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Which software is used to write scientific textbooks, especially in engineering?
Which software do learned professionals use - LaTeX or Google Docs or Word or any other software to write their books (especially engineering level scientific textbooks)?
Points to consider:

Could have diagrams, images, tables, graphs at quarter or half or complete page or in-between the text
Divided into chapters, should it be a different doc for each chapter in a Word/G.Doc like software?
Citation management should be easy

Some some people use all kids of obscure software, the vast majority use LaTeX.

Writing complex equations is quite a task in LaTeX. Sometimes image placement bothers too. Rest is good.

@DimitriVulis Outside of a few fields (including those overrepresented here) most people haven't even heard of LaTeX.

@DimitriVulis, I wouldn't say vast majority. Maybe not even a majority.

@SachinMotwani: Writing complex equations is quite a task in LaTeX. Hmm, seriously? Not too long ago I had a job where I was required to regularly type equations in Microsoft Word - and it was really pain in the ass compared to LaTeX.

Writing complex equations is quite a task in anything but LaTeX.

@BryanKrause But “most people” aren't professional typesetters or textbook editors. Granted, LaTeX is neither the only nor even the most prevalent DTP but if you're a professional typesetter and you haven't heard of LaTeX you (a) are part of a tiny minority, and (b) lack intellectual curiosity.

@JochenGlueck Compared to LyX? Absolutely.

@KonradRudolph OP is asking about the people writing textbook content as far as I can tell, not professional typesetters.

@Bryan Krause: But those few fields are precisely those inhabited by people who write scientific textbooks :-)

Have a look at the publisher's website - they usually have templates and guidelines for document preparation.  For example, see https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/book-authors/prepare-your-manuscript/index.html  or https://press.princeton.edu/resources/manuscript-preparation or https://global.oup.com/academic/pdf/authors/authors-handbook.pdf?cc=gb&lang=en

I can't get over how few people in Engineering know how to use LaTeX, especially PhD students.

The second part of this question is a duplicate of https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5414/ . I would suggest to remove it and focus on the first part ("which software is used").

@sleepy: Fixing overful hboxes and underful vboxes can be quite a task in LaTeX. Also it's quite hard to fix some of the errors if you forgot a {, |, or &&

Modern packages in LaTeX as well as a wide spectrum of easy-to-find examples and of course tex.SE have done a great job in making LaTeX much easier to write in the way you want. No comparison to the time when you had to tweak your way around quirks etc. and to those guys who x-splained to you that if LaTeX doesn't offer it, you don't need it (yes, seriously!). For a non-fully professional software, LaTeX produces some of the best-looking documents I have seen (they used a different font from the usual one, and hadn't I known, I would not have realized it was LaTeX).

What publishers and authors choose or prefer for document processing really depends on the discipline.
Your profile says you are interested in "Electronics and Communication Engineering". For that kind of technical writing I suspect LaTeX is the system of choice, both for you and for your publisher.
It's easy to prepare large documents with several files. LaTeX manages citations, diagrams and images. As an author you focus on content. The publisher can then make format and design decisions that require no retyping.
The folks at TeX stackexchange will gladly help you.

Yes, the folks at TeX.Stackexchange are very helpful. And it’s a good thing they are, because beginners often need lots of help. I just looked at the first page of questions, and there are two asking how you change font size, and three asking about spacing between various types of items. These things sound simple, but they’re not.

@bubba These things are (relatively) complicated because the entire philosophy behind LaTeX is different from MS Word. In LaTex you decide what kind of document you want and then LaTex decides what the appropriate fontsize is. So ideally you should have no need to change the font size yourself. Sometimes LaTeX makes bad choices but it general it makes better choices than 99% of people who are not professional typesetters.

Yeah, I know the philosophy — just type the text and let TeX and the document rules control the formatting. It doesn’t work 100%. Take a look at the source for the TeX book or the LaTeX book. Both are full of little tweaks to improve appearance. Anyway, newbies think (rightly or wrongly) that they need to adjust formatting. So, either someone has to tell them how to do that (which is difficult), or has to teach them “the philosophy”. Either way, a lot of people would be in trouble if it weren’t for the generous folks at TeX.Stackexchange.

The use of “styles” in MS Word follows the same approach — it doesn’t work 100% there, either.

"As an author you focus on content." <- That's the epitome of wishful thinking my friend.

I've written several books, maybe a bit "advanced", in mathematics, and I've used plain TeX in all (due to getting committed to plain, as opposed to La-, TeX, to be able to manage small formatting details that my publisher 25 years ago could not cope with...)
But, yes, some dialect of TeX.
For diagrams, I've used xypic, which is by now old-fashioned, but still adequate for my purposes.
By this year, it is a bit silly to use plain TeX, since competent publishers can do whatever reformatting on their own (rather than complaining that when they print out your draft, and hold it up to the light, the page numbers don't match up... sigh...) Plain TeX does obligate one to load fonts and stuff, which, yes, I figured out how to do ages ago... at at time when, also, the RAM in many computers was awkwardly small to include the actual font files for everything, as opposed to the font metric files... and that kind of lower-level stuff.
I gather that a slightly more modern, but maybe still several-years-old, graphical package for (La)Tex is "tikz"...
In any case, I'd wager that 99% of academic math people in the U.S. use some version of TeX for substantive writing. Yes, I can imagine that some might be coerced to use "Word"... but I'd tend to think that with current personal-computer capabilities, the end-product of a PDF document would be viewed as acceptable, regardless of the "engine" that produced it.

+1 for an answer based on actual experience rather than semi-informed speculation.

And if some publisher happens to want Word files, there are (per a quick search) plenty of ways to convert your LaTeX files to Word.  Presumably the same might apply to plain TeX.  (I don't know how well they work, having never needed to use one of them.)

@jamesqf In my limited experience they work very badly, On the other hand, if a publisher is requiring MS word documents they deserve what they get :)

@jamesqf I've done so once and I hope to never have to do it again.

@jamesqf At work I occasionally need documents that are written in LaTeX but look like Word documents. It can be done but LaTeX produces tons of warnings.

A few years ago I was the lead editor for a business engineering textbook. Right at the beginning of the project we had to clarify the question of which software to use. In this field, LaTeX is largely unknown because everyone uses Word. But since it was already clear that the book would have well over 1000 pages and Word has problems with such large documents, we decided on LaTeX. This was also due to the fact that the manuscript had to be a unified whole in order to reduce errors in the typesetting and thus the time needed for corrections. (This publisher had outsourced its editing to a country where non-native speakers worked on it).
The publisher provided us with an adapted template in which we worked. The finished manuscript in LaTeX was then converted internally by the publisher into a custom XML format, on the basis of which the typesetting was carried out.
We could also have submitted data in Word, PDF, HTML, RTF or other formats; this is all converted internally by the publisher. Don't worry about what format the publisher wants, but think about what you can work with best.

"This publisher had outsourced its editing to a country where non-native speakers worked on it" - wow. Just wow. I wouldn't go near a publisher like that. (Mind, I am a non-native English speaker myself).

@YuriyS I believe Springer, one of the main publishers in math, does that at least some of the time (I'm pretty sure they did this with one of my journal papers), but in any case a lot of publishers don't carefully correct English anyway (as evidenced by many books and papers I've read).

@Kimball I didn't want to reveal any names, but… yeah.

"LaTeX is largely unknown because everyone uses Word." <- Everyone in such fields uses Word because, and sorry for sounding conceited, they're being too crude and careless about typesetting to bother learning LaTeX; or - their publishers just take the MS-Word content and use something better.

@einpoklum My impression is that the further away you get from mathematics/science and the closer you get to economics, the less interest there is in how things work and the more desire there is for pretence, for illusion without the work behind it. Microsoft is catering to exactly this target group. But these are prejudices, of course.

Publishers of books are normally pretty flexible about what they accept from authors. They don't want to put up barriers. It needs to be something that works for the author and that the production staff can work with. For textbooks there is usually a "copy editor" involved as well as a production staff. The publisher seldom (in my experience with three large publishers, though a bit dated) asks the author to produce final page proofs. Those are done by professionals.
The author is, then, required to proofread those pages and quickly provide any needed corrections. What happens in the background may be LaTeX or some older typesetting technology, though probably not hot lead anymore.
They might even provide professional help on preparation of images for the final copy.
A publisher may have preferences, but for books, probably not rigid requirements.

