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Should I agree to review a paper that I do not fully understand?
I recently received a request to subreview a paper for a top computer science conference. While it is related to my field of research, it is extremely long (the conference does not have a page limit) and complicated (it is an algorithm made of more than ten sub-algorithms, each of which is itself worth a conference paper). I find it very difficult to verify that it is correct. I mean, theoretically I may be able to understand it if I spend several whole weeks on reading every sub-algorithm, crafting small examples to myself, writing comupter simulations etc., but then I will have to stop doing anything else. What should I do?

Decline the request, hoping that the paper will be given to a smarter reviewer that will be more capable of verifying its correctness? Or -
Agree to the request, but tell the PC member in advance that I am going to review only a part of the paper which I can understand?

NOTE: The problem is not with the authors' presentation. In fact, their explanations seem good and clear. Just the algorithms themselves are highly complex.

From my experience, at least one or two of the reviewers don't know what the papers are about (that are mostly the "publish as is" reviewer comments...). That said, I (personally) would decline out of respect for the author and myself. If I can't really review a paper, I wouldn't.

Is your subfield of computer science one in which conference papers are final publications?

While modesty is generally a good thing, I'd encourage you not to think of another reviewer as being "smarter" than you. We all have different areas of expertise.

It seems to be rather common with reviewers who don't have many clues, but act as if they do. Probably discourages some percent of people wondering if they should go into academia each year. So I would go with 1)

@DSVA yeah that happens a lot too ("You should write what E_{SCF} is, otherwise nobody understands what you are doing")

What do you mean by "subreview"? Is that a euphemism for reviewing instead of the official reviewer who can't do it?

I would go with 2, or at least contact the editor saying you would do 2, and asking if they'd prefer 1. There tends to be a shortage of referees, at least in my field, so I'd expect 2 to be preferred. I've been sent a paper to look at one aspect where someone else had apparently already checked a different aspect.
While I hate to say it, I believe in maths it would not really be expected that every tiny detail of a similar paper would be checked. I used to think it worked like that, but the time issues you mention are true for others too, so I guess 'certain enough' has to replace 'absolutely certain'.

Accept it. In the worst case, your review could be something like

The paper is well structured and well written; while I was not able to confirm every single proof/algorithm, I am confident that the topics are presented in a sound way and would make an interesting topic in the conference.

This will make your position quite clear, and the publisher/organisator will easily be able to decide whether to take your review or not.
You will help to filter out badly written stuff, you will also be able to find flaws in the "internal" logic and the general approach, language, presentation etc.

I would contact the editor or PC member who assigned me the paper, explain my limitations, and ask whether they would like to reassign the paper. They are in a better position to judge whether there are people better suited to review the paper or if you are the best reviewer available to them.
Another alternative would be suggesting a reviewer who is a better fit, if you know one and think they would be available.

Why the downvote? If there's something wrong with my answer, I'd like to know what it is.

By declining the review request for a conference (with sharp deadlines on notifications) you are not doing much favor to either the PC committee or the authors: the PC member invited you would have to spend more time searching for another replacement referee and this is highly non trivial and time consuming and, consequently, would give less time to the next referee for the report.
Note that probably the PC member that invited you is aware that you are not the expert. In  many (most) cases, a relatively light review should be enough: nobody expect you (for a conference submission with a short deadline during summer) to read every little detail for the paper but rather to be able to understand and judge the results and the techniques. Are they relevant? Do they make good sense? Do they break some widely believe assumptions (sanity checks etc)?
It doesn't matter if you cannot verify every Lemma just make a high level recommendation based noting that as far as you have checked the results seem correct and reasonable. Of course you should mention everything to the PC committee.
Note that more than 50% of the reviews I have received of my submissions are 1 paragraph reviews: either saying great, super, accept and that's it, or criticizing that my paper is not relevant enough. In the beginning of my career I was slightly mad but I get to understand that expecting something more from all referees regarding conference submissions is unrealistic.

As an editor of a journal, I'd encourage you to contact the editor stating pretty much what you've said here and offer to review the paper as best you can in light of those limitations, should they want that.
This is for two reasons.

The editor is probably less of an expert in this than you are. Editors see all sorts of papers spanning dozens of subfields and do their best to find folks who have a reasonable chance of understanding what the paper's about and whether it's interesting. That you've been asked to review the paper means, somewhere, an editor thinks that you have a special knowledge of this particular subtopic.
There is probably a lot you can do here, even if you don't have the time or ability to follow all of the authors' arguments. Does the argument appear well-crafted? Do the ideas fit together? Does the paper seem as though it will be of interest to people? Refer back to Point 1: from the Editor's perspective the paper may be jargony, rely on methods that are more obscure to them than to you, and may be of dubious interest. Your opinions may matter.

Simply decline, and, if you really wish, say why and what you could do instead if asked. You are not up to the job to review the whole thing, and it's ok to declare so. If the paper is really astronomically complex, it would be the responsibility of the PC to choose an appropriate reviewing method, e.g., partition reviewing into subtasks and ask you (or others) to accomplish these subtasks.
PS. Personally, I would read and try to learn something new and useful from the paper. But it would be my own, subjective, personal decision, weakly related to your situation.

If it was me, I would decline to review the paper. It doesn't seem fair to the author of the article to have an article half-reviewed and the most important part not even verified.
Furthermore, if it so happened that if the paper was published and someone else further down the line spotted problems in the paper then it would come back on the journal for allowing it to be published.
If you don't have the time or don't believe you can, then don't.

I've encountered situations like this before, and if there is a limitation with the availability of potential new reviewers or time constraints, the solution I've found is to work with the panel of multiple reviewers. It's reasonable to request clarification on different points of the paper before proceeding with any final decisions, and normally the author is expected to have their draft work and notes readily available. But you should let the author know ASAP, as you should only evaluate the paper on the topic it discusses.
Though you yourself may not understand or be able to review all of the paper, if you are confident in your credibility in your field, you should still give your input on whatever parts of it you do understand, and converse with other panel members on the parts that you don't, breaking the topics in the review process across multiple members if necessary. It's obviously not an accurate representation of the effectiveness of a paper if only one person with limited experience reviews it.

Just give an honest review. Although it may not apply in your case, conference papers are often judged by different standards from archival journal papers, and a quick response that says, for example, interesting, should provoke worthwhile discussion (or whatever conference-like virtue the paper may have) will probably earn the organisers gratitude. Be honest about what you did not understand, or did not have time to understand. If you can analyse WHY you did not understand it, and suggest gaps that need to be filled, even more useful.
As others have pointed out, your imperfect review may be better than leaving the organisers searching, with limited time, for a more capable reviewer who may not even exist. If it is planned to publish proceedings, I would expect that another round of reviews will be organised, for which discussion following the paper may well be significant.

You should entertain the possibility that the problem lies not solely with you, but with the authors' presentation. If you find it hard to understand, likely many others will struggle too. Have the confidence to state this plainly.


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How can I import my BibTeX file to my Google Scholar Library?
I have a large library of articles in CiteULike, but recently it does not work very well, so I would like to move to using the Google Scholar library. I exported my CiteULike library to a BibTeX file. Is there a way to import this file to my Google Scholar library?

Sorry, currently you cannot...

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Letting students grade their own homework
I am going to teach a course in algorithms to 2nd-year undergraduates. The grade in this course is composed of 90% exam and 10% homework. The problem is, this year we do not have enough personnel to grade the homework.
Theoretically, it may be possible to change the grade struture and make it 100% based on final exam, but, this will reduce the incentive of students to study and practice during the semester, which I think will harm their learning experience.
So, I thought of the following scheme: the students will have to submit each assignment before the next TA session. The TA will explain the solutions during the session, and then each student will grade his/her own homework.
Sure, some students might be tempted to give themselves 100 on all assignments, but I believe this will not be very harmful since:

All assignments together compose only 10% of the grade, so every single assignment is less than 1%. Even if many students get 10% for free, the final exam is still sufficient to differentiate the good from the bad students.
The group consists of excellent students (the top 20%, based on their 1st year mean grade). I believe most of them want to succeed in the exam, so they will take this as an opportunity to track their own progress during the course, rather than an opportunity to just get some points for free.

What do you think about this scheme?

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Question: Even if many students get 10% for free, the final exam is still sufficient to differentiate the good from the bad students. If you don't care about that 10%, why grade the homework at all?

@Jason From experience, if the homework isn't graded, most students won't do it, and therefore most students will learn less.

@JeffE It's effectively not graded if it doesn't really make a difference in your final grade.

@Jason You'd think so, but that's not how students actually behave, in my experience. I've been repeatedly surprised at how much more willing students are to work for 1% of their grade than for 0%. But they are. How much the homework is worth matters far less than whether it's worth more than zero.

@JeffE it seems implausible that people who won't do homework when it isn't graded would both do it and grade themselves honestly under this system.

