on the internet, and, after I purchase them, I typically find that they came from some academic library, somewhere. I have mixed feelings about this: I love the fact that I can own the books, but it worries me that libraries are ditching them.
Now my question: when academic libraries get rid of books, do they typically scan them, first? Or, is there some systematic effort to convert older (no longer copyrighted) materials into digital form. I can’t stand the thought that this stuff will be lost.

Google Books has many millions of books scanned. That’s where I’d check. I very much doubt many libraries are scanning books on the way out as an individual project-they’re selling them due to lack of interest, after all.

Don't forget that the interlibrary loan system implies that not every library needs to keep copies of all books, especially those that are seldom requested.

I've retrieved books from library disposals on several occasions; each time the stated strategy was about disposing of duplicates (the library had had multiple copies) or older editions, with the claimed intent that there would always be one copy of the book remaining available.

I worked at a university library and it is common for librarians to identify books in the collection as not needed any more, due to age, condition, duplication, lack of recent circulation and/or a note from a professor saying that the material in the book is covered in newer books. These books are then "withdrawn" from the collection. If they are to be sold, they should be stamped "WITHDRAWN" somewhere at the beginning of the book. Unfortunately books are also sometimes stolen or lost. You should be able to ask the library if the book is still part of the collection.

On the plus side, in the past 15 years I've gotten books that I never expected to find for purchase (before amazon, that is). Not only that, but many of the 100+ such books I've gotten over the years are nearly untouched and in excellent condition. Two recent acquisitions, each about $50 and essentially untouched, and each I'd been searching off-and-on for many years for a copy under several hundred dollars: Naber's Set-Theoretic Topology and Łojasiewicz's An Introduction to the Theory of Real Functions.

Thanks for the answers. The thought of a classic beloved book lying in a dumpster makes me physically sick. I guess I'll just keep buying them. I have the "funding", I have the space, and I certainly have the motivation.

Wouldn't scanning the book to a digital format be a copyright violation?

"a note from a professor saying that the material in the book is covered in newer books".  I have very little confidence in that assessment process.

Other answers here have mentioned that libraries typically do not scan their holdings, and have described why this is both more expensive and more complicated than you might expect.
It's worth mentioning, in this context, that although the MLA sector (museums, libraries and archives) seems rather homogeneous from outside, those in the business see those three strands as being very different from each other.
In particular, the big difference between archives and libraries is when and why they chuck things out.  And all three have to be selective about material, for the brutal reason that they have finite amounts of shelf-space (or digital analogue).  I once heard someone giving a talk in this area remark that ‘the dirty secret of the library sector is the “deaccession facility” (sc. the large skip) at the back door’.
An archive deletes/destroys/discards stuff at accession time.  Archives are typically given stuff rather than actively seeking it (a national archive might have a very specific obligation to hold on to government materials no longer in active use, and might have elaborate rules concerning what they are obliged to accept and whom they are allowed to show it to afterwards).   When material is offered to the archive, the decision is made whether to accept it or not, made on legal grounds perhaps, or bearing in mind the possible interests of future historians.  Once it's admitted to the archive, though, the typical plan is that it stays there.
A librarian, however, would regard themself as serving current information users, as opposed to historians yet unborn.  They are more willing to accession things, and also more willing to deaccession them if they're not earning their keep.  Different libraries will obviously have radically different notions of what counts as a book ‘earning its keep’.  A national library might well have an obligation to be given and to accept every book published in the country.  One library might see its user population as including the scholars who would eventually want to read that 19th century geometry book; another might see that book as simply taking up valuable shelf space that its users would prefer to be filled with a new purchase.
Both are perfectly rational libraries.  Libraries also know each others' holdings, so they'll typically try not to throw out the last copy of something: ILL is your friend and theirs.
Museums are a bit of both, but dealing with miscellaneous lumps of stuff other than books.