Over the past few decades, I’ve written hundreds of technical documents containing diagrams, tables, and mathematics, including a 400 page book about computer geometry.
Prior to starting the book, I used MS Word for everything. For the book, I switched back and forth between Word and LaTeX 3 or 4 times, and eventually settled on LaTeX. I still use MS Word or Google Docs for everything except books.
It took me a very long time to get the formatting set up the way I wanted in LaTeX. The memoir package was a big help — in the LaTeX world the solution to every problem is “there’s a package”. But your publisher might give you a document template, anyway, so you’ll have no choice about formatting.
Creating tables in LaTeX is ridiculously complicated, compared to MS Word. For diagrams, the TeX purists favor tools like Tikz and Asymptote, in which you essentially create a picture by writing code. I find this approach impossible, so I make pictures in drawing packages, or PowerPoint, or CAD systems, and include them in the LaTeX document as PDF. That works fine.
I think LaTeX is faster for simple in-line math, but for big complex equations, I find Word faster because I can see the equation emerging as I type it, so I make fewer mistakes.
In the end, I chose LaTeX because I very much like the appearance of the Computer Modern fonts, and getting those to work in MS Word was painful. But some publishers will insist on changing fonts, anyway.
In research-level mathematics and physics, most people use LaTeX for formal documents like books and papers. In elementary mathematics and science, most people use Word. In engineering, I’d guess it’s about 50:50 — in academia, LaTeX use is common, but in industry it’s not.
A lot of folks in the TeX/LaTeX community dislike MS Word or any other software that costs money. So, there’s quite a bit of anti-Word propaganda, some of which is out-dated folk-lore. The people in the Word community don’t have a corresponding dislike for LaTeX because most of them have never even heard of it. So, as you’re reading, you’ll probably find that Word critics are more common than LaTeX critics.

I agree tables (and matrices in equations) can be annoying with LaTeX. Using an online table generator or a LaTeX editor with that feature can help, however, but I still haven't it done as smoothly as in the WYSIWYG systems. E.g. Tikz and pgfplots certainly have steep learning curves. While the TeX enthusiast community may favor them, I think most people who just use TeX to write e.g. papers tend to generate graphics through some other system(s), so you're not alone in that choice.

As for the spreadsheeet to .tex issue, if not natively supported anyway / with a macro (e.g., the older calc2latex, excel2latex), tex.se, has some tradition to assist in the identification of solutions for this e.g., here.

For complex equations in LaTeX, I will often draft them in a standalone editor (e.g. LaTeXiT on the Mac), so that I can typeset as I go without the overhead of typesetting the whole document.

It's not (at least for many of us) about the software costing money, since you can get LibreOffice (which I believe is an MS Word workalike) for free.  It's just that we find writing code for things a lot simpler than e.g. trying to draw when you have no artistic ability, or trying to figure out what all the supposedly "intuitive" icons do.

@Anyon: I agree that matrices are not nice to handle in LaTeX, but it seems to be even worse in Microsoft Word. I just tried to create a large matrix in Word 2019, and I found precisely two ways to do so: this one, or to display the matrix as markup code (which the context menu calls "linear") and change it manually - which is a complete mess compared to LaTeX, since spacing and line breaks can't be used for code formatting.

@JochenGlueck Yeah, that's fair. I originally meant to make a comment just about tables (which I think are handled nicely in Word), but added the mention about matrices at the end. So I didn't intend it as a statement that Word handles matrices nicely.

"for big complex equations, I find Word faster because I can see the equation emerging as I type it," That is exactly why I mentioned LyX in my comment to @JochenGlueck at the top. If I were to write my dissertation in LaTeX in a text editor (as I did for my masters and some papers before) I would have likely never finished it in time. I now use LyX to prepare my lecture notes. And I use LyX to prepare tables to papers prepared in some shared LaTeX environment. Doing them in plain LaTeX is a very terrible experience and leads to errors that cannot be debugged.

@Anyon. I think LaTeX matrices are ok. Maybe even a bit better than Word’s. It’s the LaTeX tables that are painful, in my experience.

A little late, but I just ran across some actual data (as opposed to all the speculation and opinion in the other answers, including mine). There was a study of LaTeX usage by François Brischoux and Pierre Legagneux, published in The Scientist in 2009 (Volume 23, Issue 7, Page 24). I don’t have access to the original paper, but I suppose the following table, which was reproduced here is a good summary:

Things may have changed since 2009, of course.
Many of the other answers here are trying to tell the OP which authoring system is “best” in some sense. That’s not what he asked — he asked which ones are most commonly used. But, if anyone is interested, there’s some data about “best” in this article, published by Knauff and Nejasmic in 2014.  In their tests, they found that using MS Word yields higher productivity than using LaTeX. YMMV, as always.

It's worth noting that the table caption only mentions papers, not textbooks. I expect the trends to remain more or less the same also for textbooks (as people tend to use what they're familiar with), but the numbers would likely change.

If you're working with a publisher, ask them. Chances are they accept virtually all major software. TeX is the obvious one for scientific text, but Word is also fine if you know how to use it. If you're self-publishing then it really doesn't matter, whatever works for you is fine.

Could have diagrams, images, tables, graphs at quarter or half or complete page or in-between the text

If you're working with a publisher, this matters only if you need to refer to other pages while you are writing the manuscript. Otherwise it is irrelevant, do not worry about it. That's because by the time the manuscript's been reformatted it will not look like what you submitted and all the time you spent on this will be wasted. If you're self-publishing then whatever floats your boat.

Divided into chapters, should it be a different doc for each chapter in a Word/G.Doc like software?

Again if you're working with a publisher, this is irrelevant. If you're self-publishing then whatever floats your boat.

What do you mean by "scientific text" here? I'd be surprised if TeX is the obvious choice for authors of biology textbooks, for example.

@Anyon IDK, it looks like a lot of Biology journals, at least, are providing LaTeX templates.

It looks like LaTeX usage in biology was essentially zero in 2009 (see my answer below).

I sometimes help edit high-school mathematics textbooks, which have most of the requirements you mention (not citation management) and are published by an academic press that also does university textbooks, so I expect the process will be similar enough.
This kind of publishing is a group project. Authors generally aren't responsible for their own layout, just for providing the words/equations. In my experience that's usually done in MS Word, using either Mathtype or Word's equation editor; I can only remember one time when an author worked in LaTeX. (NB most of the authors I work with are high-school teachers; I suspect there'd be more LaTeX users among university academics.)
Other editors/etc. then format that material for house style, create diagrams according to the author's sketches, and lay it all out to generate a tidy PDF, usually one per chapter.
Breaking it up into chapters not only keeps file sizes manageable, but also helps with workflow - since there will be several different people working on the same book, you don't want to have each person go through the whole book before the next person in the sequence can start.

You had all kind of reasons to use LaTeX in other answers. The extra few you may want to consider:
PROS:

repeatability: you can compile a LaTeX document several times and when you change a list you will not suddenly have all your headers change font (yes, I had that)
stability: the more text you type in LaTeX, the longer the compilation becomes - but you get something at the end. My good friend stopped his thesis on "(...) this equati" and then he could not neither add nor remove text.

CONS:

unsung suffering when you want to change the default formatting. You really need to dive into the language.
you edit plain text so you do not have the usual hints on headers, bold text etc. (some IDEs can probably handle that)
collaborating is a real pain. No matter what, the "tracking" in Word is much better

CON that is actually a PRO

between what you type and what you see there is a compilation session so it is not immediate. And this is a good thing because you know you have no influence anyway so you concentrate on your text.

EXCEPT for equations, where anything more complicated is beautiful but requires a second CPU in your head to follow the \int{\frac{a\frac{\times}{... where am I...?

I would strongly disagree with putting collaboration as a con for LaTeX. The pain ASCII LaTeX source works very well with the revision control systems used for software development (e.g git, mercurial or Subversion), and the related diff tools. It helps if you follow the practice that each sentence starts a new line in your LaTeX source. This doesn't affect the final appearance,  but means insertions and deletions leave clean diffs.

@StephenC.Steel: I am a developer and use git on a daily basis. It is wonderful when developing with others developers. Having someone not used to it collaborate through diffs, merge requests, etc is simply not an option. This is light-years from a Word tracking that is simple and very intuitive. I can explain to my father by phone how to use it, something impossible with git & co.

@StephenC.Steel: it is even more obvious with online editors such as Google Docs where the collaboration is completely seamless.

To be fair, one can draft the text in Google Docs and then finish it collaboratively in a shared LaTeX environment like Overleaf. But it is more for journal papers, rather than books.

@StephenC.Steel.  Interesting typo. You probably meant “the plain ASCII LaTeX source”, but pain is often present, also.

WRT your CON/PRO, it's pretty easy to write an editor macro that compiles the LaTeX file you're working on, and displays it in a pdf viewer.  So you can see final output whenever you like, but don't have to deal with changes in real time - and especially things like automatic misspelling.  (AKA "spell checkers",)

@jamesqf: yes, what I meant is that the fact that you do not have a WYSIWYG editor helps to understand, after some time, that it is not that useful to peek at what you wrote in its final form because it is going to be good anyway (or that you do not have much control in it). Except for equations :)

note the existence of Overleaf.