At U of Toronto, that 10% is free anyway. They call it a participation mark and you get it for attending, or for raising your hand when questions are asked. Not worth sweating. Also, the learning benefits of the self-reflective and metacognitive elements probably make up for any cheating.

You could always just not assign homework. Tell the students the work they need to complete and assume they did it. You could make up that extra 10% with one or two quizzes before the exam if you don't feel comfortable making the exam worth 100% of their mark.

I have used a similar technique, albeit in a course for nonmajors and at a time late in my  career when I was willing to acknowledge that my grading was often pretty impressionistic even when I had a rubric.
To maximize what students learned from homework and to minimize the time I had to spend parsing their answers, I would go over the homework in class while the students still had their papers. I asked them to comment on their work, with a different writing implement than the one they used at home.
They could correct simple mistakes, flag serious misunderstandings, tell me which problems they were worried about. I encouraged comments like "I didn't understand this at home, now I do" or even "I didn't understand this at home and I still don't".
Then I collected the papers and read and graded them. That took much less time than it would have without their comments. It also gave me better feedback about problem areas.

Interesting. Did you get any feedback from the students regarding this method? How about the average of the group at the end, could you draw any conclusions from it?

@user347489 Some students seemed to like it, and to learn from it. The samples were too small and too noisy to draw any conclusions other than that it worked well enough for me to repeat it regularly.

This might sound a bit weird, but what if you just award points for submission? It doesn't matter if they got any of the questions right, just that they tried to answer them and turned them in. Make this clear at the start of the course.
Then you can leaf through the submissions to gauge what people understood and what still needs some clarification, and fix it in the next lecture.

This is what I've had a bunch of teachers do to encourage people to do their homework but not have to spend tons of time grading it.  Yes, you could scribble in nonsense to make it look like you "tried", but at that point, it's easier to put in honest effort. It always seemed to work well.

Why is this weird? Effort grades for homework are a thing, and IMHO the best way to grade homework. Homework is meant to reinforce the material learned in class, not to test the student. If your homework is not meant that way, style it as a take-home quiz. This way, honest effort is rewarded, and taking homework answers from SO has no point. Also, you can see what students are struggling with the most, and address this in class.

This is not weird, and not a bad idea in itself, but it doesn't solve what I consider to be the main problem: Part of learning is getting feedback from your teachers (or TAs) on your own work. So not upvoting nor downvoting.

In my experience, this is a good idea. To improve on the feedback problem you could even grade some selected exercises without incurring to much work. You could even have a short look over what they handed in and then give them a graded exercise covering one or two of the most problematic points. In my experience, most of the need for feedback is in a small subset of the assignments anyway.

Homework is meant to reinforce the material learned in class — No it isn't. Homework is meant to help students learn the material presented in class.

A combination approach might work well, assuming that some of the homework can be graded.  Divide the 10% into 2 parts, could be 5% and 5%, 2% and 8%, whatever - one part is participation, the other is score.  If the student completes all homework they get 100% in participation.  Randomly select certain assignments to be graded and that becomes the score percentage.

I see two problems with this approach:
1) It is unclear how the students should grade their assignment. How many points should they deduct?
Even if you give them the right solutions, sometimes students think "oh yes, in principle my solution was right, it was only written down differently" when in fact some important parts are missing. It may very well be that very self- confident students give themselves more points than non-self-confident students.
2) Depending on how your grading structure works, 10 percent more may result in a better grade than the student actually has earned. (In countries where grades are not considered important, this may not be a problem.) While you can probably say who the good and the bad students are - does the grade you have to give the students by your syllabus say the same about them?
Two tips from me:
1) If you announce to sometimes check their solutions and control if they gave themselves the right amount of points, you can reduce "obvious cheating" a little bit. However, you cannot prevent the nonobvious cheating/ misunderstandings (which I described in (1) above).
2) You might actually not grade their homeworks, but grade their effort: You may announce that students get credits for those exercises which they reasonably tried to solve. Then the students hand in their homework and write down the number of exercises where they did reasonable approaches and sometimes you look over the exercises and check if they did not lie. This is much less work. Of course, here also students can make sometimes different claims - but much less than if they really grade their assignments. (You should make a reasonable effort to define "reasonably", though.) And you give them the solutions anyway (as you planned to do).
Merry christmas!

For example (I cannot.comment.on your question), if I read the instructions "Mad Jack" links to above, I would mostly give myself 5 points if I really would have earned 8, because I am so afraid I might be cheating (and thus maybe fail the course). So I would rather err on this side. Other students may err on the other side. However, this makes the grades more unfair.

So, instead of letting them grade their own homework, remove the name from the submission and put a code / number on each piece of work, hand them out randomly and they grade each others.
My experience shows they are harder graders than I am - establish a control ie check 10% every so often and they respect it.

That's what I thought too. Add an option that, in case someone things he/she was graded incorrectly, they can ask you (TA) to re-grade (with the possibility that re-grading results in a lower grade as well).

While I maybe would not give myself 100% for being not completely correct, I would probably do so for other people. Your approach does probably only work in certain cultures. Are you from the US or Canada, by any chance?

@Haudie no, luckily...

@Mark yes, that happens , works well, but the 10% checking also helps.

The main benefit of having your work examined by a TA or the professor is getting constructive feedback on what you did, didn't do, and couldn't do. The students are not capable of doing so. (Or rather, a minority of them may happen to be, but most aren't). The question of whether the grades are high or low is of minor importance IMHO.

You are trying to solve the wrong problem.

The problem is, this year we do not have enough personnel to grade the homework.

Note what I've emphasized. The problem is not "how to make do with not enough personnel", the problem is "not enough personnel". If you try to somehow hide that fact with some kind of a "hack" solution - which you yourself don't think very highly of - you'll just make it even harder to solve the problem.
(While not the focus of my answer, I'll also say that your self-grading system is unfair to students. Feedback from a trained academic is of critical importance to their education, especially the feedback about what they have not thought of themselves, or regarding alternative possible solutions which they may have stumbled upon, or errors they make trying to establish what's correct in itself, and so on.)
"But", I can hear you saying "The dearth of homework graders is a systemic, non-technical problem - not something I can solve merely by my sharpened intellect. And it's not as though I can just tell my department 'we need more people', since other courses probably have a similar issue too."
Well, to that I would say:
It's time to unionize.
(or to shake up your do-nothing shell of a union you may officially have.)
Faculty or University management has allowed itself to cut back on the number of positions beyond the necessary minimum. That has been possible for some combination of the following reasons:

It can make decisions without consulting with the faculty
It can force its own decisions on the faculty
The faculty do not have enough sense of professionalism / perspective on the pedagogic process to voice objections when consulted
Faculty representatives are co-opted by management
Faculty representatives are not subjected to oversight / do not really need to answer back to their public

These are all issues that a faculty union is supposed to - and can - address. Note that I didn't say you need to start the socialist revolution and take over the world, but if you had a working union, you could (in order of the above issues):

Demand from, and possibly force, management to only make such staffing decisions when the faculty agrees that they're reasonable
Allow for individual course professors to not have to accept the allocation of TAs/homework graders/lecturers they were given from above, i.e. for the individual (like you) to say "that's not enough" and for there to be a binding procedure for addressing this beforehand, rather than you being stuck with the current situation
Educate each other, especially new faculty, and more especially new graduate students who become junior faculty, about things like obligation vis-a-vis the students and vis-a-vis your colleagues, what the faculty believes should be the reasonable workload and why, etc.
Make sure that faculty representatives to decision-making processes are at least somewhat beholden to the actual faculty and its interests, e.g. through elections, and also:
Make your representatives report regularly to their colleagues, both in writing and in the occasional meeting, and that you all make certain decisions together rather than leaving everything to their on-the-spot personal judgement.

If the above happens, I'm sure you will have both the will and the means to rectify the lack of sufficient personnel. In fact, collective power could allow you to do things that are personally less possible, e.g. get the faculty to invest in automatized question generation and grading, at least in some courses (not algorithms probably), which could free up some of the teaching staff.
PS - Since you (seem to be) Israeli, I recommend you read a few relevant chapters of Dr. Daniel Mishori and Dr. Anat Maor's anthology about Exploitative Employment in Israel. It's available on-line for free (Hebrew only though) and has quite a few chapters on Israeli universities' teaching staff employment practices.

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Instead of having the students grade their own paper why not have them grade their peer's paper. Peer editing will hopefully reduce the risk of students giving themselves an "A". In addition, peer editing allows students to see how others have attempted to solve the problem and it also allows them to discuss how they came to their solution. This cooperative dialog should hopefully heighten understanding of the topic.
If there is a great concern in terms of dishonesty in using peer editing. I recommend having each student write their name at the bottom of the paper they are peer editing. Then I would also encourage you or the TA to randomly mark a few papers each week just to check the honesty of the grades. It keeps everyone on their toes while keeping the workload to a minimum. This also allows you to identify common mistakes to address during lectures.