No. As indicated in other answers they do not scan them, and usually they scrap them. When you see ones being sold, this is actually a library being considerate. Some libraries send them for pulping or even landfill in huge quantities.
It is because, often, academic institutions and their librarians see the purpose of the library different to us, and their attitude to the books can be different to ours. This  is also why they do not scan the volumes; saving  the knowledge is often not seen as the purpose of their library.
I have felt strongly about this in the past and my office contains many tomes I "rescued" from waste skips behind a library!
Many academic libraries do not see themselves as repositories of past knowledge but an information resource for supporting student study. If a book is not "borrowed" by a student or researcher then often they feel it has no place in the library. I have, in the past, pointed out, that students consult many books from the shelves without taking them on loan and there is no record of this ephemeral use of the books. For example, when I set an assignment on the history of a topic students may consult many older books in their search for information but borrow few. However, the librarians feel there should just be a single book called "The History of X" that students can borrow. How that book comes to be created is not their problem!
The librarians problem also stem from not having enough funding to create the archive space needed for storage. This is why serious researchers have to depend on their National repository library, which does act as an archive, but is often not available to the average undergraduate student doing a class paper.
Although having several volumes of six figure mathematical tables, including tables of high entropy random numbers on my shelf, the library could not justify their existence on theirs.

This doesn't explain why the librarians do not scan these volumes. That would solve the problems of limited shelf space, optimizing for ready access, etc.

@CodyGray It did implicitly, but I made that reason more explicit for clarity.

@CodyGray I think scanning books is still fairly expensive isn't it?

@DRF - Not especially expensive, but certainly time-consuming and also a copyright nightmare

I am surprised that you actually had to go dumpster-diving for those books though. All the libraries I have known had some special "free for the taking" shelf/table/box near the entrance where those books were put for a week or two before actually being tossed.

"students consult many books from the shelves without taking them on loan and there is no record of this ephemeral use of the books" -- but there are commonly signs in libraries that say, "Leave books on a cart, do not return to shelf." While this is in part to keep ephemerally used books from being accidentally reshelved by the patron in the wrong place and being lost for a time, it is also so libraries can "track which items are used by people, even if those items are not checked out". So if patrons obey these signs, there is a record.

@Valorum: In the US, the books OP is talking about ("written between around 1850 and 1920") are all in the public domain anyway (because at that time, US copyright had a fixed term). Other countries' laws may differ, but in most countries, a work is in the public domain if the author has been dead for 70+ years.

@Kevin I thought it was if the work was older than Mickey Mouse. https://www.google.com/search?q=mickey+mouse+curve&tbm=isch

@user253751: It's possible that Mickey Mouse is already in the public domain, and if it is not, then it will be as soon as 2024.

@Kevin I'm sure nobody is going to win a lawsuit based on the exact wording of the copyright notice. However, they may win based on the fact it actually expired.

@user253751: You can be as sure as you like, but you're mistaken, because that's exactly what happened to Happy Birthday.

high entropy random numbers?? Sounds like https://xkcd.com/221/

This feels as ungracious as a student saying “My prof doesn’t care about helping students” because they wouldn’t give unlimited help on homework — the prof may care deeply about teaching, but must balance it against other duties. Similarly, librarians (and their budget committees) are usually well aware of preservation issues, but they have other legitimate priorities, and limited resources.  The answers of lupe and Norman Gray give a much better-informed picture of the situation.

When academic libraries get rid of books, do they typically scan them first? Not typically with commonly available works. If a country operates Legal Deposit most works have been archived in national repositories. Other libraries can borrow from national libraries and inter-library loans mean library visitors can get access to works no longer present in the library they visit. Since the 1990s there has been a transition from physical access to materials to digital access. The primary benefit for institutions is the savings in manpower (book handling and walking the shelves) and floor space (more study spaces and less shelving).
Is there some systematic effort to convert older (no longer copyrighted) materials into digital form? Yes. This is one aim of the Internet Archive, originally established to archive the web, it now digitally archives most media types, including books. It works with many larger libraries to digitise books. People who wish to preserve knowledge contribute to their effort to retain human knowledge.

One can use the online search feature of WorldCat to get an idea of which libraries have a physical copy of a book. The interlibrary loan of physical books is important.  I read a lot of books that way.

Also Project Gutenberg.?