@BenBolker: yes, I use it to show LaTeX to my children, we are still far from real tracking features in MS Word (or, to a large extend, in Google Docs)

@WoJ: And things like image placement.  But I don't need or want to see my text continually typeset as I enter characters.  Then too, I'm very familiar with the text editor I use, and can do pretty much everything without thinking about it.  Whereas with some special-purpose tool like Word, or WYSIWYG LaTeX editor (that I don't use all that often), I have to stop and try to look up commands, or resort to just retyping stuff.  (As I do in these comment boxes.)

@WoJ If you are collaborating with someone who is not familiar with revision control tools, you can simply manage this aspect for them. They just email you their updated files and you check it in to your local repo on their behalf and merge changes. They will be amazed at your organizational skills when you you tell them that you've undone that change they made to the wording in the third paragraph of the introduction 5 weeks ago, as you still think your wording was better.

@BenBolker Even a journal paper takes ages to compile in Overleaf. A whole book...  It is always not very pleasent to write the actual text content there.

@VladimirF You can mitigate the long compile times problem by using breaking your book up into separate files for each chapter (or whatever unit is convenient for you to work on) and only compiling the part you need. Here's some explanation from Overleaf specifically: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Multi-file_LaTeX_projects but I recommend doing this even if you're working in plain text.

authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


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Can someone join a journal's editorial board with no academic affiliation
Recently I became aware that a journal is recruiting a board member. The subject matter is very close to my research background and I am very interested in the position.
I have a PhD in the field (with an active academic email) but am currently working in the industry (my current affiliation is non-academic). Given this, is that still possible to apply for the position? I did some research and never saw a non-academic board member: is that a no-no?

As probably about 98% of all offers to join editorial boards are fake, be certain that this is a real reputable journal before going for it.

I would think a (reputable) journal would care more about your recent publications in the area than about your affiliation (if any).

@Arno OP says the journal is recruiting, which makes it sound like the journal advertised for a board member as opposed to approached the OP with an offer to join the board. That's fairly normal - see e.g. https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/koni-callforeditor/

Plenty of industry and national lab folks on editorial boards...

Note that being a (good) editor can be time-consuming, and it is not typically remunerated. You really need to have an employer who is willing to consider editorial duties as 'part of your job'.

Decent journals will care less about where specifically someone works, but what their qualifications are in a field. From the perspective of a journal, a good editor will be someone who:

Knows the area well, i.e., knows what is in the literature
Actually works in the area, i.e., has practical experience
Is known as an expert to the researchers in the area, i.e., has the stature to make decisions and have these accepted by others in the community as based in knowledge.

So, if you are an expert in a field, and if that is easily recognizable by your peers, then I see no reason why you wouldn't be a reasonable candidate to serve as an editor.

I would emphasis that your bullet points need to be currently accurate. If OP satisfied these a few years ago but hasn't keep up with the field, possibly due to leaving academia, then that would disqualify them as well.

... is that still possible to apply for the position?

It's certainly possible to apply; the worst that can happen is you'd be rejected.
If there is a requirement to hold a current academic post at a certain level (e.g. professor, lecturer...) then I would think this would be stated in the call for applications, and I assume it isn't. Even if this was stated as a requirement, if your other qualifications are sufficiently good I think they should at least not immediately reject you just for not fulfilling every stated requirement. And if they do immediately reject you, it would probably mean there are a lot of well-qualified applicants and they don't have time to consider all of them, in which case your chances wouldn't be great even if you did hold an academic post.

Yes, it's possible. Example from Taylor and Francis. They are looking for:

Someone who is active in the community with strong personal networks
Confidence to engage with authors and researchers to solicit the highest quality submissions
Strong organizational skills to ensure that submissions are handled in a timely manner
Previous editing experience, e.g. as an Associate Editor or Guest Editor would be advantageous, but not essential
The ability to foster positive working relationships with colleagues such as Associate Editors

Which does not include "is currently affiliated with a university".
Here's another example from Oxford University Press:

At least five years' experience as a senior academic and or research professional, with a recognised and demonstrated standard of excellence in the following areas:

An established track record in Health Services research, Improvement Science,
Implementation Science or Patient Safety research or practice
Experience as an in editorial role of a scientific or academic journal
Experience as a reviewer of papers submitted to scientific or academic journa

You again don't need to be an academic, but you do need to have spent five years in research.

source: Stack Exchange

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How do I regain interest in a class if I’ve lost confidence in the instructor’s depth of knowledge?
I have joined a 3-4 months technical, online course related to my profession. I know the basics of this subject, yet wanted to get in-depth content about it and hence opted for this one. The course is also intended for experienced ones, not someone who is new to it.
We are less than 20 students in the class and the instructor ensures it is an interactive one. I have asked a few questions to which the instructor was unable to answer and tried to dodge the question by saying, 'It is not important', 'Don't worry too much about it' etc. I googled those questions and got it clarified myself. But, later on, may be say, after a month or so, s/he would talk about that topic which s/he had dodged earlier.
The course is for two more months but I have almost lost interest in attending this course, because of those incidents. It is mainly like, though the course is an interactive one, the instructor doesn't want to answer in-depth questions.
I am unable to concentrate in the current sessions. How should I get back my original enthusiasm as when I have joined it?
P.S: This is not a company sponsored course. I have opted it out of my own expenses.

This sounds like something you should talk to the instructor about. It might be that if you were asking about details which would be covered later in the course, they meant "don't worry about it, we'll get to that later", which would be a fair response (though perhaps not the best wording).

None of us knew that it would be covered later. He was only trying to dodge it. May be because he didn't know the answer then.
In fact, the questions that I had asked were popular and highly voted questions on stack overflow, with ~200-300 votes.

Is it required (formally or informally) that you take this course? Do you get anything by completing it?

Yes. There are advanced topics that are being taught. And some internals of the basic topics. Most importantly, i paid for it too.

First, if you aren't getting anything out of the course then you should probably just quit. The money you spent is a sunk cost for which there is no return and no reason to sink more.
However, if you think that there is something valuable to come and still want to stay with it, then one strategy you might employ is not to treat the course and its instructor as a source of answers, but as a source of questions.
You indicate that you are already doing this, of course. Going outside the course to answer the questions that are raised in your mind from participating in the course can be valuable, actually.
Part of the problem might be that you already know just about as much about this topic as the instructor, so your questions are also new to them.
It is a powerful learning experience to explore, on your own, questions that arise in some (any) context. Keep a notebook of the unanswered questions that arise that you think are worth exploring further. Then, as time permits, attack those. You will probably learn more, and at a deeper level, than if the presentations were very slick and complete. In that case some of the important ideas just slide right by without imparting any real insight.

Not that it is a solution, but you might go back and look at how the course was advertised. If it claims to be what it isn't, then you have a right to complain to the organization that sponsors it. But it might also be that it was your expectations that exceeded what the course promised.

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Presenting at a conference with no results
I am an undergraduate engineering student, I recently submitted an abstract for an upcoming conference in about a week. However, I have not produced any results yet and have not gone far in my research. Is it at all acceptable to present what I have done thus far? Or should I just cancel my attendance?

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

What kind of conference contribution are you talking about? A poster, a talk...? And is your abstract realistic with what you will be able to present?

Is this conference intended for students? Are you working with an advisor?

Yes, it is acceptable to present what you've done, even if it doesn't quite reach a finished result. If you've done something, though, I doubt you actually have no results. Try to reframe what you've done already and look for the results that you actually have, even if the result is "X doesn't work because Y".
You can also present some of your next plans, and hopefully you'll get some feedback from other attendees on those plans that will help in your next steps.
Your research advisor is a good guide for these things - make sure you're checking in with them regularly, and don't be afraid to ask them questions like this.

Thanks for the advice, the feedbacks will indeed be quite helpful so I guess its worth a try

(+1), especially for "X doesn't work because Y". I've both attended and read published reports of many talks that essentially surveyed what is known and what is not known about a certain topic the speaker is interested in -- 3 examples by people I know (one was my Ph.D. supervisor) are talk 1 and talk 2 and talk 3.

You will almost certainly get feedback and probably suggestions on continuing. Be prepared to capture those ideas. A small pocket notebook is good for that sort of thing.

It is definitely fine to present what you have worked on thus far. Are you sure that you will have no results at all (even small steps) that you couldn't frame as part of a pilot study for your main research/study? I often see presentations at conferences that present preliminary findings, or even failed experiments, followed by their next steps. As an undergraduate, the experience you will gain from engaging with your peers at this stage will be really valuable and help further guide your research anyway.