I suugested this above, it works well when I use it.

Then again, this only works in certain cultures. Also consider that some students might tell who they are grading.

Self-grading is actually advocated by some education researchers (Phil Race is the one that comes to mind, but there are others).
However, the reason for doing it is not primarily about saving your marking time (although that is part of it). It's also about helping students to learn to assess their own work, rather than relying on the marker to tell them whether they've done it right or not, which is an important skill they will need when they reach the real world.
To avoid upsetting the more honest students, you need to be able to explain why it is good for them, not that it is because you haven't been given a grader (bear in mind that you can do the grading yourself, and they may believe you have little else to do all week).
Also, you need to teach the students how to assess their work. Go carefully though some worked examples with them at the start (bad ones as well as good). Show them what they need to look out for. It's pretty surprising how little they pick up on major differences between their work and the model solution (eg, in maths, random mathematical symbols versus full sentences). The rubric must also be very clear.
One way to reduce the cheating aspect would be to moderate the work - either take in a random sample each week, or get them to hand in all their marked work, and remark one sheet chosen at the end (I chose to use a die to decide which to mark, so they can see you're not deliberately picking the one they did badly on).

The solution I tried in a class where I had no help for grading and too many students was to not grade homework at all, but to make it clear that a portion of questions from every homework would be on the exam, nearly verbatim.  Mostly I shifted numbers and/or signs around so that they couldn't just memorize what they did before and regurgitate it.
I found this worked quite well.  I did give a small grade for submitting each homework on time, but the work was not reviewed and I don't think it was a particularly important part of the scheme.
Advantages:

Low grading work
The homework and the exam are connected in a tangible way for the students, making it clear that assignments are worth their effort (as opposed to them deciding something worth only 10% of their grade is worth only 10% of their effort)
You've forestalled any questions about what is on the exam or will there be a study guide, because the homework always is the answer
Less micromanagement on your part
According to my reviews, the students liked it.  They hate lack of clarity on how to get good grades
I like solutions that involve going over the homework answers in class time, but that's very costly in terms of student face time that could be used for other things, and this solution avoids that

Disadvantages:

Might allow less-motivated students to really fail badly if they neglect the homework, where they might have been motivated to do it by hard deadlines

Combine this with you having TAs who can go over this in sections with students, and I think it would work very well for your problem.  Also, as a former TA, I applaud you for not just deciding the remaining TAs need to double their workload!

The most significant disadvantage is the students not having feedback from more experienced academics regarding their own actual homework. They don't know what they did right or wrong, and how. Even after the exam they only know this very partially, and have not had the chance to learn from their mistakes.

@einpoklum Why would you do it that way? I certainly didn't.

I didn't get what you mean by "it" and "that way" in your comment; can you rephrase?

@einpoklum Students not getting feedback and help isn't an inherent part of what I described. The OP has TA sections where that would be possible; I did mine in office hours and email, plus the questions had an auto-grading system online that was pretty good.

It seems to me that the amount of work, both on the part of the students preparing and the staff grading, involved with the homework assignments is disproportionate to their share on the grade. 10 assignments worth 1 percentage point each seem a bit too much buck for too little bang, so to speak.
I agree with you about the assignments being useful to improve the course experience and quality; therefore, I think that could be reflected in how they're weighted. If you have 90% weight on the exam and 1% each on 10 home assignments, that seems to me to communicate to students that the assignments aren't important. In trying to improve course experience, I'd try to fix that first.
I realize this may be outside your authority to change, but an avenue that occurs to me is to increase the homework share on the grade. Perhaps to 70-30 for exam-homework? I've had a few assignment-heavy courses where the grade balance ran to 50-50 or even higher (i.e., exam worth less than half the final grade). I'm not saying you need to go that far, especially if the assignments are individually small. But still.
If the balance was changed this way, this, together with presenting the course differently than before (i.e., a course where the homework matters) might be a fairly good argument to get additional staff assigned to grade it (at least if that's a realistic possibility at your school), thereby solving your original problem and, IMHO, improving the course in the process.

Does the homework include different parts (for instance, different questions/problems)? If so, you can say that, for every homework, you will only grade one or two questions chosen at random. Because they are chosen at random, they will still need to reply all of them. You can have the additional requirement that incomplete homeworks will not receive any score at all. Then, in class, roll a die to choose the question, so they see it is truly random.
Another approach is that you randomize the homework papers and distribute them, so everyone grades someone else's. That might be delicate if it's a large class and don't know each other very well, or there are frictions that you may not be aware of.
A third approach is that everyone grades their own homework, using a different color/ink than the solution they wrote, and then give them to you. You pick a few papers at random (~10% of the class), or not at random but the ones you think may have inflated the grades, and double-check their grading.
In all these approaches, the probability that their homework will be graded by someone other than themselves should deter most of them from inflating their grades.
And, as someone mentioned, if this is not a consequence of a well-thought teaching decision, but of a lack of personnel, join your union and fight for an improvement of your working conditions!

One approach is to collect the entire homework assignment, but then only grade one or two problems (chosen at random). Since students won't know which problems will end up being graded beforehand, they are still responsible for completing the entire assignment. However, it drastically reduces the total number of problems that you need to grade.
The system remains fair, as all students have the same problems graded on each assignment. There will, however, be a small amount of griping early on about how "I did the rest of the problems perfectly, but you graded the only problem I didn't do." As long as you make sure to note that the problems you selected to grade were chosen randomly and remind them that sometimes they might get graded on the only problem they did perfectly, students will generally buy into the system. I would further advocate for this system as homework accounts for a smaller portion of the final grade under your syllabus, so any random variations should be reasonably minimized.
I have also tried doing student grading in the past, but as other answers have noted, this can end up consuming a large amount of precious classroom time and you are forgoing your ability to give feedback---one of the most important reasons to do homework.

I don't know if this would help. But at my uni, we had to submit homework, but it had no grade in itself. It did, however, allow us to participate on a sort of test at the end of the semester (as in, we couldn't participate in it if we hadn't submitted 70% of our homework), in which some exercises from our homework were selected and depending how good we did on these exercises the grade we got. 10% is maybe too little to implement this, but maybe you can think of something similar.
Hope this helped

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What are the most reasonable side margins for a (math) preprint?
When disseminating your research with a preprint, is there ever a disadvantage to using (almost) the full printable page area? I see overwhelming advantages to using the entire page:

The page count is lower,
hence the document is easier to navigate
and the printed stack is cheaper and lighter

Possible disadvantages include:

Some people may want ample space for their own annotations
Some people may dislike long lines

Whether to use the full printable area is more important in mathematics because one of the dominant styles for formats, namely the ones used in AMS publications, leaves side margins that basically cover >40% of the entire page. This seems rather excessive.
But I also know that many (recent?) formats in mathematics go fairly close to the printable area. So what are the most reasonable side margins for a (mathematics) preprint?

The first advantage is not an advantage, just a statement of fact. The second supposed advantage does not follow from the first claim. The third is simply irrelevant – is the cost of printing papers an actual concern to you or anyone you know? By focusing on supposed efficiency, you're really missing the key point here, which is not that "some people may dislike long lines", but that it's a well-established typographic principle that when the lines are too long the text gets more difficult to read.

You might not truly want readers to wonder why-in-the-world you did a strangely non-conformist thing... distracting them from the content. Not that I'm an advocate for conformity, but, sometimes, non-conformity can just be "noise".

@paulgarrett: who says non-conformist? I see very different common practices next to each other, and rather than just picking one by chance, I'd rather make a conscious choice. Besides, the "why-in-the-world are doing that strangely non-conformist thing" is generally how virtually everyone else reacts to conventions in mathematics.

@AdamPrenosil: Yes, it is. I'd rather print, organize, and carry less paper than more. And are you saying that physicians, economists, and physicists are doing it all wrong and only mathematicians got it right? I'd rather make an informed decision when picking between the different conventions in math.

@Ambicion, well, to my perception, many/most people just use default TeX/LaTeX settings for margins and such... I suppose because they are more interested in the content than the format. I myself have experimented with different fonts, font sizes, interline spacings, etc., but, as it turns out, the defaults are pretty good, by comparison. Well, ok, yes, to my perception. :)

@Ambicion "And are you saying that physicians, economists, and physicists are doing it all wrong and only mathematicians got it right?" No, I am explaining what the main reason is to keep your lines short. I don't know what the normal preprint looks like in physics, but as far as I can tell they tend to be typeset either like math preprints or in a multiple column format (which keeps your lines short). What is not happening, as far as I can tell, is that they are typeset in a single-column format like math preprints but with smaller margins.