I saw the dismissals of parts of a couple of academic libraries and they didn't scan the dismissed books. It's just two examples, but I suspect it's the commonest case. The effort to scan lots of books in a short time is huge and the personnel is usually limited (dismissals frequently happen in bulk during reorganisations or restructures).
On the other hand, there are libraries, like the Biblioteque Nationale de France, which offer the service of photocopying or scanning rare books at a price that includes the payment of the copyright fees (side note: I actually used that service from another country, and as a memento for those who come here asking how to find rare books, I can say: learn to use library services around the whole world!).

No, it's not typical to scan books before throwing them out - unless the book is important
I've seen a number of answers saying how unfortunate it is that libraries don't scan them, and this strongly underestimates the work involved in a useful scanning project.
I've spent roughly three years working as a developer on a large digitization project for an institution with roughly 300 years of important archives. Getting a useful scan involved these steps:
1) Working out copyright/existing agreements:
This isn't an easy step. Some books can be in the public domain. Others need the copyright holder to be contacted, which may take some considerable detective work, in the case of older works.
2) Preparation of the source material:
This is typically done by an archivist, possibly working with a bookbinder. Typically, in the past, you needed to remove the book spine, to turn it into flat sheets - it's a bit less necessary now as there's software that will work out how the page bows and flatten it, but for good quality scans removing the book's spine and restoring it is still the gold standard
3) Scanning: To do this at any sort of speed takes a large, highly automated, and expensive setup. Our test system could do 1 page every minute. We were up to 10 by the end of my involvement in the project, and this required 2 full time employees working with the material (admittedly, these were unique items, you could go faster on books going to be thrown out anyway, but you still need to ensure decent image quality
4) Doing stuff with the scans: This is where I come in! having a giant server full of book images accessible to the public is fine, but not very useful. We'd typically add metadata to each book scanned, we might do OCR on the documents, which is pretty imperfect still, so needs someone to skim through for mistakes. If any of the books are being released under a licence, you need to put access controls in place.
5) Keeping funding for the project so all your hard work doesn't just vanish: surprisingly, the hardest step out of the 5. Academic institutes are normally happy to commit funding for long enough to get a nice news headline, and have a thing to show off at the next benefactors meeting.
Basically, the TL:DR of this is that doing this kind of project, even on a small scale, takes a lot of person hours. Your academic library probably has limited resources to preserve, say, older textbooks - they might reasonably argue that if the material is still covered in modern textbooks, and the book isn't of particular importance, something else should get priority.


text:
What is the scientific term for a “research gap”?
After I read about 40 papers in my research topic, I summarized 25 of them in my thesis, explaining methods used and solutions provided in the literature survey and literature-review sections. I found out a gap in the previous researches and would like to point it out in my thesis, in order to explain where my work would fit.
Should I call this section research gap, or there are a better scientific terms usually used?

I think that's called the literature review.

I believe 'literature review' is a deep explanation about previous research in the field.

While the existing answers cover your direct question for the section title, my impression is that "research gap" or similar terms are indeed used in papers, as well. They do not appear as a section title, but in the running text of your paper, you could, for example, write something like: "We have noticed a gap in related approaches concerning XYZ." Example, example, example.

knowledge gap, maybe?

"Literature review" would be a good term. It refers to the section in a paper where you review the existing literature and show where your new piece of research fits in.
Don't confuse this with a "review article", which summarizes and integrates a large number of previous publications, typically far more publications than you'd review for an original article. A review article typically only does the synthesis, and does not add any original research of its own, although it may well point out gaps in existing research for subsequent investigations.
In you want to draw specific attention to the fact that the question you will investigate has not been covered in previous research, you could call it "open questions".

I have wrote the "Literature review" and come out with a conclusion in its' end, in this conclusion I draw a tree figure combining all previous researches, now in the next chapter which is "Research Design"  I would like to point to the research gap clearly in a separate section. What should I call it while I already have a complete "Literature review" chapter.

@IsmailAl-Jubbah: I added a possibility.

Depending on the field, "State of the art" or "Mise en scène" is more commonly used.

@yo' "Mise en scène"? in what field is that?

@CapeCode In my field (TCS/dynamical systems), where many people are French, so everybody thinks that using French is cool :-)

@yo' I see. It's usually a term for drama and cinema, interesting to see it used in an academic paper (that is not about drama or cinema), you have an example?