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Question about APA 7-- Avoiding ambiguity in groups of similar authors
In an article I have under review, one reviewer took issue with my use of the citation "(Smith et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2006)." They suggested that it be changed to "(Smith et al., 2005, 2006)." Normally, I agree that this is the correct change.
My problem is that the "et al." in these two citations are actually different groups of coauthors. I think their suggestion implies that the authorship of the two articles is identical, but it is not. If my two articles had been published in the same year, I understand that I should list one or more coauthors to differentiate the works (eg., "Smith, Doe, et al., 2005; Smith, Smythe, et al., 2005).
Should I do this as well in the current situation, or is it appropriate to take the reviewer's suggestion and lump the citations together? To be clear, this reviewer is suggesting the change to match APA 7 guidelines, not any special guidelines of the journal, but the authors are asked to follow APA 7 guidelines. I'm just having trouble figuring out what the guidelines recommend in this situation, and I'm not sure that the reviewer noticed that the coauthors are not the same in both references.

Do the most the journal allows to disambiguate the references so that your reader can easily see what's going on.

And I'd suggest ignoring the reviewer's opinions and leaving it to the journal after acceptance to specify any change...


text:
Can I add my middle initial to my author name in preceding articles?
So I'm not sure what to do. I've been listed as a co-author on my first publication in X journal, with a decent impact factor. Now I just realized that my middle initial wasn't included on the first publication.
Can I start using my middle initial in future publications? I know it's only my first, but that paper could get plenty of citations in the near future. (just hypothetically)
What do you think?
Is there a way to link the 2 names? Could I link them if I publish again in that same journal, specifically an ACS journal?

I believe you would be interested in the question How to edit name on existing publications after a name change?

I would not suggest closing this question. The one @scaaahu identifies is close and helpful, but it does not address the question that is probably more important here: "Can I start using my middle initial in future publications?"

In the modern day of vastly intelligent computer software and important internet presence, it is highly unlikely that a missing middle initial will be the cause of "nonrecognition" of your name. As Stephan wrote, a bigger problem is name confusion; it is definitely a good idea for you to start including your middle initial(s) in future publications. I'll answer here focused more on how to make sure the names are "linked".
My Google Scholar profile, which is compiled entirely by a computer (my only contribution there was identification of duplicate entries and removing them), even picked up some of my undergraduate term-reports which I put on my website many years ago (and which are now no longer available). Of my published papers, I've listed at various times my name as

Willie Wong
W W Wong
Willie W Wong
Willie W-Y Wong

and I don't seem to have had much trouble*.
If you want better control over the articles associated to your name, you can always register for Web of Science researcher ID and/or an ORCID which are both designed to help alleviate the problem of name collision and name changes throughout the career of a research scientist.
For fields which encourages the use of arXiv, the author identifier also helps group all of your pre-prints, and allows you neat things like a Javascript widget for your own website showing your recent pre-prints.
For mathematics, the AMS maintains author profiles (they recently upgraded this!) to which you can also submit corrections to include omitted paper or to exclude misattributed papers by other authors. (The AMS author profiles are only accessible through a MathSciNet subscription.)
I am not that familiar with other fields, but you should look around to see if your scholarly society provides a similar service to help maintain a comprehensive publication record for authors.
*With Google, at least. Microsoft Academic Search has some trouble coming up with my complete list of publications.

In mathematics, the editorial staff at Mathematical Reviews and MathSciNet have a reputation for being very careful to detect equality or non-equality of authors despite non-equality or equality of names. This applies not only to variation from including or excluding initials but also name changes when people get married or divorced, etc.

You will probably not be able to change your name on an already-published article. (Is it already fully published? You can of course change things at the proof stage.)
So the question is whether it makes sense to use your middle initial going forward. I think that yes. There are millions of "John Smith" out there, so it would be much better to be "John Y. Smith" so people can identify your papers among the many by other Smiths.
The drawback, as you mention, is that people may not be able to link your very first article to you. Yes, that is not nice. But believe me, in ten years you will be much happier if people correctly identify your papers than if this one single article is linked to you (along with possibly a lot of other papers someone with the same name as you wrote, if you decide to leave out your middle initial in the future).
Plus: literature databases are getting more and more sophisticated. I assume that things like missing middle initials should not be a problem for long in linking papers to authors. After all, later publications of yours will not only connect in terms of your name as an author, but also in terms of subject matter, collaborators, affiliations... All things that any decent machine learning algorithm can easily take into account.

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text:
How much tweaking of figure design (not content) can I postpone until the final figures are requested?
I have finished all of my manuscript revisions except for some minor details in the figure.
As I understand it, once the manuscript is accepted, a final draft of high resolution figures will be requested. In the past, I have also had requests to relabel and rearrange subplots.
Does this mean that I can wait until the final draft figures are requested to make minor tweaks, like aligning and sizing fonts and graphical elements? The content will be the same, but I still want to finalize elements such as the font sizes, line widths, title placement and legends.
In the interest of speeding up the process, is it acceptable for to submit revisions with the figures still in draft form?

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1933/440 . Especially with regard to those disciplines where LaTeX submissions are the rule.

I think this will depend highly from the publisher himself, but any problem will probably result in delay before publication.
If the publisher sees for the first time at the final draft slightly new figures, he might still ask for a few modifications. As such, I prefer to do before the next revision as much as possible to make sure that the publisher is happy and everything is done as soon as possible.

As a referee, if figures are in a rough shape, I will absolutely call the paper out on that, and demand improvements. This will potentially set the acceptance back by weeks. Unless the figures will take weeks to get right—and in this day, that would usually imply  that more data needs to be collected—then it's better to just do it right the first time.

I agree with  aeismail. Your figures should be as polished as possible before submission. As a reviewer, I am dedicating my time, for free, to improve your paper (if possible) so that it is appropriate for publication. Every problem that you leave unfixed is something that I feel like I have to mention, and it makes me angry/frustrated that the authors didn't take the time to correct obvious problems.
I ask my own lab members to spend time making figures polished and clear even for internal discussions. It is a good exercise in visual communication for them and saves everyone else (other lab members and myself) time since we don't have to waste time.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Emailing professor too early has any impact?
I was just wondering when should we start contacting professor of grad school for admission. Does contacting professor too early cause any impact? like, professor gets irritated and never reply back again, blocks forever and things?

I think your question is broad and nobody can give you a specific answer; because the professor's habits and policies varies from one to another. In my experience, nobody can correctly predict anybody's behavior.

Graduate admissions are highly dependent on what country you are applying to graduate school in, so you should say.

Any sensible professor would be happy to reply to a talented student with A+ results; and be more than happy to supervise one.
The only issue with the time is, sometimes the good professors at a university can't take more students to supervise; because they are supervising 5-8 students for their final year projects. So, as soon as you can contact the professor, the better.


text:
Is it possible to obtain a PhD in Canada without having to attend courses for a master degree?
I am used to European university system and I don't know much about how things are working overseas.
I already hold a Bachelor degree and a Master degree. I will soon be looking for a PhD. If I am not mistaken, in the USA, someone directly jumps from a Bachelor degree to graduates studies which include a Master degree + a PhD, is it correct? Is it also the way it works in Canada (Vancouver, UBC)? Is it possible to make a PhD in Canada without having to take time for the Master degree?
I read somewhere that a Canadian PhD last between 4 and 7 years. Does it include the Master degree? If yes, how much time does the PhD only represents?

Canada is different from the USA, in that direct entry for a PhD after a bachelors degree is rare. The typical path is a bachelors, followed by two year masters, followed by four to five years for a PhD.
As far as I know, no typical Canadian PhD program also grants a masters, as in Canada, it's sort of implied that you already had one going into the PhD.
This is of course, based on my understanding of the sciences: Humanities and Engineering may vary.
EDIT: One note about courses: Course requirements vary dramatically from program to program, university to university. Some will require relatively few courses, others, many more.

Same in CS, although there is often a possibility to "fast-track" to the PhD after one year of masters. For the courses requirement, even PhD students usually have to take a few (at least in Qc universities), but those done at the master can count.

@Zenon true. Seems to happen pretty rarely in my experience, but is definitely a possibility.

I completed a PhD in Canada. I started in a MSc program, but after one year transferred into the PhD without completing the MSc. My total length of graduate studies was 5 years. This is not uncommon in biology at the schools I've been associated with. I'm not sure if you can technically apply directly to the PhD, but many students enter the MSc program with the expectation that they will transfer after one year, so it amounts to the same thing.
In my experience Canadian schools with a PhD program also grant MSc degrees in the same program. There are schools that only offer MSc without PhD though.

It's good to see the counterpoint to my answer; My experience has always been that transfer has been rare, but I don't hang out with many biology grad-students.