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How to avoid self-plagiarism when copying boiler plate sections in a math paper?
My research in mathematics uses concepts from a variety of subdisciplines that usually don't interact much with one another. For that reason, I need to include boiler plate sections that establish the notation for the paper and specific the definitions.
When writing a succession of articles, I naturally want to copy-paste those boiler plate sections. How do I avoid self-plagiarism?

A statement, early in the new paper, that notations and definitions are taken from ... (citation) should be enough. If you are depending on several prior papers then you may need to replicate such a statement for different sections of the new work.
The important thing is to point a reader to the earlier work(s) in which a more complete context can be found.
If the earlier work is published and you no longer hold copyright then you need to be more careful to stay within the bounds of any license from the publisher. This may require quotation and such as well as citation. But that is a separate question than self-plagiarism.

Note, however, that in citing the work of others, rather than yourself, you need to be more precise.


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What are Honarary Editors?
As in the title: what is the function of an Honorary Editor on a journal's editorial board, as opposed to regular editors?
I have seen this a few times in a journal and I suspect it is supposed to add legitimacy to a journal, in particular if the journal only recently started being published. But what is their official function?

The official function will be what is negotiated between the journal and the honorary editor. It could be anything from nothing to being a full editor.

As Maarten says, the official function could be almost anything.
I've seen this title used to mean "a former editor who was really awesome" but I think it could also mean "someone who is doing some editing for us, pro bono" or "someone we ask for help when we have a tricky decision".


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Who holds the copyright to a preprint article with multiple authors?
Given a preprint article that is not submitted anywhere else, may be not even on a preprint server, who holds the copyright to the article?
To what extent do authorship contributions or being listed as an author affect the copyright status?

Copyright law varies, though there are common elements. Generally, assume that all authors hold the copyright jointly and equally unless other arrangements are made by the authors themselves.
From the University of California we get:

Co-authors own the work’s copyright jointly and equally, unless the authors make an agreement otherwise. Each joint author has the right to exercise any or all of the exclusive rights inherent in the joint work. Each author may:

Grant third parties permission to use the work on a nonexclusive basis without the consent of other joint authors

Transfer their entire ownership interest to another person without the other joint authors' consent

Update the work for their own purpose

A statement of contributions won't affect this, as long as all are authors.
The linked site has more information.

Thank you. The very last paragraph about authorship in the copyright sense vs scholary sense is most interesting for my question.


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Is it acceptable if researchers publish in journals and serve on the editorial board at the same time?
It seems to be a not too uncommon practice that researchers publish (frequently) in the same journal on which they are on the editorial board.
On the one hand, there are good reasons why that would situation would arise:

Researchers in field X publish in journals in field X
You don't want to cut out yourself from a journal while doing service to the community
If it is a good journal, you still want to publish in it

On the other hand, that leaves a bad taste. When you are on the editorial board, you'll more political leverage and thus more possibility of pushing your own articles past peer review. Essentially, once you have climbed the ladder that high, you can game the system.
How is that handled in practice?

Does this answer your question? Should an Editor in Chief publish in their own journal? or Publish an article in the journal in which one is an associate editor

See also https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/194645/reviewing-a-paper-written-by-an-editor-of-the-journal-am-i-really-anonymous/194646#194646

The obvious solution in this and all other similar situations is to remove the person from decision making on their own papers. This is a matter of both institutional and individual ethics.
But, I think you have the wrong idea about publishing. The purpose of academic publishing isn't "political" or personal aggrandizement, but the advance of scholarship. This is especially important in some fields where the research has real human effects.
You probably want active researchers making decisions about the validity and academic/scientific value of recent research. They should be the best people to weed out the chaff. And you especially want them setting the direction of the journal. Who better to recognize when something earth-shattering comes along?
If a person were to live "up" to your fears, I think that their reputation would suffer greatly. Their peers would quickly recognize this and would complain, quite loudly, I'd guess. The reputation of the journal would also suffer if it publishes dreck produced by so-called self-important superstars.
Yes, abuse is possible, but don't assume that people are inherently only self interested.

It is not unexpected that editors and EB members also contribute with articles to the journals they serve, and journals in some cases also offer incentives to editors such as discounts in the APC, however, this is also considered endogenous publishing and often is encouraged to be kept at a minimum; e.g. the DOAJ guidelines allow up to 25% of articles in a given journal issue to be coauthored by members of the EB. In some journals, when a coauthor is part of the EB sometimes it is mentioned in the conflict of interest statement.


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Should I ask for permission to name a mathematical theorem?
Suppose that two researchers, say, Y. Yubaba and Z. Zeniba have proven an original mathematical theorem that I want to use.
I would like to name it the Yubaba-Zeniba theorem. Is it proper etiquette to ask for permission first to use their names in that way or are names good to go in general?

If the theorem is published, there is no problem in naming it this way.

There is a story of a very famous mathematician, I can't remember his name, say Xerxes, who went to one of his colleagues and asked what is the "Xerxes Theorem" I'm reading about. Someone else had named it in his honor. Perhaps it is apocryphal and perhaps someone can supply the name. I heard the story half a century ago.

@Buffy You likely mean the story about Hilbert asking about the definition of a Hilbert Space, see here.

@Mark, yes, that resonates. I had Hilbert in my mind as I wrote the comment actually. Thanks.

I found myself referring to "Anning's Theorem" when I needed a convenient way to refer to something which would otherwise be really unwieldy and cumbersome to describe: https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Anning%27s_Theorem

fyi I've just asked Has there ever been a case where someone wished a theorem or important result wasn't named after them? Has it happened more than once?

You can say ''a theorem of Yubaba and Zeniba'' to not sound too formal.

There is no need to ask permission, and mostly likely they will be happy to have the theorem referred to with their names.
The normal way to do it is state it as "Theorem (Yubaba-Zeniba [YZ])" and it's up to you how you then refer to it in the text, e.g., "the Yubaba-Zeniba Theorem", "Yubaba and Zeniba's Theorem", etc.
The only caveat is if they have another, or many, well-known theorems, then I would either qualify it more (e.g., the "Yubaba-Zeniba Vanishing Theorem") or use the possessive form rather than "the Yubaba-Zeniba Theorem" or refer to it by the theorem number in the text to prevent confusion with their other results

fyi I've just asked Has there ever been a case where someone wished a theorem or important result wasn't named after them? Has it happened more than once?

Oh that Yubaba-Zeniba theorem!

I hereby reproduce, in full, the Yubaba-Zeniba Vanishing Theorem:

I suppose there is no formal need to ask for permission, but

I see no harm in doing so.
I see the potential for harm in not doing so.

I wouldn't think of it as "asking for permission" but asking for "suitability." Situations where you might regret not checking with the authors:

The original authors, or other authors, have already started calling the theorem by another name.
Yubaba did not contribute to that part of the paper, and believes Zeniba should get all the credit.
The statement of the theorem made by Yubaba and Zeniba is a special case of a more general and widely applicable theorem, which was not included in that paper but perhaps has been proven elsewhere in the meantime.

I've never been in this exact situation myself, so perhaps I am being overly cautious.
I did once have the temptation to name an amazing insight after the person from whose paper I learned it, only to later learn that the insight was a relatively small generalization of a 30-year-old result I was not aware of at the time.

Yubaba and Zeniba have collaborated on a far more important and more widely known theorem that OP just hasn't come across. This could confuse readers who have, and the authors may be aware of this and could help OP

Yubaba and Zeniba didn't discover the theorem; a source unknown to them did, who should actually be credited as the author (e.g. the Doe Theorem of XYZ), or at least as an addition with a hyphen (e.g. the Yubaba-Zeniba-Doe Theorem of XYZ).

fyi I've just asked Has there ever been a case where someone wished a theorem or important result wasn't named after them? Has it happened more than once?

I generally agree with colleagues here that it shouldn't be a problem. But, it would be prudent to point that this can often go wrong. It is often the case, for example, that the people who popularise a theorem are very different from the people who first describe it, or first put the most non-trivial building blocks that allowed others to popularize it in the first place. Sometimes what is an incremental and what is a fundamental contribution is not clear.
In your case it may be clear that these two, and only these two authors have worked on this problem; but in cases where it's not, particularly if the missing authors themselves (or often enough, their national bodies in posthumous situations) would consider them ignored pioneers of that work.
I can think of many examples of people/nations with grievances of this kind. This is especially true in medicine, where people (or often, their birthplaces) try to eponymize diseases all the time.
The most obvious example that first comes to mind to me (as a Greek person) is Behçet's disease, which as the wikipedia page calmly states, "is sometimes also known as Adamantiades-Behçet's disease".
What this calm statement hides behind it is that the two wikipedia entries have almost been a battleground of edits between people of Greek and Turkish origin, defending what the correct name to use is, etc. You can see some of this still remaining in the talk pages, but these typically get cleaned out of view, hiding such battlescars!
Tellingly, if you look for Adamantiades in the English wikipedia, you will be redirected to Behçet's disease; if you look for Behçet in the Greek wikipedia, you will be redirected to Adamantiades-Behçet's disease :)
Behçet's disease is particularly interesting, given the information in the article:

It was "first formally first described by H. Planner and F. Remenovsky, who published their findings in 1922"
Behçet, an eminent Turkish dermatologist and scientist, first (?) recognizes the three main symptoms of the syndrome in one of his patients in 1924 (but no publication is made at the time).
Adamantiades presents independent (?) work at the Medical Society of Athens in 1930, identifying the three major signs of the disease, and insisting in their classification as a single clinical entity. This results in a publication in 1931 in Greek and French medical journals.
Behçet subsequently reports his own research on the disease in the Journal of Skin and Venereal Diseases in 1936.