@CapeCode http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0331

The standard phrase is "a gap in the literature."

thank you, I had googled it and it perfectly fit, I will use "a gap in the literature."

@IsmailAl-Jubbah: I agree with Noah Snyder that this is the standard phrase, but I would avoid using it to describe your work.  One reason is that it sounds unambitious, like you are saying you add something minor to complete an otherwise well-explored topic, and this is not the image you want to project for your dissertation.  (It's true for some dissertations, but not all, and in any case it's not something to emphasize.)

A second reason is that there's a common joke about filling a much-needed gap in the literature (which looks like a compliment, but it's an insult since it's the gap that is much needed, not the paper that fills it).  Maybe I'm off base about this, but my impression is that this joke is widespread enough that many people will see a comment about a gap in the literature and immediately think of the joke.  That's not a serious problem, but it makes the phrase "gap in the literature" a little less useful than it was before it got humorous associations.

@AnonymousMathematician I got your point I gonna use term, it would be more academic.

Open problem, unsolved problem, need for research, unexploted potentials, areas not covered by previuos research, questions not asked in previous reseach,

I found out a gap in the previous researches and would like to point it out in my thesis, in order to explain where my work would fit.
Should I call this section research gap, or there are a better scientific terms usually used?

There are two parts to this.
First is the literature review, or summary of existing literature. These are short summaries of the 40 papers you have researched and descriptions of their key points.
Second, you might want to have a section called research questions or research issues. This can take the form of statements like, "existing literature does not appropriately address X, Y, or Z" or "existing literature presents weaknesses for addressing A, B, C" types of things. Basically building the case for why your thesis exists. What problems with existing literature are you trying to solve?

I'm writing a master thesis about Test Automation in Web Applications,
research questions or research issues is a good suggestion, but I found "a gap in the literature" is perfect fit.

"Knowledge gap" is another way to express that there is something missing from the literature.

Contribution
This would also work as a (sub-) section heading. I prefer it to "research gap/lacuna/desideratum" etc., because it focuses on what your research does to close the "gap".

The meaning of differentiation in [dictionary.cambridge.org][1]is given as :

"the act of showing or finding the difference between things that are compared".

So I suggest you may use the phrase "The research differentiation".
[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/


text:
Commercial product with the same functiality as my research project
I’m writing my master’s thesis about visual automated testing, which will be summarized to paper.
In my theoretical study, I reference other people’s work, papers and study about this topic. Meanwhile, there are some new commercial products that have the same functionality as my research project and they provide a 30-day free trail.
Now my questions are:

Should I reference those commercial products too in my theoretical study or should I just ignore them?
If I reference them, do I have to add a comparison of results between those products and my implementation in my practical study?
There are no publications on the commercial product I found. So could I publish a paper on my work and if yes, should I ignore those methods?

Just a note that you should read in details the conditions of the free trial: in some cases it could forbid you from publishing results from the product, although in any case you should still at least mention that the product exists.

@MarcGlisse , oh yeah, I almost forget about that, thank you for mentioning this issue, I gonna check the license before publishing any result.

Are there really no publications on the commercial product?  There's nothing stopping you citing an instruction manual, or product brochure.

@SimonB , yeah, even one of them work completely online, I don't install any program on PC, I just install add-on on the browser and it do the rest, but their instruction manual is a YouTube videos, can I still cite it, can't I ?

I'm sure you could cite a YouTube video.  But I would prefer to cite the company's web site, or even better, some specific brochure on that web site.