I started a Canadian PhD program after completing a European Master's program. This is the typical progression in Canada; the combined Master's-PhD programs are the exception, not the norm. PhD programs typically take between 3 and 5 years. The exact length depends mostly on how quickly your research progresses.
That said, there are significant differences between Canadian and European PhD programs:

Most Canadian PhD programs require you to take some courses. In my case, I had to take 3 graduate classes in various disciplines.
You are not an employee of the university. You do not get a salary from the university for being a PhD student, and instead have to pay quite hefty tuition fees. You should make sure that your funding is enough to cover the tuition and living expenses. This funding can include salary from TA (Teaching Assistant) or RA (Research Assistant) work for the university, scholarships, and money from your supervisor's grant.


text:
Is it right to ignore publications coming from non-top publishers?
When I look into a specific problem over Google Scholar and simple Google Search, I find many related publications from publishers other than IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Springer etc.
Usually the authors come from Indian, Chinese, Arabic institutions. My initial instinct is to ignore them, however I always feel as if there might be something important.
What is the right thing to do in such cases?

It should be noted that coming from some major publishers does not necessarily imply that the journal isn't junk.

@Fomite... as evidenced by Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals, published by Elsevier.

What is the right thing to do in such cases? — Read the papers yourself. Of course, that was the right thing even before Google Scholar.

Is it right to believe that accepted or high-voted answers are
correct?  Is is right not to read answers that did not (yet ?) get votes? Use your brain.

"Is it right to believe that accepted or high-voted answers are correct?" -> Yes! (more likely than the other answers). This is highly dependent on the credibility of the voters!

There are a lot of good publications in the world that are not published by mega-publishers.  Some of them you've never heard of because they are regional or specific to certain subfields, but are still very good.  It's also often difficult for people from certain countries to publish in mainstream conference venues due to visa issues. For example, IEEE and ACM usually require at least one author to be present in person, and that may simply be impossible for, say, a group of Iranian authors and a conference being held in the U.S.  Likewise, the cost of travel is often prohibitive for authors from the developing world.
That said, there's also a lot of junk publications in junk venues, and even something like the IEEE stamp doesn't mean you're reading a real paper.
So how should you evaluate a paper in a dubious venue?  Just like you would any other paper:

Is it on target with what you are looking for?
Are the results significant?
Is the data credible?
Is it part of a network of related papers building toward the presented result?

Publications in dubious venues are just much more likely to fail these tests.

IEEE and ACM always require at least one author to be present in person — Not exactly true. I have presented papers at ACM conferences on behalf of authors who could not attend.

True, there are occasionally exceptions: I've seen a remote talk as well.  But it's always some sort of special case and they definitely require a conference fee.  Now, whether the organizers properly obey the regulations they have been given is sometimes a different question...

Strictly speaking, the visa issues are not a total obstacle. What IEEE and ACM essentially require is the registration. If, by the time the conference takes place, the authors/presenters do not turn up, the proceedings are already finalized and printed/burnt on CD. To my understanding, it's generally too late to remove any paper at that point.

Having just served as publications chair for a conference, I can tell you that IEEE, at least, specifically asked us afterwards if anybody failed to register and present as required.  They might end up on the USB drive, but would not be archived in Xplore.

and they definitely require a conference fee — Again, not always. In at least one case, the authors I spoke for could not attend and therefore did not register.  IEEE may have draconian registration policies, but I've never heard of such from ACM.

@JeffE: I just went and read the ACM official policies, and couldn't find an IEEE-style registration requirement, so I think you're right; the ones I've dealt with have, which is why I assumed, but that could have been for their own financial reasons.  I've modified my answer accordingly.

Google has recently done an analysis of citation trends, and found that citations to "less" prestigious journals are actually increasing:
Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals
An extract from the above study:
"... now that finding and reading relevant articles in non-elite journals is about as easy as finding and reading articles in elite journals, researchers are increasingly building on and citing work published everywhere. Considering citations to all articles, the percentage of citations to articles in non-elite journals went from 27% in 1995 to 47% in 2013. Six out of nine broad areas had at least 50% of citations going to articles published in non-elite journals in 2013."
Additionally, in my personal experience (15+ years of computer science research), I've found that the breadth of ideas is considerably enhanced if one makes some effort to go beyond the so-called "top" journals, while still staying aware of publications in "top" journals.
A lot of the elite-type publications can be quite political, in the sense that stuff won't get published in them (ie. get past the reviewers) unless it follows the fashionable-approach-of-the-day and cites the "right" papers. This can lead to a reduction of new ideas and/or only incremental improvements of existing methods.
As a consequence, some of the less "prestigious" journals can in fact be a breath of fresh air, where some of the more risky, newer, and/or alternative methods are explored.

Back in the old days before online publication and widespread indexing of journal articles, readers depended on journal publishers to curate the research papers and select the best papers for publication.  Now, there are many more places to publish, and the number of papers being published has grown dramatically.  More so than in the past, good papers are published in obscure journals and bad papers are sometimes published in prestigious journals.
In evaluating the quality of a paper, you're largely on your own.  However, one thing that you can do now that you couldn't easily do in the past is to check how many other authors have cited the paper that you're looking at.  If the paper that you're looking at is widely cited by other authors (and the citations are not negative ones), then there's a good chance that the paper is reasonably trustworthy.

I'm not sure that the citation count for an article is a reliable measure of its usefulness. At best it's a blunt measure. Many papers are simply cited because someone else cited them.

I agree that citation counts are a blunt measure and not the only way that you should judge a paper. The point is that it's readily available information, and by looking at papers that cite the paper in question you can see what impact the paper in question has had.

You should have a basic workflow for assessing the merit of a resource.  If it's from an unknown journal or seems a bit dodgy, I would do a quick scan of the abstract, introduction, methods and conclusion (if they don't exist then there's a red flag). Also, what resources are listed in the references/bibliography? If they are all low-quality (the MSM, other unknown journals, Wikipedia) then I'd quickly move on.
But, if the writing is clear, the research aim, hypotheses/questions, analysis and findings appear credible, there are good quality references cited, and it is relevant to the research you are doing---always ask 'how is this relevant to my question?'---then I'd read deeper and errr... Google the author to find out a bit more about him/her and the institution to which s/he belongs.
As you get further into your reading and your field you will be able to assess the quality of the resource quickly.

At this point, for almost any field worth doing research in there is just too much literature for anyone, even an expert, to keep up with. In the field that I work in on the order of 100 papers are published a week  - I could literally read all day and still not be caught up.
Instead of this, I have found much more use in following particular groups whose work I have found useful in the past (some outside of the US/Europe axis). So, if one of these (approximately 100) groups publishes a paper in a non-major journal, I am more apt to read it. Along with this, I don't read everything in the major journals of the field, either. This might help if you don't want to completely ignore non-major publishers but also don't want to spend your whole life reading.


text:
What are some techniques to get some work done during the Christmas period?
Given the fact that at the moment I am working with no strict time frames and I can manage my time and other activities on my own, I wonder is it possible for someone to maintain the concentration during the Christmas period and keep working on important tasks? And what are some techniques to enable that?
I am asking this, because I want to plan my vacations during December, but I am not quite sure if it is a clever idea to do the vacation in the first half of the month (so I can save some flight costs, because prices go up as the end of the year approaches),  and keep the latter part to work, having in mind that everyone gets into the festive atmosphere and it is hard getting things done?

This seems like a question about you personally that none of us can answer. I have certainly gotten a massive amount of work done during the break since no one was around to bother me!

If you have no managerial responsibilities, you might be able to follow Nate's advice in his answer and take an extended break (say perhaps from early-mid December to mid January). You would need your supervisor / boss's approval, and strong self discipline, but you could spend a lot of that time working remotely. The clincher is that most of your friends and family probably only take time off around Christmas, so it's usually worth the extra flight costs to maximize your time with them. (I feel your pain, my home country is almost antipodal to my current country)

"everyone gets into the festive atmosphere" - who's "everyone" and where will you be during the time you're not on vacation? Techniques to resist the festive advances of your own children in your own home would have to be radically different from techniques to resist the festive advances of colleagues if you're living alone on a campus. You can fob the colleagues off with one evening of attention, not so much your kids. And how important is Christmas to you, are you going to be depressed on your own and need a technique for that? Not sure this can be answered for "people in general".

A major perk of being an academic are the long breaks between terms, when we have the freedom to travel and make our own schedules.  However, this comes coupled with the responsibility to keep being productive during these breaks, and this is harder than it sounds.
You are wise to be thinking ahead about how to manage this.  I'm not sure exactly what you have planned, but I'm going to guess it may include extended visits to see friends and family.  Here are some things I have found useful:

Explain to them that, although you are glad to get to spend time with them, you're not on vacation from work the whole time.  (Non-academics often don't realize this and assume the entire break is free time for you.)
Look ahead to set aside specific times in your schedule for work.  Ask your hosts to check with you before planning any family activities, to make sure they don't conflict.  Again, they shouldn't assume that all your time is free.  ("Oh, but you can't work on your paper tomorrow!  I've just arranged for us to go on a picnic with Uncle Jürgen!")
Consider going somewhere else to work, such as a library or cafe.  Trying to work with relatives around is often distracting, especially if some are children.
Set specific goals for what you want to accomplish during the trip.  If you share them with your family (and can convince them that they are exciting) they may be able to help encourage you to work toward them, and to arrange things so that you have the time to do so.


text:
Should I cite my undergraduate thesis in my paper?
Before I finished my undergraduate thesis, my supervisor had asked me to write a smaller paper with the same content as my thesis and send it to a conference. Now, my thesis ended and my paper is going to be published. Should I cite my undergraduate thesis in my paper? Because undergraduate theses are not easily accepted as a references.