So the implication here is: the two people who first really discovered this, are not even contenders for the name here; Behçet's largest contribution here was presumably being among the pioneers who described this disease, ostensibly not the very first, but certainly the most eminent, and the one who published in the most impactful journal, the one whose contribution actually reached the most eyes and had the most impact, and thus (perhaps rightfully) the name most now associated with the disease.
So, yes. I think it's mostly ok, but just keep in mind there's always a small chance you might accidentally start World War 3 in a 'butterfly flapping its wings' kind of way if you're not too careful :p


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What is the optimal number of times one should meet one's PhD. advisor?
I see sad students who meet may be once in a month and they complaint of not having enough progress. I have seen systems where the prof meets almost every few hours on weekdays and the prof is basically continuously working with the students. I see students who meet every 2-3 days or every week.
So what is the "right" frequency if at all?
What is the good frequency?
Once the weekly(instant) gratification of getting full scores on the course homework is removed it is quite a challenge to keep a gauge of whether one has made any progress during the week. How does one measure progress during the week during one's PhD?

The last paragraph asks an entirely different question - I suggest that it be made into a separate question on its own!

Do you only consider one-on-one meetings?  Many groups have weekly group meetings that may include a part where everyone briefly describes what they've done in the past week; then the supervisor gets an update from all group members, including PhD students.

To expand on Peter's great answer, I'd also like to throw out the idea that the "ideal" frequency varies not only case-by-case, but also may change during the course of one's graduate education.
A beginning graduate student will very likely need much more supervision than a student in the middle of her program. Similarly, the student who is finishing up may need more frequent contact, but only because changes are probably happening at a very rapid pace, and it's important to make sure deadlines are completed on time.
From my own experience, I started out meeting weekly with my advisors; after about a year or so, the meetings became every two weeks, but then toward the end became weekly again (for the last two or so months before the defense).
Within my current group, I use a similar scheme: new students have weekly meetings, while older students (and the postdocs) meet every other week, or as needed. (Some of my students get along quite fine meeting with me only once every three to four weeks, and I'm fine with that, because they are independent enough not to need more "face-to-face" time.)
The important thing, I think, is that the PhD student should know that the time is available, if she needs it. However, it's also been my belief that it's when the student doesn't want to meet that it's actually most important to do so. This usually means that something's not quite right—and that's when intervention can make the most difference!

The "right" frequency is probably "enough". Whereas this may seem like a joke, it is not. The frequency with which you need to meet your advisor will primarily depend on you, your advisor and your project (work conditions). If someone complains about not meeting enough, it can be because of two things, either they do indeed not meet enough or maybe the student is not independent enough. It is important to be self-critical on both sides. The problem is, in other words, that each student-advisor relationship is different and enough may not be what either the student or the professor thinks is enough. A minimum should from my perspective include meetings to iron out the really difficult points in the work and to provide feedback on thesis revisions, prepare for lab or field work or the equivalent and to simply touch base on a regular basis (perhaps monthly). If there is a social environment where you meet, that is fine but not necessary.
I personally had a weekly "show-and-tell" with the research group my advisor ran. These meetings were awful and more stressful than anything else. I could have done better without them. I probably met and discussed my thesis once per month on average, certainly more when writing up. I doubt my story is neither unique  nor typical.

The last sentence has two negatives. Did you mean " I doubt my story is either unique or typical."


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Choosing a project for a fresh graduate student
I am starting to advise a new graduate student for M.Sc. degree (in theoretical computer science), and I am considering what should be the first problem they should work on.
One option is a small and focused project that fits within a larger work that I recently did with a colleague. The advantage is that the student will likely succeed, since it is a relatively simple problem. Also, if the paper gets accepted, the student will have a publication in an early stage, which is encouraging. The disadvantage is that the problem is not sufficiently significant on its own - only as a part of the larger project. I am not sure how the student will put this in his thesis - he cannot put the entire paper in the thesis since it's not his own work.
Another option is a larger and completely new project. The advantage is that, if the student succeeds, it will be entirely his own work. The disadvantage is that it is a harder problem, so the student might get stuck and be discouraged.
What are some guidelines for selecting a good first project for a starting graduate student?

What is the timescale for this project? Is it limited to a term or is it open-ended?

Some of what you suggest/ask here depends entirely on university rules: "I am not sure how the student will put this in his thesis ...". Those rules can vary.

The timescale for master's thesis is 2 years. For the small project, I would like to submit the paper in some 4-6 months, but this is flexible.

My model is to start a student off on a small project.  The project must be within the reach of the student's current knowledge.  I use this project to train the student in the art of research.  Usually, after the first project, a student becomes a semi-competent researcher.

I think this also depends on the amount of time you are (realistically) able to spend on this student and their MSc. If you have the time, then the larger/newer project might be the way to go, so you can guide them a bit more to prevent them from getting stuck/discouraged.


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How to write tedious algebraic manipulations
In some of my papers, some of the results require tedious but straightforward algebraic manipulations. I am not sure what is the best way to present these manipulations:

I can write them at the paper body, then they might disturb the continuous reading of the text and distract the reader from the main results.
I can put them in an appendix, but then they will appear out-of-context and will be difficult to verify by the few readers who will want to.

One solution I thought of is to present them in their place in the paper body, but surround them in a gray box and in a smaller font. Then, most readers will be able to skip them easily, but the few interested readers will be able to read and verify them in context. Is this a good practice?

Possible duplicate of Exact results found, but not reported

One solution I thought of is to present them in their place in the paper body, but surround them in a gray box and in a smaller font. – Sounds like something no publisher will accept.

I don't think this is a duplicate of the other question. This question is about omitting intermediate stages of tedious calculations; the other question is about not stating the final result because it's too long and tedious. I think those are two rather different scenarios.

The obvious answer is Y follows trivially from X, intimidating any reader or reviewer who dares to question the triviality. ;-)

@gerrit "Trivial, adjective: any concept that you now understand, no matter how complex it is and how long it took you to understand it." - as far as I'm concerned, the more detailed the explanation is, the better.

If you use the math environment in LaTeX, the equations are in a new paragraph and get centered, so they are relatively easy to skip, if you arrange the text around it in a way that does not necessarily require the math. See here: http://www.lyx.org/images/about/preview_dvi.png

@gerrit I prefer "Y follows from X by straightforward but tedious algebraic manipulation (which we omit)."

If the algebra is straightforward, omit it from the paper.  You may, however, put it in a quasi-appendix on your website, and you may mention that in the paper.

For this sort of thing, I always fall back on the advice of one of my professors from my PhD coursework.  He said you first write out all the algebra in the paper, then you move it to the appendix because it's too long, then you delete it from the appendix because that's too long, and stick it on your website.  Finally, you delete it from the website because no one looks at it.
Of course this depends entirely on how crucial the computation is to your paper, and it might be good to look at what's done in other papers in your specific field.  But generally speaking, I think you can frequently trust your reader's ability to do tedious algebra if they so desire.
One bit of middle ground that I see a lot is to describe what you do without showing it.  For example, if you present three equations and two of them are to be substituted into the first at some point, you can write something like "We first solve equation 1 for lambda, then substitute in equations 2 and 3 for alpha and beta.  This gives us equation 4..." That way in one simple sentence you've told the reader exactly how to get to the end result without showing anything more messy than your starting equations and ending equation.
May be unrelated to your field, but in economics I was always fond of Alfred Marshall's advice from 1906:

(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in (4), burn (3). This last I did often.

Not really indicative of modern economics, but I like the principle regardless.

As far as I understand from his profile, Erel's work is mathematics, so Marshall's advice to essentially treat it as nothing more than a tool might not be appropriate.

@DavidRicherby OTOH within the field of mathematics you should be able to assume that your reader can perform straightforward algebra.

@Taemyr Yes, but maybe he can check correctness of straightforward algebra even faster.

I included the Marshall quote more for amusement than anything else.  It doesn't even apply to economics very well anymore.  Sorry, thought that was more clear.

Great answer; however, I don't see any reason to delete the material from the website.  Just because nobody reads it doesn't mean it must be deleted.

I would add the advice that you should never skip these steps and never write out the manipulations in the first place. While they're tedious and nobody will read them, you do need to make absolutely sure they're correct before you remove them. Typesetting them is a reasonable way to find any errors.