You can totally reference non-free software in your work. The licence under which it is released has no impact on the technical and scientific merit of its algorithms and features. The only issue is that it is harder to know exactly what the system does if the code is not open, and that it will be harder (and probably more expensive) to reproduce any research based on it.
There are a lot of papers out there (often coming from private-sector reserachers rather than from academics, but still) which are exclusively focused on industrial products under proprietary licence. What is important is what is said about them, to which extent they are analysed, whether they are properly compared to other existing systems... Of course, it is easier to do that if you have inside knowledge of the product (i.e. you have participated to its design for instance), but it will remain difficult (not impossible) for the community to validate or refute your claims.
In a state of the art, if you know that a non-free system has a relevant feature, or solves a related problem, or contribute to the field, you just cannot ignore it, it would be a deep mistake, scientifically speaking (*). However, it might be useful to take precautions about the verifiability of the system's claim.
For what it's worth, the software development attached to my PhD thesis relied on a proprietary framework. It's not ideal in my opinion, but it doesn't invalidate the corresponding research, as long as the choice is duly motivated (for instance, no other framework provides feature X).
(*) "Listen to me: someone who doesn’t know the truth is just thick-headed. But someone who does know it and calls it a lie is a crook." (Berthold Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 9 - you want to be a researcher? This play is a must read).

Well, my research doesn't depend on these products, but produce the same result as their demo did.
So I suppose, I will reference them in my practical study, but not in the theoretical study. Is that OK?

I understand you have two separated "state of the art" or "related works" sections, one theoretical and one practical. I guess that if you don't have any theoretical info on those tools, and if their authors haven't formulated any theoretical claims (in the sense of your classification), then there is no point in mentioning them in your theoretical related works and yes, they could be cited only in the practical section. It is just an uninformed opinion though, and you should check your strategy with your advisor.

Yes, I have two separated state of the art, theoretical and practical, theoretical section focus on published and non-technical work, while practical section focus on implementation and technical work.

I think you absolutely should mention the found products in your thesis or papers. If you can compare them with your work this is even better!
To show that you know about these products is usually appreciated and gives you a higher competence. When you do not mention them it might be interpreted that you either a) don't know the market and state of the art
or b) you try to make yourself appear smarter than you are by hiding/lie about competitors. It is likely that there are people in the reviewers or audience that know the other products so that this issue comes up sooner or later. It is always better to include discussion of your competitors (esp. in computer science), even if you were at the end of long work and find out last minute that there is something available very similar to your work. To lie or conceal the competitors does not improve your work and if this becomes known it will give you a very bad reputation (for good reason).
So write about what you found. I also don't see any problems for scientific publication.

That was helpful, you encouraged me to do the right thing, thank you

I am not familiar with your area but I do not see a problem here. Basically about every book you reference is not for free anyway. Much of the laboratory tools used in natural science are neither for free.
If it is necessary that your experiments be reproduced then the facility will provide the means to the researchers to do so. Science has never been "for free" and research can cost quite a lot of money.

I got your point, Well, I should have said these non-free products are also closed-source, So I should deal with them as a black-box (I mean, I don't know the way they reach their result), while in published papers and books they describe their works and explain how they reach their result.
So can I reference closed-method (non-free products) or just reference   opened-method (papers and books) ?

I see the problem but unfortunately cannot give you an answer to this as in my field it would not matter (the result is independent from the computation methods). However, I do not see it as a problem as it is theoretically possible to disassemble the programme. Is it from a reliable source (e.g. a well-renowned university)?

Yes it's form well known company in this field, so I will cite their work in my study.

I think as long as the others can find out how you did it (e.g. by also buying the programme and reproduce your results) there should be no problem. It gets, however, tricky, when your results are not replicable since then you could tell anything and defend your result (even if it were made up) by simply blaming the others' methods.


text:
Almost identical general statement with different citations – is this a problem?
Paper X states that

A is bla bla, but also referred to as B [1] and C [2].

I recently wrote:

A is referred to as B [3] and C [4].

where Paper [3] and [4] are about the same topic as papers [1] and [2], respectively.
Would this almost identical sentence be an issue (in the sense of plagiarism), in particular since I cite Paper X for another reason elsewhere in my paper?

Then I don't see why you need to cite their sentence about [0] being referred to as [2] and [1]. Many similar papers have been written and will continue to be written ...

This form of basic sentence is common and hence would not be regarded as plagiarism. You are not taking any distinct sentence and hopefully you are not providing the same references as specified in the first sentence.
Plagiarism occurs when you use the work of another without proper attribution. I would not consider your query to fit in this description.

thanks. no i use two different papers identifying the same thing.

Then by all means, this isn't plagiarism, @vasper.