I'd include the thesis in the bibliography and write in the paper (perhaps in a footnote) something like "This paper is an abridged version of the author's undergraduate thesis [reference here], written under the supervision of [adviser's name here].

@AndreasBlass You should turn your comment into an answer. It is exactly what I would have suggested. In addition, in my field (CS) it is not rare to cite undergraduate thesis and I've never heard anyone complaining.

As suggested by @MartinČerný I'm turning my comment into an answer. I'd include the thesis in the bibliography and write in the paper (perhaps in a footnote) something like "This paper is an abridged version of the author's undergraduate thesis [reference here], written under the supervision of [adviser's name here]."


text:
Has the Journal of Fluid Mechanics really published more than 800 volumes?
I currently want to cite this article from the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, but what strikes me is the high volume number (879). To what I have found:

the volume number refers to the number of years a journal has been in publication

So could it be that long?

The statement you've quoted is not true for all journals.  Perhaps you should provide a citation for the statement.

Granted I spend my time in the humanities, not natural sciences, but I don’t know of a single journal where volume number = number of years the journal has been published. Even for the ones where the aim is to publish exactly one volume every year, something inevitably goes wrong at some point to break the equivalence.

In addition, even where there are yearly volumes, they often run from a random month (feb-feb), so finding the volume from the year is further complicated. Then there are journals where the month epoch changes, particularly around things like 1940 (for journals published in europe)...

Check out Proceedings of SPIE. They're on volume 13211 as of now; they publish one volume per conference, and for the SPIE, that works out to be more than 1 a day.

In the same vein as the comment of Nij (and to add some data) in this case it is extremely easy to ascertain the truth of the matter, for example by using Mathscinet: https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/serials/issues?groupId=2338 The linked search returns 1054 issues with the latest one in volume 988. (The listing there has some gaps, but checking the journal website shows that there are indeed 988 volumes to date.) The current output appears to be 24 volumes per year.

From the website it looks like they publish a "volume" every two weeks which would mean that the journal is somewhat between 30 and 40 years old.
I do not know if there is a universally agreed upon standard for what a "volume" should mean. The purpose of a citation is to identify the source exactly and uniquely so just cite it as the journal indicates. Everything is fine with the journal.

Spend enough time here and  you learn there's no universally agreed-upon standard for anything.

The Journal of Alloys and Compounds is now up to volume 1002. Some use the same volume number for multiple issues in one year. some use the same volume number for multiple issues in half a year. Some use the volume number for each issue. Publishers are weird...

@JonCuster And the current volume number of Journal of High Energy Physics is 2024 because they just use the year to label volumes.

@Anyon - wait, that actually makes sense! How could that be???

I think the "standard" for a volume is "a reasonable number of pages to fit in a single physical bound volume".  That's the original purpose of volume numbering, after all, even if it has mostly become irrelevant with online publishing. So it makes sense that a big journal which puts out a lot of pages per year would need several volumes per year.

@JonCuster It only makes sense until you (inevitably) get snowballing delays, in which case you either end up with the 2021 issue appearing in 2023, the 2022 issue in 2025, etc.; or with some very unorthodox volume numbering (2019, 2020, 2022, 2025, etc.).

@JanusBahsJacquet I'm not sure what your implying. If your research isn't ready for publication in 2021, you publish it in the 2022 volume. There's presumably going to be other contributions that make up the 2021 volume. So there wouldn't be missing years.

@ChellCPlus No, there absolutely are missing years. I’m not talking about authors not making the submission cutoff, but the process of editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc., after articles have been accepted. Lots of smaller journals, at least in the humanities, are handled entirely by people who do so as part of their full-time university jobs and have more urgent responsibilities to grapple with (teaching, their own research, admin), and journal editing often takes a back seat to more urgent teaching, researching and admin tasks.

@JanusBahsJacquet Ah I see what you mean, I suppose journals like JHEP just have more resources so they can get away with it. Makes sense.

@AzorAhai-him- Mandatory xkcd.

Journal volume numbering practices are not universal. While a significant number may follow an annual volume model consisting of of some number of issues, that is far from accepted standard. There are several common practices.

volumes begin with number 1 and contain some number of issues - often monthly or weekly.
volumes begin with the year of publication and correspond to the year of publication, and consist of issues as above
the volume numbers themselves are assigned for each issue, which are published monthly or weekly, with no subissues (this is likely the situation you are describing)

There are other possibilities, of course, but these are the most common.
If you consider that a monthly "volume" for a journal would rack up about around 600 volumes between over 50 years, and weekly "volumes" would rack up some 2,600 volumes over the same period, the number you cite is not unreasonable. Just look to the journal's publication history and dates, as well as their "About the journal" page to see their typical publication schedule. As someone above mentioned, this journal publishes every two weeks currently, so assuming that same pace for their entire publication history, they would have published more than 1,768 volumes since they launched in 1956 ((2000-1956)*26 issues per year).


text:
Publishing an article with only three citations on the arXiv
I wrote a paper about quantitative biology that is 55 pages long and has only three citations. Does this have a chance of being accepted on the arXiv?

Accepted where? on arXiv? Not sure what you are asking, citations are not something considered for accepting an article for publication

@Dr.Snoopy on arXiv. I saw a publication with 75 pages and 4 citations on arXiv.

We cannot predict if your paper will be accepted by arXiv or not, but length over 6-8 pages and number of citations are not part of the acceptance criteria. Why do you worry about citations?

Ok. I'm worry about the number of citations because this paper may be rejected due to low number of citations.

As I said that's not the acceptance criteria, it would not make sense, arXiv is a preprint server.

Do you mean the number of papers that your own paper is citing (as part of bibliography), or something else?

ArXiv contains course notes and other manuscripts not intended for later publication, and surely some of those have ZERO citations.

@Sulfura Arxiv is not a journal or conference. It's just a website where you can post papers so you can easily link to them. That's it. Anyone can post anything to Arxiv and it will "be accepted" provided it follows the basic guidelines.

Do you mean its been cited three times, or that you only reference three papers in the article? number of citations is generally the first.

@SpencerKraisler no, not anyone can post anything to arXiv and be accepted. That is the reason viXra was invented (not that I suggest submitting there). The work must satisfy scholarly standards, which would include citing the relevant literature. If by citations the OP means number of articles they cite, that likely doesn't reach scholarly standards.

I think you don't mean "citation" but "references". A citation is an occasion of someone else citing your paper.

As you already noticed, there are papers on the Arxiv which have a very low number of citations.
All such papers I have ever seen come from pure mathematics or adjacent fields.
These papers (and fields) cite so little, because they do not do introductions providing context embeddings.
They can get away with an introduction that is literally:
“We consider the problem of X.”
Quantitative biology is not such a field.
This is not just an arbitrary convention:
Arguably, if you disembed a work of quantitative biology from biological context, you are left with mathematical toying around.
For that reason, a reputable journal for quantitative biology is very unlikely to accept such a manuscript without substantial revisions.
Now, the Arxiv is not a journal and has lower standards for acceptance; so this is not a problem per se.
If an experienced quantitative biologist produced such a manuscript and just did not bother to write an introduction for whatever reason, it will likely meet the Arxiv’s criteria for publication.
But then, this rarely happens and if it does, the authors are completely aware of what they are doing.
The fact that you wrote such a manuscript strongly suggests that you are inexperienced with academic writing and do not have an experienced academic mentor.
(Further contributing to this suspicion is the rather high length of the manuscript and that you asked this question in the first place.)
All of this in turn makes it very unlikely that you produced academic writing meeting the Arxiv’s standards, and unfortunately the same applies to the research itself.
Now, at this point you might find that I guessed a lot here based on what information you provided and indeed I did.
But I am still confident in my conclusion as most of my guesses were already optimistic.
For example if you indeed wrote a substantial introduction, the low number of citations makes it almost certain that your writing doesn’t meet the Arxiv’s standards.

Nobody can predict if your paper will be accepted or not to arXiv (which is just a preprint server), because the acceptance criteria is just that your paper is really an academic research paper (and not some homework assignment or plain spam), and that it fits into one of the arXiv topics.
Citations is never considered for acceptance, because it would make no sense, many researchers post their papers in arXiv as a way to make them public, and papers need to be made public before they can get citations.

I think OP means that they only cited 3 other papers in their manuscript.