I feel that the key is to think carefully about your intended audience: what they want, what they need and what skills they have.
First, your field matters.  In some academic fields, mathematical derivations are not necessary in papers; in others, they are not expected; in others still, they are not common but bring some cachet when they are present, and in yet others they are really not wanted and will be viewed negatively.  So first figure out how essential a mathematically complete argument is to your paper.
From your profile and site presence, I gather you are working in a branch of CS that is rather mathematical: fair division.  If your goal is to prove theorems, then mathematical completeness is obviously quite important.  If your goal is to present a new algorithm, then a proof of correctness of the algorithm and/or a rigorous run-time analysis will be very important to some audiences, but others will be more interested in its practical applicability.  So I think you should ask yourself How important is it to my readers to be able to understand and verify the mathematical soundness of my work?  If it is not that important, then by including a lot of tedious algebra you are putting things in the paper that they will not value that much.  I wouldn't recommend doing that.
The next question to ask is To what extent will my readers be able and willing to supply tedious but straightforward algebraic calculations if I omit them? I hope you know that most math papers do not spell out every single detail.  On the contrary, when mathematicians are writing for an audience of peers in their subfield, they often omit lots of routine things because they expect that their peers know or can easily figure out the omitted things (and sometimes for less good reasons, honestly, but this is a good reason).  It is not rare at all to encounter in a math paper "A routine calculation shows X."  (And nowadays, when a calculation is of the sort that a standard software package can do, it is rather common to mention the software package and omit the calculation entirely.)  If I had to rule on mathematics as a whole, I would say that our culture is probably a bit too willing to say and do things like this: it is super easy to say "see math.uga.edu/~pete/Gory_Details.pdf if you want the gory details," and this is done sometimes but arguably not often enough.  (And indeed, though that's my homepage, there is no such pdf file!)  And perhaps the calculation is omitted more because of the length and difficulty of typing it up than because it's so straightforward...unfortunately.
Anyway, I hope these are useful questions, but the answers are not easy.  In the end you have to exercise your best judgment as to what will make your paper most readable and most valuable to the audience.  Try something sensible and see what happens.  For instance, if you think the paper is being cluttered up by too many, too-routine calculations, why not try omitting them from the paper but actually making a Gory_Details file that contains them?  The referees and editors may suggest that you do something else -- an appendix, a journal-hosted supplementary file, etc. -- but they will see that you are working hard to do the right thing.

One solution I thought of is to present them in their place in the paper body, but surround them in a gray box and in a smaller font. Then, most readers will be able to skip them easily, but the few interested readers will be able to read and verify them in context. Is this a good practice?

Unless this is commonly done in your field, I don't think so.  To me it mostly telegraphs your uncertainty and/or lack of confidence in the value of the calculations.  As long as your paper is well written, readers don't need a gray box to be able to skip your calculations, and a small font literally makes it harder to read them (please remember that many people, especially older people, have trouble reading small print), which could be annoying.


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Recommenders that are professors but not co-authors
I applied to a junior faculty position in a certain university. They asked me to provide a list of recommenders with the following requirements:

Each recommender should be a professor.
No recommender can be someone with whom I wrote a paper.

The second requirement rules out not only my Ph.D. advisors, but also most professors who know me as a researcher. I thought of several ideas for recommenders that meet both these requirements:

Professors who meet me regularly at department seminars. They can (hopefully) testify that I can ask good questions. But this is only a small part of being a good researcher.
Professors whose courses I took as a graduate student. They can testify that I can learn well. But again, this is only a small part of being a good researcher.
Professors for whom I did some technical work, e.g. computer programming (for research purposes); same comment as above.
Editors of journals for whom I reviewed a paper. They can (hopefully) testify that I can write good reviews; same comment as above.
Editors of journals in which I published papers. They can (hopefully) testify that my papers are good. But, the fact that they published my papers already shows that they think it is good.
Professors for whom I worked as a TA. They can (hopefully) testify that I know to teach. But for this, it may be much more relevant to bring recommendations from students (which I have).

What other options do I have?

How about your department chair?

Slightly off-topic, but that's an abysmal set of requirements. I have no idea what value they are expecting to get out of it, but as you correctly state, they're leaving out the people who (1) know you best and (2) know your value as a researcher.

What country?  This may give us a better sense of what kind of letters they are looking for.

@eykanal - One could make the same arguments about reviewers for papers.  Indeed, I suspect that the hiring university is (at least formally) looking for peer reviews of applicants, not letters of recommendation.

Too short for an answer: sometimes hiring committees care whether or not anyone beyond your co-authors and advisor care at all about your work. This is not completely unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh for beginners. That is, if the only people who like your work are co-authors and advisor, that is a limited endorsement. Better to have some distant big-shots to have taken notice, and be willing to endorse. Distant big-shots are always more persuasive than anyone we know personally, after all?!? :)

People who cite your papers
A particular audience that is suitable for this are people who cite your papers. It is quite likely that the committee wants to see what impact (if any) your research has on your field, so they would want opinions from people outside your team that have read your research and find it useful. One way to find such people is to look at citations to your papers - they (obviously) have read your research, consider it valuable, and you should be able to find their contact information from their papers.

That is an interesting direction I have not thought of. One comment thought: "they (obviously) have read your research" is not necessarily true. Often, in my field, people cite many papers that seem related just by reading the abstract.

I don't know what kind of institution this is, but if it's a research institution, presumably they want references that can evaluate the significance of your work "objectively."  So I would think of names of people who you haven't worked with, but should be interested in and capable of mostly understanding your work.  It need not be anyone you know personally.  (Of course you should email them to see if they are willing.)
If it is a teaching institution, then they probably want references from people who know how you will be as a teacher and as a colleague.  (And a research institution may want at least one teaching reference anyway.)
Note: the institution may try contacting people not on your list, and if you have questions about what they are looking for, try asking them.

This strikes me as they are taking a similar approach to references / recommenders for junior faculty hires as many institutions do -- at least in North America -- for the tenure-track; those going up for tenure are often asked for names of potential letter-writers who are familiar with their research / teaching / service but have not published a paper with them. Putting aside whether this is appropriate when hiring at the junior faculty level, for the situation you are in I think there are a few options:

As hpc answered, if you haven't published with one or more of your PhD committee members, they should make excellent candidates to ask to write a reference / recommendation letter. Most faculty and postdoc job applicants that I've seen (both previously as student colleagues during my PhD and now as applicants to my current university) have at least one of their committee members in the list of references they provide. Sometimes it can even look strange if you don't have at least one of them as one of your references, although in this case if you've published with all of them then you won't be able to do that (and nor will many other applicants, of course). If you haven't published with them, though, and depending on their role in your committee, they should at least be able to speak to your research, and possibly teaching or service as well.
Ask faculty at your PhD university who you have not published with, but that know at least part of your academic profile. Perhaps they are familiar with your research and research skills from your papers and presentations, or from talking with you. Perhaps they have observed your teaching or have had you work as a TA for them. Perhaps they know about your service from serving on the same committees or in the same associations and organizations. They may not be from the same research specialty as you, but hopefully they can speak to at least some of your qualities. If you weren't able to use a PhD committee member, it might be helpful to try and get at least one faculty member who is a full / named professor and/or has some form of administrative role (department chair, program director, etc.) at your PhD university.
Ask faculty from other universities whom you have met at conferences or other events and are in your area of specialty and/or your field. Think of those you might publish with down the road, should things work out, but that you haven't published with yet. Similar to those at your PhD university, if they have gotten to know about your research or service, they should be able to speak reasonably well to your achievements and potential.

There is likely some variance (as stated in the comments) depending on the country of the university you are applying to for a faculty role. That said, this is my sense based on my own experience in the US and Canada, and things may vary in Israel or other non-American/Canadian contexts. Good luck!

Other options:

Your PhD committee members
Your MS Thesis committee members (if applicable)
Department Chair or the Graduate Program Director

You can also take your work to a professor you are not familiar with (but he/she is familiar with your research area), request them to write a reference letter based on their evaluation of your CV/papers/TA work etc. I think this has as much a chance as items 4 and 5 of your list.


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Doing upper division pre-requisites for a second master's degree - need advice
I have a BA and an MA in biological anthropology/bioarchaeology (as well as all my PhD coursework done, go me). I left that field and academia in general several years ago and ended up landing a job as a web dev/computer programmer, which is a skill set I learned in high school and never once studied formally in college or grad school.
I'm really in love with my current field however, and would like to get a degree in comp sci. After looking around, it seems a lot of local departments don't admit students at the undergraduate level who already have bachelor's degrees, so my option is to go in at the graduate level.
Biggest problem is my first two degrees don't do much for me in terms of satisfying prereqs for admission into an engineering MS program. I had to take lots of stats, for example, but no calc or discrete math. Additionally, I need to knock out a whole bunch of comp sci courses, many of which are either upper division or not available at community colleges.
Has anyone out there done this before? If so, how did you get the upper div or otherwise difficult-to-find-outside-of-a-major-university prereqs?
Thanks!