@BryanKrause Yes, could be, but its unclear from the question.


text:
How to ask a professor to join their research lab?
I am intending to apply for a PhD, but I lack prior research experience. I’m currently getting my master’s, but all of the labs at my university are full.
Therefore I am considering to join a lab at another university. The professor doesn’t know me; I will be cold-emailing them. How do I ask to join their lab? I don’t want to be paid, I simply want the experience. What do I do? Should I even reach out to this professor?

Write an email telling how you can be useful, and prepare for rejection or not hearing back. Try other places.

Suggest an internship (unpaid, for starters); topic of the prof's area.Maybe they may be interested. Highlight why you would add to the lab and what they would gain from this. I assume you do not need a visa for that, or better pick a formal option. Are you looking for a PhD?

Yes a PhD, but I don’t have enough research experience

If you have a masters, what level of research experience does that lab expect more than your masters?

I have recently had several (good) students suggest something like this to me. I rejected, essentially because it seemed like a probable breach of labor laws, and a breach of academic student/teacher etiquette in any case. It smells of student exploitation. Students should always either get a degree / course / whatever for working for you, or be paid and have a contract.

The masters is not competitive. There are students with publications and a few years worth of lab/research experience who I will be facing during application cycle. The master is not enough- as I’ve been told from admissions counselors for PhD programs I want to apply to.

@DaGuk Unfortunately, that doesn't entitle you to work in someone else's lab. Your next step is to get a job as an RA for a few years until you feel ready to apply to PhD programs.

What country are you applying in?

United States. I am a U.S. citizen

@AzorAhai-him- I’m confused how entitlement is even a topic here?

"All of the labs at my university are full" -- I don't work in a laboratory science, so this comment might be naive -- but this seems like a serious problem to me. Are others in your degree program also not finding lab placements? I would talk with your graduate director, student ombudsman, grad student union if there is one, etc. Good luck.

@DaGuk: I think you are confusing being entitled in general with being entitled to some specific privilege.

@DaGuk Perhaps I could have chosen a different word, but my point is that you are unlikely to be taken in as a student at this point. To get the experience you need, apply for jobs.

It's possible working without pay is not legal in your jurisdiction.
It's very likely the professor would like to (or is compelled to) focus on mentoring students at their same institution.
A cold email has a low success rate in the best of circumstances, these aren't the best circumstances, but that's all you really have. In your email be brief and to the point, use maybe a sentence to say what you want and a sentence to say why you're interested in that lab, attach your CV, and then plan not to hear a response (that's okay, you're taking a shot in the dark).

It's important to note that what makes this "not legal" is the wording "join your research group", which implies, or at least sounds dangerously close to, working for somebody unpaid. If you ask for collaboration / mentoring, your chances may be higher (still not great, but higher).

@xLeitix I clarified that the part that is possibly not legal is the working without pay part.

You certainly have an uphill battle. Each student a professor advises costs, on average, perhaps 2-3 hours per week if you include advising meetings, paperwork, reading thesis drafts, etc. Why would a professor offer this amount of time if it isn't part of their job duties at the university they're at? Why would a department agree to a professor using this much time if the university does not get the student's tuition or the state's subsidy for students?
In short, you're asking the person to do something out of the good of their heart, using time they could be spending with their family, gardening, reading books, riding bikes, or hanging out with friends. I think it's unlikely you're going to be successful -- regardless of how exactly you phrase your email.

I think this answer is a little too pessimistic - many professors have more ideas than they have time for, and are happy to take students to implement them.

@justauser - and there are likely local students they are familiar with already available, rather than going outside for an  unknown commodity.

Yes unfortunate situation. I need research experience to get research experience. There’s no opportunity at my current university and if I try at another university it’s a no. I’ll probably have to find another career cause without the research I’m not competitive or qualified for a PhD

@DaGuk You'll have to switch universities, then.

You note that you are in the US. I suggest you apply to a variety of doctoral programs across the country. Cast a wide net, and you are likely to get into some doctoral programs. It may not be at your dream destination, but it is certainly better than being unpaid labor in a situation that is frankly not productive for you or your voluntary advisor.
While I work in a different field, I do get requests for remote supervision from students wanting to apply theory to our experimental work (usually foreign, or foreign students who got into a US program that is lower ranked/resourced than they had hoped). I always decline. This is not a reasonable arrangement, and frankly it violates many of the Conflict of Interest clauses at my University. I am using time and other resources to unofficially mentor a graduate student for whom the University can claim nothing (no degree conferred, no other metrics met).


text:
Why are journals telling me that my article is plagiarized even though I wrote it by myself?
Recently, I wrote an article, and I'm trying to submit it somewhere, but two journals told me that my article is plagiarized even up to 70%!

I'm 100% sure that it's not plagiarized because I wrote it by myself.
The only thing that I suspect caused this problem is that I posted the pre-print online in ECSarxiv, and I think they found my pre-print and think my paper is plagiarized! My name on the pre-print is exactly the same as in the submitted paper.
I checked the pre-print policy of these journals, and they clearly stated that they don't have a problem with pre-prints.
I checked it with Turnitin, and it says there is no plagiarism in my article. I also searched the Internet for random sentences from my article and it just shows my pre-print.
I complained after I received the rejection, pointed out to my pre-print, and asked them to name the paper I allegedly plagiarized from. However, they did not respond back to me. I now sent an email to editor-in-chief and I'm waiting for response.
I am confident that the journals are reputable (Elsevier and Springer).

Any ideas or suggestions?

Moderator’s notice: I deleted a lot of comments since they are addressed by information added to the question. If you feel that some important information is still missing, please post a new comment (and @AloneProgrammer: please [edit] additional information into your question). Also please do not post answers as comments. Finally, please refrain from commenting that blindly relying on a automated plagiarism checker is stupid – you are preaching to the converted.

Chances are the journal ran your paper through an automated plagiarism checker (the only realistic way to check for plagiarism these days) and this 70% number is what the program found. That you found nothing using Turnitin isn't enough evidence to prove there was no plagiarism: a plagiarism checker is only as good as the data it has, and it's possible Turnitin doesn't have the original paper.
Having said that the journal should tell you which paper they think you've plagiarized from, as well as which sentences are plagiarized. If they don't, you should absolutely write back to ask. From your comments you've already done that, so there's nothing to do now except wait. The fact that at least two journals have checked your paper and found plagiarism is a bad sign; on the bright side, you can ask both journals for more details and it's less likely they both don't answer.
If they respond you'll be able to fix the plagiarism if it's there, or point out why there's no plagiarism if it isn't there.
If they don't respond after a reasonable time, then the only thing left to do is submit the paper elsewhere.

Also when you decide to submit the paper at a third journal you may want to upfront tell them that other journals have rejected your paper because of alleged plagiarism, but erroneously so; that you ensure them you have written it yourself using best practices; that it is your understanding that the standard plagiarism checks must come up with a false positive, so that this is to be expected; and ensure them of your full cooperation should any questions arise.

Also, write them that their checker might have registered your own pre-print as an "original" so they can recheck while exxcluding it

@PeterA.Schneider I fear this self promotion for alleged plagiarism may induce some prior impression and could bias their decision.

@PeterA.Schneider: Do you have evidence that it is better to do that? Suppose the journal in question is a dis-reputable one. If the asker then submits to a reputable journal, should he/she really mention this debacle? Should not, in my opinion.

@AloneProgrammer, How hard is it to check the date and the name of the original author on the pre-print? It shouldn't be hard at all. Right? So why not explain the issue right from the get-go instead of wasting everybody's time communicating back and forth?

@StephanBranczyk I'm not sure that I get your point correctly, but there is no difference between my pre-print and submitted article. Also, I put my name and affiliation correct in both pre-print and submitted article. So, can you explain the point you are trying to make in your comment a little bit more?

@AloneProgrammer if there's no difference at all between the pre-print and submitted article, and the claimed plagiarism is from the pre-print, 70% similarity is unusual. I'd have expected 95+%.

@Allure I know that's strange. I checked a bunch of plagiarism checker tools and I got from 0% to 10% to some other articles. But, none of them showed me my pre-print. My pre-print also is indexed by Google scholar so I don't think that's not indexed in their database. Really strange... BTW it's almost a day that I did not hear back from the editorial office of the journals. They were fairly quick to reject my article cause it just took half a day to receive the rejection letter but I'm not sure why they did not respond to my email.

@AloneProgrammer, Either the software is making a mistake, or someone copied part of your pre-print and published it under their own name, but at a later date than your pre-print. If the latter is the case, you'll have to issue an DMCA take down and get it taken down (the electronic copy at least) before you can publish it under your own name.

@StephanBranczyk My pre-print is under "CC-By Attribution 4.0 International" license in the ECSarXiv repository. Is it possible still to issue a DMCA take down in the case of someone copied some parts of my work?

@AloneProgrammer If they followed that license, including attributing your work to you, no, it's not legal to use a DMCA takedown, but then you have that attribution to bolster your case. If they didn't follow that license, it's possible to use a DMCA takedown.

@ChaiT.Rex You mean just he/she needs to give an attribute to my work and that's it?! I think if he/she gives an attribute to my work and comply with the license, still it's plagiarism and it is not acceptable because it is written by me originally.

@AloneProgrammer As far as the DMCA and copyright is concerned, you've given permission for them to use it if they follow the terms of the license. As far as plagiarism is concerned, they may not have used it in an academic context or they may have properly cited you.

@ChaiT.Rex Thanks, I'm still waiting for editorial response hopefully. I hope it would be my pre-print that created conflict.

@AloneProgrammer Do keep in mind that plagiarism and copyright infringement are two separate things. The former is an ethical problem, the latter is a legal problem. It's possible for a person to plagiarize without infringing on anyone's copyright (which might be the case in the situation you described 3 comments up); it's also possible to commit copyright infringement without plagiarizing. But sometimes if someone is plagiarizing your work, they are also infringing on your copyright, and that may give you the option of using the legal system to get them to stop doing either.

Springer and Elsevier both use cross check (see Springer's webpage and Elsevier's webpage). In particular, the Springer link has a note under "tips and tricks - how to interpret the results" that states

iThenticate is a tool detecting text similarities. It does not detect plagiarism. The similarities may be an indication of plagiarism.

and

When you find a very high similarity percentage (for example 80%) for an article that has already been
  published it is most likely that the match found is to the paper itself. The source needs to be excluded
  from the matches. Unless it was published somewhere else than Springer.

It also notes that

In addition different internet sources including repositories and Wiki’s
  such as Wikipedia are indexed.

With that in mind, it should be enough to write the editor politely noting that you have made a pre-print available and it appears the similarity detector has found that rather than any actual plagiarism. Since you've taken those steps there's nothing to do but wait and politely follow up in a couple of weeks.

NB Crossref's "CrossCheck" has been renamed "Similarity Check". https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/

@Joe, Thanks for adding that.  That's a better name in my opinion, as it reflects what the service actually does.

@user2699 I don't know about that, the ice hockey meaning of crosscheck could apply in this case ;)

I recently had the same problem with a different publisher.
So, I bought credits for the iThenticate (which was the similarity checker they use) and checked the full similarity report myself only to find out nearly all similarities here related to a paper I posted on arXiv and another I had published on a similar topic.
So here are some tips I learned through the process:

Avoid including stuff like the header with the journal's name; The report showed tons of matches with papers from the same journal in completely different subjects.
If possible, leave the authors' affiliations and biography for the final version. The text "The authors are with...", university's name/department, funding agency also were reported to match lots of unrelated papers. The whole biography, from me and my coauthors, was also flagged.

I wasn't able to reduce down to the journal's threshold, but instead, I wrote to the editor explaining that the paper was an extended version of our previous paper in arXiv and that it had many references in common to our previously published paper.

Since data science and text analysis has blown up recently ( this decade ), Plagiraism checkers have been a huge use for it.
Problem is, text analysis can range from the very rudimentary (check how many times a word appears in a document and come up with a ratio of it to the all the words in the document) to the very complex (look for sentence structures, topic analysis, etc).
You would think that journals would run some high-end plagiraism checker, but you never know. They may be running a rudimentary checker that just racks up all the words in your paper and it seems to pattern-match the ratio of words you use compared to your whole document to seem similar enough to another person's document. But, that wouldn't take into account the order in which the words are used.
I would ask them what analysis software they're using. Seeing as it's a journal, and science is all about reproducability, they should be able to direct you to the plagiraism checker to let you run it through yourself and see what it's doing and also provide in-depth knowledge of HOW it's doing it.
Because the biggest concern in data science (and all it's applications .. including text analysis, ai, machine learning) .. is you want to know how the inner workings of something work. That way you're not at the mercy of some "black box" spitting out some answer that everyone is taking at face value (when there could be HUGE amounts of bias or overly-simplified stupidity going on INSIDE the black box).
I would also worry about anyone you may have shared your work with.. even in confidence.
I worked with a group one time where we shared our work internally. But, one guy in the group was friends with some folks in another group. They were having issues with something, so they asked him for help. Like most folks, he was lazy, so instead of walking through everything with them.. he just showed them our work.
Later on professor was asking several groups to step forward to figure out who did original work and who plagiaraized. Because what this one group was doing was asking ALL the groups in class if they could "help" them with different parts.. then just stitching everyone's work together and submitting it as their own.
The guy in our group did not say he was showing our work to anyone. I operate in a group environment under the unspoken assumption that it's just common courtesy to not show a group's work to any outside parties unless you get the inner-group's permission first. So, I was floored that this guy was sharing our work w/o our knowledge.. and it had vast repercussions. (Because at the school I go to, the honor code states that the folks who got plagiarized are just as responsible for the folks that plagiarized.)
So, I would think about who you possibly showed your work to. You may have thought you showed it to them in confidence, but they could be wandering around showing others.
And if you did this work for a class.. a professor may have taken your work and turned it in as their own. That's not uncommon.
This semester a professor is letting another prof show up and toss a mini data science project onto us. I've had this other prof before, and he's the type that asks students to do in-depth research projects in his field of interest, and there were rumors of him just turning around and publishing their work as his own after he fleshed things out a bit more. Well, the project he's tossing on us is another one of these "I have no clue how to do this, so I task you with dreaming up a way.. oh, and document and detail everything as if it's a research paper." I find it very shady.. and assume he's just going to take everyone's work, condense it down, and publish it under his own name after-the-fact.
So... think about who may have had access to your work. There's some underhanded, shady folks out there.

Have seen it happen.... Some tenured professor that was a dummy when it came to IT, asked a professor friend to give his master thesis theme to an undergraduated class as the semester work...too long ago, both are probably retired by now.

"at the school I go to, the honor code states that the folks who got plagiarized are just as responsible for the folks that plagiarized" Wow, that's truly awful.


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Best way to discreetly share a link to your academic website when a PhD math application doesn't request a CV
I’m not from the US and I'm applying to US grad schools for a PhD in Math and I'd like to share my academic website containing details about six of my favourite courses that I took in my masters and around 30 or so PDFs of solutions to challenging problems, assignments, tests etc. that I did during my program. This could be seen as evidence that I made efforts to solve problems beyond the syllabus and that I'm genuinely interested in researching those areas.
I usually share a link in the contact information section of my CV but in case a CV is not requested, what's the best place to share this link? I could add a line in my SOP and include a link in the footer but that's usually discouraged.
Will also including information about my extracurricular activities and some photos be considered okay? What else could I include in this website to give further evidence of my preparedness for a PhD program? (I do not have any publications or master's thesis yet)

You write "in case a CV is not requested" - have you actually encountered examples of this, or is it just a hypothetical? Second, if a school has trimmed down their application process so far that they don't even want a CV that often fits on one or two pages for a PhD applicant, why should they be going on to view personal websites of students?

@BryanKrause Stony Brook University (https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/applying-phd-program) has no option to upload a cv or any additional material. UCLA (https://ww3.math.ucla.edu/admissions/) does not ask for a cv though I think I uploaded it in the additional documents section. There was one more school that I can't remember the name of. They have sections for research experience, awards, publications, employment history in the application so most of the important stuff from the cv is already covered I suppose. Still, it might not hurt to leave a link to your website but I'm not sure where.

If they have an application form that effectively contains the elements of a CV, that looks to me like an effort to a) make sure CVs have the right information, and b) avoid CVs that have extra information. I think they definitely do not want to see your 30 PDFs of challenging problems. They're likely going to have hundreds of applications, how many additional pages per student do you think it's reasonable that they consider?

I have never seen a PhD programme which you can apply without a CV. Also, I am not sure whether your CV is the best place to showcase your efforts. The committee will definitely require a research proposal from you. This is where you state your goals and ambitions.
Explaining your research goals with evidence is never a bad idea, and in fact it's a really good structure if you highlighted your website and encouraged the committee members to go and check it for the coursework you've completed etc.

The SoP, not the CV, is the place to state your goals, both for study and thereafter. So, focus there on the area(s) that you want to study. Use past accomplishments only in brief statements (phrases) that support those goals.
I'm also surprised that you aren't asked for a CV, though it might be permitted to supply one anyway. The reason for this is that most doctoral programs in the US don't require anything beyond the bachelors so the opportunity to develop a meaningful CV is minimal for most students. Other places (Germany...) where a masters is usually required probably would want a CV or similar.
And a link to an academic website might not even be followed in a US application. It would be a bit strange to refer to it from the SoP which should be future focused, not detailing past accomplishments.
See: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in Country X?