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Question on terminology (postgraduate studies)
How does one call postgraduate studies in countries where the appropriate degree is not PHD? It can't be PHD scholarship. Can I use "postgraduate studentship" in this sense in official papers? Maybe "postgraduate scholarship" is better or there are some other variants?

Why do I get downvotes for this question? If you downvote please comment why.

The wording of the question is quite confusing. Try to improve it to make the question clearly answerable. In my answer I pointed out some issues, otherwise also try to pose a single question. I guess that would improve it. Don't worry about the downvotes. There's a good core to your question.

How does one call postgraduate studies in countries where the appropriate degree is not PHD?

You need to be precise about which term for the title/degree you would use. In the follow-up comment you reveal that the degree is "candidate of sciences". In Eastern Europe there were such degrees given in the past, in most countries this was one way or another changed to PhD, or similar. In the past, the process towards the "candidate of sciences" (CSc. degree in a country I am familiar with) was called candidature. "I work on my candidature." Just like that. You would also call it postgradute studies, but see also this question for potential caveats.
However, as Paul Hiemstra points out, you would use this in your system, but when communicating with the world you should use the equivalent term. Most countries have a signed international treaties regarding education and professional degree recognition and equivalence with most other countries (at least in Europe and OECD). In those treaties (usually public material) you should be able to find the exact tables of equivalent degrees, possibly with various stipulations about their use. Look for such a treaty which your country signed with the country where you want to use your title/study term.
P.S.
Scholarship is usually the funding you get to perform your studentship.

This really depends on where you are going to use this term. The goal is to make clear to people what kind of degrees you have. So if you communicate with people from the US, you can just say you are working on a PhD. If you are communicating with people form your own system, just use the title that is appropriate int that context.
For example, until recently the Netherlands did not have the Bachelor-Master system. This did not prevent people from using the MSc title abroad when that was the title people where familiar with.

The degree is called "candidate of sciences", so I have no idea how to call this. "candidate of sciences scholarship" sounds very bad for me. But I think that I can just use "postgraduate studentship" without any confusion


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FizzBuzz for Academia, Questions to Gauge Research Understanding
Is there a simple line  of questioning which gives an up front indicator as to a    persons ability to do research?
FizzBuzz is an interview question which is used to determine whether an applicant knows how to program. It is a simple problem, with a simple solution which can seperate those who can, from those who can't.
Are there common equivalent questions for gauging someones ability to do research?
(Granted, there are a wider variety of  perspectives of what research is, especially across disciplines so it is unlikely there is as clean-cut an answer to this question.)

I disagree with the downvotes.  This is a perfectly on-topic and useful question, whose answer happens to be "Don't be ridiculous."

@JeffE Doesn't "Don't be ridiculous" imply pretty directly "Your question is ridiculous"? What else might the asker have done that would be ridiculous? Written the question while balancing a trout on their head?

If your education system is worth its dime, the answer is "a university degree".

What is the intended target of your question? A prospective graduate student, a postdoc, a candidate for a tenure-track position? It would be useful to specify it.

No, there is no useful research analog of FizzBuzz.
FizzBuzz is a rather limited test of programming ability.  An incompetent candidate may fail at it, but passing this test in no way qualifies someone to work as a programmer.  Some programming jobs attract lots of incompetent applicants, and it's worth filtering them out, but FizzBuzz is just a small step in that direction.  The only reason we've heard of it is because it makes a great story when someone applies for a job but can't pass the simplest test.
For faculty hiring, there's no need for such a crude filter.  The number of highly qualified candidates is much greater than the number of openings, and filtering out the incompetent is not a big deal.  (If you spend a lot of time worrying about whether your candidates are incompetent, then something has gone catastrophically wrong with the search process.)  Instead, the hard part is deciding who the very best candidates are, and FizzBuzz-style questions won't help with that.
For graduate student admissions, competence testing is more relevant.  However, there's a fundamental difference from hiring a programmer.  In that case, you are looking for someone who already has programming experience, and FizzBuzz helps filter out people who are bluffing about how experienced they are.  Someone who fails could still learn to be a fine programmer, but you don't care since you're looking for someone who already knows how.  On the other hand, most applicants to graduate school have only limited experience with research, and that's OK.  You're looking for potential, rather than experience, and that's trickier to evaluate.  I'm skeptical that any simple, clear-cut test can reliably predict research potential.

"For faculty hiring, there's no need for such a crude filter." - interesting in light of this related question on hiring at a community college: How to screen out candidates for faculty jobs who don't know the subject

As I've said in another answer, the best predictor of success in research is... success in research.
The interview question for gauging someone's ability to do research is therefore:

"Tell me about your research."

As an interview question, I like this one:

"What's the most interesting discovery you have made in your research?"

Answers to this question can show what the researcher thinks is particularly interesting about their work, exposing some of their character.
It can also be useful to hear what they consider to be a "discovery".


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Scholarships in general and Ontario Trillium Scholarship in particular
I am a new PhD student in Canada. Recently my university nominated me for the Ontario Trillium Scholarship (to my surprise), which I eventually won. I originally come from a country which do not use the system of scholarships and awards, so I do not know much about the benefits of scholarships. As I see there are three potential benefits:

More money for living ($40.000 each year for four years in this case, for living and tuition)
The Scholarhip pays for tuition and other fees, so your supervisor/institute do not need to pay anything
Looks good on a CV

I have not much advantage of the point 1, since my institute usually gives higher PhD salaries than standards in Canada and therefore I only receive slightly higher salary relative to that (people from other institutes will of course benefit from the extra cash). Number 2 seems to be a really good benefit of scholarships, since they make you more free and able to pursue your own interests even more (since your supervisor is not paying).
My question is primarily about point 3. How big a role does Scholarships play when applying for a post doc position? I generally see many people in North America, especially the US, which have a lot of scholarships and awards they have won. This is my first ever, since we do not have awards in my original country. Is there any real advantage to be able to mention previously won scholarships? And my final question is, how good is the Ontario Trillium Scholarship in this regard? Is this a standard type of scholarship?
(Sorry for asking this anonymously rather than using my stack exchange profile. My profile contain my real name and I would rather stay anonymous for various reasons).


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How to find out where a College's Graduates are now?
I am looking at graduate schools and one of the things I would like to know about the schools I'm looking at is where recent graduates are now. I realize that contacting the colleges individually would certainly work. However, there are a lot of colleges out there, and it is untenable to ask them all individually. Is there a place where this kind of thing is available online?

Would you be more specific: which country? which field?

Might be of interest: Dataset of researchers CV

@steropere North America/Europe, natural sciences

If your looking at PhD's who presumably wanted to go on to academic careers, and if you can get a list of the graduates from a particular year, then you can generally track those people down by searching for them using Google.  Most people who've remained in academia have at least some presence on the web.  Folks who go to work in industry often become invisible.
The hard part is getting a list of graduates from a particular year.  This can sometimes be done using commencement programs.  I have done this using the mathematics genealogy project at:
[http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/][1]

Despite the name, this database has records for computer science, mathematics, and statistics graduates from many institutions.  You can search by institution name and year of PhD (e.g. I'm Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1992.)

obviously, if a person's name is something like "John Smith" it may be impractical to identify them amongs all the search results you will get :-(

Doing these sorts of searches can be important, and it's the only systematic method I know of to get this information.  There are a few things this won't detect, though: you won't see students who never graduated, and if someone ended up with a different sort of job than what you'd like, you can't tell whether they took what they could get or whether they just had different preferences.

Membership directories of professional socieities are also useful resources.  The AMS, MAA, and SIAM maintain a combined membership list that has been very useful for tracking down mathematicians.

One field-specific method is ACM (dl.acm.org) where it shows for every author, his/her affiliation history.

Is there a place where this kind of thing is available online?

No. Not to my knowledge.
Some departments list where (some) of their graduates go after finishing their PhD. Your best source of information is your potential advisor webpage. Some professors mention where his/her PhD students go after finishing their degree while others mention only the names.
In the latter case, one simple way is to Google their names; you may get an idea where are they now. Another is to look for your potential advisor recent publications that are co-authored by his/her graduated students. You may know where are they now by their affiliation.
If you still do not have a potential advisor, a random sample over the faculty members in your department may be sufficient.


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Is it okay to contact members of a lab before applying to a position?
There is a certain permanent position recently advertised at a lab that I'm interested in. The application consists of submitting a number of documents (CV, project, etc.) online, which will be reviewed eventually, and they might pick some applicants for interviews, and so on.
I wonder if it makes sense to contact people working in the lab (it's in my city), to discuss briefly with them, about science and maybe a bit about how the lab works.
For context, I am in Europe, specifically in France (I presume there could be different "etiquettes" to follow in different countries). But I have heard it's good to contact people, so they get to know you (and your work) a bit even before reviewing the application. But I'm not really sure what's the appropriate behavior to follow.

Why would it not be ok? It is good to do your due diligence about an institution, group, and particular opening.

@JonCuster Whatever is considered "ok" in a situation depends on the typical expectations people have traditionally developed. So that's why I'm asking. To me, it sounds okay to try to contact people if I'm curious, but I don't want to waste anyone's time, and I'm not sure what is the expectation of others.

This answer isn't specific to any particular place and there might be exceptions, though I doubt they would be in Europe.
Yes, you can contact and even visit a lab and speak with its PI and probably some of its members, assuming permission of the PI.
Getting information about the lab and its work and being more able to make an informed decision about how it fits your plan is a good thing. Showing interest in their work, assuming it is genuine, is a good thing. That would be true even if you ultimately go elsewhere.
Whether this gives you an "edge" in an application is debatable and would depend on many things. For that reason, talking to the PI first might save you some grief, if they think it improper. Hopefully, however, people are smart enough to do their job properly.

Please note that this is for a permanent researcher position. There is no single PI, rather there are many other researchers that work at this lab, with whom I may or may not attempt a first contact.

I assume someone is director or something similar for the lab. PI was just a shorthand. If everyone is independent, then no worries.

Alright, is just in this case I think contacting directly the director is a bit too much (and probably will not reply). The researchers are more or less independent, yes.


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Alternatives to Google Scholar to follow publications of selected authors
I like Google Scholar's alert feature, where you can subscribe to alerts about an author's new publications.
However today I found out this feature is limited to 200 alerts. After that, I cannot follow any more authors. (Ref. How to increase the number of authors followed in Google Scholar?).
Thus, is there any alternative service that tracks the publications of an author as well as Google Scholar? I have tried Semantic Scholar, but I find it a bit lacking (e.g., often an author will appear with multiple profiles with slight name variations). Any other suggestions?

You could try Web of Science's Author Alerts. I don't know if there is a maximum number of alerts. In my experience, WoS typically does a good job at identifying unique researchers, but it's not perfect. YMMV. The delay in indexing may or may not be an issue for you.
According to NIH Library's Keeping Current with the Literature page, Scopus also supports author alerts. The same level of detail is not given for EMBASE or PubMed.

How exactly do I create a search in Web of Science? I see the screenshots in that link you posted, but there is no actual link to a page where I can actually search.

@a06e Assuming you have access (presumably through your institution as it is a paid service), just go to https://www.webofscience.com/wos and switch the search mode from Documents to Researchers.


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Forgot to include implication rate in grant proposal
I just submitted a project to ANR (French research grant fund), but I realized I forgot to mention my implication rate (i.e., the percentage of time dedicated to the project).
This is a grant for a single partner (me), so naturally my actual involvement will be substantial.
The deadline has passed so I cannot modify it. How grave is this mistake ? Can they automatically block a good quality fully written scientific proposal, just because this detail is missing?
Just asking for some advice from people with similar experiences.

The people at the ANR might be worth checking with.

Your chance of getting a valid answer here are vanishingly small. It is probably a rare mistake and we don't have all that many users with such experiences. You can and should try to ask them. While it would seem odd to reject an application when they can ask for clarifications, I don't know their rules or workload.

There's really just one thing you can do, and that is ask the folks at the funding agency.
Short of that, the proposal is sent and there is nothing you can do about it until it comes back with a decision. So kick back and relax, put your mind to other endeavors, and be productive in the areas where you can achieve something. It's not worth worrying about submitted proposals and papers because there's just nothing that worrying can affect.


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How to be persistent in a polite way?
Recently I contacted an important researcher in my field, and he offered me a collaboration with his group. He told me to email him a proposal. Moreover, he recognized that he was usually very busy and received a lot of email, so I should be persistent. He even gave me his personal phone number.
I sent him the proposal, and alerted him by an SMS. He replied that he would look at it. It's been a couple of weeks, so I SMS him again, and he replied that he hadn't had the time yet to look at the proposal, but that he would soon.
This is a very important and unique opportunity for me. In view of his advice to be persistent, and the fact that he is very busy, I want to do what I can to remind him of this, until he acts on it.
What is the most polite way to insist? What time window should I wait before reminding him again?

Having worked in sales and academia, I have often come across the "how often do I contact this person" question. The answer heavily depends on the situation and the person whom you wish to contact.
You have contacted him twice thus far, and he encouraged your being persistent. I would think he would have no problem in you checking back with him every two weeks. Going to his office may even be suggested after several attempts had been made.
Try to approach the professor in your emails with courtesy, but also with urgency. Always thank him for his time, but also stress that you would like to get your research plans finalized, so if he could respond by such and such date it would be helpful.


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Language certificates when applying to positions in the USA
I am non-US citizen and I want to apply for an academic position in the USA.
At which point do I need to show up a language certificate? For example, together with the job application, or together with the visa application?

Have you applied for any academic position in the U.S. yet? If so, did any institution ask for language certificate?

Normally TOEFL is required for admissions in USA. However, you must check the requirements that are required by the University first to secure admission that may or may not include TOEFL beside other tests such as GRE, GRE subject, GAT etc.
Second is the visa requirements, make sure if the TOEFL is required or not for the visa, as in that case, you may get admission but denied visa or vice versa. so get eligibility criteria from different universities, compare them and find out what are the common requirements for all the universities, and then check the visa requirements.
Time of showing language certificate depend on the university, they can ask in advance or later.

Generally, you will never be asked for a language certificate.  The people hiring you will determine if your English is good enough by looking at the application materials you submit and by the interviews they conduct with you.
The immigration officer will also talk to you and might be suspicious about your claim to have received a job offer from a university if you can't string together a coherent sentence in English.
As a general cultural matter, the US is comfortable leaving many matters to subjective judgment rather than relying on official bureaucracy and formal rules.


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Do referee lists of journals compromise the single-blind peer-review process?
Many journals maintain a preface in their print versions (usually available online) where they list those people who acted as a referee for the current issue.
Does this compromise the anonymity of the peer-review process? As an author you could get a good guess who reviewed your paper from such lists even though you cannot pin it down to a single individual.
Why are such lists maintained? Is there a reason not to bother about it?

Why on earth are people downvoting this question? The downvoting culture here never seizes to amaze me.

@Sverre never "ceases" to amaze, as in "never stops amazing" - seize means "to take forcefully, suddenly" - note: I don't intend to be annoying or pedantic just truly want to help out with an English idiom in case you are an English language learner (which even applies to those of us that learned English first...)

@BryanKrause Whoops! I know better than to think it's the verb "seize" in this expression, but homophones have a tendency to get mixed up in writing anyway :)

Why are such lists maintained?

To recognize and express gratitude to the reviewers, who contribute a substantial amount of their time to review papers, typically without pay or any other direct reward.  It might also serve to help readers see that reviewers really are well-known experts in the field (assuming that they are).

Does this compromise the anonymity of the peer-review process?

Maybe a little bit.  As you say, it makes it somewhat easier to guess who your reviewer might have been.  But the reviewers still have plausible deniability - nobody except the editors has proof that any given reviewer worked on any given paper.  In small subfields, it is often not too hard to guess who reviewed your paper anyway.
It's a judgment call by the editors to decide whether this risk outweighs the benefits.  Some journals decide to do it one way, others the other way.

My CV has a list of conferences and journals for which I have been a reviewer. Such lists are the only way this information can be verified.

@Thomas, I assume that neither your CV nor the publisher says what you reviewed, only the publication/venue for which you reviewed.  If a publication says you were a reviewer for X but you didn't say it on your CV, I'd assume it's your oversight, not theirs.

@Thomas: Well, normally there is no reason for anyone to need to verify this, and it's considered "honor system".  Anyway there are still plenty of journals that don't publish these lists, so the public doesn't really expect to be able to verify.  In case of a situation where it really does need to be verified, like an internal review at your institution, you can provide the review invitation you received from the editor, with the understanding that it will be kept confidential.

Bear in mind that many papers are reviewed without being published, and that no one knows everyone who could potentially be a reviewer of their paper. So you may guess, but you really can't do so with certainty.
I think a bigger issue in this regard is the shepherding process done in some conferences, in which one person who served as a reviewer interacts directly with the authors to verify that concerns from the reviews are addressed.  Now you know who a reviewer was, just not which review they wrote.  Such conferences often have 5-7 reviews per accepted paper, but I've seen it done with as few as 3.
In either case, I think the possible unblinding of a reviewer is a minor concern. You really ought to be writing the public portion of reviews as though the authors know exactly who is reviewing (this came up in another question recently) and some reviewers choose to sign their reviews explicitly as a matter of principle.